One day a field officer suddenly barged in with a friend to inspect Puyi’s reception room. They even rubbed their hands around the chair reserved only for Puyi’s use as they walked around. They did this without informing Puyi in advance and without following proper procedures. They just demanded that Puyi’s servant Wu Changming hand over the key and Wu, also without informing Puyi, just opened the door for them. At that time, Puyi could not say anything to the Japanese “guests” even though he was angry. When the “guests” left, he was beside himself with fury and lashed out at Wu.
I looked on at all this from the side, thinking that there was no comparison between Puyi’s life as a puppet ruler and his life back in the Forbidden City.
—PUJIE
Yoshiko was not the only one who took time to understand the truth about Japan’s operations in Manchukuo. Saga Hiro, too, shows a staggering inattention at first as she keeps her distance from the lives of the Chinese people around her. Once she moved into her leaky residence in Changchun, Hiro was cloistered and obedient as always, and kept to her regal duties.
It must be said that Hiro sensed trouble at her wedding in Tokyo, when the military wouldn’t allow more than five hundred guests—way too few in her opinion—and, apart from a few close relatives, forbade imperial family members who wished to attend. “When I heard about this, I had some dark thoughts,” writes Hiro. “If this is supposed to be a marriage that shows the goodwill between Japan and Manchukuo, wouldn’t the very act of inviting other members of the imperial family bolster Japanese-Manchukuo harmony? And if they ignore our wishes and exclude the people closest to us, then tell me, who is this wedding for?”
After her marriage, Hiro expected the courtesy due a member of Manchukuo’s royal family, but the Japanese army saw no need to treat her with respect once they had her married off. She was unprepared for the insults and disdain she suddenly faced. When she went to the Changchun airport to receive a visiting member of the Japanese royal family, a Kwantung Army officer rudely shouted at her, scorning her husband’s rank in the Manchukuo army. “What did you come here for? This is no place for some captain’s wife. Go home! Go home!”
Still, she steeled herself to forge on despite these affronts. “Hiro, don’t think about yourself,” her father had told her. “No matter what happens to you, just endure it.”
There was also the implacable weather, which did not spur Hiro to get out more to establish contact with her subjects. “During my first winter in Manchuria, the cold seeped into my bones. The temperature outside was many degrees below zero, a temperature I had never experienced before. Except for those events I couldn’t avoid, I stayed inside our home, which was heated.”
Her first daughter was born shortly after, but a Japanese army officer, reflecting the feelings of his military colleagues, was furious that she had given birth to a girl. He tossed away his baby gift and stormed out of the hospital. The Japanese army had banked on her producing a male heir to Manchukuo’s throne; with an aristocratic Japanese mother and royal Manchu father, this male heir would represent a blending of the two nations, increasing Japan’s psychological and political hold. Since Puyi either would not or could not—because of his rumored homosexuality—cooperate in this project, the army had put its hopes in his younger brother, Pujie, and Hiro.
On the other hand, the birth made Emperor Puyi, the baby’s uncle, ecstatic, since this baby girl could never become a rival for his throne. “The emperor sent over a congratulatory message, and in addition, every day a large portion of a different kind of nutritious Chinese soup arrived,” Hiro wrote.
Hiro’s troubles increased by the day, and so did the contempt of the Japanese military. When a growing family meant that Hiro and her husband required more living space, the Japanese army refused their request for an addition to their residence. Here the sneers of the Japanese army shook her domestic arrangements: “How can a mere captain request all that luxury?”
Her pride hurt, but her dignity intact, Hiro collected herself. “After that we decided not to depend at all on the Kwantung Army and the like.” With their own funds, the couple bought property just beside their home, where they cultivated vegetables and apricots.
Echoing Yoshiko’s accounts, Hiro tells of having known nothing about Japan’s true intentions in China and of being caught up in the prospect of the “paradise of benevolent government” that the Japanese said they were creating there. In her autobiography, she consistently presents herself as uninformed and dutiful, loyal and strong, a made-in-Manchukuo version of the virtuous samurai wife, whom her Japanese readers would readily adore. Her descriptions about her ignorance of Japanese activities in China also won over ordinary Japanese readers, who would defend their own wartime behavior in the same way.
In particular, Japanese expatriates in Manchukuo in this period describe sequestered communities, where, they maintain, they had no idea about the carnage not so far away. “My contact with non-Japanese was mostly with Russians,” one longtime Japanese resident of Harbin recalled. “Even my servants were Russian. I had contact with the Chinese only when I went to eat Chinese food. But even then, I didn’t go alone but with friends. We Japanese feared being kidnapped by the Chinese and disappearing forever. The Chinese houses were complex, one built inside another, and the Japanese police wouldn’t enter their territory. So we feared the Chinese section of town.”
When spring came, Hiro was at last willing to venture outside with her baby, and only then did her observations take in a wider world, including two Chinese children who came over to peek at her daughter. “The children were open in their innocent way, and so they gave me invaluable information.” They told Hiro about how prices had gone up because of the Japanese occupation, how the Japanese soldiers and police refused to pay their bills at the family restaurant. “They don’t pay, act like big shots, and walk out.”
Though these are trifling complaints compared with widespread Japanese cruelty in China, Hiro is astounded at even these little transgressions. “These were all stories unimaginable to me up to then. Once I learned these facts, I was seized with dark thoughts about what would happen to the Manchukuo slogan about ‘the harmony of the five races’—Japanese, Manchu, Mongolian, Han, Korean—if such behavior continued.”
Hiro’s husband, Pujie, tells a different story in his autobiography, which was written under different circumstances and for a different audience. Hiro’s autobiography was published in Japan in 1959, when memories of the war were fresh and readers welcomed her tale of a Japanese woman who had behaved well during a period that brought no honor to the Japanese. Pujie’s account came out in China in 1994, after his years as a lackey for the Japanese occupiers; their defeat; the fall of Manchukuo; his arrest by the Soviets and then by the Chinese Communists, who held him as a war criminal; the complete refashioning of his ideas while in a Chinese prison for eleven years; his “rehabilitation” into Communist Chinese society; the death of Hiro.
Also, Pujie’s story was meant for Chinese readers, who would not have been charmed if he, a former high-ranking royal official of Manchukuo, kept insisting that he had been ignorant of conditions in China during the war. Pujie writes as a newly minted admirer of the Chinese Communists, who had been so kind as to not execute him when they took power. To return the favor, Pujie extols the Communists’ humanity, their acumen, even their concern for his teeth. While not exactly a searing act of self-flagellation, his book is an apology for the man he used to be.
Throughout, a contrite Pujie acknowledges that he had wholeheartedly backed the Japanese. He shows himself as more astute than his brother Puyi, whose wits were not keen to start with and whose understanding of the world had not been improved by a sequestered palace existence since his birth. Pujie clearly got out more and could assess people and places in ordinary settings. His commitment to the Japanese, therefore, is harder to accept than his brother’s, since Pujie at least had the ability if not the will to make reasonable judgments.
Pujie seeks forgiveness as he provides examples of his wickedness. He tells of the time he served as company commander of Manchukuo’s Military Academy, a Japanese-backed institution. Only after the war did he comprehend that the Chinese students there were trained to develop a “slave mentality,” bombarded with slogans about “Japan and Manchukuo—United in Virtue and Spirit” or “The Inevitable Victory of Imperial Forces.” At the time, he gave wholehearted backing to the academy and put his prestige behind Japanese policies. When the Japanese military police tracked down students considered “anti-Manchukuo and anti-Japan,” Pujie agreed that such odious elements would have a terrible effect on the reputation of the academy and the other students. Asked for his opinion about what should be done, Pujie recommended that the anti-Japanese students be “severely punished.” So it was with his consent that the rebellious students were sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labor, and upon release found themselves without homes and no hope of finding employment. He heard later that one student threw himself under a train in despair.
In the manner of repentant autobiographies, Pujie gets to return to this shameful episode in 1950, when he again encounters one of those rebellious students. Now Pujie is the prisoner, on the train going from his Soviet prison to the prison in China where he would remain for a decade. He recognizes the former student, who is part of the Chinese Communist cadre charged with escorting Pujie and other prisoners to their Chinese jail. Fearful of retribution from this man whose life he had destroyed, Pujie instead is treated by the former student with the consideration and wisdom he finds so typical of Communist officials.
“Your tenure as company commander of Manchukuo’s Military Academy is a fact that cannot be denied,” the former student tells him with astonishing sagacity. “But if you study and seriously change your ideas, your future will be bright.”
In fact Pujie’s loyalty to the Japanese regime had not stopped with military education, and as he took up various posts in the Manchukuo government, he always wanted to affirm his devotion. While Pujie was military attaché at the Manchukuo legation in Tokyo, a Chinese secretary was suddenly arrested by the Japanese military police and taken to places unknown. Thinking that Pujie would come to the aid of a fellow Chinese, the secretary managed to smuggle out a secret plea for help several years later. Far from rushing off to rescue his former aide, Pujie became furious at being put in a potentially damaging position. He burned up the message, destroying all traces, and sent word that he wanted no part in such doings. When Pujie learned that the secretary had been executed, his remorse, overdue, is profuse: “This episode preyed on me afterward and sometimes I couldn’t sleep. Not only had I refused to help him out, I may have actually speeded up his execution. What a terrible sin I’d committed!”
At last Pujie perceived the truth about his role in Japan’s China enterprise. By then he was in too deep, because, like his brother, Pujie was not the man to give up royal trappings and turn on the occupiers of his country. He describes a visit to Beijing to see his father, Prince Chun, a nostalgic journey from Manchukuo to the city where he had spent his childhood. Each morning he took a walk around the garden in the Northern Mansion, his father’s residence, and remembered times long past. “With much emotion I wondered whether we would ever be able to return to the quiet life of the old days.”
But he is back to reality soon enough when he is invited to dinner by Yin Rugeng, also a collaborator with the Japanese, who headed the East Hebei Anti-Communist Autonomous Government, another puppet regime in China. Yin Rugeng—whom Pujie has the temerity to label a “traitor”—urges Pujie to remain in Beijing and work with him. With a sense that his life had complications enough, Pujie hurries back to Manchukuo.
“I understood why the Kwantung Army did not want us to go to Beijing. The army saw that we’d run into problems likes these. Everyone wanted to use my brother and me as their puppets.”