Yoshiko Yamaguchi, a singer and actress who starred in Japanese propaganda films during Japan’s brutal military occupation of China in the 1930s and ’40s and who, after narrowly escaping execution by the Chinese after the war, helped normalize relations between the nations, died on Sept. 7 in Tokyo. She was 94.
日本歌手、演员山口淑子于9月7日在东京逝世，享年94岁。20世纪三四十年代日本对中国实行野蛮军事占领期间，她曾在日本的宣传影片中担任主演。战后她侥幸逃脱了中方的死刑，后亦曾帮助两国实现关系正常化。
Her death was announced by a family spokesman, according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
根据日本报纸《朝日新闻》报道，一名家族发言人宣告了她的死讯。

Ms. Yamaguchi’s life was marked by a series of self-reinventions, most of them forced on her by the same historic events that changed the face of Asia in the 20th century. In recent years, her story became a touchstone for film histories, television dramas, a novel and an opera — all in some way exploring national identity in Asia.
山口淑子的一生充满一系列自我重塑，其中大部分是受那些改变了20世纪亚洲面貌的历史事件所迫。近年来，她的故事为若干历史题材的电影、电视剧，以及一部小说与一部歌剧提供了素材，而它们的主题都与在亚洲探索国家身份认同有关。
Beginning in 1938, when she was 18, she was a movie star known in China as Li Xianglan, the Chinese pseudonym she assumed to hide her Japanese identity in films promoting Japanese occupation. After the war, she lived as an exile from China, the country of her birth; acted in 1950s Hollywood B-movies under the name Shirley Yamaguchi; and became a cosmopolitan voice for Sino-Japanese détente in the Japanese parliament.
1938年，18岁的山口淑子是一个电影明星，以艺名李香兰在中国广为人知。她以这个中国化名来隐藏自己的日本人身份，参演了若干用来赞美日本占领的宣传片。战后，她被中国驱逐（中国是她的出生地），在50年代使用雪莉·山口(Shirley Yamaguchi)这个名字出演了若干好莱坞B级片；在日本议会中成为超越民族偏见、缓和中日关系的代言人。
In the United States Ms. Yamaguchi had starring roles in King Vidor’s “Japanese War Bride,” a 1952 film co-starring Don Taylor; “House of Bamboo,” a 1955 film noir directed by Samuel Fuller and co-starring Robert Stack; and a short-lived 1956 Broadway musical, “Shangri-La,” based on the James Hilton novel “Lost Horizon.”
在美国，山口淑子曾出演1952年的《日本战地新娘》(Japanese War Bride)，该片由金·维达(King Vidor)导演，唐·泰勒(Don Taylor)饰演男主角；以及1955年的黑色电影《竹屋》(House of Bamboo)，由萨缪尔·富勒(Samuel Fuller)导演，罗伯特·斯塔克饰演男主角(Robert Stack)；此外还有1956年昙花一现的百老汇音乐剧《香格里拉》(Shangri-La)，由詹姆斯·希尔顿的小说《远逝的地平线》(Lost Horizon)改编。
She played her major roles, on and off the screen, in Asia.
在亚洲，无论是银幕内外，她都扮演着重要的角色。
Born to Japanese parents in Manchuria, the northwest region of China that was invaded by the Japanese in 1931 and held at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilian lives over the next 14 years, Ms. Yamaguchi was an 18-year-old Mandarin speaker when the Manchurian Film Association cast her in the first of a series of Chinese-language propaganda films.
山口淑子出生在满洲的一个日本家庭，这个位于中国东北部的地区1931年被日本侵略，其后日本的统治持续了14年，数十万中国人丧命。18岁那年，会说普通话的山口淑子被满洲映画协会选中，开始出演一系列中文宣传影片。
At the time, she wrote in “My Life as Li Xianglan,” her 2004 autobiography, she did not understand the not-too-subtle message in the melodramatic romances she made, like “Honeymoon Express” (1938), “China Nights” (1940) and “Song of the White Orchid” (1942).
她曾出演许多戏剧性的爱情电影，比如1938年的《蜜月快车》、1940年的《支那之夜》和1942年的《迎春花》，在2004年的自传《我作为李香兰的人生》(My Life as Li Xianglan)中，她说自己当时对于这些电影中的露骨信息，并不太理解。
In each film Ms. Yamaguchi played essentially the same role: a downtrodden but beautiful Chinese woman who initially spurns help from a handsome Japanese sailor or soldier, then falls in love with him. (In “China Nights,” after she is slapped and hurled into a wall by one exasperated Japanese savior, she pleads: “Forgive me! It didn’t hurt at all to be hit by you. I was happy, happy! I’ll be better, just watch.”)
在这些影片中，山口淑子其实扮演的是同一个角色：一个备受欺凌但非常美丽的中国女人，一开始蔑视一个英俊的日本水手或士兵所提供的帮助，之后爱上了他（在《支那之夜》中，她被恼怒的日本救星掌掴，又被推到墙上，她恳求道：“请原谅我！被你打一点都不痛。我很快乐，快乐！我会变得更好，你看着吧。”）
The Japanese owners of the film studio knew that Ms. Yamaguchi was Japanese, and a Japanese citizen, but presented her as Chinese to suit the underlying allegory of the films: An oppressed China, resisting the occupation at first, soon embraces Japan as its rescuer.
满洲映画协会的日本老板们知道山口淑子是日本人，也有日本国籍，但他们把她作为中国影星推出，以便配合电影中的隐喻：被压迫的中国一开始抵抗日本的占领，很快就接受了日本，把它视为救星。
“I thought my films were simple romances,” Ms. Yamaguchi told The Boston Globe in 1991. “I thought I was working for the good of the Manchurian people.”
“我以为我的电影只是简单的爱情故事，”1991年，山口淑子在接受《波士顿环球报》(Boston Globe)采访时说。“我觉得我是在为满洲人民做好事。”
After Japan’s defeat, the Chinese authorities arrested her for treason amid calls for her execution. As nationalist and Communist forces fought in China’s civil war, she spent nine months in prison before she could produce a copy of her birth certificate, proving she was not Chinese but Japanese.
日本战败后，中国当局在对她施以极刑的呼声中以叛国罪将其逮捕。中国国共内战期间，她在监狱度过了九个月，之后提供了一份出生证明，证明自己不是中国人，而是日本人。
Her Japanese citizenship legally absolved her of treason. But in ordering her deported to Japan, a Chinese judge condemned her wartime role as “a Chinese impostor who used her outstanding beauty to make films that humiliated China and compromised Chinese dignity.”
日本国籍使她从法律上得以免除叛国罪。但在遣送她回日本时，一名中国法官谴责她在战争中的角色是“一个冒牌中国人，利用出众的美貌拍摄侮辱中国、有损中国尊严的电影”。
Ms. Yamaguchi, who settled in Japan in 1946, openly apologized for what she said had been her unwitting role as a propaganda tool during the war. And she was one of the first prominent Japanese citizens to acknowledge the history of Japanese brutality during the occupation, an episode for which many Japanese nationalists still refuse to apologize.
1946年，山口淑子在日本定居，公开就她在战争期间无意中充当了宣传工具而道歉。她也是第一批承认日本在占领中国期间残暴行为的著名日本人士，很多日本民族主义者至今仍拒绝为那段历史道歉。
She later campaigned for greater public awareness of that history and advocated paying reparations to so-called comfort women, Korean women who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military during the war. (Japanese leaders later apologized to the women.)
后来她为公众更好地认识那段历史进行宣传活动，并倡导对战争期间被日军强迫做性奴隶的韩国妇女，即所谓“慰安妇”进行赔款（日本领导人后来曾对那些妇女道歉）。
As “Ri Koran,” a Japanization of Li Xianglan, Ms. Yamaguchi began re-establishing her film career in Hong Kong and Japan in the late 1940s. She appeared in a dozen Japanese films, including Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film “Scandal,” in addition to her work in Hollywood, before retiring from acting in 1957. She married Hiroshi Otaka, a Japanese diplomat, the same year. He died in 2001. A previous marriage, to the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, ended in divorce. Information about her survivors was not available.
20世纪40年代末，山口淑子以“Ri Koran”，即“李香兰”的日文拼法在香港与日本重新开始自己的电影事业。1957年息影之前，她出演了十几部日本电影，其中包括1950年黑泽明的《丑闻》，此外还在好莱坞拍片。息影那一年，她与日本外交官大鹰弘结婚，后者于2001年逝世。此前她与日裔美国雕塑家野口勇的婚姻以离婚告终。她在世亲人的信息无法获得。
Ms. Yamaguchi became a talk-show host on Japanese television in the 1960s under her married name, Otaka Yoshiko. She was elected to the upper house of the Japanese Parliament in 1974, and served until 1992. As chairwoman of that body’s foreign affairs committee in the 1980s, she was among the legislature’s most effective proponents of improving relations with the People’s Republic of China.
20世纪60年代，她使用婚后的名字大鹰淑子在日本电视脱口秀中担任主持人。1974年，她当选日本参议院议员，任期至1992年。80年代，她担任参议院外务委员会委员长，在参议院中，她是改善中日关系最积极的支持者。
Ms. Yamaguchi was born on Feb. 12, 1920, in Fushun, a coal mining region of Manchuria, where her father, Fumio, was a Beijing-educated Japanese linguist and teacher of Mandarin. She began singing on the radio at 13 as Li Xianglan (Fragrant Orchid), the stage name that would later became the masquerade that haunted her life.
山口淑子于1920年2月12日生于中国东北的煤矿城市抚顺。她的父亲山口文雄是一个在北京受教育的日本语言学家，在满洲担任教师。她13岁开始以李香兰为名在广播中唱歌，这个艺名后来成为在她人生中萦绕不去的伪装。
Ms. Yamaguchi’s shape-shifting persona and instinct for survival became the topic of film histories and inspired two Japanese television dramas, a 2008 novel by Ian Buruma (“The China Lover”) and an opera, “Ri Koran,” about Ms. Yamaguchi’s protean life during the occupation of Manchuria.
山口淑子变化的表面形象与求生的本能成了若干历史电影和两部日本电视剧的题材，此外还有伊恩·布鲁玛(Ian Buruma)2008年的小说《中国恋人》(The China Lover)与歌剧《李香兰》，这部歌剧是关于山口淑子在日军占领满洲期间多变的生活。
The opera, produced by a Japanese theater company with her cooperation, became a political phenomenon in Japan when it was first staged in 1991, mainly for its depiction of Japan’s wartime aggressions. Many Japanese raised in the 1950s and after knew little about them. A Chinese production, titled “Li Xianglan,” had a successful run in Beijing in 1992.
这部歌剧由一个日本剧团与她合作打造，于1991年在日本上演，因其对日本战争期间的侵略行为的描述而成为政治话题。许多在20世纪50年代期间及之后长大的日本人对这些侵略行为几乎一无所知。中国制作的版本《李香兰》1992年在北京登台，大获成功。
Ms. Yamaguchi told interviewers that as a young woman she considered China her “home country” and Japan her “ancestral country.” She had always loved them both, she told The Globe in 1991, and never fully recovered from the war between them.
山口淑子在接受采访时说，她年轻时认为中国是“家乡”，日本是“祖国”。1991年接受《波士顿环球报》采访时，她说自己一直热爱这两个国家，并且一直未从中日战争的创伤中恢复。
“The war, in my mind, is never over,” she said.
“在我心中，那场战争从未结束，”她说。