Joshua Hammer reviews Ian Buruma’s book, “The China Lover”:

In Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the 1930s, a teenage singer and actress named Yoshiko Yamaguchi rose to stardom in a series of propaganda films intended to celebrate Japan’s noble role in China. Acting under the pseudonym Ri Koran, Yamaguchi created a sensation in erotic melodramas like “China Nights,” about a love affair between a Chinese peasant girl and a heroic Japanese ship captain in wartime Shanghai. Yamaguchi’s career as a tool of the militarists continued until Japan’s surrender in 1945, when Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces charged her with collaboration. (She was spared execution when she was able to prove her ethnic Japanese origins, which her bosses had kept secret.) Yamaguchi rebuilt her career from the war’s ashes, first as the star of pro-American films in occupied Japan, then as the Hollywood actress Shirley Yamaguchi, her new name inspired by Shirley Temple. Retiring from the movies in the late 1950s, Yamaguchi continued to reinvent herself, as a diplomat’s wife, as a journalist and as a prominent politician in the Japanese Parliament…

A thorough tour through Yokohama’s Chinatown:
“Like most Chinatowns, the entrance to Yokohama’s Chinatown is marked off by a large 牌坊 (pai2 fang1), with the characters 中华街 (zhong1 hua2 jie1), one of the various translations of ‘Chinatown,’ written on it. Behind the gate is a tangled web of streets and alleys, swamped by mobs of people. The streets are jammed with stores selling Chinese spices and trinkets, restaurants with names such as ‘Shanxi Family Chinese Restaurant,’ and street vendors galore. By far, the most common items were smoked chestnuts (板栗) and baozi (包子).”

American economists compare China’s path with Japan’s:

“BEIJING (Reuters) - Now the Olympics are over, a new game is under way: telling China’s economic future by reading the tea leaves of Japan’s past.

Teasing out economic parallels is a favorite academic pastime, but it can be just as treacherous as extrapolating prevailing trends into the indefinite future. In the 1960s the Philippines was the second-richest economy in Asia after Japan. Now it is bringing up the rear.

Still, looking at Japan provides some useful pointers as the world ponders how long China can keep up the growth of nearly 10 percent a year that it has enjoyed since it embarked on market-oriented economic reforms in 1978.”

John at Sinosplice explains why he’s lost his Japanese while in China:

“It’s not because I never met Japanese people in China. The real answer may sound a little strange. I had struggled hard for my right to speak in Chinese here in China, and I was sick and tired of people trying to use me for English practice. I just couldn’t bring myself to pester Japanese people in the same way. I didn’t want to be perceived as another user.”

“Some sentences in the textbook include ‘I like the way of your coquetry,’ ‘Don’t leave tonight,’ and ‘Let me take off your clothes,’ in Chinese and Japanese.”