One of Shanghai’s great pop singers of the 1940s, Li Xianglan (1920-2014) was born as Yoshiko Yamaguchi to Japanese parents in northern China, and was supposedly given her Chinese name as a teenager by her Chinese godparents. Her ancestry was concealed by China’s music and film industries, the latter employing her as an actress with command of both languages. After World War II, she was deported to Japan and continued her acting and musical careers both there and in the United States. In her later life, she was active in Japanese politics, becoming a member of parliament.