Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy: The Story of Kawashima Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy Who Commanded Her Own Army

A DAUGHTER LOOKS BACK

After the defeat of Japan, my brother and I were sent to the Soviet Union and kept under detention there as war criminals. In 1950, we were transferred to the Fushun War Criminals Prison in Northeast China. At first, we were much worried that we would be put to death. But gradually we found to our relief that the War Criminals Prison wanted us to repent for our sins and start a new life.

My brother and I were granted special pardons and set free in 1959 and 1960 respectively. We both turned over a new leaf.

—PUJIE

On a chilly spring day, I met Fukunaga Kosei for tea in Tokyo. She, too, knows much about disillusionment and bafflement, shame and remorse, which came to dominate the lives of her parents. As a consequence, Kosei has spent a lot of time deciphering their emotions for the world at large, and for herself as well. Kosei’s difficulties, like Yoshiko’s, started at the moment of her birth. And just like Yoshiko’s, her difficulties seemed never to end. Born in 1940, Kosei is the only surviving daughter of Saga Hiro and the Manchu prince Pujie. She lived with her parents in Manchukuo as a member of the imperial family until she was five years old, but with the Japanese defeat, she fled with her mother to Japan. Eventually, she married a Japanese and had five children, settling down for good in Japan.

While Kosei determined years back that she would aim for anonymity and domestic quiet, leaving a life as a Manchukuo princess behind, she has not always been able to keep her past at bay. When she speaks, Fukunaga is still an aristocrat, always showing extreme politeness and tact. And when she gazes ahead, there is the fragility of a woman who cannot believe how much life has battered her.

“My mother had a strong sense of responsibility,” Kosei told me, reviewing her Japanese mother’s marriage to Pujie. “For her entire life she worked to bring the cultures of Japan and China together. She came from an old Japanese family, related to the imperial line. She was very much aware of the responsibilities that came with her place in society and the position she had been placed in.”

The last one left, Kosei is now her family’s spokeswoman, though she has no fondness for publicity. She does, however, want to make sure that posterity treats her parents well, and with that in mind, she endures questioning about her closest relatives and encourages memorials in their honor. She supported the placement of commemorative stones in a “Sino-Japanese Friendship Garden” in Nishinomiya, Japan, and contributed a white-flowering obassia, an offshoot of the tree that the Japanese empress gave to her mother long ago.

“As you know, my parents’ marriage came about under difficult circumstances, arranged by the military for their own reasons. The military’s strategy, to forge ahead by linking two countries together through their marriage, was hard for my parents, I think, but my mother realized that my father had a good character, and so they were able to forget about such things and create a relationship between two human beings. For my mother, the society she had been born into played a role. While the marriage was still under discussion, my grandfather—that is, my mother’s father—guided her, saying that if she’d been a man, she’d join the military to help her country. If she, as a woman, wanted to serve the country, then, he said, do your duty and marry. That is how my mother steeled herself to face what was ahead.”

As part of her efforts for her parents, Kosei agreed to be the focus of a television documentary about her father; this included a visit to her childhood home in Changchun, which she had left sixty years ago. A woman who has reason to see the world, and especially China, as a fount of catastrophe, Kosei clearly braced herself for the journey.

“My Father, Pujie,” which aired in 2006, follows Kosei as she contends not only with her own memories but also with elderly Chinese residents, who can still call up their bitterness about the Japanese occupation. “They treated us Chinese workers very cruelly,” a Chinese man who labored for the Japanese tells her during the trip. “They’d abuse us and call us idiots all the time, constantly beat us. The Japanese treated us like slaves and so we workers hated them.”

Kosei knows that she cannot atone for the wrongs of the Japanese but is eager to emphasize her father’s repentance for his role in the Manchukuo regime: “My father served his older brother, Emperor Puyi, like a loyal vassal,” she says, in her pained way, “and continued this throughout the war. In that way he also cooperated with the Japanese, perhaps hoping that his participation would build a fine country in Manchuria. But in his later years, he reflected on what he had done and accepted censure, realizing that the mistakes in his thinking had led him to do unforgivable things. This definitely was not the result of brainwashing. From the bottom of his heart he felt that his past history had been a mistake, a mistake that had brought misery to the people of China’s Northeast. When he apologized, he was expressing his true feelings.”

During the documentary, Kosei was at least allowed a happy moment to look around the site of her old home, which is now on a busy Changchun street.

“Beyond the garden I am pretty sure that there were rice fields. The cook would come out in a long apron, leading a long line of ducks and ducklings—just the way you often see ducks with their ducklings now. It was that sort of scene. Behind them I would come stumbling along. That’s the only kind of thing I remember now.”

Kosei can recall the pleasant scene with the ducks, but this soon yields to her other recollections of dislocation, terror, disgrace, and tragedy. As a child, she faced the insecurity of being transported back and forth between China and Japan during the war as her father took up official posts in the two countries; after the Japanese defeat, he was imprisoned as a war criminal for fifteen years; she and her mother made their escape from Manchukuo to Japan through vengeful Chinese mobs and measles epidemics; in 1957 her older sister died in a sensationalized double suicide in Japan. The Chinese underwent unspeakable agonies under the Japanese—there are accounts of mass beheadings by sword, humans flayed alive, biological experimentation on prisoners. Beside these, Kosei’s troubles can seem tame, a tiny firecracker amid an unstoppable blaze reducing an entire country to ashes. As a result, Kosei is reluctant to bring up her private grief, perhaps wary of accusations that she, a privileged woman sheltered from the worst of it, doesn’t know anything about suffering.

By the time of Kosei’s earliest childhood years, the true nature of the Manchukuo regime was obvious to its citizens and to her parents as well. “My mother’s ideas about Manchuria before she went there,” Kosei told me, “were quite different from the actual conditions she encountered after she arrived, which surprised her. In the beginning the Japanese believed in the idea of establishing harmony among the five races and wanted to create an ideal country there. But then the army, the Kwantung Army, became stronger, and another aspect emerged, one that had no relationship to their ideals. The military treated ordinary people very arrogantly, and this made my mother very sad. Japan was lacking in natural resources like coal, and so the Japanese increasingly looked to Manchuria for such supplies. Human greed is something that changes over time, and so Japan’s early plans for Manchuria underwent great changes.”

Among other oppressive decrees, the Japanese ordered the citizens of Manchukuo to abandon their native beliefs and follow the practices of Japanese Shinto. Later on, Emperor Puyi claimed that he had no choice but to go along with the Japanese decision to ban Manchu rites.

“Though the Japanese made much of their slogan about the ‘Harmony of the Five Races,’” Kosei’s mother, Hiro, wrote, “in reality, the Japanese came first in all of Manchuria. … Puyi was forbidden to worship his Qing ancestors. They forced Japanese Shinto on him. … The Japanese built a plain wood shrine in honor of Manchukuo’s founding near the Imperial Household Department. They trampled on the custom of ancestor worship, which was the principal belief of the Chinese, and forcibly installed Shinto as the state religion. … Did the arrogant Kwantung Army believe that they could just rewrite history according to their whims? Did they delude themselves into thinking that actions of this sort would stir warm feelings for them among the people of Manchukuo?” Japanese military officials kicked and beat Manchu soldiers if they were not making good progress in their Shinto studies.