I’d rather die soon than spend all these useless days in this prison.
—KAWASHIMA YOSHIKO
Awaiting the results of her appeals, Yoshiko spent the whole day inside her six-foot-square prison cell, except for thirty minutes of exercise. Although she awoke while it was still dark and had nothing to do until the end of the day, she tried to keep her spirits up, especially when writing to Naniwa, whose aid she still sought in a series of emotional letters.
I feel that it’s truly a good thing to be here in this cell in this cruel, tumultuous China. It is truly a perfect protective box, an exceedingly safe paradise. Thanks to you, I have experienced a spiritual awakening regarding various matters. I sit and eat, following the rules, and at the appointed time, my food (cornmeal) arrives. But because it bothers my tongue, they give me water. I am grateful that I am given my food without any trouble. Every day all I do is rack my brain, trying to come up with some bit of cleverness, which must make everyone in the world of mere mortals quite envious.
A court official interrogates me over and over. “You don’t give us serious answers,” he tells me. “All you talk about are your monkeys, feigning innocence.”
She made friends among the women prisoners but in general was repelled by their behavior. “The racket created by women is the same everywhere. They’re crude and argue with each other a lot. I’m surprised at how many have killed their husbands.” Still, these women were devastated when the guilty verdict was announced.
“I received the death penalty,” Yoshiko wrote in a letter to Ogata. “I think that there’s no one in the whole world as unconcerned as I am. Everyone is extremely impressed with me. The day the death sentence was announced, I ate two big bowls of noodles. My friends in the prison were very sympathetic, and all of them wept. Even though I kept a smile on my face for the others, I felt like crying.”
Her Chinese relatives, who had problems of their own, did not come to visit. In danger of being arrested for their own wartime cooperation with Japan, they did not need to remind everyone about their ties to a traitor. “I have received neither letters nor visitors since being detained in prison. Receiving mail is one of the happiest things that can happen to a prisoner. When I see that other inmates get letters from their family members or friends, I feel quite sad.”
Always, she longed for her pet monkeys: “Even today my heart aches when I think about how cute Mon-chan looked when he twisted his head and looked down from the Sannō Hotel’s second-story window, watching the road below where the streetcar ran. When I remember the dead Fuku-chan’s face, tears come to my eyes. Sometimes, as I think of these things, I turn to the blue sky above and call out to them in a loud voice, ‘Fuku-chan, Mon-chan, Deko, Chibi! You were all so unlucky. If I knew that we were going to be separated so quickly, I wouldn’t have hit you like that.’ It really makes me feel terrible.”
Only her assistant, Ogata, tried to help her once he himself was released from prison. Selling some blankets for cash, he collected items that she needed—socks, tooth powder, towels, cakes, smoked pork—and delivered them to her prison through fierce wind and snow. He apologized for not visiting her often but said he could not afford the trip. Next he borrowed money from a Chinese friend and again gathered supplies for her, but when he reached her prison, he found out that she had been flown to Nanjing. “It was really a shame,” Ogata wrote to her. “I was so upset that I wept.”
Yoshiko tried to maintain her concentration, hoping to save herself no matter what. She realized that she would not be freed, but at least she hoped to avoid execution on appeal. While repeatedly stressing her acceptance of death, she wrote letters full of instructions and was in a fever as she attempted to galvanize Ogata and Naniwa. To the end she believed, wrongly, that if she could produce proof that she was a Japanese citizen, she would be spared the death penalty.
Yoshiko’s hopes depended entirely upon Naniwa, whom she urged, in cryptic Japanese meant to elude the prison censors, to get cracking in her defense. Cajoling, flattering, and begging her adoptive father, she was desperate to get her point across.
How are you? The matter I am most concerned about is your health. I am feeling better and better, so please don’t worry about me. This time I require a copy of your family registry. If I can show my name in a Japanese family registry, then I will be cleared. As quickly as possible please send me that copy you sent to Tianjin. This is my sincere request. I think that it’s too soon for me to be killed, so I ask you to do this as fast as possible.
She wanted his family registry in order to prove that she had been officially entered as his adopted daughter and thus had Japanese nationality. But as she knew, her name had never been entered into Naniwa’s family registry, and so she urged him to falsify this document by substituting her name for the name of her niece Renko, whose name did appear.
Falsifying the registry would have been a delicate operation at any time, and it is speculated that Naniwa did not venture to do this because he did not understand what Yoshiko was trying to tell him or because he feared for his own safety in Japan. He too was under scrutiny, from U.S. Occupation authorities investigating his wartime activities for possible war crimes.
Yet, apart from any of these considerations, Naniwa does not sound like a frantic parent who will do anything to save his child. Perhaps this is not surprising since he had, after all, endured more than he could have anticipated when he ushered Yoshiko into his household, including the innuendoes she had encouraged about their incestuous relations. In his response to Yoshiko’s pleas, Naniwa seems collected and detached, a father who washed his hands of his wayward daughter’s shenanigans long ago and does not intend to have his life shredded by her again.
Naniwa did not send a falsified family registry but instead wrote an extremely polite letter to Yoshiko’s Chinese lawyer, describing his own past services to her family and assuring the lawyer that no young woman was as Japanese as she was. “Since her youth, Yoshiko has received a pure Japanese education. Her speech, customs, and habits have all been Japanized. And of course as a result, she has virtually no sense that she is a member of the Qing royalty. All Japanese recognize her as a daughter of the Kawashima family.” But Naniwa did not provide any concrete evidence and settled for a lie about the existence of an official family registry with Yoshiko’s name duly inscribed, but lost “as a result of the great earthquake in Tokyo on September 1, 1923, when all the documents in the town hall were destroyed by fire.” With much courtesy, Naniwa expressed his hope that the Chinese authorities would be so kind as to release his daughter from confinement. “This year I will reach the advanced age of eighty-three years. My mind and body are growing weaker. I do not have any children, and so in my lonely old age, I fervently wish for Yoshiko’s release and her return home.”
Naniwa smashed more of Yoshiko’s chances when he contradicted her claim that she was eight years younger than she actually was, the point she had been stressing with her jailers. When Naniwa briskly noted the date of her adoption, he was also providing proof that Yoshiko had been lying to Chinese authorities about being too young to have carried out the crimes cited in the guilty verdict. “At the time,” Naniwa wrote, “Prince Su felt sorry that our household was a lonely place since we did not have any children. And so in 1913 he sent Yoshiko to my home in Tokyo. She was six years old at the time.”
Aghast at such a blatant refutation of her testimony, Yoshiko pleaded with Naniwa to revise his statement. “You’ve made a mistake in your letter. Please think this over again now. At the time of the Manchurian Incident [1931], I was just sixteen years old. This year I am thirty-three without a doubt. You’ve got it wrong, I think. … If you make a mistake in the year, it causes me all sorts of problems. They’ll say that I am telling lies to suit my own purposes.”
Still hoping for a reprieve, she continued to beg Naniwa for the quick dispatch of the documents that might save her. But, at last, she realized that all was lost, and her mind sought the exaltation that would see her through.
“After I finished writing,” went a letter to Ogata, “I threw my brush away. I thought to myself, ‘Will all this deceit do any good?’ I had planned to distance myself from all attachments. But I could not do it. Attachments are power, and at the same time they are death. Only when you are dead do attachments fall away. While you are alive, they amount to nothing for all but outstanding people, crazy people, and fools.”
Yoshiko granted a last interview to Spencer Moosa of the Associated Press, who would be one of the two Western reporters allowed to witness her execution. “Penniless and bereft of her once disarming beauty,” Moosa wrote in an article published just days before she died,
the “Mata Hari of Asia” is awaiting with resignation her imminent execution. … She no longer looks the part of the Oriental siren who used her charms to help Japan in the war. At the age of 33, her upper teeth are gone, her hair is cut in a mannish bob, and she wears a padded gray jacket and slacks that make her small figure look bigger than it is. Some clues to vanished beauty remain in her fair skin, large dark eyes and small, delicate hands.
He told of her “barren” cell and her request that the execution be speeded up so that she did not “freeze to death in jail.” She had also requested a private death, because she would be “greatly embarrassed” if she were killed at the public execution grounds near the Temple of Heaven. “Only real traitors and other criminals are usually shot there,” she said. This request was granted.
Moosa added that many Chinese “say that the death penalty is too harsh since she was reared as a Japanese, regardless of her technical nationality.” Nonetheless, she had little hope of being granted a reprieve, especially since there were stories about how at least one Nationalist official, alarmed that she would spill secrets he had indiscreetly shared with her long ago, wanted her executed immediately.
“I don’t like men,” Yoshiko told Moosa. “They only make trouble for women.”
Though toothless and weak, Kawashima Yoshiko died as she had vowed, in a manner that did not shame her ancestors. “Arguments are just the stuff of this ephemeral world,” she had written in one of her last poems. “Go with a smile—that is the proper way. I am my father’s daughter.”
Refusing the assistance of her jailers, she walked out to the frost-covered prison yard on March 25, 1948.