If you know Yoshiko Kawashima at all, you probably know her from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor — the flamboyant “Eastern Jewel,” a spy in men’s clothing who supplies Empress Wanrong with opium. It is one of cinema’s most memorable villains.
I was born in Matsumoto, in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. In Matsumoto, Yoshiko Kawashima is not a movie villain. She is a former local schoolgirl whose grave stands in a quiet temple on the edge of town, and whose memory is still honored every March. My childhood home stood in the old castle town, close to the residence where she once lived. This article is about the distance between the legend and the person — and about which one the surviving records support.
A Qing princess in the Japanese Alps
Yoshiko Kawashima was born Aisin Gioro Xianyu (愛新覺羅顯㺭) in 1907, the fourteenth daughter of Shanqi, Prince Su of the Qing imperial house. Her father dreamed of restoring the dynasty after the 1911 revolution, and he entrusted that dream to his children — sending Xianyu, still a small child, to Japan as the adopted daughter of his close associate Naniwa Kawashima.
(I have written about Prince Su Shanqi’s reform vision in [Prince Su Shanqi: Yoshiko Kawashima’s Father] — the two articles are best read together.)
Naniwa Kawashima was born into a former samurai family of the Matsumoto domain. He had earned Prince Su’s trust in Beijing after the Boxer Rebellion, where he helped establish China’s first modern police academy. When he settled at Asama Onsen, a hot-spring district in Matsumoto, his adopted daughter came with him.
The girl who rode a horse to school
So the future “Mata Hari of the East” spent her formative years as a schoolgirl in a castle town in the Japanese Alps. She attended Matsumoto Girls’ High School — the predecessor of today’s Arigasaki High School — as an auditing student, and she commuted from Asama Onsen on horseback. The townspeople of Matsumoto would say to each other, “That’s a Qing princess for you,” and assumed she would one day return to China.
This is not just a story from old books for me. One of my own high school teachers told me he had seen her, with his own eyes, riding to school. And on the grounds of today’s Arigasaki High School, the tree where she tethered her horse is still standing. The school buildings have been rebuilt and relocated, and the tree carries no plaque — you would walk right past it unless a member of the local memorial society pointed it out to you.
Why she never graduated
In 1922, her birth father Prince Su Shanqi died at Lüshun (Port Arthur) — still in exile, still hoping to return to Beijing and restore the dynasty, and never making it home alive. He had fled Beijing in 1912 with a poem of farewell, which can be rendered:
Youyan is my homeland no more; / whistling, I turn back toward Liaodong; / wheeling my horse, I watch the beacon fires — / the Central Plain falls in flames.
The family decided the funeral would be held in Beijing after all. The entire clan traveled from Lüshun in a special ten-car train of the South Manchuria Railway, and a grand funeral was held at the Prince Su family cemetery, after which the family stayed on at the Prince Su mansion before returning via Lüshun to Dalian. Yoshiko left Japan to attend as a member of the family.
A princely funeral of the old Qing court was an enormous, protracted affair, and the school had approved her absence. But while she was away, the principal of Matsumoto Girls’ High School changed — and the new principal expelled her for insufficient attendance. Her name is therefore missing from the graduation registry to this day. One cannot help thinking the school simply had no idea what the funeral of an imperial prince entailed.
I find this small administrative episode strangely moving. Long before any spy legend, here was a sixteen-year-old caught between two worlds in the most mundane way possible: a Japanese attendance rule on one side, a Qing dynasty funeral on the other. It would not be the last time the two countries made incompatible demands of her.
The legend and its manufacture
What happened next is the part the world knows — or thinks it knows. After a reported suicide attempt at seventeen, she cut her hair and began dressing as a man. The Japanese press made her a sensation: the “beauty in male attire.” She was drawn into Japanese military intelligence work in China, was linked to operations around the Shanghai Incident and the founding of Manchukuo, and became a celebrity in both countries.
But here the sources demand caution. In 1932 Kawashima herself asked the popular novelist Shōfū Muramatsu to write a novel based on her life. The book blended fact and invention freely — and it is widely noted that at her postwar treason trial, material deriving from that novel and its film adaptation was treated as evidence of her deeds. About her newspaper fame, she herself remarked in a magazine memoir that the publicity had inflated her actual movements many times over. A legend, in other words, was manufactured — partly by the press, partly by a novelist, and partly by Yoshiko herself. It then helped convict her.
She was arrested by Nationalist forces after Japan’s defeat in 1945, tried as a hanjian (traitor to China), sentenced to death in 1947, and executed in Beijing on March 25, 1948, at the age of forty.
What the film shows, and what classmates recalled
The Last Emperor depicts her as Wanrong’s lover and the person who fed the empress’s opium addiction. It is powerful cinema. But recollections from people who knew her in her school days paint a different picture: a disciplined, intelligent, proud young woman. Whether the film’s specific claims have any documentary basis is, at best, unproven — they belong to the legend layer, not the record layer.
✦ Satoe’s reading: My own view, for what it is worth, is that the cutting of her hair reads most naturally as a declaration — the resolve of someone who intended to fight for the Qing restoration herself, in a world that assigned that role only to men. Naniwa Kawashima was a man who had once negotiated, alone, to protect the Forbidden City from shelling during the Boxer chaos, and whose circle in Matsumoto devoted itself to studying and preserving Qing cultural heritage. This is interpretation, not established fact — but the “declaration” reading fits the documented pattern of her life.
The grave at Shōrin-ji
After her execution, a Japanese Buddhist priest recovered her remains, and they were eventually brought home — to Matsumoto. When Naniwa Kawashima died in 1949, Yoshiko was laid to rest with him in the Kawashima family grave at Shōrin-ji temple in Arigasaki.
I have visited the grave. Father and adopted daughter are buried together, and beside the grave stands calligraphy by Prince Su Shanqi himself — her birth father’s brush keeping watch over her Japanese resting place. Standing there, you feel the whole improbable triangle of her life at once: Beijing, Matsumoto, and a dynasty that never returned.
A death poem was reportedly found in the pocket of her prison clothes. Its opening couplet — lines she had loved to write out in calligraphy during her lifetime — can be rendered: “There is a home I cannot return to; there are tears I cannot speak of.”
The niece who stayed: Renko Kawashima and Bōkyō
Yoshiko was not the only member of the Prince Su house raised in Japan by the Kawashima family. Naniwa Kawashima also adopted a girl of the next generation: the daughter of Prince Su’s eldest son, Xianzhang. She was thus Prince Su Shanqi’s granddaughter and Yoshiko’s niece, and she lived under the Japanese name Renko Kawashima (1913–1994). Her life is, if anything, an even starker version of the same tragedy.
Raised in Japan, active in the National Defense Women’s Association of Manchukuo, Renko lost everything in 1945: the state collapsed, the family property was confiscated, and she lived in poverty under Nationalist rule. When the Communist government was established, her royal birth and her Japanese upbringing branded her a “bad element,” and she was sent into forced labor. During the Cultural Revolution, relatives were imprisoned and she herself was denounced as a Japanese spy.
Here is what moves me most: after the war, when many fled abroad, Renko chose to stay in China. She welcomed her homeland’s independence and hoped to work for the new China. That hope was never accepted. After thirty years of hardship she finally returned to Japan in 1981, at the age of sixty-seven, and died there in 1994.
Her daughter, Naoko Kawashima — born and raised in Beijing, and discriminated against in schooling because of her mother’s background — resented her mother for years. Only by learning her mother’s full story did she come to understand: Renko had been made to carry a fate she never chose, and had suffered in both countries for it. Naoko wrote her mother’s biography so that the tragedy would not be repeated. Its title is Bōkyō (望郷) — “Longing for Home.” The book exists only in Japanese.
Longing for which home? Japan, where Renko was raised and found her cultural footing? Or China, where she was born and to which her blood tied her? I suspect the answer is neither and both: what she longed for, in the end, was to be accepted by both countries — or simply to be respected as one human being, regardless of nationality and birth. The title could stand over this entire family.
A memory kept alive
In 1998, fifty years after Yoshiko’s death, a memorial room opened in Matsumoto with her calligraphy, belongings, and items donated by former schoolmates and their families. It now stands in the Matsumoto City History Village (Matsumoto-shi Rekishi no Sato). Around March 25 each year, a memorial service is held at the temple, and people still come from inside and outside the prefecture. In 2001, two hundred waka poems she had written privately were published as a collection — a quieter, lonelier voice than anything in the spy legend.
✦ Satoe’s reading: History, as I often write on this blog, is recorded by the winners. Yoshiko Kawashima was condemned in China as a traitor and consumed in Japan as a media spectacle — two versions of the same erasure. What Matsumoto preserves is neither: an unmarked tree, an absent name in a graduation registry, a shared grave, two hundred poems, and an annual gathering of people who refuse to let a caricature be the last word. A teacher from Matsumoto once told me never to forget that, within a violent era, there were also Japanese who worked desperately to protect the cultural heritage of the Qing. I have carried that sentence for decades.
One last thing. My daughter attended high school in Matsumoto, and her cycling route to school followed the very road Yoshiko once rode on horseback. A century apart, two schoolgirls on the same road — one of them free to simply go to class, graduate, and choose her own life. Perhaps that ordinary freedom is the best measure of what Yoshiko and Renko never had.
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Related articles: [Prince Su Shanqi: Yoshiko Kawashima’s Father] / [The Light and Shadow of History: Kodaira Soji] / [Wanrong Part I & II] / [Manchukuo’s Hidden Plan]
Reference: Naoko Kawashima, “Bōkyō: The Life of Renko Kawashima, a Qing Princess Between Japan and China” (Shueisha, 2002, in Japanese)