NEW YORK -- The New York Times' recent reprinting of a cartoon showing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat gagged and bound to a chair while Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon presses him to "say something! do something!" made me think of Rikoran, known today mainly as Yoshiko Yamaguchi.
A little before the cartoon appeared, my friend Inuhiko Yomota had written: "Yamaguchi tells me she can't die until the Palestinians are liberated. She's still so hale you can't believe she's 82!"
Moved by Beijing film director Chen Kaige's ("The Emperor and the Assassin") assertion that "Li Xianglan ( Chinese pronunciation of Rikoran) is the most important woman that 20th-century Asia has produced," Yomota, semanticist and film historian, has dealt with the actress-singer turned politician in two books: Yomota wrote "Nihon no Joyu" ("Japanese Actresses," Iwanami, 2000), in which he analyzes her career along with that of Setsuko Hara. And he edited "Rikoran to Higashi Ajia" ("Rikoran and East Asia," Tokyo Daigaku, 2001).