She didn’t have anything to do during the day. And since she liked animals, she bought three monkeys in Asakusa and took care of them in her room. Another one was born, and so … there were four monkeys in the end.
—OGATA HACHIRŌ
Yoshiko called her pet monkeys Fuku-chan, Mon-chan, Deko, and Chibi; they lived with her in the Sannō Hotel, then one of the rare Western-style hotels in Tokyo. In addition to tending to her monkeys, Yoshiko busied herself in Tokyo with more urgent projects, like arranging for a cease-fire between China and Japan. She repeatedly phoned the home of Tōjō Hideki, then army minister, to offer her services.
“I would like to serve as the bridge of peace between China and Japan,” she told Tōjō’s wife. “If they will escort me to Japan’s front line, I can help. I know a lot of Chiang Kai-shek’s generals.”
Tōjō refused to take her calls, telling his wife, “Japan is not so far gone that we need to depend on help from a feeble woman like her.”
Yoshiko says that when she heard the news about Pearl Harbor on her radio, she “immediately realized that Japan would lose.” In a memoir she supposedly concocted in prison—its authorship has been widely questioned—Yoshiko cited the reasons why Japan was doomed: “Because of the arrogant, blind conceit of the military, they did not understand the true facts about the United States. And at the same time they had excessive faith in their own abilities.”
Yoshiko continued to make trips back and forth between Japan and China, unable to settle down. Meanwhile, Sasakawa Ryōichi arranged for the sale of the open-air market in Dalian, which had long been a source of income for Prince Su’s family members and for Naniwa—as well as the source of the family’s accusations about Naniwa’s plunder of their assets. The sale provided Yoshiko with some cash for expenses in China and Japan, and while she had once proclaimed herself safe in both places—“If I am arrested either by Chinese soldiers or by the Japanese military, I will not be killed”—clearly both sides now suspected her of spying for the enemy.
Yoshiko with one of her monkeys Photographer unknown. All rights reserved
Her sister Jin Moyu reflects the family’s disgust in reporting that Yoshiko ran around with an unsavory crowd in Beijing. Their daily lives in shambles because of the war, her relatives had little patience to spare and tried to keep their distance, though Yoshiko clearly needed to maintain contact with them. Yoshiko is said to have taken up with the Chinese head of the Japanese military police in Beijing, and while others accused her of swindling money out of a Chinese opera star, she later said that she had not cheated him but instead received money owed to her brother.
Kawashima Yoshiko decided on Beijing in the end and established her final residence there, together with her monkeys and Ogata. At last, once Japan’s defeat seemed inevitable, the perpetual traveler Yoshiko refused to budge. The dangers awaiting her in China after Japan’s loss were obvious to anyone who cared to think about her welfare, but she either could not take in simple facts anymore or had made the astute judgment that once the war was over, she would not find a refuge in Japan either.
A fortune-teller long associated with her family had another suggestion: “I know a way to escape to Mongolia. I will show you the route.”
But Yoshiko clung to the idea that her righteous heart would override any accusations and ensure her safety. “I have opposed Chiang Kai-shek’s government but I have always devoted myself with great sincerity to the Chinese people. I won’t run away. I won’t hide.” She summoned a blind biwa player to play songs in her house and indulged in afternoon naps. All signs point to a forlorn existence as the end of the war approached.
Later, at her trial, a judge asked why she had returned to Beijing, and she offered another explanation: “I came back because one of my monkeys had diarrhea.”
