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

Her songs came to express the very sadness of those dark days.

—SATŌ TADAO

“She smiled, her face strikingly white, oval-shaped, and showing obvious refinement,” wrote Yamaguchi Yoshiko about the first time she saw Kawashima Yoshiko. It was 1937 in China, just when the Sino-Japanese War broke out, and Kawashima Yoshiko had once more changed her profession: she now ran a Chinese restaurant in Tianjin. “She was not tall but had a figure that went well with her size,” Yamaguchi continues in her autobiography. “Wearing a man’s black Chinese robe, she had the kind of beauty you see in a charming male actor who specializes in female roles.” So began a friendship that has been the subject of much analysis, for the two women would seem to have had much in common. The scrutiny has been unflagging, not only because of their common given name but also because of the similar perils they faced—one coming out alive and going on to flourish. The other not as fortunate.

“The two Yoshikos,” as they have been called so often, were actually rather far apart in age, with Kawashima Yoshiko older by thirteen years. She took note of her seniority immediately that day they met in her restaurant.

“When I was little,” Kawashima said to Yamaguchi, “people used to call me ‘Yoko-chan.’ So I’ll call you ‘Yoko-chan,’ and you call me ‘Older Brother.’”

Yamaguchi calculates that she herself was about seventeen at the time, and Kawashima over thirty, though she looked much younger. Yamaguchi was wary about this new acquaintance, and a reader of her memoir often gets the sense that she was not one to throw herself into a new connection without carefully evaluating what was on offer. And, certainly, Kawashima gave even those less cautious cause for worry.

Yamaguchi Yoshiko was born to Japanese parents in China in 1920 and as of 1937 had not yet set foot in Japan. That was why she could not immediately decide whether or not the man’s black Chinese robe that Kawashima had on was some kind of cutting-edge Japanese fashion. “In China,” Yamaguchi observes, “there are male actors who take female roles in opera, just like Japanese Kabuki, but there’s no custom of women taking male roles like Japan’s Takarazuka drama troupe. … So I didn’t understand what it meant for a woman to dress like a man. The only thing I understood was that this was a strange kind of beauty, her masculine charm drawing people in. I felt that I was looking at a living doll.”

Although still a student on vacation when she met Kawashima in the restaurant, Yamaguchi had already absorbed complex elements into her life, and these would multiply as conflicts between China and Japan intensified. While everything about Yamaguchi was consistently female, she could match Kawashima when it came to clashing loyalties and beliefs. The commentators like to equate her mixed-up background with Kawashima’s in other ways too, but they leave out deep psychological distress, which beset Kawashima frequently, while Yamaguchi, adept at adjustment to a churning landscape, seems to have been less vulnerable. Yamaguchi presents on the whole a hardier case, less likely to be shattered by anything that came her way, and certainly she was, over the years, pelted from many directions.

Yamaguchi’s father, a sinophile since his youth, taught Chinese to Japanese employees of the South Manchurian Railway. According to Yamaguchi, he was enraptured by Chinese culture from the start and carried on with curiosity and wonder, sometimes sounding, in her sweetened-up recollections, like that most winning of characters—an imperialist gone abjectly native. “My father felt we are the younger brother nation, China is the older brother. He would say, ‘You can do nothing to change China. China is so big, so deep. It has such a long history.’ Or, ‘What is the sense of taking one drop of the Isuzu River [a sacred river in Japan] and putting it in the Yalu River [in China]?’”

Yamaguchi’s father insisted that she learn to speak Chinese and personally supervised her study of the language. She gives credit to her musical ear for her mastery of Chinese, which she soon spoke fluently. Her health too played a part in her destiny, since she contracted tuberculosis as a young girl and took singing lessons to strengthen her lungs.

When Yamaguchi was thirteen, she made her public debut at a recital organized by her singing teacher. In one of those miracles abounding in memoirs, she tells of how a Japanese representative from a Manchukuo radio station was in the audience. He turned up again at her next singing lesson, bringing along his fateful offer. In order to attract Chinese listeners, the radio station was developing a new program that would feature songs from Manchuria. They had originally sought a Chinese woman singer who spoke both Chinese and Japanese, but in the end they could not find any Chinese who met their qualifications.

Giving up on the real thing, her Japanese sponsor decided to pass this young and lovely Japanese singer off as a Chinese, sure that she could sing about Manchu fishermen with all the conviction and linguistic proficiency of a native speaker. Yamaguchi was not being recruited to become an ordinary singing sensation, her photo to hang in every home in Manchukuo just to boost her career; rather, her songs would boost those old standbys, “Japanese-Manchu Brotherhood” and “Harmony of the Five Races.”

From that time forward Yamaguchi performed as a Chinese, known as the singing star Li Xianglan, whose remarkable voice and popularity would eventually storm across national barriers in a way that the politicians and military could never match. So complete was Yamaguchi’s immersion into her Chinese identity that she spent the rest of her long life trying to get herself and her public disentangled from the deception.

Yamaguchi went on to bigger things when she was hired by the Manchuria Film Association, headed by the murderer, opium boss, and zealous nationalist Amakasu Masahiko. The studio’s films also extolled the Japanese version of friendship with the Chinese, even going so far as to promote Chinese-Japanese romance. As the faux-Chinese actress Li Xianglan, Yamaguchi appeared on-screen as a Chinese woman who would not only be won over by the beneficence of the Japanese regime in China, she could even fall in love with a fine, high-principled Japanese man. In this way she proved that the Japanese, unlike those pillaging, imperialist Westerners, were lifting the Chinese up from their backwardness and, through patient instruction, bringing two ancient nations together, sampan and cherry blossoms commingled. Enchantment relied not only on Yamaguchi’s voice but also on her beauty, which let loose a magic not easily exorcised.