The Kwantung Army hoped that Pujie would marry a Japanese girl for the sake of friendship between the two countries. … Clearly they intended to bring Pujie completely under their control.
—PUYI
Around this point in descriptions of Yoshiko’s childhood, Saga Hiro is often brought in for comparison. It is easy to see why. From a noble family, Hiro was born in Tokyo in 1914, and so she was about seven years younger than Yoshiko. Unlike Yoshiko, she did not become known for dressing like a man, gain a reputation as a spy, or get herself executed as the sun was coming up. But both faced dislocation and danger; their futures were settled by powerful males, who gave no thought to their welfare.
Yoshiko, a Manchu by birth, was shipped off to Japan as a child; Hiro was a Japanese forced into a marriage with a Manchu prince and then sent to live in Manchuria. The contrast is neat. For both women, there were language problems, foreign customs to be taken in, adjustments to food and weather. And both had political issues to consider: Yoshiko kept up her loyalty to the Manchu cause from the start, spurred on by Naniwa. Hiro seems to have taken more time to sort out her loyalties, though, finally, she lived out her life in China.
Yet the similarities between the two women go only so far. The Manchu Yoshiko had a difficult time from early on, wrenched from her father’s mansion in Beijing to exile in Lushun and then on to a life in Japan, where she was distant from everything familiar. Spared such experiences, the Japanese Hiro spent her youth on a Tokyo estate with her family, who were related to the Japanese emperor. The two women were opposites also when it came to their manners. Yoshiko spoke her mind too often, ranting about both petty and consequential matters. Restraint rarely eluded Hiro, and upon being suddenly ordered to marry a Manchu prince, she obeyed: “I will leave the matter to you,” she dutifully told her family. One unstable and promiscuous, the other a marvel of propriety and strength, they both took part in momentous events far from home.
Marriage of Saga Hiro and Aisin Gioro Pujie, 1937 Courtesy Fukunaga Kosei
The writings of the two women also show the divergent impressions each wished to make on the public. Yoshiko can be bitter in her descriptions of her personal and political predicament. She was used, abused, discarded, a victim of epic connivance, and won’t let anyone forget it. Saga Hiro, on the other hand, uses her autobiography, Vicissitudes of a Princess, to create a more refined atmosphere, feeding her readers’ fascination for the upper crust by providing a close-up view of royalty in Japan and Manchuria. She is assisted by rich material, which includes her dissection of the formal kowtow she was obliged to perform while pregnant and in high heels (kneel three times, touch forehead to floor nine times). In such passages, Hiro manages to transform her experiences into a riveting romance about the years with her beloved prince in a far-off land, culminating in her hair-raising flight to safety after the war.
But then again, after insisting that the two princesses are quite different, we must return to their similarities. In fact Kawashima Yoshiko and Saga Hiro have both been offered up again and again, to perform the same role for the Chinese and Japanese: the two life stories have enough soap opera elements to keep the focus on their emotional highs and lows rather than on the hell of war, which sent these women off to god-knows-where in the first place.
Hiro’s appeal to her public is more straightforward than Yoshiko’s, because Hiro was a woman who did her duty. She was bred to become a proper and aristocratic Japanese wife. As a young woman she showed some pluck in deciding to put off marriage and continue her studies in Western painting. Instructed by a well-known artist, she enjoyed the Bohemian atmosphere at his painting school. Yet Hiro was no rebel and embraced the conventions of her class. She could not have expected to pursue her artistic ambitions any longer than it took to get her married off into a Japanese family with a lineage comparable to her own.
Hiro may have been able to stall her parents’ plans for her marriage for a little while, but she did not stand a chance when the Japanese army stepped in. One day in 1936, when Hiro thought she was going to attend a performance of Kabuki with her mother and grandmother, a Japanese general came to pay her family a visit at their Tokyo home. Apparently, the general had just the man for her—the Manchu prince Pujie, who was the younger brother of Emperor Puyi. For their enterprise in Manchuria, the Japanese wanted to emphasize the union of the Japanese and Manchus by this marriage of the Japanese Hiro and a Manchu royal. Her grandmother wept and vowed to block the army’s plans, but in the end, the family had to accede to their demands.
“We refused the offer that had been made,” Hiro wrote later. “But that did not put an end to it. Behind the proposal lurked the Kwantung Army, which in those days took pride in its great power.”
According to the sweet tale, officers from the Kwantung Army, Japan’s military force in Manchuria, selected Saga Hiro from a pile of photographs of well-born Japanese women and urged Pujie to marry her. Here’s the romance again, for Pujie, who was studying at Japan’s Army Academy and spoke Japanese, happened to be a fan of Takarazuka, Japan’s all-female drama troupe; he saw a resemblance between the photo of Saga Hiro and one of his favorite stars. That was all it took to set up the first meeting between Pujie and Hiro at her parents’ Tokyo home.
Their love story remains perfect for mass-market distribution, especially since it is usually stripped of troubling moral issues like Pujie’s willingness to go along with the Japanese military and his prominent public role in the sham regime the Japanese set up in Manchuria. Instead, the couple’s romance has been shaped to invite, and get, the tears that flow with each dramatization. Years later, with wars, a lengthy prison stay, and tragedies behind him, Pujie still savored that moment when he first met his future wife:
Unexpectedly, for both of us it was love at first sight, and I agreed to make Saga Hiro my wife. At the start, this was a marriage that the Kwantung Army had arranged on its own, but it turned into a marriage in which a husband and wife shared a deep love for each other and many hardships, joy, and sadness. Over the years, we two would frequently talk about who had been responsible for bringing us together as a married couple, inseparable for our entire lives. In any event, because we were brought together, there is no denying that she brought me countless days of happiness. Nor can I forget that the first half of my life, with its many vicissitudes, brought her immense pain.
