Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu, eds. Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire, University of Hawai'i Press, 2023.

This book showed up out of the middle of nowhere. I saw that there was an interview with the editors on the New Books Network, but before listening to the interview, I ordered the book. (To be honest, I still haven't listened to the interview. But I'll get around to it sooner or later!)

In my somewhat foggy state of mind, I think I was attracted to the word "persuasion" in the title and the term "pan-Asian rhetoric" in the book's summary. Paging through the book, I was surprised to see a chapter on Li Xianglan (李香蘭), who is also known as Yamaguchi Yoshiko (山口 淑子) or Shirley Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi was someone I had forgotten that I had heard of before--the other day I stumbled onto her movie, China Nights (「支那の夜」), also known as Shanghai Nights (「上海之夜」) on YouTube. I ended up watching the whole movie even though it was 98% Japanese with no subtitles. (Needless to say, I didn't get a lot out of the dialogue.) The Wikipedia article about Li Xianglan (zh) reminded me that she had also played an Indigenous girl in a movie made in Taiwan called Sayon's Bell (「サヨンの鐘」). A 2011 post by Darryl Sterk from the anthropological blog Savage Minds introduces a recent "anti-aboriginal romance film" named Finding Sayun (【不一樣的月光：尋找沙韻】) that critiques the representation of Indigenous people in the original film.* 

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading that chapter to find out more about Yamaguchi and Sayon's Bell, which I've also found a copy of on YouTube: 

I also found this 10-minute preview of Finding Sayun: 

* I think my title punctuation is a mess in this paragraph--apologies!