On the 24th of May 1907, in Beijing, a daughter was born to Prince Shankai, a direct heir of the imperial clan that had ruled China for nearly three centuries. She was his fourteenth daughter, born of his fourth concubine, Lady Janjia, and given the Chinese name Jin Bihui, meaning Eastern Jewel. Her father called her his Oriental Pearl. But the world she was born into was collapsing.
In October 1911, revolutionaries in southern China overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China. The royal family was stripped of power. Many remained in the Forbidden City, living off pensions and old privileges, but others fled into exile, dreaming of restoration. Prince Shankai was among them.
He fled to Japan, where he lived under Japanese government protection, adopted Japanese dress, speech, and manner, and began plotting to put the young emperor Puyi back on the throne with Japanese help. In 1915, for reasons that remain unclear, Shankai gave his young daughter to his Japanese friend Naniwa Kawashima, a mercenary and spy. The girl was renamed Yoshiyo, a boy’s name meaning good boy, and raised as a male. She was sent to an elite boys’ school, where she had to hide the fact that she was a girl.
Alongside her formal education, she was trained in horse riding, judo, and fencing. Later her name was changed again, this time to Yoshiko, meaning good girl. It was all part of her father’s plan: a daughter raised like a son, hardened and educated, to serve the cause of restoring the Manchu dynasty. Prince Shankai spent years working toward that restoration.
In 1917, with the aid of a loyalist general, the eleven-year-old Puyi was briefly restored to the throne. It lasted eleven days. By 1921, Shankai was an impoverished royal with little hope left. He died in March 1922, leaving behind thirty-eight children.
Yoshiko’s mother, a concubine with no official identity after his death, committed suicide in accordance with Manchu tradition. Yoshiko was fourteen years old. At seventeen, she entered a military academy. After two years, she graduated, trained in espionage and warfare.
Her adoptive father taught her bushido, the samurai code. It was also during these years that he began violating her repeatedly. She attempted suicide three times. All three attempts failed.
A turning point came when she cut her hair short, left her adoptive family, and fell in with the Black Dragon Society, an ultranationalist Japanese group that wanted Japan to expand into China, Korea, and Mongolia. They recognized her value. In November 1927, she was forced into a political marriage with a Mongolian prince named Ganjorjab. For a time she lived in the Mongolian desert, but she soon grew bored.
She considered the marriage a waste of time. After two years, she escaped on a white horse, riding through the desert back to Japan. In Tokyo, she changed her name to Yangkuei Faith and supported herself by seducing wealthy men. But her ambitions ran deeper.
She sold her life story to a publisher for money, bought a ticket to China, and made her way to the foreign concession in Shanghai. There she met Rukichi Tanaka, a Japanese military attaché and head of intelligence in China. He employed her as a spy, and she used her connections among Manchu and Mongol nobility to expand his network. The two became lovers, but Tanaka was soon recalled to Japan.
Kawashima then came under the command of General Kenji Doihara, a secret service chief of the Japanese army. Under him, she became one of the most formidable spies in the region. Her first assignment was an inspection tour in the northeast, disguised as a woman teacher. She made connections with educators and newsmen, and gained the confidence of civil and military authorities.
On missions in Manchuria, she wore military uniform, making men question whether she was male or female, which allowed her to move easily among guerrilla groups. She was described as strikingly attractive with a dominating personality, half tomboy, half heroine, with a passion for dressing as a man in perfectly tailored uniforms. Everything had to be precise, from the positioning of her sword to the polish of her boots. But she could also use her femininity, manipulating subjects while wearing a Japanese kimono or a Chinese ceremonial dress.
Over time, she became ruthless, willing to exploit anyone to reach her objectives. Doihara took her into his confidence fully. She became his right hand and later his mistress. During the 1930s, she spied on the Chinese and masterminded incidents that served Japanese expansion.
She was involved in blowing up a Japanese railroad, an act promptly blamed on China, giving the Japanese army an excuse to attack and expand its territory. Her royal background proved especially useful when Japan sought to create puppet states. Through staged assassination attempts, deception, and persuasion, she convinced her distant cousin, Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, to accept the role of figurehead ruler of Manchukuo, the puppet state of Manchuria. Puyi became chief executive in February 1932 and emperor two years later.
One problem remained: his wife, Empress Wanrong, had become an opium addict and stayed behind in Tianjin. Kawashima took it upon herself to visit her, befriend her, and bring her to Manchuria to accompany her husband. The manipulation succeeded. As a reward, Kawashima was appointed commander of her own army, a position she delighted in, proudly wearing the uniform of a Japanese officer.
She mixed with high society, partyed nearly every night, and lived a life of luxury. When anti-Japanese volunteer armies formed in Manchuria in 1932 to resist the new state, Kawashima raised an independent cavalry force of roughly five thousand former bandits. The suppression was brutal but effective. The Japanese press dubbed her the Joan of Arc of Manchukuo.
She became a popular figure. Her story was published in local newspapers, she appeared on radio broadcasts, and she recorded songs. Much of what was written about her was fictional, but readers loved it. The fame, however, damaged her usefulness as a spy.
She became too recognizable. Worse, she began openly criticizing Japanese military policies in Manchukuo, angering Japanese officials. In 1933, while addressing her army, she was shot from a distance by an unknown soldier under her command. She ordered every soldier tortured and interrogated until the traitor was found, then killed the culprit with her own hands.
The wound was severe and caused her mental breakdowns. She became addicted to morphine and opium. Despite her addiction, she remained useful. She reportedly commanded four hundred Japanese spies in Tianjin, where she worked as a dancing girl in ballrooms and opened a restaurant in 1936, all to gather intelligence on the Chinese.
When Japan occupied northern China, she settled in Beijing, where she wielded tremendous power. A word from her could cause someone’s death or restore their freedom. According to one story, when her driver was offended by the driver of a gendarme chief, Kawashima scolded the chief and ordered him to serve as her driver for the day. She lived a life of debauchery, with many lovers who constantly quarreled over her.
She wore men’s clothing, explaining that it served as a protective color, reducing the flood of love letters she received. Her house was protected like a fortress: bodyguards, twenty-nine police dogs, trained monkeys, and two white geese guarded the doors. Traps were laid for intruders. But her criticism of Japanese policies grew harsher with time.
By 1940, high-ranking Japanese officials considered her out of control and ordered her killed. Many of the assigned assassins were her former lovers. None followed through. Instead, she was exiled to Japan and kept under surveillance by the secret police.
The exile did not last. In 1941, she was back in Beijing, spying for Japan. She failed to notice that Chinese secret servicemen had planted an agent inside her household as a servant in the spring of 1945. When the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in August 1945, the Japanese began to flee the region.
Kawashima ran as well, hoping to escape the Chinese authorities. The once notorious spy, known as the Mata Hari of the Far East, was now drained and ragged, suffering from venereal disease. She spent her last wealth on protection and went into hiding. She was betrayed by a former lover, who led Chinese military authorities to the hovel where she hid.
She went on trial on the 4th of July 1946, charged as a traitor. She and her lawyers argued that as a Japanese national, she should be tried as a war criminal. But she had been born in China and could not prove she had been adopted, so the defense was rejected. The chief prosecutor declared that she deserved death as a traitor, especially because she had ridden in Japanese airplanes over bombed Chinese villages and laughed.
The prosecutors had no solid proof of her crimes, but the burden of proof fell on the accused, and she could not prove her innocence. She was sentenced to death. On the day of her execution, she demanded the military honor of a firing squad and asked to change into a white kimono. Both requests were denied.
She was executed on the 25th of March 1948, at age forty. A Japanese monk collected her corpse and cremated it. Her remains were sent to her adoptive family and buried at the Shore Ninji Temple in Matsumoto, Japan. She gave no final words.
A poem was found in her pocket: Though there is a home I cannot return to, I am full of tears I cannot cry. Though there is law, it is not righteous. Though there is a false accusation, to whom can I appeal? After her death, speculation arose over whether the executed woman was really her.
The execution was carried out privately in the early hours, the bullet severely damaged her face, and her hairstyle days before differed from the one in the post-mortem photograph. In 2009, documents held by the National History Museum in Taiwan contained the testimony of prison officials confirming that the sentence was definitely carried out and that the executed woman was certainly Yoshiko Kawashima.