I listen to this record quite often, but I only discovered recently that this song called Shina No Yoru (支那の夜, which means “China night”) had a special and controversial story. It was actually not so easy to find out who was its original performer, so that I had to make several researches to make this clear.
According to the information I found, this song was first performed in 1938 by Japanese singer Watanabe Hamako (渡辺はま子, 1910-1999) and was used during the Japanese occupation of China as the main theme of 1940 propaganda movie Shina No Yoru.
Watanabe Hamako
There is also a cover version performed in 1941 by Japanese singer and actress Yoshiko Ōtaka (山口淑子, also known as Li Xianglan 李香兰 and Shirley Yamaguchi), who actually played the main role in the same film (I told you it’s a bit complicated). According to this post and the comments I read on Youtube, it seems that there is still a controversy concerning the identity of the original performer.
Later on, the song became popular among American GI’s based in Japan and Korea after World War II, and its hard to pronounce title became “She Ain’t Got No Yoyo”. You can easily find anecdotes about it in Korean War veterans forums on the web.
The record was published by Columbia Japan. Lyrics written by Yaso Saijo (西條八十), music composed by Nobuyuki Takeoka (竹岡信幸).
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