2 | From Confinement to Containment | Temple University Press and North Broad Press

YAMAGUCHI YOSHIKO was a movie star who traversed multiple, overlapping worlds. The variations of her stage name from the 1930s to the 1950s suggest as much: she was known in China as Li Xianglan (“Fragrant Orchid”), as Ri Koran (its translation) among the Japanese, and as Shirley Yamaguchi in the postwar United States. Born to Japanese parents in Manchuria, she was fluent in several languages and identified more often with China than with her ancestral homeland. Yamaguchi did not even visit Japan until she was eighteen years old, only to discover how out of place she felt there. Still, she was a citizen and a product of its imperial system. Her father worked for the Southern Manchurian Railway Company (or Mantetsu), which Japan had acquired from its victory in the Russo-Japanese War. The actor began her movie career in 1938 with the Manchurian Film Association (or Man’ei) and performed as well for other studios in propaganda pictures that encouraged the friendly ties between China and Japan. These projects were part of the latter’s strategy of asserting its dominance by overseeing “harmonious” relations among Asian peoples through the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yamaguchi gained renown in her films playing the Chinese love-interest of Japanese men, interactions that personalized the larger cultural, political, and economic stakes in the region. Man’ei publicists even advertised their star as a Chinese national with Japanese sympathies to maintain audience interest. After the war, however, Kuomintang officials charged Yamaguchi with treason, and she faced possible execution for collaborating with the enemy. Authorities released the actor when she revealed herself as Japanese, proving that she could not be a traitor to China. Chastised for her ruse, she submitted to repatriation to Japan and appeared in a few productions there. In 1950, Yamaguchi decided to try the American movie market. Hollywood proved a fitting change of venue, when producers at Twentieth Century–Fox cast her in two motion pictures, King Vidor’s Japanese War Bride (1952) and Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955). In these films, she once again portrayed a woman wooed by members of an occupying force, this time in postwar Japan with U.S. servicemen, to dramatize the new relations between former foes.¹

The actor’s arrival on the Hollywood scene came at a telling moment in not only U.S.-Japan relations but also race relations within the United States. During and after the U.S. occupation, the fraternization between American GIs and Japanese women stirred domestic and international controversy. Most encounters were casual and fleeting, but others developed into committed relationships that resulted in marriage, from which the wives became known as “war brides.” During the late 1940s to the early 1960s, roughly thirty thousand of them came to the United States.² These unions initially occurred without official sanction from the U.S. military and met with resistance in both Japan and the United States. To the Japanese, native women having sexual relations with foreign occupiers heightened feelings of defeat and despair as well as disgust at the mixed-race progeny created from such pairings. Friends and families of the war brides often reacted with shock and shame.³ To Americans back in the United States, Japan was a former enemy that still conjured up feelings of distrust or even hatred. Moreover, these interracial couples, if relocated to the United States, would challenge segregation and miscegenation policies that safeguarded white supremacy and immigration restrictions on Asians established since the late nineteenth century. In light of these charged issues, the United States worked to improve its image abroad as a multiethnic democracy to downplay these racist practices and to present a better alternative to communism. It was no coincidence, then, that magazine and newspaper coverage, popular fiction, sociological studies, and Hollywood films throughout the 1950s focused attention on the phenomenon of U.S. soldiers bringing home Japanese wives.⁴

Yamaguchi seemed particularly suited to play a war bride because of her past roles that enacted the intimacies of empire, when Japan metaphorically “wooed” China through fictional characters’ romances to justify its expansion and dominance. American-produced narratives of postwar relations gave her another opportunity to embody a conquered, feminized nation, this time Japan, now courted by a benevolent, masculine, white hero personifying the United States. Conveying international alliances through romantic relations, as illustrated by American soldiers wedding Japanese women, was one way for Hollywood to stage the new turn in global affairs. But these accounts were as much about establishing and naturalizing hierarchies of authority as they were about portraying the acceptance of cultural or racial differences. As Ann Laura Stoler and others have shown, the personal, familial, and sexual relationships developed between occupiers and the occupied reveal the dynamics of how imperial systems exert and extend their sovereignty over subjugated populations beyond military force. Creating laws that forbade miscegenation, restricted migration, instituted hygiene standards, and managed adoptions and child-rearing practices, for instance, demonstrated these methods of rule.⁵ Yet unregulated interactions still occurred, despite what a governing bureaucracy documented or attempted to control, as seen in the censured GI–war bride marriages, among other examples. In these cases, intimate affairs remind us not only how nation-states acquire and sustain ascendancy over other territories and peoples but also how resistance or adaptations to this power arise and persist past its reach.⁶

The status of postwar Japan further complicates this framework because it was unlike conventional colonies or newly formed postcolonial states. Having asserted its own modern imperial machinery on the Asian mainland and surrounding islands, the nation enjoyed a favored position within American political, economic, and military structures to help oversee the Pacific theater. Japan’s strategic location, rebuilt industries, and past knowledge about the broader swath of Asia proved invaluable to U.S. aims in containing communism and in integrating market economies.⁷ As Paul A. Kramer notes about such relationships: “Throughout history, empire-builders have been acutely preoccupied with other empire-builders; networks of modern empire bound rivals together in competitive and cooperative exchange, emulation, and adaptation.”⁸ These frictions and overlaps were evident in U.S.-Japan relations, especially from the 1930s to the 1950s, providing an important context for understanding Yamaguchi’s transnational allure. The two nations not only came to blows in the Pacific War; they also developed as imperial powers almost simultaneously, when procuring colonies and client states at the turn of the twentieth century. In similar fashion, each positioned itself as an exceptionalist, anti-imperial state desiring to enlighten and to liberate other realms and populations. Americans thought of themselves as part of what Thomas Jefferson called an “empire of liberty,” while the Japanese advanced the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.⁹ As Takashi Fujitani and Yukiko Koshiro have demonstrated, the United States and Japan even shared a disdain for racial mixing, just as they purposefully crafted narratives about it during and after the war to signal the importance of political and cultural partnerships, however contradictory these feelings and intentions appeared.¹⁰ It should be noted that to compare the two nations’ designs and development as imperial states is not to ignore their differences in political ideologies, governing systems, levels of applied coercion, availability of resources, scales of occupation, collaborations with native elites, and other factors that were apparent in their approaches to dominating the Pacific. But the significance of Yamaguchi’s evolving movie career rests on how she epitomized these countries’ intersecting stances on interracial intimacies that validated and disrupted their colonizing presence. In this way, her appearances in Hollywood productions and the publicity about them coincided with broader social and political developments, especially regarding American reactions to Japan as a new ally and to the intimacies occurring between U.S. servicemen and Japanese women.

Yamaguchi’s films and star image in Asia and the United States thus exposed the correlations between imperial Japanese and postwar American objectives, when each nation sought to extend its power and influence at home and abroad through cultural forms. Noteworthy too is how different populations read the actor’s persona and performances to suit their own ends, oftentimes in defiance of such power and influence. While she posed as a Chinese national, the Japanese actor had to weigh her wartime identities and agendas with the demands of moviegoers in occupied China and imperial Japan. In this balancing act, she realized the freedoms and the dangers involved when seen as belonging to both nations and to neither. Yamaguchi likewise attracted divergent responses to her postwar Hollywood films, with audiences that included mainstream Americans as well as Japanese and Japanese Americans. By this time, however, her nationality became more stabilized as “Japanese.” With the end of the war came the end of the “Chinese” performer Li Xianglan/Ri Koran, although fans throughout East Asia still recognized the movie star by these names long afterward. Nevertheless, Yamaguchi went by her Japanese family name in her later film credits. She even played a Chinese protagonist in one postwar Japanese production, Woman of Shanghai (1952), but audiences by then saw her as a Japanese actor.¹¹

Within the context of U.S.-Japan relations, Yamaguchi’s new image, while not as feigned or fluid as before, developed into a different kind of celebrity as she negotiated her postwar identity. This makeover avoided her past complicity in advancing Japan’s wartime propaganda and her resulting guilt about it. Promotional material in the 1950s omitted mentioning these matters because of changing geopolitical concerns and alignments. Japan’s defeat and new status as a U.S. ally, American desires to build workable partnerships in the Pacific, and China’s emergence as a communist state all contributed to this silence over the actor’s prior movie career and affection for China.¹² Cultural beliefs about gender roles in the United States also played a significant part in repressing Yamaguchi’s war guilt within her public persona. Unlike Imperial Army veterans, such as Hanama Tasaki, who fictionalized his own feelings of remorse (discussed in Chapter 1), Japanese women as a whole became disassociated from their homeland’s prior militarism and empire building. These included the war brides who immigrated to the United States. Americans viewed them, and Yamaguchi in particular, as the image of a revised, yet still docile, “Madame Butterfly,” catering to Western male fantasies of Asian women’s subordination. This orientalist impression, one grounded in the history of U.S. imperialist desires in Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, also applied to postwar Japan as a whole, reassuring Americans of their ally’s love and loyalty. But the purposes and contexts of this U.S. orientalism differed from earlier eras because of the new threat of communism in the region and the lingering doubts about Japan’s willingness to embrace democracy and U.S. leadership.¹³

We can see in this configuration of “Japanese/American” how Yamaguchi enacted the parallel processes of “becoming Japanese” and “becoming American.” The former describes her transition into a more fixed Japanese persona in her postwar publicity, while the latter addresses her fictional roles as a Japanese war bride assimilating into U.S. society or accepting American influences in her life. Both methods of “becoming” represent narratives about integrating racial Others: not only for Japanese war brides in the American mainstream but also for a suspiciously “mixed” Chinese/Japanese repatriated actor in Japan. From another perspective, Yamaguchi’s Japanese/American positioning highlights how the entertainer and popular media coverage simultaneously merged and separated her real-life and onscreen performances to sustain her reconceived celebrity status. Her “becoming Japanese” played an important part in her “becoming American,” when Hollywood intimated through her roles as a war bride the broader transitions that a newly reconstituted Japan had to make when conforming to U.S. expectations. In this framing, Japan as a “feminized,” subordinate nation would willingly adapt to what the United States wanted it to become. Yet Japan had its own social, political, and economic interests to pursue, which Americans certainly recognized. Japanese moviegoers even interpreted Yamaguchi’s postwar Hollywood performances in ways that contested the U.S. film industry’s marketing and imagery of their nation. Thus the solidus between signifiers in this Japanese/American construct also illuminates the underlying tensions and divisions between an occupied Japanese populace and an occupying American force, despite their new political partnership.

In contrast, Nisei reviewers saw the commonalities they shared with Yamaguchi as part of a broader transpacific community contributing to the improvement of U.S.-Japan relations and domestic race relations. Indeed, Yamaguchi’s Hollywood roles recalled issues at home and abroad that affected how the Nisei imagined her: first, through memories of the mass confinement depicted in Japanese War Bride and, second, through the U.S.-Japan discord revealed by the release of House of Bamboo. Publicity about Yamaguchi’s private life enhanced the visibility of these topics. For example, the actor’s marriage from 1951 to 1955 to the renowned Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi epitomized for audiences on both sides of the Pacific this melding of, and the frictions between, two peoples, cultures, and nations. Arriving at the crossroads of interracial and international relations, Yamaguchi offered through her star image and her Hollywood features more intimate ways of realizing these wider challenges.

A Chinese/Japanese/American Movie Star

On February 28, 1946, Yamaguchi Yoshiko waited with two thousand other Japanese nationals at a Shanghai harbor to board a ship headed for Japan. At the conclusion of the Pacific War, the process of repatriating people to their ancestral homelands began, whether or not they were born there, or had ever lived there. Dismantling an empire meant that the Allied victors had to remove Japanese soldiers and civilians from not only China but also Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, a total of 6.9 million individuals. In turn, almost 2.3 million subjects from occupied regions who had been relocated to Japan for their labor required reinstatement to their native countries. Repatriation also included persons whom the Japanese had transported from one client state to another, such as the 1.5 million Koreans in Manchuria and the tens of thousands in other places formerly under imperial authority. The famed actor’s presence at the Shanghai port was one small part of this massive transference of peoples.¹⁴

Yamaguchi’s own repatriation exposed the initial difficulties she faced when attempting to conform to a new established order. That February morning at the harbor was chilly, as she recalled, and the gathered crowd could see their collective breath wafting in the air. The actor was tired and disheveled, having endured a treason trial after being mistaken for a Chinese national and charged with collaborating with the enemy. Kuomintang authorities in Shanghai, like moviegoers throughout China, still saw her as Li Xianglan, the Man’ei-created film persona who besmirched their national pride by starring in propaganda films for imperial Japan. Yamaguchi was arrested and imprisoned, but she eventually confirmed her Japanese citizenship and escaped a likely execution when a friend traveled to Japan to retrieve the family register documents proving the actor’s nationality to a Chinese military court. Although the issue appeared resolved, the drama continued at the Shanghai harbor when the officials checking repatriation papers also recognized Yamaguchi as Li Xianglan and prevented her from boarding the ship. Apparently, proper notification of her acquittal had not yet reached them. Yamaguchi tried to explain to the harbor officials that the court had already cleared her of treason charges, but to no avail. She would not be traveling to Japan that day. In the weeks that it took to re-verify her identity, authorities placed the controversial star under house arrest. When all was finally settled with the Chinese government in late March, Yamaguchi proceeded back to the harbor and left on another vessel. She was now a Japanese repatriate (223–256).

These encounters with Chinese officials emphasize how Yamaguchi’s multiple identities and the postwar confusion about them created both public interest in her celebrity and dangerous circumstances for her own life. The pressures of presenting such a fluid persona had been building since her interactions with Chinese and Japanese production companies, movie reviewers, and audiences throughout the latter half of the Asia-Pacific War. The revelation of her true nationality and her repatriation to Japan, however, marked her transformation into a less ambiguous film star. In her memoir, Yamaguchi even titled the chapter describing her efforts to leave China as “Farewell, Li Xianglan.” In this valediction, she discarded both the glamour and the troubles of her wartime past. Her departure thus concluded a tumultuous period of growing up amid war and occupation, of celebrated renown, of having Chinese friends and admirers, of enduring suspicion and even hatred because of her Chinese and Japanese sympathies, and of shedding a Chinese persona that became too precarious for her. When Yamaguchi’s ship from Shanghai arrived in Kyushu, Japan, a crowd of reporters surrounded her, asking for a statement. The actor proclaimed to the press the symbolic demise of Li Xianglan, or the Japanese rendition of this figure. “Ri Koran has died,” she remarked. “I now wish to live as Yamaguchi Yoshiko once again” (258). Reclaiming this identity signaled her hopes for transitioning into a more peaceful postwar life.

Yamaguchi Yoshiko’s original identity emerged in 1920, when she was born in Fengtian (Shenyang) in Liaoning Province, located in the southern part of northeastern China (or Manchuria). At this time and place, her family background and her coming of age already revealed the difficulties she would have to negotiate when caught between Japanese imperial actions and persistent Chinese nationalism. That her “motherland of China” and her “fatherland of Japan” (as she called them) clashed with each other only made her sympathies for both an empire and its subjects problematic from each side’s point of view. Varying levels of distrust about Yamaguchi’s intentions lingered among Chinese and Japanese officials, journalists, and audiences throughout the war. The inner turmoil she felt was also considerable. “If I really wanted to become Chinese,” she surmised, “I would lose my Japanese character; but if I wished to retain my Japanese self, I would be misinterpreted by the Chinese” (44). Because of these internal conflicts, she often desired to eschew national attachments, even as she ended up serving the interests of the Japanese empire.

This intermingling of peoples and cultures from which Yamaguchi emerged played an important part in Japan’s aims to create a cooperative society in Manchuria. In 1931, Japan’s Kwantung Army invaded and occupied northeastern China, establishing there a puppet state and renaming the region Manchukuo by the following year. The army became a garrison force, maintaining order through its brutal, imposing presence, while seeking to secure the territory’s northern borders against any Russian belligerence. But various factions in Japan had other coinciding plans for the region. To industrialists, fostering an integrated economy with Manchuria was essential to the overall scheme of empire. To agrarian reformers, encouraging the mass migration of Japanese farmers into Manchuria meant relieving population pressures in Japan and extending its influence to the Chinese hinterlands.¹⁵ On another front, Yamaguchi’s father was one of the people who had been relocated to China to manage the railway lines and urban planning ventures of Mantetsu that conjoined Japan, Manchuria, and Korea. Japanese leaders thus saw Manchuria as part of a modern, interconnected, multicultural empire. The idea of pan-Asianism outlined this prospect, from which the “harmony of the five races”—Japanese, Chinese, Manchus, Koreans, and Mongolians—announced the rise of a new Asia under Japan’s enlightened guidance. This notion, however, also signified the consolidation of Japanese power throughout the region, as those under its rule were quick to discover.¹⁶

Yamaguchi’s upbringing in this environment revealed a cosmopolitan blurring of affiliations, one filled with an appreciation for the arts. She noted that her parents never required her to learn the more conventional aspects of Japanese domesticity, such as cooking, needlework, flower arranging, or the tea ceremony. Instead, they encouraged her interest in music, providing her with lessons in singing as well as in violin and piano (2–3). Under the tutelage of a Russian voice teacher, Yamaguchi included in her repertoire Russian folk songs, classical opera, and other types of Western music. In 1933, at the age of thirteen, she caught the attention of the Fengtian Broadcasting Station. This Japanese-run company wanted to attract Chinese audiences to the cause of “Japanese-Manchurian Friendship” through its playlist of adapted Chinese folk songs and other popular tunes. Since Yamaguchi was conversant in both Mandarin and Japanese, she embodied what the radio station had been seeking. Her vocal skills would later help her film career with Man’ei and other studios that showcased her singing, a talent still enjoyed by listeners throughout Asia to this day (26–28).

Occupying several worlds at once was not unusual for Yamaguchi, given her family roots and interest in China. Her grandfather, Yamaguchi Hiroshi, was a Sinologist. Her father, Fumio, also developed a deep admiration for Chinese culture. Fumio became an instructor of Mandarin for Mantetsu; by way of these lessons, the railway company’s Japanese employees could communicate with their Chinese coworkers. As a young girl, Yoshiko attended her father’s language classes and soon achieved fluency. So developed were these family interests in China that they extended to personal relationships with the Chinese elite. Fumio agreed to have a friend, General Li Jichun, symbolically adopt Yoshiko as his own daughter, a common cultural practice in China that signified friendship between families. Li was a Japanese collaborator and the president of the Shenyang Bank in Fengtian. As a new member of Li’s extended family, Yoshiko took the name “Li Xianglan” to honor her adoptive father’s surname (19–21).

Another significant influence on Yamaguchi was Kawakita Nagamasa, a movie producer and the president of the Towa Film Company. Like the actor herself, Kawakita admired Chinese culture and possessed “a cosmopolitan sensibility rarely seen among the prewar Japanese,” as she recollected (186). Indeed, her worldly concerns matched his. Yamaguchi observed that the conflict between China and Japan was “so personally painful that it threatened to tear him apart,” a sentiment he often expressed to her (187). As a well-connected man, Kawakita diligently promoted Japanese films overseas, bringing Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon (1950) to international fame. He also imported Western films to Japan and worked with Chinese production crews and actors. Kawakita maintained contacts with European and American filmmakers too. For instance, one of his friends in the United States was Joseph Bernhard, a producer at Twentieth Century–Fox. In 1950, Bernhard had a project in development, East Is East, later renamed Japanese War Bride, for which he needed an actor to portray the title character. As a friend of Kawakita’s, Yamaguchi came to the Hollywood producer’s attention as just the right person for the role (264).¹⁷

Yamaguchi’s life and career up to 1945 thus exposed the entangled histories of Chinese collusion with the Japanese (through the Li family) and Japanese interest in the Chinese (through her family elders and Kawakita) that challenged the conventional contours of national allegiances. These personal connections explain why Yamaguchi could develop both Chinese and Japanese sensibilities, even admitting that she “felt” Chinese when growing up. She once admitted, “I forgot completely that I was Japanese. . . . Living on a vast continent led me naturally to think that we all coexisted as friends, whether any of us was Chinese, Korean, or Russian” (75). Amid this mix of peoples, specific ethnicities or nationalities mattered little to her, as she readily embraced the possibilities and pleasures offered by other cultures.

But since her youthful days in China, Yamaguchi also realized the stark contrasts in Japan’s objectives in creating a multiethnic empire. She recalled with horror, when looking out her house window as a child, the Japanese military police interrogating and beating a Chinese man in the early days of occupation (7–8). When first visiting Japan as a teenager, she prompted a policeman’s wrath for wearing Chinese clothes and speaking Mandarin to her accompanying Chinese friends. Reading her given Japanese name on her passport, the officer erupted at her hybrid mannerisms, as she described his outburst. “Now look! We Japanese belong to a first-class nation,” he lectured her, believing this status threatened when she adopted the habits of an “inferior” culture. “Damn you! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” he continued (81–82). Yamaguchi saw and experienced enough of Japanese discrimination against inhabitants of Manchuria and elsewhere to know that the espoused harmony among a diverse populace was far from achieved or intended.

Having cosmopolitan interests likewise placed Yamaguchi’s friends and family in great peril. Japanese authorities suspected both Yamaguchi’s father and Kawakita of having overt Chinese sympathies, putting their lives and their careers at risk. The military police once detained Fumio for questioning about his perceived aiding of “the enemy,” since he had many Chinese friends and associates (13). Rumors of potential assassination attempts swirled around Kawakita because he advocated for allowing Chinese film companies to function without imperial oversight (192–193). While also working for Japan’s wartime movie industry in Manchuria, Yamaguchi later discovered that she had been under surveillance by Japanese and Soviet agents. Amid the “bewildering profusion of ideologies and ethnicities,” she wrote, it was her transnational contacts, and thus her indeterminate loyalties, that attracted suspicion, even though Japanese film companies had encouraged her hybrid identities in the first place to gain wider audiences (183–184).

To facilitate imperial Japan’s objective of regional dominance, its movie studios produced storylines about the nation’s expansion into other lands as acts of benevolence. Expected viewers included colonial subjects across East Asia as well as Japanese audiences in occupied areas and in the home islands. That Man’ei and other institutions portrayed Yamaguchi as a Chinese actor with Japanese sympathies, who played Chinese protagonists submitting to Japanese supervision, was a vital part of this propaganda strategy.¹⁸ Hers, then, was a double-layered performance incorporating a manufactured public persona that matched her onscreen fictional protagonists’ portrayal of the cooperation between subjects and rulers. But within these dynamics, her films and characters conveyed different meanings to different audiences. While viewers could simply enjoy the aesthetic pleasures of Yamaguchi’s singing and acting, the political ramifications of her movies were hard to miss. On the one hand, the Chinese saw in Li Xianglan particular characteristics that expressed their defiance and nationalism amid Japan’s occupation. On the other hand, the Japanese pondered through Ri Koran the aptness of their imperial presence in China. Two of Yamaguchi’s signature films that spawned such reactions were China Nights (1940) and Glory to Eternity (1943).¹⁹

China Nights became one of Yamaguchi’s most famous and controversial productions, one of many in which she depicted a Chinese woman wooed by a Japanese male hero. Yamaguchi plays the orphan Keiran, a plucky girl who becomes enamored of the Japanese sailor Tetsuo. Initially, Keiran repulses Tetsuo’s kindnesses and advances because she hates the Japanese, the war having claimed both her parents and her home. What remains discomfiting to Chinese audiences is the scene wherein Tetsuo becomes impatient and angry with Keiran’s resistance to him, and he slaps her. After this abrupt violence, Tetsuo apologizes and Keiran comes to recognize his love for her. She then shares her newly realized feelings for him. As Yamaguchi explained in her memoir, the Japanese producers and viewers understood Tetsuo’s blow as stemming from affection. Thus, in a larger sense, a China that required military occupation and its ensuing brutality would come to appreciate what the Japanese were attempting to accomplish for its own benefit. Most Chinese, however, did not see it this way. Although Tetsuo’s love for Keiran compelled him to apologize for his violence and to make himself vulnerable to her feelings, Chinese moviegoers were still incensed at her humiliation from this episode, finding her response and the plot development unbelievable (99–100).

Yet, with such a flexible identity, Yamaguchi was able to traverse the lines between imperial dominance, in which she was complicit in Japan’s objectives, and native resistance, when sympathizing with the Chinese. Glory to Eternity, a joint Chinese-Japanese production, exposes again how various audiences could generate diverse meanings and pleasures from the same film. In this feature, Yamaguchi plays a candy peddler who visits an opium den in 1840s China, a country under British imperial rule. In one famous tune, “The Candy Peddling Song,” she wishes that the Chinese would consume the sweets she sold instead of the destructive opium offered by the British. The Japanese producers hoped to present a critique of Great Britain and white imperialism, while portraying themselves as enlightened leaders. But among Chinese movie patrons, the song stirred a resurgent nationalism regarding not only their past under British colonialism but also their present circumstances under Japanese authority (194). However unintended, Yamaguchi’s performance and star attraction in the film exposed the vulnerabilities within an empire’s acts and intentions.

Indeed, Glory to Eternity and the publicity behind it served to boost Yamaguchi’s popularity among Chinese audiences. Shortly after the film’s release, the actor felt compelled to reveal herself as a Japanese national because her Chinese friends continually expressed anger about her roles that they thought demeaned them. “I was beginning to feel guilty” about these wartime films, she confessed, especially since they “ended up satisfying none other than Japan’s egotistical needs” (169). But Yamaguchi’s managers pressured her to remain quiet about her identity to maintain the success of the studios and of her own career. When Yamaguchi appeared at a press event, a Chinese reporter, assuming that the actor was also Chinese, asked how she could portray her own people in humiliating fashion in such films as China Nights. Yamaguchi cited as an excuse her unknowing youth at the time and apologized for these earlier portrayals. The gathering of journalists then applauded this expression of remorse (200–201). Some evidence suggests that because a few Chinese fans knew, or inferred correctly, about Yamaguchi’s Japanese citizenship, her elicited repentance carried added weight when they read in her apology that Japan itself was regretful for its actions against China. On her own behalf, Yamaguchi was able to relay her guilt in a convincing manner because of her personal connections to Manchuria and her interstitial position as a Chinese/Japanese movie star. It was after this incident that the performer’s fame in China expanded beyond Manchuria, particularly from record sales of her songs and from the Shanghai movie market. By the postwar era, however, China endured a civil war and emerged a communist nation, while Japan became an American ally. For Yamaguchi, showing remorse over her films was then no longer possible. She now had to disassociate herself from China because of these political shifts and her new acting career in Japan and the United States. Not until the early 1970s, when China and Japan began reestablishing diplomatic relations, did she start another phase of rapprochement with the Chinese by publicly apologizing again for her prior complicity in the wartime propaganda pictures.²⁰

Yamaguchi’s postwar appearances in Japanese films offer another instance of reworking her identity and “becoming Japanese” as a repatriated actor. Repatriates in Japan were often viewed as not quite Japanese, since they carried the temporary stigma of foreignness themselves, developed from their prior interactions and familiarity with colonized Others in China, Korea, and elsewhere.²¹ In this light, Yamaguchi appeared alien and exotic because of her Manchurian background. Some Japanese moviegoers even criticized her for looking “too Chinese” in her postwar films. Others surmised that she was of mixed parentage, a rumor that started during the war (74).²² Such reactions never dogged Hara Setsuko, another Japanese movie star and Yamaguchi’s contemporary. Hara also appeared in imperial propaganda films, also at times as a Chinese woman. But she never adopted a Chinese public persona, instead becoming the archetype of the pure Japanese maiden, as opposed to Yamaguchi’s continued ethnic posing and involvement in fictionalized illicit romances. In the postwar years, moviegoers even identified Hara as “the eternal virgin,” the chaste, ideal embodiment of modern Japanese womanhood. She personified this type of figure in such Ozu Yasujiro classics as Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953). In these and other productions, Hara played the morally centered protagonist who cared for friends and family while also maintaining her dignity and independence.²³

Despite Yamaguchi’s “mixed” background, the star still fascinated Japanese viewers because her own rehabilitation paralleled postwar Japan’s. Yamaguchi’s film characters in Japanese productions during the 1950s, as Jennifer Coates observes, produced anxiety and ambivalence among audiences. Because of her past roles as a subjugated woman who also presented an elusive, hybridized exoticism, moviegoers began identifying with this status, seeing in it their own defeat and ignominy. In this affective state, they realized themselves as the feminized and racialized Other, as the Chinese and other Asians had been under Japanese rule. This new condition arose in large part from the racial views of Japan’s white American occupiers, who now set the rules and standards for what was or was not acceptable regarding everyday practices, beliefs, and behaviors.²⁴ We can then see how Yamaguchi’s past appearances in propaganda films, in which she portrayed Chinese characters under occupation, ironically provided Japanese audiences with a model of heroic and enduring comportment. The star’s power thus stemmed from her ability to offer movie patrons a cultural outlet for their own sense of despair. It also lent credence to the nation’s feelings of uncertainty when shifting from an imperial to an occupied state and then to a sovereign state again. Her “becoming Japanese” in this way matched Japan’s own efforts at creating a new national identity amid such transformations. This process entailed the Japanese and the actor herself downplaying or reimagining their former roles in cultural exchanges with, and the colonization of, other Asian peoples.²⁵

Yamaguchi’s transition from a Chinese/Japanese to a Japanese/American actor likewise occurred within the overlapping national and global contexts of U.S.-Japan relations. When “becoming Japanese” as a postwar star in Japan and “becoming American” in Hollywood films, Yamaguchi revealed how her performances, both onscreen and in media coverage, reinforced the desires of each nation. But the actor’s career was still lithely transnational, albeit in different ways from her earlier roles. Yamaguchi was already well experienced in portraying characters that crossed cultural, racial, and national boundaries through acts of “transgressive love.”²⁶ In the United States, she elicited diverse reactions among mainstream and Japanese American audiences that corresponded with the nation’s postwar anxieties about domestic race relations and international affairs. The Nisei especially saw in her celebrity status their own significance in larger transpacific exchanges between their ancestral and native lands. Yet the actor’s participation in Hollywood also discloses how imperial Japan and the United States exerted their power and influence through popular entertainment, not only for home audiences but for the conquered as well. This latter population now included the Japanese.²⁷ Against this backdrop, it made sense to American filmmakers to present Japan as a model ally and Japanese Americans as a model minority, static cultural framings that aligned with Yamaguchi’s more stabilized star image, to promote democratic values and goodwill at home and abroad. But moviegoers in Japan and the United States read the films in ways that challenged these representations. Yamaguchi and the Japanese war bride characters she portrayed became the means by which audiences could then interpret their varying postwar conditions.

Madame Butterfly Redux?

The arrival of Japanese war brides in the United States both confirmed and complicated how the nation could fulfill its interests and responsibilities in the postwar world. Despite the controversy surrounding the women’s marriages to American GIs, their visibility on the domestic front helped to advertise racial tolerance and diversity as well as U.S. desires to secure overseas allies to the anticommunist cause. In this manner, the war brides’ importance extended beyond public curiosity about their racially anomalous position within the white mainstream. Nor were they and their husbands seen as simply engaged in romances that merged different families, ethnicities, and cultures. To be sure, their marriages held great political and cultural significance during the Cold War because they offered Americans an intimate framework for assessing their nation’s race and gender relations at home and dealings with nonwhite populations abroad. The interracial pairings consequently stirred broader national debates about U.S. immigration, citizenship, and miscegenation policies, the roles of women in and outside the household, U.S. relations with Japan and other Asian states, and American abilities to contain communism in the Pacific.²⁸

The war brides from Japan presented a unique challenge to U.S. immigration and citizenship policies because of the prior restrictions on Asian populations within and outside the country. When pairings of GIs and Japanese women began with the occupation in 1945, few foreign-born Asians could become naturalized as American citizens. Nor could they gain entry into the United States without extreme difficulty. Congress passed a series of temporary “GI brides bills” between 1945 and 1952 as a partial acknowledgment of these relationships, allowing servicemen to bring their foreign-born wives into the country. But these acts were intended mostly for white women from occupied Germany or from allied European nations. Because of the longstanding limits against Asians, private bills sponsored by individual congressmen and by such organizations as the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) permitted GIs to circumvent the immigration quotas and to enter the United States with their Japanese wives. The moral logic behind these moves came from emphasizing the men’s martial sacrifices, and thus the rights earned from this service, rather than from desires to create a diverse and racially tolerant society by admitting Asian women.²⁹ The passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, the same year in which Japan regained its sovereignty, opened the door to legitimizing Asian arrivals by offering them naturalization as part of a Cold War strategy to embrace the “good immigrants.” More broadly, it enacted standards for color-blind citizenship in the United States. But the number allocated for admission from Japan was only 185 people per year, and even fewer were to be admitted from other Asian countries. These restrictions revealed a dogged reluctance among U.S. leaders, including the bill’s sponsors, Senator Pat McCarran and Congressman Francis Walter, to permit entry to those seen as racial Others. Japanese war brides were exempted from these provisions because of their non-quota status as spouses of American citizens.³⁰

What sparked Japanese American interest in the McCarran-Walter Act was its section on naturalization, which gave foreign-born Asians who were already within the United States, particularly the Issei, the opportunity to become citizens. However, as a Cold War document, the legislation included mechanisms to denaturalize and deport subversives, targeting anyone who espoused communism or had ties to any suspicious organizations. The law developed from the Internal Security Act of 1950, also a product of Senator McCarran’s efforts, which sought to control immigration through such tactics as detaining or expelling suspects as part of the broader battle against communism.³¹ Some Nisei editorialists feared that this state power might be abused, since it invoked memories of Japanese Americans being marked as threats to society, which then resulted in their wartime imprisonment. Yet the JACL, a supporter of the McCarran-Walter Act’s passage, argued that what mattered most for Japanese American communities was getting the Issei protected as U.S. citizens. Backing the bill with its anticommunist provisions would also reinforce their model status as loyal Americans. These moves and debates revealed not only how the overlapping issues of citizenship, immigration, and national security affected U.S.-Japan relations but also how Japanese Americans positioned themselves throughout the Cold War.³²

On the cultural front, American popular media associated the newly arriving Japanese war brides with the figure of Madame Butterfly. One major manifestation of this idea came from John Luther Long’s 1898 novella, Madame Butterfly, which became a useful narrative for comprehending U.S.-Asian relations. The central character of the book is Cho-Cho-San, a young and innocent Japanese woman who falls in love with the American naval officer Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. A carefree man, Pinkerton seeks a woman’s companionship while stationed in Japan. Winning over the agreeable Cho-Cho-San, he oversees the daily rhythms of her life, convincing her to convert to Christianity, ordering her to speak English in the household, and estranging her from her extended family. Pinkerton then returns to the United States, vowing to come back in the springtime. Meanwhile, Cho-Cho-San gives birth to their son. Pinkerton eventually reappears in Japan, yet unexpectedly with his blond American wife, Adelaide, who determines to take the child back with them to the United States. Mired in grief, Cho-Cho-San tries to commit suicide to maintain her honor. But the cries of her son prompt her to live for his sake. As the story concludes, the two have already disappeared to some unknown future when Adelaide comes for the boy.³³

This orientalist image of submissive yet wary Asian women had roots in U.S. empire-building efforts at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, Madame Butterfly appeared in the same year as the Spanish-American War, when the United States defeated Spain and acquired its colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Borrowing from western European assertions of racial and cultural superiority over Asian, African, and Middle Eastern peoples, white Americans similarly viewed their nation’s imperialism and dominance over native populations through orientalist lenses to legitimate their overseas interventions.³⁴ These more frequent encounters with racial Others, particularly in Asia, subsequently stoked interest among novelists, playwrights, architects, musicians, artists, designers, and others in “East meets West” styles and themes that influenced domestic consumer tastes. White American women, who had a hand in purchasing choices, adorned their bodies and households in orientalist fashions to reinforce their middle-class or elite status. Acquiring furniture, wallpaper, and artwork, dressing up in kimonos and adopting ornamental hairstyles, or reading romantic novels set in Asia and written by white authors like John Luther Long, were acts of ownership that showcased the broader impact, however indirect, of the nation’s imperial endeavors.³⁵ Long’s text gained resonance because it established through fiction how audiences could conceive of international affairs through hierarchical renderings of race and gender relations. The novella held such attraction that the playwright David Belasco wrote a successful New York stage adaptation of it in 1900. The most famous rendition of this story comes from the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, whose Madama Butterfly (1904) and its later variations draw worldwide audiences to this day. Notable in Puccini’s reworking is that Cio-Cio-San (as spelled in his version) proceeds in the end to kill herself. This act signified the unsuitability of interracial relations between white men and Asian women.³⁶

The appearance of Madame Butterfly also coincided with the nation’s reception of, and restrictions on, immigrants coming from a variety of different shores. The United States began curbing the influx of migrants from Asia and then from southern and eastern Europe when domestic fears of growing ethnic diversity complicated the nation’s needs for industrial and agricultural labor. A few years before the book’s release, Congress enacted constraints that targeted Asian populations, including the Page Act of 1875, which controlled the admission of women, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, directed at laborers. Several years afterward, the informal Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 limited Japanese entry into the nation. As Susan Koshy notes, U.S. laws that sought to contain relations between Asians and white Americans at the turn of the century disclosed fears of miscegenation within and outside the United States because the act threatened the authority associated with white supremacy. But, as she continues, sexual interactions that occurred overseas were implicitly condoned as part of American empire building, which extended the military and political privileges of white men. Exchanges happening within domestic borders, however, were forbidden, including Asian male–white female pairings, because they would disrupt the nation’s established hierarchies. Where these relationships occurred, whether overseas or within the nation, had become as important as why they required controlling. The consequence of geography and the assertion of imperial authority, together with constructed notions of race and gender, thus determined American outlooks and actions on interracial intimacies.³⁷

Not surprisingly, the image of Madame Butterfly resounded within American Cold War thinking, when the United States began reasserting its presence in East Asia after the power vacuum left by a conquered Japan and by weakened European allies that could no longer control colonial territories pushing for self-determination. But the ideals of freedom and democracy that informed U.S. participation in World War II and the Cold War altered how Americans understood their own race relations, pushing them to tolerate ethnic diversity as a way of differentiating themselves from fascists and communists. This sentiment, however, did not necessarily translate into equal treatment of nonwhite peoples. As Naoko Shibusawa, Traise Yamamoto, and others have contended, postwar Americans saw their hierarchical relationship with occupied Japan through the themes of race, gender, and maturity in order to accept an erstwhile enemy as a political ally. In this new framing, the Japanese, as a defeated, feminized, and childlike people, would loyally and lovingly serve the interests of the victorious, masculine, and benevolent United States. Interactions between American GIs and Japanese women most clearly personified this association.³⁸ Notably, more than a few of these war bride marriages occurred with African American or Nisei husbands. But white servicemen became the main face of such interracial unions, and thus of the nation’s global relations, because of the power and privileges associated with their race and gender positioning at home and abroad.³⁹ As depicted in popular culture, the war brides, as embodiments of Japan, presented opportunities for domestic audiences to consider the new extended influence of the United States. Yet persistent anxieties about Japan coincided with concerns about integrating ethnic minority populations at home and anticommunist nations abroad. Japanese war brides offered reassurance that they would willingly adapt to the American mainstream, just as Japan and other countries would willingly join a U.S.-led global alliance against the “red menace.”

Popular literature in the United States relied on the romance narrative as a way to comprehend the intricacies and intimacies of international affairs during the Cold War. Unlike prior storylines about a submissive Cho-ChoSan that charmed turn-of-the-century audiences, the idea of wooing postwar Japan came with a lurking suspicion, if not fear, that the Japanese would attract communist rivals. As no ordinary client state, Japan elicited such anxieties because American officials and cultural pundits believed that its strategic military value and its industrial output could tip the geopolitical scales any which way in the Pacific. Worries also arose that the United States, when bestowing democracy and its accompanying bounty to the world, might fail in its suitor role to win over hearts and minds.

Mainstream reporters were apprehensive about losing potential allies to communism, pointing to Japan as a potential victim and recalling their worries about China and its surrender to the Red Army in 1949. This earlier event stirred controversial perceptions of the State Department “allowing” the Chinese to turn in such an unwelcome direction. Now Japan’s future was at stake. The prominent journalist Stewart Alsop noted in 1950 that the Soviets would “take advantage of our foolishness in Japan as they did of our foolishness in China.” Sooner or later, he lamented, “we shall be asking ‘Who Lost Japan?’” To Alsop, the United States remained as clueless as when dealing with China. Other writers agreed with this assessment. Commonweal’s 1951 editorial carried a suggestive title, “Second Chance in Asia,” but grimly concluded: “We dare not fail in Japan as we have failed in China.” The Nation magazine also warned in 1955, “If in the future the fearful cry goes up, ‘Who lost Japan?’ the American obscurantists [in Washington, D.C.] can look to themselves for the answer.” These and other articles urged a strengthened American resolve to halt a potential collapse to communism in East Asia. Despite their certainty in U.S. power and superiority, a pervasive feeling among observers suggested that states vulnerable to communist influence might reject American practices and principles.⁴⁰

That the United States viewed postwar Japan in racialized and gendered ways was no accident, considering the extended influence of Madame Butterfly and other popular narratives. But when displacing the metaphor of romance onto overseas affairs, U.S. observers revealed not only the gratitude they expected from their Cold War allies but also the concern that Japan might betray American trust and generosity. This positioning only intensified fears about “losing” Japan to communism, or even about Japanese indifference to U.S. aid and incentives. Visiting the country in 1952, the civil rights activists and U.S. diplomats Hugh and Mable Smythe warned in Phylon: “An observer in Japan rather suspects that this partner to the shotgun marriage of East and West secretly looks forward to a divorce, albeit an amicable one.” “Like all nations,” they continued, “Japan is opportunistic, following her self-interest wherever it leads.” The Nation added in 1955: “Japan and the United States are sworn allies.” This partnership, however, “was nevertheless not a union of true love, but rather a marriage of convenience.” Newsweek also bemoaned Japan’s waywardness in light of communism’s attractions: “Its flirtations with Red China had sent Japanese-American relations into a tailspin.” The editorialist suggested that Japan had wandering eyes for other likely allies and advised U.S. statesmen to be wary of potential unfaithfulness.⁴¹

Commentators also expressed through the rhetoric of romance their specific unease about Japan’s desires to trade with China and the Soviet Union. U.S. News and World Report’s subtitle for a 1954 piece, “Communist Wooing Is Winning Friends in Japan,” emphasized Japanese dissatisfaction with the amount of American economic aid received. A Saturday Evening Post editorial remarked as well: “Although Japanese public officials ordinarily express only the most cloying sentiments of affection for the United States, it is undeniable that important currents of opinion are running against us.” Some reporters reproached the Soviets and the Chinese, as well as Japanese socialists and communists, for sowing displeasure with Americans. But others pointed to the United States as also blameworthy. Apprehension about keeping Japan under U.S. dominion revealed itself in a 1955 Look magazine piece entitled “Japan: Partner or Problem?” The author noted that Japan’s continued economic growth was imperative to containing communism in the region. The situation, however, was becoming dire. Japan enjoyed a brief period of development when the United States spent over two billion dollars there to fight against North Korea and China. Afterward, Japan’s economy began to decline, as it had done before the Korean War. The problem was that the Japanese could not achieve self-sufficiency since losing their colonial possessions, which had provided raw materials for their industries. In addition, hardly any country wanted to buy products that postwar Japan offered. As a result, it recorded large trade deficits with Australia, Canada, and the United States for cotton, wheat, rice, and other necessities. In these unstable conditions, the article warned, China would be more than willing to do business with Japan. In a Saturday Evening Post article from 1957, “Are We Driving Japan into Red China’s Arms?” the writer observed that the United States itself shared responsibility for missteps in its dealings with Japan. Tariffs on Japanese goods, the magazine suggested, made Americans appear too controlling in the relations with their junior partner, obliging Japan to look elsewhere for commercial opportunities. The Nisei press likewise noticed the trade tensions that China introduced into the U.S.-Japan alliance, with the Pacific Citizen asking, “How long will the postwar honeymoon between the United States and Japan last?” That such frictions would “hasten the day of reckoning,” the editorial surmised, meant that Japanese Americans had to stay informed of overseas events to better enact their roles as transpacific mediators to help ease misunderstandings between the two nations.⁴²

Fretting over Japan’s objectives in the Pacific extended to depictions of cultural exchanges too. Newsweek reported on a 1954 tour of Kabuki dancers and musicians in the United States. But the magazine jealously remarked that “the Communist world has begun to woo Japan” when Soviet dignitaries also requested that a Japanese troupe perform in Moscow. Meanwhile, “Communist China slipped in its blandishments” with its own invitation to engage in a “friendship pact” between Beijing and Tokyo. Other news reports on the difficult courtship of Japan faulted the Japanese themselves. Even if the populace displayed fondness for the United States, some thought this sentiment misplaced. Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, opined in 1952 that Japanese affections arose from a foolish delight in American popular culture: “Gum, jive, jazz, tight sweaters, padded bras, yo-yoes [sic], comic books, neon lights, dance halls, and chromium trim.” These pleasures, he quipped, distracted from the more important matters of developing political democracy in Japan. Cousins complained that the younger generations of Japanese especially “love us for the wrong reasons.” A strained U.S.-Japan relationship, suggesting a marriage of convenience, flirtations with the communists, and apparent misunderstandings of U.S. ideals and intentions, disclosed pervasive qualms about not only Japan’s loyalties but also American effectiveness in managing global events.⁴³

In this light, media attention on Japanese war brides framed them as alleviating anxieties over international relations, emphasizing the wives’ apparent love for, and loyalty to, American servicemen. Hollywood productions and popular press coverage on the women contributed to public debates about domestic and overseas affairs by portraying them as incarnations of both the model minority and the model ally.⁴⁴

On the home front, the Japanese wives appeared to successfully adapt to life in the United States, similar to postwar Japanese Americans, whose apparent assimilation offered a forceful retort to reforming structural inequities that adversely affected other ethnic minorities. At first, popular periodicals expressed concerns about how the GI–war bride marriages would work, given the admitted discomfort that white Americans had with racial differences, let alone with mixed-race progeny arising from these relationships. Over time, however, the press scripted the Japanese wives as eager participants in the American way of life, as revealed through their embrace of mass consumerism, their acceptance of gender hierarchies, and their misgivings about communism.⁴⁵ In this way, these wives’ support of American politics, culture, and consumer goods served to promote the ideological and material wonders that the United States offered to the rest of the world. Their heterosexual relationships with predominantly white men and their establishment of stable nuclear families also assuaged the American mainstream about the continuing power of the nation’s Cold War aims. These included not only confronting the threat of communism but also ensuring domestic abundance and solidity by using the example of Japanese brides to prescribe subordinate roles for other minorities and women. This point became clear when commentators favored Japanese women’s recognition of gender hierarchies over the behaviors of more “aggressive” or “liberated” white women in the United States. As depicted in various novels, films, and other popular forums, white American women threatened domestic stability because they sought employment outside of the household, were too emotionally unbalanced, or were too demanding of their husbands. Femme fatale characters in film noir and in pulp fiction, or even a meek housewife who accommodates darker personalities within, as seen in the Hollywood production The Three Faces of Eve (1957), suggest the range of hazards that white women presented in a postwar world. At the same time, a blockbuster picture like Sayonara (1957) displayed Japanese wives catering to their white GI husbands during the U.S. occupation—behavior that stood in distinct contrast to their restive American counterparts.⁴⁶

Regarding international affairs, the Japanese war brides’ apparent submissiveness to their spouses paralleled overseas subordination to American leadership, bolstering the idea that Japan would devote itself to the United States when combating communism and extending global capitalism. The mainstream media in particular invested in the narrative of rescuing, enlightening, or assimilating female racial Others who represented subsidiary regions to demonstrate the benevolence of masculine occupying powers.⁴⁷ The idea that Americans were uplifting Japan from feudal ways and thinking, which had prevented the country from progressing to a modern liberal state, became understood through the language and imagery of race and gender relations. Influenced by their male occupiers’ values and behaviors, Japanese women came to appreciate the open-minded attentiveness of American suitors. War brides themselves did make conscious decisions to marry GIs to escape from not only restrictive traditions but also the material deprivation and destruction in their homeland. As heads of struggling households when their fathers and brothers became casualties of war, many of the women felt freer to find work with the occupation forces, where they met their future husbands.⁴⁸ But even as Americans saw themselves as attempting to enlighten Japan, they also applauded the idea that Japanese women knew their place and the expectations of them. Two accounts from popular periodicals highlight the pervasiveness of these cultural attitudes toward the war brides and how such outlooks related to U.S. Cold War objectives.

One story in the Los Angeles Times in 1953 emphasized the steady and assuring presence of Kyoko Ariki, who had married a U.S. corporal while in Japan. The soldier, Claude Batchelor, then left with his unit to fight in Korea, where he became a prisoner of war. During the negotiations for peace, however, Batchelor decided to remain with his communist captors. This act played into American frustrations regarding POWs “turning communist,” prompting larger worries about U.S. impotence, malaise, and weak-mindedness at home and abroad. Susceptibility to “brainwashing” was seen as a symptom of physical and mental softening stemming from too much consumerism and domestic affluence, or not enough religious faith and a lack of strong family ties. These issues, many Americans feared, would eventually lead to a break down in individual and national autonomy. Such concerns transferred to overseas conflicts, when communist forces held American soldiers captive in body, mind, and soul.⁴⁹ Yet, back in Tokyo, the Japanese war bride, as exemplified by Ariki, became the symbol of resilience in these difficult moments “because of her hatred of Communism” and her appreciation of an American lifestyle.⁵⁰ A large photograph of Ariki dressed in Western attire graces the article. In it, she faces the camera in a medium shot with an earnest expression, sitting with pen and paper, ready to encourage her husband to resist communist propaganda and to return to their marriage. No demure Cho-Cho-San, she instead presented a strong-willed persona, but that of a wife who would respect the gendered order of the household, once her husband realized his mistake and reintegrated into domestic stability. This image of the war bride’s resolve was thus required for a subordinate partner to withstand a marriage under fire, a situation that paralleled international relations. In this light, even if American GIs in Korea became susceptible to enemy indoctrination, their Japanese wives not only stood firm in their love for their spouses but also represented a faithful, anticommunist Japan that would remain true to the United States in troubling times.

In 1955, Reader’s Digest presented another war bride, Mieko Miyazaki, whose story embodied American Cold War dreams of an overseas model ally turned domestic model minority. When interviewed for the magazine, she described on the one hand white American women as too competitive when trying to lure potential husbands or when buying clothing. On the other hand, American men were better than their Japanese peers when it came to romance. During her first contacts with them in occupied Japan, U.S. soldiers struck her with their “human-ness, a conviction that human beings are important.” As she continued, “It’s the quality that makes Americans fight Communism.” She also confessed that she experienced no racism when coming to the United States. Miyazaki admitted that she felt lucky when immigrating in 1948, as opposed to the 1920s, when racial prejudice was more extensive. She cited the example of her father, a Japanese diplomat; when he was visiting the United States, someone spat on him. By the postwar era, the nation presented to the war bride not only the apparent racial progress made but also the “beautiful homes, lovely cars and elegant clothes” to which all Americans could aspire. “America is a country where such dreams seem feasible,” she remarked. In an interesting twist, Reader’s Digest first presented Miyazaki as a liberated new woman in Japan when she wrote an article about birth control. The American military government, however, censored her work for unstated reasons. Incensed, she went to an occupation office to lodge her complaint. But she met a GI there, and they soon fell in love. Any reminder of her initial activism then disappeared from the narrative, presumably coopted by her marriage. Although Miyazaki desired to escape a “rigid, tradition-bound life in Japan,” her views on reproductive rights became contained when love made her an accomplice to the power of a white American patriarchy.⁵¹

Yamaguchi Yoshiko negotiated her performances within and against these American understandings of Japanese women. When the actor traveled to the United States in 1950 to test her talents in Hollywood, she teased American reporters that she looked forward to learning how to kiss, a statement designed to attract headlines about the star. Much of her response targeted the Japanese film industry, where caressing was uncommon in movie scenes. Yamaguchi had already appeared in a few productions in Japan showing such acts. In 1948, she told the Japanese press that their country’s performers were not skilled enough in on-screen kissing, but Americans certainly were. For their part, U.S. occupation authorities encouraged reforms in Japanese cinema by allowing actors to kiss, hoping to instill among audiences more frankness in public feelings. Much of this impetus came from the desire to spread American cultural values throughout Japan. But other motives were steeped in stereotypes about Asian inscrutability. Such secretiveness, as many Americans saw it, led to the attack on Pearl Harbor in the first place. Hence, U.S. officials wanted to promote openness among the Japanese through popular entertainment that introduced democratic beliefs and practices. Yamaguchi’s postwar roles in Japanese movies belonged in part to this American project.⁵²

The movie star’s public statement about coming to the United States to learn the art of kissing also signified a shift from her previous wartime roles in the intimacies of empire; American men now sought to woo Japanese women. Yamaguchi’s gesture implied her willingness not only to be courted and protected but also to be tutored in the affairs of love and sex by white men, thus ensuring their superiority over her. This stance, in turn, suggested the sexual immaturity of Japanese women as a whole, which reflected the political immaturity of Japan, positions that reenacted Lieutenant Pinkerton’s dominance over Madame Butterfly. As an entertainer who had already spent years in the limelight, however, Yamaguchi was adept at telling correspondents what they wanted to hear. This skill at negotiating publicity recalls her apology to the Chinese press about her wartime role in China Nights, which helped her attract attention for the release of Glory to Eternity. In her cultural diplomacy with American reporters, she voiced her anticipated pleasure at embracing Western ideals and behaviors. By doing so, she also allayed U.S. anxieties about Japan, while expanding her professional opportunities to a nation that occupied her country.

Still, promotional material on, and reviews of, Yamaguchi’s Hollywood films resorted to simplistic and common archetypes regarding Japanese womanhood and, consequently, postwar Japan in order to demonstrate American supremacy. Movie critics in the United States continually described the actor as “pretty and doll-like,” an “exotic film favorite of Japan,” or in similar phrases reminiscent of a foreign, submissive Madame Butterfly.⁵³ This outlook extended to political debates on the reconfigured postwar alliances in the Pacific. For House of Bamboo, Twentieth Century–Fox publicists either misunderstood or misrepresented Yamaguchi’s life story after World War II, proclaiming that the actor left China to escape from communism rather than because of a postwar repatriation.⁵⁴ This storyline highlighted how a reformed Japan, under American tutelage, became an important refuge from the dangers presented by communist China. The strategy also served to diminish Japan’s wartime occupation of China, as well as Yamaguchi’s own role in that imperial project, within American public memory. Given such publicity, Yamaguchi had to keep silent about her love for, and guilt about, China as her “motherland,” as her more complicated relations with that country dissipated in the Cold War spotlight. Meanwhile, postwar Japan, when imagined by the U.S. movie industry as a charming and innocent junior partner, became a safe haven for the actor and for the rest of Asia, a stance that reinforced American aspirations to contain communism in that region.

American uncertainties about Japan and the reassurance provided by war brides, as played by Yamaguchi, were apparent in cultural venues throughout the early Cold War. The actor was well aware of how her Hollywood productions coincided with the growing number of Japanese women marrying their American GI suitors, as briefly noted in her memoir (264). At the same time, she gave little credence to these films because they reached only a modicum of worldwide success. Important as well, her Hollywood pictures aroused tepid, if not angry, reactions in Japan because of their simplistic depictions of its culture. A related problem, as other Japanese complained, stemmed from American dominance of the film industry in their country. Yamaguchi herself noted how U.S. production crews were inattentive to her advice, particularly about portraying Japanese women. Japanese War Bride and House of Bamboo, however, offered opportunities for cultural commentary beyond the growing disharmony in U.S.-Japan relations. The films and Yamaguchi’s presence in the United States also elicited varying Japanese American responses that highlighted this group’s interests in domestic and transpacific affairs.

“American Japanese, Like Me”

In 1952, Japanese War Bride appeared in theaters across Japan and the United States just as major events symbolically converged with regard to the two nations’ concerns. The year marked the official end of the U.S. occupation of Japan, raising questions among both Japanese and Americans about how the new allies would perform on the world stage. On the U.S. home front, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, allowing the Issei and other foreign-born Asians to apply for American citizenship, while also permitting a small annual quota of Asian immigrants to enter the United States in addition to Japanese war brides. The film thus appeared amid debates over national and international belonging, in terms of assimilating racial Others as citizens and as representatives of allied states. The Hollywood production dramatized U.S. Cold War aims by fitting Japanese women and Japan itself within the process of “becoming American” to highlight the power of liberal democratic tenets. At the same time, the presence of Japanese American characters and the references to their wartime imprisonment in the film complicated how this unilateral endeavor would work. Creating their own sense of transpacific collaborations, the Issei and Nisei figures exchange onscreen moments of postwar healing, forgiveness, and self-protection with the Japanese war bride that occur beyond the sight, or the intervention, of white protagonists. These actions, in turn, offered possibilities for Japanese Americans to read the film in ways that differed from the views of mainstream critics.

Although underdeveloped in plot and characters, Japanese War Bride is still a rich cultural artifact that reveals the unresolved racial tensions of World War II.⁵⁵ As Caroline Chung Simpson suggests, the rising visibility of Japanese war brides in the postwar United States and these women’s gradual acceptance by the white populace overshadowed the fact that other Japanese Americans still faced difficulties gaining recognition from mainstream society.⁵⁶ Japanese War Bride, however, brings these matters to a head. The film begins with an American soldier, Lieutenant Jim Sterling (Don Taylor), who gets wounded while fighting in Korea and recovers in occupied Japan. He falls in love with a Japanese Red Cross nurse, Tae Shimizu (Yamaguchi). After courting and marrying her, Lieutenant Sterling brings her to Salinas, California, to meet his family, whose members react in different ways toward the war bride. As their name suggests, the Sterlings represent the typical all-American, middle-class family that farms its own land and adheres to basic values of decency and hard work. But the sheen wears thin when Tae enters the picture, and some of the Sterlings greet her suspiciously, if not with outright hostility. Complicating these relations further are the neighboring Japanese Americans, the Hasagawas, who had been imprisoned during the war. Composed of an Issei father (William Yokota), his son, Shiro (Lane Nakano), and daughter, Emma (May Takasugi), the Hasagawas welcome Tae, yet still remain cautious when interacting with the Sterlings. Presenting an array of characters in their hurts, doubts, and grievances, Japanese War Bride offers a narrative in which neither the white mainstream’s approval of Japan as a new ally, nor forgiveness on the part of Japanese Americans, is assured.

When arriving in Salinas, Tae’s anticipation and enjoyment of becoming American earns her the glowing affection of her husband, Jim. Dressed in Western clothing, Tae appreciates the bounty of postwar consumerism by going shopping with some of the Sterling women, which serves to reassure audiences of their nation’s abundance amid uncertain times. The United States, as Tae sees it, is also filled with the marvels of modern technology and industrial productivity in a pastoral setting. The Sterlings drive her past expansive fields dominated by harvesting machinery, as the camera pans across the scenery in a documentary-like manner. The Hasagawas then show her the vegetable packing plant in which they work, alongside white laborers. Thus the film reveals Japanese Americans as a part of this rural modernity in which U.S. industrialism and consumerism benefit everyone, regardless of race.

Yet Tae’s presence in the Sterling household evokes past troubles associated with the Pacific War and with the Japanese American confinement. One of the Sterling’s elder white neighbors, Mrs. Shafer, cannot hide her disgust at the mixed marriage. Mourning her son who fought and died at Bataan, Mrs. Shafer tells Jim’s mother, “I hate them all!” Tae’s racial presence and the war memories she conjures only add to Mrs. Shafer’s grief. Occupying the opposite end of the grudge-carrying spectrum is the Issei Mr. Hasagawa, who, along with his children, was incarcerated in the wartime camps. Shiro and Emma have little problem putting the past behind them and visit the Sterlings, bringing a wedding present to Jim and Tae. One medium shot depicts both parties meeting over the white picket fence of the Sterling farm—an image that suggests overcoming barriers. Mr. Hasagawa, however, remains behind in the truck. Like Mrs. Shafer, Mr. Hasagawa cannot move beyond the pains and sorrows of the war. Yet the film minimizes Mr. Hasagawa’s feelings when viewers hear a gong on the soundtrack during a close-up shot of his fixed expression. Jim’s mother also compares him to a cigar-store Indian, sitting there in stony silence. Mrs. Sterling’s comment reduces both Asians and Native Americans to stereotypes but also recalls the groups’ shared history of repression and containment, when portions of Indian reservations served as “relocation camps,” notably at Gila River and Poston, Arizona, during the war. In several other conversations, Tae asks her husband about the Hasagawas, wondering whether they are friends of the Sterlings. Jim mutters that they are simply neighbors. His uneasy response reveals that he knows about, and wishes to avoid, discussing the removal and confinement of Japanese Americans. Tae’s presence and curiosity once more conjure a submerged memory dating back to the war, one that few desire to address, or even to redress. The topic of imprisoning Japanese Americans, however, becomes minimized since Shiro and Emma Hasagawa represent the younger generation that will set priorities for the future.

What proves most interesting about Japanese War Bride is the relationship between Tae and the Hasagawas, which dramatizes Tae’s becoming American, a process aided by these Nisei neighbors. Once settled in Salinas, Tae looks to the Americanized Hasagawas, and not to the Sterling family, as her model of U.S. citizenship. At one point, Tae refers to the younger Hasagawas as “American Japanese, like me,” when the Sterlings show her the fertile farmland that Japanese Americans reclaimed after the war. In another scene, Tae refers to Emma Hasagawa as “a real American, as I hope to be.” In these cases, the Nisei Hasagawas provide Tae with a racialized template of how to be an “American.” On the surface, the film celebrates a postwar image of American diversity and tolerance as part of the nation’s strength, and the Nisei still display their faith in the American creed. As the film suggests, the younger Hasagawas, as paradigms of the model minority, are able to make a living within the white mainstream, despite their Japanese ancestry and the past discrimination against them. Likewise, Tae, as a model ally, will endure the distrust and hatred of some white Americans. But taking a lesson from the Hasagawas, she will surmount these obstacles as well. Thus the Nisei become exemplars of American pluralism, even as the film presents them as stereotyped characters who endure setbacks and forgive past wrongs against them. Yet, on another level, the idea that they will endure racism, despite their citizenship, still lingers. The younger Hasagawas are then the purveyors of democracy as well as the strategists on how to persist in spite of its systematic shortcomings.

One telling exchange about the wartime past occurs between Tae and Shiro, the Hasagawa son. The film gives voice to Japanese American anger when Shiro tells Tae about his family’s incarceration during the war. But since Shiro’s sister, Emma, had handled it well enough, the elder Mr. Hasagawa’s bitterness appears more like an individual’s failure to forgive than a nation’s structural failure to protect its ethnic minorities. Caught in a different situation, Shiro had been in Japan looking for employment when the war erupted, and authorities there imprisoned him because of his loyalty to the United States. Shiro’s enduring ire at Japan thus serves to offset his father’s rage at being mistreated back home. In turn, Tae recounts her family’s sadness at hearing about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and how they did not support the militarists in Japan. This positioning presents Tae as an innocent bystander rather than a hated enemy. Tae’s persona then reinforces how postwar Americans could view the Japanese as infantile and malleable when asserting U.S. authority during the occupation and downplaying their prior racial hostility toward a new Cold War ally. Tae fits the profile here, with her eagerness to please the Sterling family.⁵⁷

Yet the war bride serves another purpose when interacting with the Japanese American characters. Tae and Shiro eventually agree that the old adage of “forgive and forget” is the best one to follow, allowing for the Cold War integration of both the Japanese and Japanese Americans into the nation’s interests. The film aligns with other popular venues in presenting this message, as both groups express their desires for freedom, democracy, and material comforts. This scene, however, offers other interpretive possibilities. Tae and Shiro voice their idea of forgiving and forgetting to only each other and not to any white character overseeing their conversations. But they also support one another when acknowledging that this attitude toward the past will help them to survive in, and adapt to, a postwar nation and its expectations of racial minorities.

These insights were apparent to Nisei reviewers, Larry Tajiri the foremost among them. He commended the film in the Pacific Citizen for addressing the wartime confinement and for giving Japanese American actors this rare opportunity to appear in a Hollywood production. He also emphasized the importance of showing Japanese and Japanese Americans interacting with each other. In one of his several columns on Japanese War Bride, he observed, “It is from Shiro that Tae learns of the problems faced by the Nisei during the war, of the mass evacuation and the relocation camps and of the bitterness that is the residue of that wartime experience.” But Tajiri avoided the “forgive and forget” message from the characters’ dialogue. Instead, he noted the lingering “bitterness” created from the incarceration, a sentiment he thought would affect his Japanese American readers more forcefully than the film’s depiction of model protagonists forgiving white society for its trespasses against them. In another column, Tajiri began not with the interracial romance depicted in the film but with the ongoing racial discrimination faced by Japanese Americans. “The subject of a California community’s prejudice against persons of Japanese ancestry,” he wrote, was a topic that was “once considered too hot for Hollywood to handle.” Now, with the need to address Cold War civil rights, the memories of the wartime confinement still motivated his concerns. The film clarified the postwar condition of Japanese Americans, as depicted by the Hasagawas, who were “still fearful of prejudice and mindful of the . . . mass evacuation and mass detention” and were “living somewhat uneasily” once returned to Salinas. Despite these challenges, Tajiri observed that the Hasagawas were significant characters, “whose friendship helps Tae in her difficult months of adjustment in a strange land.”⁵⁸

In other instances, the Japanese American press highlighted the possibilities for cultural exchanges that allowed for postwar reconciliation between the United States and Japan through Yamaguchi’s visit and onscreen appearances. Alongside one of Tajiri’s reviews of Japanese War Bride, the Pacific Citizen included news about the impending peace treaty with Japan, proposing the Nisei as “the key link” for “mutual understanding” between the two nations. “Who is in a better position to carry between the two countries the most vigorous concepts of democracy?” the paper asked. The Chicago-based Scene magazine also broached this point in its 1950 interview with Yamaguchi. That she recognized the differences among the Nisei in Japan, in Hawai‘i, and on the U.S. mainland was impressive enough. More important, though, was her desire to learn American values from them. “I would like to meet Niseis and talk to them, ask questions about democracy and so on,” she noted. If Yamaguchi portrayed the process of “becoming American” with the help of the Nisei characters in Japanese War Bride, she anticipated this stance through her star image in publicity for the ethnic press. In this context, the Nisei saw themselves as appropriate models of democracy to help reconstruct postwar Japan, displaying through their apparent recovery and successes the merits of an American lifestyle.⁵⁹

Japanese Americans were likewise pleased by Yamaguchi’s appearances and by her public recognition of them. This was particularly evident when Yamaguchi, before her work in Hollywood began, toured several cities in the United States for concerts that showcased her singing. Japanese American audiences from Honolulu to Los Angeles to Chicago appeared in great numbers to see and hear her. As Yamaguchi recollected about these experiences, “I sang with hope that I could offer consolation to the Japanese Americans, as I heard that they had gone through hardships during the war.” As part of her playlist, she offered at the Hawai‘i venue a hybrid version of Jack Pitman’s popular tune “Beyond the Reef” (1948), singing the first stanzas in Japanese and the rest in English. By merging these cultural traits in her celebrity persona and performances, Yamaguchi extended to her listeners not only solace for their wartime sufferings but also a curative pleasure and value in reconnecting with their once disparaged Japanese ancestry.⁶⁰ The affective power of these interactions was therefore mutual. The Nisei educated Yamaguchi, and thus Japan, about democracy to help rebuild that nation as a viable ally, while she widened her transnational appeal to the United States and aided their postwar recuperation.

But these transpacific interactions also necessitated that Japanese Americans overlook portions of this intertwined past. When ethnic newspapers announced Yamaguchi’s concert appearances, they reminded their readers about Ri Koran’s fame and her prior films such as China Nights. Yet many avoided mentioning how this stage name and motion picture related to imperial Japan’s occupation of China, a troubling point in her history of stardom. The Nichi Bei Times disclosed in 1950 that Yamaguchi got her start with the Man’ei film company, appearing in “romantic Japanese pictures,” but went no further to explain their context or function. Implicitly critiquing Japan’s empire building in his coverage of the movie star, Tajiri did remark in the Pacific Citizen that Japanese wartime censors eventually banned Yamaguchi’s songs from China Nights because the officials were repulsed by the idea of intimacy between “foreigners” and Japanese.⁶¹ Yamaguchi also raised this subject in her memoir. She added that, when she had visited Imperial Army troops at the front during the war, they still requested that she sing the forbidden tunes to help ease their hardships. This view suggested that she and the soldiers participated in creating other affective purposes from the songs, thus subverting the empire’s bureaucratic rulings and intentions (104–106). But as Yamaguchi wrestled with her complicity in Japan’s militarist endeavors, Japanese American papers mainly ignored this aspect of her career and its connotations of imperial dominance and destruction in Asia. Another reason to downplay these wartime associations may have been to prevent stirring prior suspicions about Issei and Nisei ties to Japan, which had been used to justify their mass confinement and other discriminatory actions against them. While these murkier histories might have linked the performer and her audience to feelings of guilt or shame derived from the Asia-Pacific War, Yamaguchi’s appearances in postwar films and concerts in the United States settled the matter. Media coverage transformed them, respectively, into models of international alliance and of domestic citizenship.

In Japanese War Bride, however, wartime prejudices against Japan and Japanese Americans resurface when tensions erupt within the Sterling family over accepting Tae and the Hasagawa neighbors. When Tae becomes pregnant, the Sterlings fall for an anonymous “poison pen” letter (written by Jim’s sister-in-law, Fran) accusing Tae of conceiving her child through an affair with Shiro Hasagawa. Although Jim believes his wife and not the rumor, the family pressure on Jim and Tae’s marriage becomes too much to bear. Astonished at Tae’s stoic countenance during this crisis, he shouts at her, in racially tinged frustration: “Don’t you people ever cry?” Cruelly admonished, Tae does indeed break down and runs away with her child. Noticeably, she first turns to the Hasagawas and later to the Japanese American fishing community in Monterey for protection from the Sterlings’ wrath and confusion. Part of becoming American for Tae is again enduring distrust and racism, which links her to the Japanese Americans who understand her position with the Sterlings and who thus provide her refuge.

As the film nears its conclusion, a restoration of race and gender hierarchies within the family and the neighborhood occurs when Fran’s husband has enough of her bad behavior and slaps her to the ground. A liberal patriarchy, while hesitant throughout the story to establish its influence over recalcitrant white women, reasserts itself in this act of authoritative violence. The Pacific Citizen noted that this moment elicited cheers from the theater audience. Tajiri interpreted the crowd’s reaction as a metaphorical strike against racism, particularly against the Japanese war bride and, more broadly, Japanese Americans. However, this brutality also reinstated men’s power over headstrong women. Ironically, the scene recalls Tetsuo’s slapping of the impetuous Keiran in China Nights. In each case, Keiran and Fran must acknowledge the limits of their own ignorance or prejudices as a result of this physical aggression. The violence instigates more enlightenment on Keiran’s part or better conduct for Fran in their relations with supposedly benevolent men. This comparison applies as well, albeit in different contexts, to the dangers of impurity that both Yamaguchi and Maria Windsor, who played Fran, represented in their respective film careers. Windsor’s notoriety stemmed from her femme fatale roles in crime dramas such as Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin (1952) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). The character Fran in Japanese War Bride is a restless and conniving woman exposed to the corrupting taint of big city attractions, which acts as a foil to the Sterling family’s simple rural life. Fran’s debasing influence thus adds to her supposed need for rebuke to control the threat she represents.

In the end, Jim Sterling upbraids his family for its less-than-welcoming attitude toward his wife and sets out to find her. When he finds Tae (thanks to information from the Hasagawas), she is strolling along the rocky coastline in Monterey. Surprised and frightened, Tae runs away from him, contemplating suicide while looking at the watery depths below. But Jim catches up to her, and the couple embraces as the music swells and the end credits roll. What remains unclear about this finale is the reception that the lovers would receive upon returning to their home in Salinas. Would the Sterlings finally accept Tae into their lives, or would their still smoldering prejudices and resentments get the better of them? Meanwhile, after safeguarding Tae and her baby, the Hasagawas had only reluctantly given Jim the information about his wife’s whereabouts, knowing full well that the Sterlings had mistreated her. The moment is full of uncertainty.

The contexts in which Japanese War Bride appeared explain some of this unresolved tension, since the outcome of the Korean War was still in doubt, and Americans were unsure about the loyalties of their new Japanese allies.⁶² The film attempts to address this issue in its opening sequence. Viewers see a field at night, filled with dead American soldiers, and the word “Korea” emblazoned over the screen. A team of rescuers with flashlights searches for any wounded and come across Jim Sterling. The next sequence shows the lieutenant in a hospital bed in Japan with Tae tending to him. Jim tells Tae that he had been part of the occupation forces in Japan and had hated his experiences there, more because of his own loneliness than anything else. Then he went to Korea, and his appreciation for Japan blossomed. These sequences reveal the metaphorical ways in which a devoted and willing Japan would aid the United States in its fight against communism, regardless of American doubts and anxieties. Jim and Tae thus become the Adam and Eve of this new postwar world. Additionally, Shiro and Emma Hasagawa might reassure audiences that at least the Nisei would assimilate back into mainstream society, get past the hurts of their mass confinement, and forgive the Sterlings for their treatment of Tae.

Mainstream reviewers on both sides of the Pacific had varied reactions to Japanese War Bride that disclosed their broader take on U.S.-Japan relations. American and Japanese critics were pleased that the heroine did not die in the manner of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, a radical departure from U.S. films about Asians that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s.⁶³ But critics in the United States were lukewarm at best. Although many enjoyed Yamaguchi’s performance, they found Japanese War Bride lacking in depth and complexity. The New York Times summed up what others saw: a film “without imagination despite [its] story that does make a perfectly valid plea for understanding.”⁶⁴ Japanese columnists were also unimpressed with the production, remarking that it was made only to appease “Mr. and Mrs. America” in their simplistic views of the world. This assessment chided Americans’ self-satisfaction and their desires for neat resolutions to racial problems. Other critics found the film clichéd and boring.⁶⁵ Yamaguchi herself remarked that reviewers in both nations took the film “to task for its inadequate portrayal of a Japanese woman married to an American” (281). Yet moviegoers in Japan and in the United States still appreciated Yamaguchi as a star performer. Japanese audiences saw the actor as an icon who sustained their national pride and evoked nostalgic visions of their past imperial glory, despite what they may have thought about the film itself. One writer even editorialized that Yamaguchi “occupied” the interests of Americans when in Hollywood, a play on words emphasizing her allure and influence on them while simultaneously poking fun at U.S. authority in Japan.⁶⁶

The publicity about Yamaguchi’s career shifted to a more personal level when she became acquainted with Isamu Noguchi, the Nisei sculptor and designer. Noguchi was the illegitimate son of the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and the American writer and teacher Léonie Gilmour. Born in Los Angeles, Isamu came of age in Japan and then returned to the United States to finish his secondary education. But, as a mixed-race child, he had felt estranged from both nations because of his unusual background. By the 1930s, he had created a name for himself in New York City with his modern sculpture and his set designs for the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. He never felt quite at home anywhere and sought exposure to different artistic styles when visiting Paris, Mexico City, Beijing, and Tokyo. Because he had lived in New York during the war, Noguchi was not considered part of the Japanese American population that required removal and confinement. He volunteered to go anyway, spending six months in the camp at Poston, Arizona, with the hopes of teaching art, creating a designed community, and sustaining democratic values among the imprisoned. After the war, Noguchi returned to Japan for a few years and met with young artists, whom he advised to fashion their own indigenous modern forms and styles, rather than mimicking Western ones. For him, the war’s aftermath presented opportunities for new ways of seeing and producing art.⁶⁷

The sculptor’s romance with Yamaguchi came at a moment when each of them had developed a postwar fascination with the other’s country and culture. They first met at a New York museum exhibit of kimonos in November 1950 and developed a relationship with the help of their mutual friends Ayako and Eitaro Ishigaki, the journalist and the painter, respectively.⁶⁸ What attracted Isamu and Yoshiko to each other were their cosmopolitan upbringings and sentiments. The two were, in Yamaguchi’s words, “rootless souls” (267). Each understood the other’s struggles fitting within and between different cultures and having their loyalties questioned because of their interstitial positions. As she noted, “In a spiritual sense, I was a mixed-race child between China and Japan, and he, in a literal sense, was a mixed-race child between Japan and the United States” (266). The Asia-Pacific War challenged their already fraught identities by alienating them from various populations and inspiring remorse about their homelands’ treatment of other countries. Yamaguchi sympathized with China and what it suffered under occupation, even as she participated in Japanese propaganda about it. Noguchi became guilt-ridden when the B-29s dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wanted to contribute on some artistic level to reconcile with his father’s land. But he still retained a complex relationship with Japan because of his mixed ancestry. In the United States, he sensed his estrangement from other Nisei upon entering the wartime camp at Poston. Noguchi was several years older than most of them, being closer in age to the Issei. As an accomplished and well-traveled artist, he did not share many of the Nisei’s experiences or interests. His voluntary rather than compulsory confinement also made him suspect as a collaborator with the white camp administrators. The harsh Arizona climate and the lack of available art material added to his wish to leave early.⁶⁹ With such laden backgrounds, the movie star and the sculptor recognized their own worldliness and isolation in the other. During one of their first conversations, Yamaguchi was struck by Noguchi’s empathy, when he observed that the war must have been difficult for her to endure, given her conflicted feelings for China and Japan. She realized that “he knew of what he spoke,” with an attentiveness that eventually won her heart.⁷⁰

In December 1951, the couple married in Japan. Their relationship attracted media attention, since both were celebrities. But to many observers, the romance between Noguchi and Yamaguchi also signified a broader postwar merging of Japanese and American interests.⁷¹ That the two were transpacific bridge-builders came in literal and figurative forms. In June, while they were still dating, Noguchi visited Hiroshima, lured there “by a sense of guilt.” As he further explained, “I wished somehow to add my own gesture of expiation” to the city’s past and to its future well-being.⁷² Because of Noguchi’s notoriety, the renowned Japanese architect Tange Kenzo invited him to design the railings of two bridges (one symbolizing life, the other, death) that led into the proposed Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.⁷³ In August, after touring the Hiroshima site and meeting with Japanese officials and other architects, Noguchi flew to Los Angeles, where Yamaguchi was on a Hollywood set filming Japanese War Bride. Noguchi noted that he drew his initial bridge railing designs in her dressing room.⁷⁴ So while he was working on a project to help Japan memorialize its wartime destruction and postwar healing, Yamaguchi was performing the role of a war bride assimilating into American society and thus enacting a larger metaphor for a feminized, subordinate state to convince U.S. audiences that Japan was a dependable ally. In this emblematic moment, the couple came together to contribute to each nation’s affective recovery from the Pacific War.

But even as the two figures came to epitomize a new partnership between their respective countries, strains emerged within this alliance from the ongoing American influence in Japan, from Japanese reactions to that presence, and from political developments in the United States. Problems related to these broader events lurked ahead for the celebrity pair. For Yamaguchi, the mixed responses in both nations to Japanese War Bride would continue with her second film, House of Bamboo. Also, amid the fervor of McCarthyism, she came under Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) suspicion as a communist sympathizer, just as her uncertain allegiances had attracted the notice of intelligence agencies during the war. Tensions with Noguchi arose as well, despite the couple’s shared cosmopolitan sensibilities. Part of this friction came from growing anti-Americanism overseas, when some Japanese critics began tiring of Noguchi and his impact on their art scene. As the sculptor and the actor discovered, what they merged stylistically in their work did not come so easily in their marriage, or in their relations with each other’s ancestral lands.

Trouble in Paradise

In her memoir, Yamaguchi noted with pride that she was the first Japanese performer working in postwar Hollywood (257). Stars from Japan, however, had pursued film careers in the United States beforehand. Sessue Hayakawa and his wife, Tsuru Aoki, appeared together in a series of silent films and founded their own movie production company in the early twentieth century.⁷⁵ Yet Yamaguchi’s presence in Hollywood was still a major accomplishment, given how rare it was for Asian or Asian American actors to appear in U.S. films. When she first arrived in 1950, Yamaguchi was slated to appear in a Broadway musical, but the production never came to fruition. By then, she had taken the name “Shirley Yamaguchi.” She later began socializing with such celebrities as Charlie Chaplin, Yul Brynner, and James Dean. She took acting lessons from Elia Kazan and met with Pearl S. Buck and Eleanor Roosevelt (263–265). But her success in the United States would be short lived. In 1955, the release of, and ensuing controversy over, House of Bamboo coincided with the end of her marriage to Isamu Noguchi.

House of Bamboo is Samuel Fuller’s remake of another Twentieth Century–Fox motion picture, the film noir classic The Street with No Name (1948). Harry Kleiner served as the screenwriter for both films, which focus on an undercover agent who tries to infiltrate and destroy a criminal gang. The Street with No Name is the more conventional film noir production, with its black-and-white, tension-ridden scenes of a corrosive underworld lurking beneath the surface of postwar America. House of Bamboo is a hybrid, transitional work that combines elements of earlier film noir with those of later color-filled epics set in “exotic” lands. Shot in panoramic CinemaScope, House of Bamboo heralded the arrival of bright, lavish features set, and often filmed, in Asia, such as The King and I (1956), The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), Sayonara (1957), and South Pacific (1958). House of Bamboo even helped to make Sayonara a reality, when Fuller gave Joshua Logan, the director for the latter production, his research on scouting locations in Japan as a professional courtesy.⁷⁶

In House of Bamboo, Yamaguchi plays another war bride, Mariko Nagoya, who is secretly married to a U.S. Army veteran involved with a criminal organization composed of other former American occupation soldiers in Japan. Her war bride status is briefly noted when her GI husband, fatally wounded in a heist, is interrogated by investigators and reveals his unofficial marriage. He dies from his injuries, which include a bullet wound inflicted by his own gang, headed by the ruthless Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), meant to ensure silence about the group’s activities. Mariko discovers her husband’s life of crime only when the authorities contact her about his death. An Army investigator (Robert Stack) then appears, impersonating a hoodlum, Eddie Span-ier, who wants to join Sandy’s outfit. He tracks down Mariko and uses her as part of his cover to gain admittance to the group. Relations between Mariko and Eddie, initially tense and distrustful, evolve into a working partnership and eventually love, when she agrees to pose as his “kimono girl,” the gang’s jargon for female companions. Along the way, Mariko becomes alienated from the rest of Japanese society because of her association with Eddie. Thus, her assumed sexual and cultural “impurity” strengthens his trust in her, since she sacrifices her reputation for his goals. Eddie at this point reveals himself to Mariko as Sergeant Kenner and ultimately foils the crew of felons with the help of the American military and the Japanese police. As part of the grand finale, a dramatic shootout occurs on the roof of a Tokyo department store, complete with an amusement park, where the gang leader, Sandy, meets his end. The concluding long shots then show Kenner and Mariko walking in a city park on a sunlit day, intimating a longer romantic relationship to follow.

American critics admired the location shots of Japan and the CinemaScope color photography. Some reviewers noted that the film was part of a larger Hollywood strategy to incorporate exterior shots from the world over, including Europe and Hong Kong, that suggested American global predominance in cultural as well as in political developments. However, most reviewers, following the Saturday Review, called House of Bamboo a “routine cops-and-robbers story.” One moviegoer was even troubled by the portrayal of criminal behavior, presuming that the United States would not want to export depictions of rogue Americans’ antics to Japanese audiences.⁷⁷

Overall, the film offered American movie patrons an opportunity to view Japan and its people through the imperial gaze of tourists who objectified and commodified what they saw.⁷⁸ This perspective coincided with travel writers’ observations about postwar Japan. Lucy Herndon Crockett provided a tongue-in-cheek description of U.S. troops that revealed the masculine power Americans exerted on a feminized Japan and, in turn, Japan’s transformative influence on those men. As she noted for Travel magazine in 1947: “So now a lumberman from Oregon, a cotton worker from a Louisiana shanty, a miner from Pennsylvania, all in khaki, can dine together to string music, are served by waitresses in colorful kimonos; they play at golf on the finest courses with Japanese girls to caddy for them, and lounge like Roman senators around marble hot sulphur [sic] pools.”⁷⁹ In postwar Japan, soldiers from working-class backgrounds and from all parts of the country could convert themselves into something like imperial officials enjoying a luxurious life. Crockett also marks these levels of power and subservience through race and gender by emphasizing that the servants are all Japanese women, belittled here as “girls.” Thus, instead of transforming imperial Japan into a postwar liberal state, democracy-loving Americans were changing into imperial occupiers—an idea that, on the surface, might generate anxiety about the U.S. overseas presence in the Pacific. But the breezy tone of the article assures readers that Japan is willing to serve and to follow Americans and their good intentions.

Miriam Troop also invested in orientalism as a tourist when reporting for American Magazine in 1955, the same year as House of Bamboo’s release. In her article’s suggestive title, “I’ve Got a Yen for Japan,” desire and spending power converge. In the essay itself, Troop remarked on “the crowds of doll-like, kimono-clad men and women,” and on how Japanese shoppers on the Ginza “behaved . . . like the well-mannered chorus of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.”⁸⁰ Describing Japan’s men and women as diminutive and “kimono-clad” figures implies that both are nonthreatening and effeminate in the minds of Americans. Various observers from the United States packaged the Japanese in already familiar ways to consumers back home, who had acquired such constructed imagery from earlier Western productions about Asia. The author’s reference to Gilbert and Sullivan, the late nineteenth-century English librettist and composer duo, and to their opera The Mikado (1885), recalls American tastes based on orientalist understandings developed from U.S. imperial involvements at the turn of the twentieth century.

House of Bamboo played into these touristic visions of Japan. Indeed, the amusement park scene at the film’s conclusion serves as a broader metaphor for Japan as Hollywood’s playground, which began with the occupation. Fuller prided himself on the location shots depicting the everyday populace in urban Japan. The film reveals multiple high-angle, “bird’s-eye view” framings of the Tokyo streets taken from rooftops, with pedestrians negotiating the walkways, while traffic moves along the avenues. The cameras also capture the vibrant storefronts and colorful garb of passersby, adding to the “exotic” atmosphere. Other background shots include views of such tourist icons as Mount Fuji, the Great Buddha of Kamakura, and the exterior of the Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. When Fuller reminisced about House of Bamboo in his autobiography, he resorted to the language of tourism when revealing sites for his production. “The light there is unique and wonderful,” he remarked about Japan. “Colors come out looking postcard crisp.”⁸¹ In this sense, House of Bamboo itself was a series of postcards shown on film. But, as the Saturday Review noted, too much of the storyline can be “seen through only the camera’s eye,” when the film needed more character and narrative development.⁸² Even so, most American critics were captivated by the Japanese scenery, which they associated with femininity. In House of Bamboo, according to Newsweek, “the shapes and colors of all the nonacting [sic] objects that fill the big screen . . . make a composition which has more than ordinary visual beauty.” Time magazine’s reviewer noted as well that the film was “enhanced by the petal-like beauty of the scenery.” This description coincided with “Japan’s picture-book beauty Shirley Yamaguchi . . . [who] has all the fluid rhythm of a ripple in a pond.”⁸³ Here, “beauty” links the landscape and Yamaguchi’s persona. Even though the film shows male Japanese detectives and police officers helping the American military capture the criminal gang, the character Mariko is the only developed representation of Japan, aside from the filmed scenery.

Fuller and the publicists at Twentieth Century–Fox were aware of the market potential of an interracial romance, emphasizing how House of Bamboo proceeded differently from conventional understandings of Madame Butterfly that presented a doomed relationship. Part of this focus arose from their realization of new Cold War alliances among former enemies and of the appearance of Japanese war brides in the United States. In the film’s press book, the director observed: “In America, at least, people’s thinking has been changed a great deal by the G.I. marriages to Japanese girls. Previously, we have been unable to go farther than ‘Madame Butterfly,’ in which lovers try but fail to clear the hurdle of tradition.” That white men and Asian women could now bring their marriages to the United States, rather than simply keeping them abroad and away from a disapproving white mainstream, was for Fuller and others a significant advance in domestic race relations.⁸⁴

Yet, even if interracial love endured in midcentury movies, variations of the Madame Butterfly image persisted in American expectations of Japanese women’s subordination within a white patriarchy. Fuller later saw House of Bamboo less as a revision of Madame Butterfly than as a film noir story of betrayal. The key point for him is when Sandy and his second-in-command, Griff (Cameron Mitchell), develop a contentious relationship, when Eddie earns Sandy’s trust at the expense of an increasingly jealous Griff. After an aborted heist, Sandy recognizes a police setup, and the criminals turn on one another over who is the betrayer among them. Sandy kills Griff under the mistaken assumption that Griff, rather than Eddie, was the informant who had alerted the authorities about the planned robbery. But Griff had been the loyal one all along.⁸⁵ Considering Mariko’s sizeable screen presence in the storyline, loyalty, rather than betrayal, is the better premise by which to understand House of Bamboo because of her devotion to, and sacrifices for, Eddie. The Japanese war bride, who deceives the criminals through her role as a quick-thinking “kimono girl,” becomes the heroine by overcoming her fears to help take down the outlaw gang. The New York Times caught the character of this dual narrative, describing the work as “a lean, hard-boiled, sharp detective thriller with just a light touch of ‘Madame Butterfly.’”⁸⁶ As a Japanese woman and as a representative of Japan, Mariko is the perfect junior partner who, whatever her initial reservations, aids law-and-order-loving Americans in their quest to combat any subterfuge—an image that bolstered the idea of Japan evolving into a model ally.

Japanese critics, however, savaged House of Bamboo, disclosing the larger simmering tensions between the United States and Japan. Part of their outrage came when The Blackboard Jungle (1955), a movie about inner-city juvenile delinquency, upset Japanese parents with its overwrought violence. It also happened to appear in Japan in the same year as House of Bamboo. Concerns about the latter film centered on developments that occurred both on-screen and off. Reviewers noted that House of Bamboo shamelessly misrepresented aspects of Japanese culture. Although location shots of Tokyo street life were essential to the production, the interiors filmed in the United States looked too wide open, and thus fake, to audiences. Others complained about the errors in the traditional and modern costumes worn by the actors. A larger issue focused on movie distribution in Japan, where theater owners felt compelled by American studios to show disliked features. One of Japan’s largest newspapers, Asahi Shimbun, called the situation “a national disgrace” because of the U.S. film industry’s power to determine what to offer Japanese theaters. This practice had started during the occupation, but remained in place afterward, bothering those who pressed for self-determination in cultural as well as political decisions. The president of a theater owners association suggested more collaboration with U.S. companies, noting that the group would otherwise “consider barring all American movies from movie houses and theaters” to protest their nation’s lack of choice in selecting films to run. As the Christian Science Monitor summarized the prevailing mood in Japan for American readers, House of Bamboo had become the flashpoint for these overseas resentments and “has been scorned and attacked by all Japanese reviewers.”⁸⁷

Given this overseas turmoil, Japanese American reviewers were divided about the film’s importance regarding domestic race relations and their roles as transpacific brokers. Some Nisei critics were quick to praise Yamaguchi’s presence and performance in the film. Tajiri noted in the Pacific Citizen how, similar to Japanese War Bride, House of Bamboo portrayed an interracial relationship in a better light than previous works that followed the Madame Butterfly narrative, in which the Asian woman must sacrifice her life as the only alternative to her lover’s rejection. Tajiri also praised Fuller for tackling the issue of racial prejudice, as seen in his earlier work, The Steel Helmet (1951), showing Nisei and African American soldiers fighting alongside their white counterparts in Korea. Significant also for Tajiri, The Steel Helmet and House of Bamboo employed minority actors of Asian ancestry, giving them a rare opportunity to work in Hollywood. Fuller would later do so again for The Crimson Kimono (1959), a crime story set in Los Angeles, in which a Nisei detective romances a white woman.⁸⁸

Yet the Pacific Citizen’s Tokyo correspondent, Tamotsu Murayama, warned of Hollywood’s impact on Japanese audiences, which might also adversely affect the Nisei living in Japan. He reported that Japanese reviewers dismissed Blackboard Jungle especially because it showcased a Nisei character as one of the juvenile delinquents, which the reviewer feared would undermine the model status of Japanese Americans. Another article in the Pacific Citizen noted that Japanese audiences “jeered” at the cultural inaccuracies in House of Bamboo, while also reporting how one newspaper in Japan “urged Japanese not to cooperate in making . . . such pictures.” Most critical to Murayama, the tensions derived from such troubling Hollywood productions made the Nisei’s job at building better relations between the United States and Japan more difficult, since they would be caught up in the anti-American sentiments brewing abroad. Despite their shared ancestry with those in Japan, Murayama intimated, their U.S. citizenship would associate them with the power of the occupation and with whatever Hollywood invented about Japan.⁸⁹

Yamaguchi offered her own insights about appearing in American films to Japanese readers—a strategy likely intended to deflect criticism of her involvement in making them. The actor noted in the Japan Times that once she signed a contract, she could not change anything in her role, “no matter how awkward it appeared” to her. She knew how wrong the impression of Japanese culture House of Bamboo gave, also realizing that the film catered to American expectations. Although she did not mention Samuel Fuller by name, Yamaguchi complained that U.S. directors desired that she play only “the part of a Japanese girl that the American movie goers like to see on the screen.”⁹⁰ It was thus another aspect of her “becoming Japanese,” but from a Hollywood perspective. Twentieth Century–Fox’s promotional material for House of Bamboo revealed as much in a movie ad tagline: “In Japan, a woman is taught from childhood to please a man!”⁹¹ Mariko recites this statement to Eddie to explain why she treats him so well, as she draws his bath, cooks his breakfast, and massages his back. These behaviors became part of the Hollywood rendition of what American audiences expected from Japanese women, that they cater to male needs and desires. That Japan was the land of submissive Madame Butterflies coming to sexual maturity solely for white men’s pleasure also played into broader perceptions of a U.S. empire that allowed for overseas miscegenation as a part of that imperial project. As House of Bamboo ends, we see Sergeant Kenner, as a representative of that American martial presence abroad, now dressed in his military uniform, walking with the kimono-clad Mariko as the epitome of a successfully wooed Japan.

Such was not the case when Yamaguchi’s marriage to Noguchi began unraveling. The couple’s global travels and separate work schedules meant that out of their four years of marriage, they were together for about half that time. When he was scouting a project in Europe, she was working on a film in Japan. When he conferred with artists in Japan, she performed in concerts in the United States. Seen as a hopeful melding of two cultures, these prominent figures also personified the unresolved frictions emerging between their respective countries.

Trouble for Noguchi began when he was designing his bridge railings for the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park. Tange asked him to also create a model for the cenotaph that would memorialize the atomic bomb deaths in the city. Noguchi’s remarkable and haunting design consisted of a large, thick, black arch, with its legs rooted deep underground, visible in a subterranean room containing the names of the dead. The city’s planning committee, however, rejected Noguchi’s model. The decision was based not so much on the abstract design itself. Instead, the issue concerned Noguchi’s being an American (and, more particularly, a Nisei of mixed ancestry) involved with building a monument about Japanese identity and suffering. One critic made the point clear: “In Isamu Noguchi’s blood there is [a] mixed half which is from overseas.” “Coming to occupied Japan where Nisei have clout,” the writer continued, Noguchi “spread the idea . . . that he, of all people, was the most suitable person to make the monument.”⁹² The Japanese detractor critiqued not only Noguchi’s foreignness and inferior racial status but also his apparent feelings of superiority over the Japanese because of his U.S. citizenship. Noguchi appeared as a Nisei getting his way in Japan because of the American half of his ancestry, one associated with the power of the U.S. occupation. The point recalls worries Murayama expressed in the Pacific Citizen about the impact of disparaged Hollywood films on the Nisei working in Japan. Although Noguchi himself had felt distant from the Nisei in the United States, the logic coming from his Japanese critics was that even if the artist was not quite American, he was also not quite Japanese.⁹³

The reaction against Noguchi coincided with feelings of anti-Americanism in Japan that arose from the peace treaty ending its postwar occupation. Many voiced discontent long afterward with the ongoing U.S. military presence in their country that the treaty ensured.⁹⁴ These larger events affected how the Japanese saw Noguchi as an American interloper in their arts scene. Noguchi became angry and frustrated when learning of his rejected work and responded the only way he could, as a cosmopolitan. “I was opposed by the people of Hiroshima because I am an American,” he explained. “Certainly, I am an American, but my heart is that of a Japanese.”⁹⁵ The project was not just a matter of ancestry for him. Noguchi saw himself as a by-product of two cultures that wished to offer recompense for a human tragedy. What the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and his cenotaph design represented, he argued, was meant not just for Japan, but also for the world at large. A few Japanese writers concurred with Noguchi on this issue, suggesting that his art transcended boundaries and that his participation conferred international significance on Hiroshima. These more expansive beliefs, however, fractured against the planning committee’s views of Japanese nationalism and victim-hood that developed after the war. As a result, Noguchi’s memorial cenotaph was never built.⁹⁶

Meanwhile, Yamaguchi had her own problems with American authorities, developments that became layered with irony. After her work in Japanese War Bride, she returned to Japan in 1953 to work on several film projects there. But later, when she tried to reenter the United States to rejoin her husband in New York, the State Department denied her a visa because officials considered her a security risk. Earlier, the FBI placed the actor under surveillance while she was filming Japanese War Bride. The agency thought that she might have been a spy working for various factions, including the communists, in Manchuria during the war. Alongside this presumed past, her different stage names and multilingual skills only added to these distrustful inclinations. The FBI also targeted Yamaguchi because agents suspected that she was a “fellow traveler” when socializing with the Ishigakis, the couple that introduced her to Noguchi. Eitaro Ishigaki’s leftist leanings in particular resulted in government threats to deport him as a subversive, but he left for Japan in 1951 (joined voluntarily by his wife Ayako), before legal proceedings could begin. Noguchi, frantic because of these developments, used his political contacts in Washington, D.C., to seek information about why his wife could not enter the United States. But neither he nor Yamaguchi ever learned the reason for her denial of entry, although they assumed correctly that the issue revolved around charges of communist affiliations. In 1954, after a year of trying, Yamaguchi obtained a visa after Noguchi’s persistent calls to U.S. congressmen and other highly placed officials (273–277).⁹⁷ By this time, McCarthyism’s hold on the nation was weakening, as the junior senator from Wisconsin began accusing the U.S. Army of harboring communists, an overreach that would spell his political demise. Studio publicists for the upcoming House of Bamboo could then depict its star as a refugee from communism, while the film itself presented Yamaguchi as a Japanese war bride and a model ally conforming to U.S. Cold War aims.

The messy mix of art and politics was not the only obstacle in front of Noguchi and Yamaguchi. Noguchi proved demanding of himself as an artist, but he also made life difficult for those around him. He appeared controlling to Yamaguchi, offering takes on her appearance and clothing that recall Lieutenant Pinkerton’s dictates to Cho-Cho-San. Noguchi forbade his wife from cutting her hair. He wanted both of them to wear kimonos of his design and straw slippers that hurt her feet. On another front, Noguchi was unwilling to entertain her friends and guests, appearing bored and detached from them, even though she accommodated his acquaintances. In the end, as their separate work schedules and personal disagreements created spatial and emotional distance between them, Yamaguchi realized how “Japanese” she was and how “American” Noguchi was, despite their cosmopolitan ways (280–281).⁹⁸ Signs of trouble rooted in their national identities appeared from the start. When registering the couple’s marriage in Japan, a U.S. official asked Yamaguchi if she wanted to pledge her allegiance to the United States. She answered in the negative: “Even though I married an American, I had no wish to become an American myself.” For her, “becoming American” was reserved for her onscreen roles. As she elaborated, memories of the Asia-Pacific War made her resist the idea of having dual citizenship (274). Posing as a Chinese national with divided loyalties during the war had resulted in traumas and hardships, including the threat of execution for treason. Yamaguchi knew firsthand the dangers associated with merging national loyalties, and she did not want to imperil herself again by identifying with another occupying power. By the mid-1950s, with the divorce from Noguchi, living as a rootless, worldly celebrity seemed no longer possible for her.

Postscript

In 1958, Yamaguchi retired from the movie business. She appeared in a few Japanese productions and in a brief nonstarring role in one last American film, the small-scale comedy Navy Wife (1956), before resuming her life in Japan. She also gained passing notice when Hollywood studios began filming Sayonara (1957), an eventual blockbuster about a white American officer wooing a Japanese woman during the Korean War. The narrative displayed all the trappings of a postwar Madame Butterfly melodrama, with its romantic tensions set amid color-filled settings in Japan and a happy ending that called for racial tolerance. The story was based on James A. Michener’s best-selling novel of the same title, which appeared in 1954. The Los Angeles Times reported that “the noted Japanese actress” Shirley Yamaguchi “was practically signed” to play Hana-ogi, the Japanese dancer courted by Major Lloyd Gruver (Marlon Brando). Industry executives, however, decided instead to give the Hana-ogi role to Miiko Taka, a young Nisei woman whom a talent agent had spotted in a parade celebrating Nisei Week in Los Angeles.⁹⁹

Yet, even as Yamaguchi’s postwar film career came to a close, she managed to create new public identities. In the year that she retired from movie making, Yamaguchi married the Japanese diplomat Otaka Hiroshi. She hosted a television show throughout the 1960s and 1970s, reporting from such political hot spots as Vietnam and the Middle East. What attracted her to these locales, and particularly to sympathizing with the Palestinian cause, were her own memories of growing up in occupied China and the brutalities enacted by the Japanese. She then translated these journalistic interests into more formal political engagements. In 1974, Yamaguchi won a seat in the Japanese Diet as a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, serving for eighteen years. Her public expressions of remorse for her complicity in Japanese imperialism during the 1930s and 1940s reemerged during this time, when the former “traitor” to China became a cultural diplomat amid Japan and China’s efforts at reconciliation. She attended several delegations on goodwill visits to China and later served as the vice president of the Asian Women’s Fund, an organization that sought acknowledgment of, and compensation for, the “comfort women” exploited by the Japanese military. During the 1980s and 1990s, Yamaguchi’s love songs recorded during the war gained new listeners when re-releases appeared on the Chinese and Hong Kong markets. Her contributions to aiding peaceful exchanges between the two nations also stirred interest in dramatizing her life story. A Japanese musical, Li Xianglan (1991), and a four-part television show, Sayonara Ri Koran (1989), played to audiences throughout East Asia. In this manner, Yamaguchi’s involvement in these later Sino-Japanese relations called for selectively forgetting and redefining her prior entertainment-as-propaganda ventures—moves that helped renew her star appeal.¹⁰⁰

The interlude of the early Cold War years also revealed Yamaguchi in stages of celebrity transformation—from a Chinese/Japanese to a Japanese/American to a Japanese entertainer—designed to surmount national borders and expectations. Indeed, her performances indicated a series of interactions with Americans that differed from, and overlapped with, her associations with China and Japan. Despite the advent of her postwar “Japanese” persona, she played along the solidus of a Japanese/American identity for her publicity in Hollywood productions. “Becoming Japanese” as Yamaguchi Yoshiko in her public and private lives took precedence in these years. But on the screen and in the press, she participated in broader transpacific exchanges that embodied both the achievements and the frictions within U.S.-Japan relations. These moves highlighted her Japanese/American marriage to Isamu Noguchi, how Japanese audiences resisted American influence in their nation, and her film star image that attracted Issei and Nisei audiences. Her war bride roles and other appearances, however momentary or problematic, served to incorporate Japanese Americans in a process of postwar healing and public recognition. In this sense, Yamaguchi’s visit to the United States played a brief but important role in her far-ranging journeys in the arts and politics of the postwar era and beyond.

Notes

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Sleeping with the Frenemy

A Chinese/Japanese/American Movie Star

Madame Butterfly Redux?

“American Japanese, Like Me”

Trouble in Paradise

Postscript

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