Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy by Phyllis Birnbaum

Author:Phyllis Birnbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS021000, History/Asia/Japan, BIO022000, Biography & Autobiography/Women
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

Naniwa, Renko, Yoshiko, and Chizuko Courtesy Hokari Kashio

For her part, Chizuko worries like a doting wife about Yoshiko’s taxing schedule and poor eating habits: “When she went to Rehe, she ate millet and corn for her meals and then went about her many activities. Finally, her health gave out, and when she returned to Shinkyō [Changchun], she had to stay in bed for a month and half.”

In such remarks, the two make no secret of the affection they felt for each other, and though this sounds like more than just a deep friendship between two women, no one knows the extent of their intimacy.

“What could be more chaotic than the dilemma in which Princess Jin found herself at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1931? [sic],” Woods asks, concerned about the conflicts plaguing her hostess. “Her adopted people, the Japanese, were at war with her own native country. ‘And I wanted to help both,’ she said.”

Yoshiko goes on to provide more detail about her loyalties, and in talking publicly about such dangerous topics, she is far too forthright, a bad habit that would later get her executed. “She thought of the way in which her parents had been treated and her brothers killed,” Woods reports, alluding to Yoshiko’s fabricated tales about the deaths of relatives, “and decided to stay with her Japanese friends.”

Yoshiko seems to have had second thoughts about such a wholehearted endorsement of the Japanese and later told Woods, “As for the Japanese, they have been very kind to me. But I do not like what they do in Manchukuo. I tell them so. But they will not shoot me yet, I think.”

*

Getting shot by the Japanese was not out of the question, and although Yoshiko liked to think that the threat was a result of her valorous role in China’s turmoil, her physical safety was more imperiled by events closer to home. The deviant passion had always been on Tanaka’s side, but Yoshiko also enjoyed her power over him and of course liked to spend his money. Their relationship was no secret to the public and to his superiors since Tanaka boasted of the connection. Yet even he eventually recognized her menace.

“She became intoxicated by her success and fame,” Tanaka’s biographer son reports. “She’d always had the kind of personality that made her act on whatever came into her head and that came into play here too. Her intolerable attitude became worse than before. Her relationship with Tanaka Ryūkichi gradually became more distant. Putting the matter of their personal relationship aside, he warned her many times that she had built a record of many achievements but if she continued this wild life of hers, she would throw away her future. She wouldn’t listen to a word of this, and instead she abused him with her foul tongue.”

Though Tanaka knew that he had to be rid of Yoshiko, it was not an attachment he could abandon with ease. “From the start, she didn’t love Tanaka,” one of his army colleagues wrote years later.

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