By then Yoshiko had become a seasoned interview subject who had spoken of her adventures to countless reporters and fans; one Japanese author had, with her assistance, already written a popular novel based on her life. Her mixture of fact and fiction was always masterful, and that is why her mother had complained about her precocious skill for telling lies. As a result, her recollections are inaccurate, self-serving, at times even hallucinatory. On top of that, her words were edited by those who had a stake in making sure that their side came out looking good. The result is an unreliable heap of facts presented with varying degrees of bravado. Yet even this jumble cannot bury Yoshiko, and she manages to strut out of the mess as she tells her story, a woman forced to the sidelines but still trying to make her case.
Yoshiko’s autobiography takes up a dramatic moment at the beginning, when she narrates a childhood memory. She is about five years old, and though she is on a ship bound for places unknown, she claims to remember the sea breezes, and the smells of paint and people. Suddenly she is awakened from her sleep by a servant who is singing a sad lullaby as the waves beat against the ship. Crying, the servant hugs her tightly.
“Why are you crying?” the young Yoshiko wonders. “What’s the matter?”
The servant’s only reply is a tearful wail. “Oh, Princess, Princess!”
The scene is well chosen, since it marks the event that would transform Yoshiko’s life. She and the large entourage of family and servants—estimates range from fifty to two hundred people—were aboard the ship en route from their Beijing mansion to exile in Manchuria, after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Her father, Prince Su, had been a prominent official in the imperial regime and firmly against the emperor’s abdication. With the end of the Qing, the more than two-hundred-fifty-year rule of the minority Manchus ended, and the majority Han Chinese took over, establishing the Republic of China in 1912.
Even so, once out of Beijing, Prince Su expressed defiance of the new regime in a poem, “I will not tread upon the soil of the Republic.” The Japanese also provided him with a residence in Lushun, and Yoshiko, along with the rest of the household, traveled by ship to join him.
As they established themselves in the Japanese-held port, Prince Su, a Manchu prince in exile, and his family could not have found the atmosphere congenial. One temporary resident of the house remembers the prince in those days as “small, with dark skin, fat. He had a big head and many wrinkles on his face. He had not cut off his queue.” Since the Manchus, a minority nationality from the north, had ruled China for centuries, it was long argued that they had assimilated into Han culture. Nowadays this view has been challenged by evidence that the Manchus did not blend in so thoroughly and instead maintained their distinctiveness throughout their reign. The prince would seem to have exemplified the sort of Manchu who followed the ancient ways, not only in his traditional Manchu queue and robes but also in his devotion to Manchu practices and to the revival of the regime.
The prince may have been delighted to get away from all those Han Republicans pouring into Beijing, but Lushun, once known as Port Arthur, put him and his family in the emotional heart of Japanese Manchuria. This port had been the site of fierce battles during the Russo-Japanese War, and in 1904 the legendary General Nogi Maresuke was renowned for having led Japanese forces to victory, incurring more than fifty thousand casualties along the way. That crucial win, achieved with the spilling of much Japanese blood, gave the Japanese control of Lushun and other territory in Manchuria, and also whetted the Japanese appetite for more of China. “Here, many hundreds of miles from home,” went the popular song that kept alive the memory of the Japanese sacrifices, “in the glow of faraway Manchuria’s red twilight, my friend lies under a stone at the end of a field.”
As such attitudes grew, Yoshiko and her large family moved into a two-story red-brick building on a Lushun hilltop; this was a former Russian hotel that had been ceded to the Japanese after the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese military never let Prince Su out of their sight, keeping him under close surveillance. “The Japanese police wanted to protect my grandfather,” his grandson writes, “and some bodyguards had been sent over by the Japanese government who kept watch on him day and night. … Grandfather liked to go fishing and would get a big group of family members together and go to the harbor at Lushun to fish from a small boat. … Of course a police guard accompanied him.”
Their big red house on the hill survives, shabbily, although the once-splendid view from the second floor has lost the fight with development and pollution. “You can say that I grew up looking out at the Laohuwei Peninsula from the veranda of that house,” Jin Moyu has written, in happy remembrance. There was not enough space to spread out, and so the family created a royal dormitory, with the children crammed together. The prince also had to adjust to straitened conditions. A devotee of Chinese opera, he had built a stage in his Beijing mansion for private performances. In Lushun, he was reduced to hobbies that did not require such a large private arena and so concentrated on Chinese chess and calligraphy.
The various plots never succeeded, and there is a sense that the organization of uprisings was not the prince’s forte. He proved, however, adept at organizing his family, which, given the crowd, was no small achievement. “In the Lushun house there was a large eating area,” begins the description in Yoshiko’s autobiography. “Three times a day at the sound of a bell, we all emerged from our rooms and headed there. You know, we were in all close to fifty people, and so when we came out of our rooms and went off to eat all together, there was a lot of commotion. After we finished eating, we’d often stay in our seats and have a family conference or father would give a talk.”
The prince exhorted his exiled family to ready themselves for better days to come. “Looking back at those days in Lushun,” Yoshiko wrote, “what I clearly remember is my father’s specialty, the historical tale ‘Putuo’s Barley and Rice.’” This tale—featuring setback in battle, suffering, eventual triumph—was one of the inspirational tales the prince related to his army of children after dinner. “With the world in today’s state of ruin,” Prince Su said in his hortatory mode,
I must say that it is an unexpected happiness that our family has not had to endure the misfortune of being torn apart, and we are able to enjoy our days here all together in this room. All of us have hands and feet that we can use for our own benefit. Up until now we have in our idle way used the hands and feet of others to do our work. We should have been ashamed of this kind of life, which goes against the Heavenly Way. Our present life may feel restricted as compared with the way we lived before, but it is really a life that accords with the Heavenly Way.
He went on to describe the fate of Gaozu, founder of the Han dynasty, whose troops were beaten back to the banks of the Putuo River. Wind and rain battered him, he was starving, but with just a handful of barley and rice donated by a kindly farmer and a drink of river water, Gaozu revived, going out again to give his all to the fight.
Though the prince, in this account, deserves credit for trying to boost morale with such myths, it would have been understandable if Yoshiko and the rest of the prince’s children found the idea of survival on a handful of grains an alien concept. After all, they had just been pulled out of their sprawling mansion in Beijing with its two hundred Chinese and Western-style rooms, at least ten courtyards, gardens, stable, and other necessities of the imperial life. There’s a story of how the prince used to air out his holdings of gold and silver each summer, filling up the whole courtyard for a week. Though only fragments of the mansion are still standing off a bustling Beijing alley—where current residents inhale the pollution and dust blown in from the Gobi Desert—it is still possible to get a sense of the prince’s great wealth on that city block. This is despite the present Chinese government’s lack of interest in preserving the former Beijing mansion of the prince, who did them no favors by collaborating with the Japanese.
All about the prince’s old neighborhood, there is definite proof of the transience of glory on this earth, since most of the old mansion buildings have been torn down. Until recently, a sock factory occupied the prince’s land. Now the old courtyard serves as part vegetable market, part distribution center for newspapers and bottled water. Two begrimed rows of rooms remain from the original mansion, almost hidden amid watermelon stands. A drunken resident from the outer courtyard is the only person who will come out to attest to Prince Su’s former eminence.
“My building used to be part of the mansion,” the man boasts as he invites visitors in to see his squalid room and filthy cot. “This was the side court for the servants.”
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“Our life in Lushun was simple,” Prince Su’s granddaughter remembered later, “but I absorbed lessons there that served me well as an adult, and so I think it was a good experience. If I had been brought up in luxury in Prince Su’s mansion, I would not have had the courage nor the spiritual strength to endure the lengthy period of suffering in years to come.”
In the old days, Manchu warriors had ridden on horseback across the northern steppes, fending off the enemy hordes with bows and arrows. The Kangxi emperor himself, whose reign began in the seventeenth century, was an ace at hitting the bulls-eye. Mindful of such achievements, the prince constructed an archery range in the garden. “Since ancient times,” Prince Su told his children, “the men of our family had to learn the art of archery starting at age ten. Each year there were tests, and the most fervent and able practitioners were given bows as prizes. Shooting off arrows with a bow is not only a discipline for the body, it is also a way to discipline the mind. Only when the heart and mind are one will you be able to hit the target.”
At home, the prince himself taught his children the Chinese classics and calligraphy, and a Japanese tutor was responsible for Japanese and math. Hardiness definitely a priority, the prince had his brood trek up and down the snowy Lushun hills, where tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers had been mowed down in combat during the Russo-Japanese War.
“They wore Japanese clothes and spoke Japanese,” a Japanese woman observed when she met some of the prince’s daughters in Lushun. “If you encountered them on the street, you would never dream that these children were Their Highnesses, the princess daughters of Prince Su, who had wielded such power during the Qing dynasty.” The children attended Japanese schools, and while the heavy dose of Japanese schooling met the prince’s high educational standards, it marked the children from then on as outsiders in Chinese society and partisans of Japan.
In order to achieve their goals, the Japanese were eager to convince the rest of the world that Manchuria, along with Inner Mongolia, was a distinct region, with its own culture and peoples, and certainly not part of China, with its mainly Han Chinese population. Some Japanese went so far as to say that the Manchus and Mongols were closer to Japanese than to Han Chinese. Plans were on for an “independence” movement that would “liberate” Manchuria and Mongolia from China and establish a new regime, under Japanese guidance.
Prince Su had a different plan in mind as he accepted Japanese assistance. He too wanted to establish an independent Manchu-Mongol regime, but he hoped this would eventually lead to the return of Manchu rule in all of China. His participation in these restorationist schemes consumed him. “Prince Su’s home in Port Arthur,” writes Christopher Dewell, “became a de facto headquarters for quasi-clandestine independence movement plots with the constant coming and going of various Japanese, Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol parties.” Currency and armbands with imperial dragon designs were kept in the house, as were firearms and explosives, all in preparation for a Qing return. Dewell calls the home in Lushun “a busy conspirators’ lair.” Notable among the prince’s advisers was his close Japanese friend Kawashima Naniwa, who served as secret liaison to the Japanese government in Tokyo and its army in China.
Almost always pictured in his Manchu robes and queue, Prince Su seems to have been the sort of preoccupied family head who would give no thought to his daughter’s emotional well-being when considering his dynastic goals. And so, around 1915, the little girl named Aisin Gioro Xianyu, the prince’s fourteenth daughter, was sent from Lushun to the Tokyo home of his loyal comrade Kawashima Naniwa. She would henceforth be known as Naniwa’s adopted daughter, with the new Japanese name Kawashima Yoshiko. Her birth date is not certain, but she was probably about eight years old.
Yoshiko about six years old, in Qing-dynasty-era clothes Courtesy Wada Chishū
As a result of this change in policy, Prince Su’s faithful fellow plotter Naniwa had to leave China and return to Japan. With Naniwa out of China, there was no guarantee that Prince Su would continue to receive this friend’s attention. Sending his daughter to Naniwa would be a way to strengthen their bond and their mutual commitment to the Qing resurgence.
Her older brother remembers the moment when Yoshiko, already a lively child, left the family:
Yoshiko went up to my father’s room on the second floor to say good-bye. She wore Chinese clothes and had a white ribbon in her hair.
She was crying. “I don’t want to go to Japan.”
When she saw her daughter weep, Yoshiko’s mother kept on caressing her. “You be a good girl. Don’t cry.”
The horse and buggy soon arrived to take her away, and the whole family gathered to bid Yoshiko farewell. Her brother never forgot their mother’s sadness that day.
Later on Yoshiko did not have a clear memory of Prince Su, her birth father, but she could easily recall her bewilderment and helplessness as a little girl facing those who had complete control over her future.
“One day I was asleep in bed in my father, Prince Su’s, mansion in Lushun, and the next day I found myself in Moji [Japan]. I was taken away without knowing what was happening to me.”
