The Pacific War began with the invasion of China in 1931.
—IENAGA SABURŌ
Conveniently, at just that moment, the Japanese military required Yoshiko’s services.
Yoshiko had become well acquainted with various military officials during her childhood; some paid visits to Naniwa, who did their bidding in secret. As an adult, she called certain top officers “Uncle,” unnerving their underlings when she swanned in and out of their headquarters unannounced as if she were visiting a relative. Even without her husband to complete the picture, she was still striking and bold, a member of a royal family, and thus a powerful public relations symbol for the Japanese, who liked to show that they had this genuine Qing princess on their side.
By 1931, junior officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army in China had lost patience with the Tokyo government’s indecisiveness regarding Manchuria and made secret plans for a full-scale invasion of this northeastern territory. The officers’ insubordination was not so secret as it appeared, however, since they received support behind the scenes from certain officials back in Japan. The army felt a takeover of Manchuria imperative for reasons that made perfect sense if you agreed that Japan had an undeniable right to control China’s Northeast. In the minds of many Japanese, of course, Manchuria had been “purchased with the blood of Japanese men,” who had died on its soil during the Russo-Japanese War.
By the treaty ending that war, Japan had gained control of the important ports of Dalian and Lushun and had also acquired rights to territory in other parts of Manchuria. Fast action in Manchuria was said to be necessary because rising anti-Japanese activity by the Chinese there imperiled Japanese investments and the large Japanese expatriate community seeking to make their fortunes; along with this, there were fears that Chinese nationalism, spurred in large part by outrage at Japan, grew more united and more fierce by the day, threatening to overwhelm the entire Japanese enterprise. And then, as had long been the case, there was the need for that bulwark against the Soviet Union.
Army ideologues stormed forward with the similarly accepted idea that Japan also required Manchuria’s natural resources to relieve economic hardship in their own country. “Manchuria and Mongolia are not territories of China,” declared Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, one of the architects of the invasion. “They belong to the people of Manchuria and Mongolia. It is a publicly acknowledged fact that our national situation has reached an impasse, that there is no way of solving the food, population, and other important problems, and that the only path left open to us is the development of Manchuria and Mongolia.”
Having heard rumors about the Kwantung Army’s plot to seize Manchuria, the Tokyo government sent over General Tatekawa Yoshitsugu and charged him with putting a stop to this. This general, however, was on the plotters’ side and, upon arrival, allowed himself to be locked inside a geisha house in Shenyang, where he spent the night. By the time he awoke, the invasion had already begun, putting an end to his mission.
“The gunfire so frightened the geishas that they trembled,” a Japanese officer later reported, “but Tatekawa told them not to worry while they were with him. He slept soundly until morning, and then it was too late to stop the incident.”
The Manchurian Incident of September 18, 1931, began with the bombing of a railway line controlled by the Japanese outside Shenyang. Although the Kwantung Army was behind this explosion, they claimed it was the work of Chinese saboteurs. Using that as an excuse, Japanese soldiers were dispatched to fight against Chinese troops stationed in the city and next fanned out through China’s Northeast. They eventually took the rest of Manchuria and, despite international protests, would not withdraw.
The bare facts about this invasion do little to convey the true nature of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Slogans tried to convince the public that this was a triumph for Asians, for now this part of China had been “liberated” from the Chinese warlords and imperialist Western powers that had carved up China. In their place would rise ōdō rakudo, “a paradise of benevolent government” created by the Japanese. There was, too, the promise of solidarity and prosperity for the five Asian races (Mongol, Manchu, Chinese, Korean, Japanese), who would live and work together in this new heaven.
In reality this was the commencement of a cold-blooded regime that would force Chinese farmers off their own property to make way for new settlers from Japan; the Japanese would acquire great swaths of Chinese land—about fifty million acres by 1941—by “price manipulations, coerced sales, and forced evictions.” By the end of the war, more than two million Japanese—military and civilians—were living in Manchuria. Some Chinese would become tenant farmers on land they had owned for generations; others would face starvation when crops were taken to feed the Japanese. Atrocities committed by the Japanese were widespread. The “pacification programs,” which were instituted to rid the countryside of opponents, would send whole villages into collective hamlets, little different from concentration camps, and even a Japanese official wrote that the program was “forced through mercilessly, inhumanely, without emotion, as if driving a horse.”
Two months after the Manchurian Incident, Kawashima Yoshiko’s departure for Manchuria was announced in the Asahi. “Miss Kawashima Yoshiko Plunges into the Turbulence,” was the headline. “Dressed as a Man in a Suit and Cap, She Goes to Manchuria, the Land of Her Ancestors.”
Departing for Dairen [Dalian] on the ship Dairen Maru in the drizzling rain was a youth who wore an elegant suit and a gray raincoat with a hunting cap pulled down low over the eyes and was surrounded by many Chinese people. … This youth is actually the orphan of Prince Su, who has changed herself into a man and cuts a manly figure. She is seizing the opportunities offered by the upheaval in Manchuria and Mongolia and is now hurrying away to be a part of the new land that must be developed in the home of her ancestors, a region rich in history. …
As usual she had been spending every night at the best dance halls in Shanghai, sporting her new haircut and Western clothes in the style of a “modern girl.” Sometimes she came and went disguised as a man, always in the company of all sorts of people.
Along with her strange behavior and deluxe lifestyle, she brings with her the air of someone with inside information, whose true persona is impossible to pin down. In the past there have been various rumors about her in Shanghai, but during that time Yoshiko continued her behind-the-scenes doings.
Now, in the wake of the Manchurian Incident, there is the chance that a new era will dawn in the birthplace of her ancestors. and so she is rushing off to the north. She says that from now on she will increasingly go about her activities as a man. Will she go to Dairen or Hōten? For a while, the answers to these questions will be wrapped in mystery.
Kawashima Yoshiko had found herself a new job.