China Night Intercultural Vortex (Part 1 of 2)

China Night is an EP released in the 1950s, popular among US GIs stationed in Japan. It has been making the internet rounds and was recently posted on WFMU's Beware of the Blog. I did a little digging to find out some basic information and was soon pulled into a vortex from which I am only beginning to emerge. This EP strikes me as the perfect subject for this blog and I hope that I am able to do it justice.

A couple of background resources: This Japanese blog post, analyzing the EP song by song. And a 2004 paper by Minako Waseda appearing in Yearbook for Traditional Music (perhaps your library can give you digital access) titled, "Looking both ways: GI Songs and Musical Exoticism in Post-World War II Japan."

First song: "China Night" by "Ho Mei Fan." Below is the YouTube rendition (if that goes away here's a more stable source).

This song was beloved by U.S. soldiers serving in the Korean War, who were stationed in Japan and/or visiting Japan on leave. Its chorus, "Shina no yoru yo," became a soramimi, heard as "She ain't got no yoyo" (or, as one crude but believable YouTube commenter has it, "She ain't got no pants on.") I don't know if its deliberately exoticized tone was read as "Chinese" or "Japanese" or simply as an emblem of the "Orient" generally, but was clearly an appropriate theme song for GIs' (often sexualized) encounters with the exotic. This explains its inclusion on this EP, which collected "Japanese" songs popular among American soldiers and sold them back to the Japanese public.

HERE'S THE THING

This is a cover version of a song first made popular in 1938 by Hamako Watanabe and which served as the theme song for a hit 1940 movie.

The song and the film were essentially propaganda, Imperial Japan's ruthless invasion of China soft-pedaled as a romantic dream. The U.S. Occupation knew this and initially banned the song, particularly sensitive to its title--"Shina," the old European-derived term for China, had come, during the Imperial Japanese era, to be a deeply insulting derogatory term. (Indeed, it is still considered insulting to this day, which is a caution to those who would throw the characters representing "Shina" ("支那") around heedlessly.) For obvious reasons, during the Korean War, the U.S. became somewhat less eager to protect the feelings of the people of China, and the ban was lifted and the song re-recorded.

Hamako Watanabe was apparently signed to another label, so Columbia chose a Japanese singer of Chinese ancestry (or perhaps better put, a singer whose father was Chinese who grew up in Japan but who was forced to live in Shanghai during the war because of her ancestry where she was commonly rejected as Japanese and who returned to Japan to sing professionally after the war). Her name on the Columbia label, 胡美芳, is romanized as "Ho Mei Fan" (I've also seen "Hu MeiFang"), but she was known in Japan as "Ko Hibou." If you look up "Ko Hibo" on YouTube you will see a lot of Christian songs (she apparently became the rare Japanese convert in the 1970s and an important cultural ambassador after the opening of the PRC).