The Lighter the Portable Shrine, the Better — The Hidden Architecture of Power Behind Manchukuo
Introduction: A Power Structure Unlike Any Other
There is a Japanese saying: “The portable shrine is better when it is light.”
A mikoshi — the ornate portable shrine carried through the streets during festivals — needs to be light enough to carry easily. And if something goes wrong, the carriers can simply drop it and run. The carriers themselves stay anonymous in the crowd.
This is not just a saying about festivals. It describes something distinctive about how power has worked in Japan — something that sets Japan apart even from its neighbors.
Consider China. When Empress Dowager Cixi ruled from behind a screen — a practice called “curtain governance” (垂廂聴政, suilian tingzheng) — everyone knew she was there. The screen was a formality, not a disguise. The real power-holder was visible; she simply observed certain courtly rituals about not appearing directly before the male court. There was no mystery about who was in charge.
In Korea similarly, when powerful figures operated behind the scenes, their identity was generally known. The manipulation was real, but the manipulators were not truly hidden.
Japan is different. In Japan, the carriers of the shrine are genuinely invisible. Not just formally concealed — actually unknown. Who decided what? Who gave the order? The question often cannot be answered, even in retrospect, even by historians with access to the archives. The ambiguity is not a side effect of the system. It is the system.
This model contrasts sharply with the Western tradition, where leaders are expected to stand in the open. Power is visible. Responsibility is traceable. A strong, decisive leader is the ideal. Failure means the leader falls.
In Japan’s version, failure means the shrine gets dropped. The carriers walk away — and no one can say for certain who they were.
After World War II, the United States initially believed Emperor Hirohito bore direct responsibility for the war. The Tokyo Trials prosecuted many individuals. But those who stood trial were, in many cases, the carried — not the carriers. The true architects remained in the shadows. Many were never identified.
The founding of Manchukuo in 1932 follows the same logic. Behind the imperial robes and state ceremonies was a machinery of manipulation — careful, patient, and ruthless. And the people who operated that machinery may never be fully known. That, I suspect, was by design.
Chapter 1: Why Puyi Was Chosen
The Other Candidate: Prince Puwei
After the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the Kwantung Army needed a puppet emperor for the new state they were engineering. The obvious candidates came from the Qing imperial family — the dynasty that had ruled China until its collapse in 1912.
For a time, a significant number of Japanese supporters backed Prince Puwei (also known as Gong Qinwang), a senior Qing prince. He was capable, politically shrewd, and widely respected. His household was united. He had a solid, stable marriage. Many Japanese officials actively worked to support his candidacy.
Then, abruptly, the Kwantung Army decided: Puyi, the last Qing emperor, would be their man.
[My Interpretation]
I think Puwei was rejected precisely because he was too capable. A puppet needs to be manageable. But there may have been another, more specific reason: as I will explain below, the Japanese side appears to have been planning to install a Japanese concubine for the emperor and eventually have a child of Japanese blood inherit the throne. Puwei’s united household — with a stable, loyal wife — left no opening for that kind of manipulation. He was too solid to be infiltrated.
Puwei’s End: No Office, No Allowance, A Mysterious Death
After Manchukuo was established, Puwei received no official position in the new state. His only assigned role was to perform ancestral rites at the Qing imperial tombs — a ceremonial function, not a political one.
But even that became a problem. Puwei performed the rites flawlessly. He carried himself with the full dignity of a legitimate Qing heir, and it showed. Puyi, watching from a distance, felt threatened.
Puyi refused to grant Puwei any official title. Then he cut off his daily stipend entirely. A man who had once been championed by influential Japanese supporters was quietly squeezed — economically and politically — until he had almost nothing.
In January 1936, Puwei traveled to Changchun to request an audience with Puyi. He was staying at the Xinhua Hotel. There, at the age of 56, he died suddenly.
The cause of death was never established. No tomb was left behind. His personal belongings were scattered and lost.
[My Interpretation]
The timing of Puwei’s death is almost too convenient. He had come to seek an audience with the emperor — and died before it could happen. No cause of death, no grave, no belongings left behind. These are not the traces of a natural death. They look like the traces of someone who was erased. If that is what happened, it follows the same pattern we see throughout this story: isolate, impoverish, and eliminate — while keeping your own hands clean. I want to be clear that this is speculation, not established history.
Why Puyi Was the Right Choice
Puyi had something Puwei did not: exploitable weakness.
His personality made him easy to manage. But the decisive factor was the situation with his wives.
His empress, Wanrong, and his secondary consort, Wenxiu, were not allies. They did not trust each other, and they did not act together. Each, in her own way, offered a different opening for manipulation.
Wanrong was proud and deeply attached to her status as empress. She could be kept content — and controllable — through lavish treatment and flattery.
Wenxiu was sharper. She understood what was happening to Puyi and actively tried to resist his drift toward Japanese influence. That made her a threat — and the first obstacle to be removed.
Chapter 2: The Succession Plan — Japanese Blood on the Throne
The Broader Strategy
The Kwantung Army’s goal was not simply to install a puppet emperor. There appears to have been a longer-term plan: to ensure that Puyi’s heir would carry Japanese blood.
To make this possible, his household needed to be restructured. Wenxiu — politically dangerous — had to go. Wanrong could stay as a formal empress, provided she was kept satisfied and neutralized. With those two conditions met, the path would be open to introduce a Japanese concubine, whose child would eventually inherit the throne of Manchukuo.
Obstacle One: Removing Wenxiu
Wenxiu was intelligent enough to see through the situation. She tried to resist it. So the approach taken against her was systematic humiliation.
The numbers tell the story clearly. In Tianjin, where the household was based before Manchukuo’s founding, Wanrong received a monthly allowance of 1,000 yuan. Wenxiu received 180 — roughly one-sixth.
The living arrangements were even more pointed. Wanrong lived on the upper floor. Wenxiu was housed on the ground floor, in the same section as the servants.
The imperial consort, housed with the household staff. The contrast with Wanrong’s thousand-yuan allowance made the humiliation all the more deliberate.
[My Interpretation]
This gap is too stark to be explained by Puyi’s personal preference alone. Keeping Wanrong perfectly satisfied while systematically degrading Wenxiu to below-servant status looks like a coordinated operation, not a domestic squabble.
In 1931, Wenxiu did something unprecedented in Chinese imperial history: she sued for divorce from the emperor.
She won her case. And on her way out, she detonated a bomb.
The Plan Collapses: The Trial and the Secret
Wenxiu took the divorce proceedings to court. In the course of the trial, it came out that Puyi was sexually impotent.
This was not a minor embarrassment. It destroyed the entire succession plan at its foundation. A Japanese concubine could be installed, but she would never produce an heir. The dream of placing a child of Japanese blood on the Manchukuo throne — through Puyi — was finished.
[My Interpretation]
Wenxiu is remembered as the woman who dared to divorce an emperor. But her testimony in court had an effect that went far beyond the personal: it dismantled the core of the Japanese succession strategy. Whether she understood the full implications of what she was revealing, we cannot know.
Wenxiu After the Divorce: The Price of Victory
Wenxiu won a substantial financial settlement. But the rest of her life was harsh.
Divorcing the emperor made her a pariah in Qing aristocratic society. What she had done was seen as an act of profound betrayal — unforgivable by the standards of the old imperial world. She was cut off from the social networks she had known.
In that isolation, she spent her settlement money trying to recreate the life she had been denied. She hired four ladies-in-waiting and attempted to live as the aristocrat she had once been. The money ran out.
After that, she sold cigarettes on the street. The former imperial consort, selling cigarettes. She died in poverty.
[My Interpretation]
Whether there was any continued interference in Wenxiu’s life after the divorce, I do not know. But the structure is worth noting: the act of divorce itself — an act of resistance — triggered the very social forces that destroyed her. The Japanese side did not need to lift a finger. Qing aristocratic society did the damage instead. And Wenxiu’s attempt to hire four attendants and live as a noblewoman looks, to me, like something heartbreaking: a woman trying to recover the dignity that had been stripped from her. She spent her last resources chasing a life she should always have been allowed to have.
Henry and Elizabeth: Life in Tianjin
Before describing what happened to Wanrong in Manchukuo, it is worth pausing on how the imperial household came to be in Tianjin at all — and what their life there was actually like.
After being expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924, Puyi and Wanrong did not go directly to Japanese protection. Their path was neither forced nor straightforward. They moved first to a princely residence in Beijing, then sought shelter at the German legation. The Germans turned them away. It was only then, out of options, that they approached the Japanese legation in Beijing.
The Japanese received them with the highest hospitality, preparing their finest rooms. But the demands of the imperial household proved difficult to accommodate, and before long the Japanese arranged for them to relocate to the Japanese concession in Tianjin.
What followed was not captivity. It was, by most accounts, the most enjoyable period of Wanrong’s adult life.
In Tianjin, Puyi and Wanrong reinvented themselves. He took the Western name Henry; she became Elizabeth. Wanrong exchanged her imperial robes for Western dresses and high heels, and moved through Tianjin’s glittering international social circuit with a grace that made her a sensation. She was called the flower of Tianjin society. She attended parties alongside ambassadors, merchants, and dignitaries from across the world.
Hiro Saga, who later joined the imperial household as Pujie’s wife, left a firsthand account of meeting Wanrong for the first time. She recalled that Wanrong stood approximately 168 centimeters tall — already striking — and wore high heels that made her taller still. Slender and poised, she was, in Hiro Saga’s recollection, exceptionally beautiful.
Puyi, for his part, bought her a diamond watch — a luxury piece now held in a museum collection. On the back, an inscription: I love you. It is a small object. It contains an entire world that was about to disappear.
The Japanese did not lure them to Tianjin. The Germans refused them first. The Japanese were the option of last resort — and in Tianjin, under Japanese protection, they thrived.
Obstacle Two: Managing Wanrong — A Choice, Then a Trap
Chinese sources generally describe Wanrong as having been deceived — lured from Tianjin to Manchukuo by the Japanese without understanding what she was agreeing to. This version positions her as a passive victim from the very beginning.
The testimony of eunuchs who were present in the household, however, tells a different story: Wanrong chose to go. She made the decision herself.
A single detail from the moment of departure illuminates her state of mind. As she was getting into the car that would take her away from Tianjin, Wanrong realized she had left behind her fox fur stole. She asked for someone to retrieve it.
She was not fleeing. She was not being dragged away. She was a woman who expected the life she was heading toward to be worth dressing well for.
[My Interpretation]
The fox fur stole is the key to understanding Wanrong’s decision. She was not deceived into going to Manchukuo — she chose to go, almost certainly because the title of empress depended on it. But she also appears to have imagined that life there would resemble what she had known in Tianjin: glamour, comfort, an international social world. She was optimistic. She was wrong. And the gap between that expectation and what she found when she arrived may have been the first crack in everything that followed.
Footage exists of Wanrong’s arrival in Changchun. Those who have seen it describe her face as sunken — not defiant, not composed, but visibly fallen. A Chinese commentator viewing the same footage described her expression as that of someone who had been deceived. I read it differently.
[My Interpretation]
The commentator was Chinese, and the narrative of Japanese deception is a powerful one in Chinese accounts of this period. But a woman who stops to retrieve a fur stole on her way out of Tianjin is not a woman who believes she is walking into a trap. She is a woman who misjudged. What the footage shows, I think, is the moment she understood that. Changchun was not Tianjin. The buildings were not glamorous. The landscape was, by all accounts, bleak and unfamiliar. The face in that footage is not the face of someone who was tricked. It is the face of someone thinking: I miscalculated.
That is a different kind of tragedy. Not the tragedy of a victim, but the tragedy of a person whose own judgment — shaped by vanity, by loyalty to her father’s sacrifice, by an attachment to a title that had become her entire identity — led her somewhere she could not escape from.
Once in Manchukuo, the operation around her shifted entirely.
The building used as the imperial palace in Changchun — the capital of Manchukuo, renamed Xinjing — was not a palace at all. It had originally been the administrative office of the Jilin-Heilongjiang Salt Transport Bureau: a two-story gray brick-and-timber building. Puyi was housed in the western wing. Wanrong was placed in the eastern wing. They were kept as separate as possible.
A few Chinese servants remained around Wanrong, but the reality was tight Japanese surveillance. Over time, the Chinese servants were phased out and replaced entirely by Japanese staff. Wanrong’s last connections to the Chinese world around her were severed.
Then there was the opium.
Wanrong had pre-existing mental health struggles, and opium had played some role in managing her symptoms. But in Manchukuo, the Japanese household staff made no effort to limit her consumption. Whatever she wanted, she received. The “generous treatment” promised to the empress was honored — in a form that was quietly destroying her.
Imperial household records show that in a single year, between 1938 and 1939, Wanrong purchased 740 liang of opium — consuming approximately 2 liang per day. That is the consumption level of severe addiction.
Cut off from Puyi, cut off from Chinese society, under constant watch, with no way out — her mental state deteriorated steadily. As it deteriorated, she sought more opium. As she consumed more opium, her mind deteriorated further. She was trapped in that cycle until the end.
[My Interpretation]
I see Wanrong’s story as unfolding in two phases. In Tianjin, the strategy was to keep her content — to satisfy her pride as empress and make her a willing, stable fixture. After the move to Manchukuo, the strategy shifted: isolate her from Chinese connections, separate her physically from Puyi, and allow the opium to do its work. The palace’s east-west division was not architecture. It was a containment system. Once Wenxiu had been removed, Wanrong was no longer useful as a social or political figure — she needed to be managed, not pleased.
A Cry in the Courtyard: Wanrong’s Own Words
One testimony suggests that even amid her deterioration, moments of terrible clarity remained. According to her brother Runqi, Wanrong once ran into the courtyard crying out that she had been “made” by her father — that her entire identity as empress had been constructed by him. Her father had invested everything in placing her on the throne: years of carefully designed education, and bribes to the court so ruinous they nearly destroyed the family’s finances. Wanrong, in turn, had clung to the title of empress to repay that debt. The outcome was not what either of them had imagined.
[My Interpretation]
Some Chinese sources describe Wanrong attempting to escape from the Manchukuo palace. I am skeptical. By the time her condition was severe, escape was physically impossible — she could not stand unaided, let alone flee. But I think there is a different, more plausible reading of what may underlie such accounts. The episode her brother Runqi describes — running into the courtyard, crying out — may be precisely this: not an escape attempt, but a moment when she could no longer contain what was inside her. She ran as far as she could. The courtyard was as far as she got.
And what poured out was not defiance. It was something more complicated: the gratitude she felt she owed her father, and a bitterness she could not speak anywhere else. She had been made for this role. She had sacrificed everything to hold onto it. And this was where it had brought her.
This testimony does not exonerate anyone who exploited her. But it adds a dimension to her tragedy: she was not only a victim of the Japanese strategy. She was also caught in a bargain her father had made long before Manchukuo existed — and she knew it.
What the Historical Record Actually Describes
The 1987 film The Last Emperor shows Wanrong descending a grand staircase and spitting at a Japanese official as she leaves the Manchukuo palace — a final act of defiance, still beautiful, still proud.
The historical record tells a different story. According to accounts drawing on Hiro Saga’s testimony — Hiro Saga being the Japanese woman who married Puyi’s brother Pujie and lived within the imperial household — by this period Wanrong spent her days lying in bed, drawing on an opium pipe. The muscles of her limbs had wasted from disuse; she could no longer stand unaided or reach the toilet on her own. Her back had contracted into a permanent curve. Her teeth had decayed and her gums had deteriorated to the point where pus ran from her mouth.
[My Interpretation]
As a dental professional who also visits elderly care facilities, I can describe what this condition actually looks like — and what causes it.
When someone is bedridden for a long period, the muscles of the limbs waste until they resemble sticks. The muscles that contract the body gradually overpower those that extend it, causing the body to curl inward — drawing the knees up, rounding the back, folding the person into themselves. What looks like a “hunched back” is often the body curling like a shrimp, pulled inward by the imbalance between flexor and extensor muscles.
Immobility also causes bone loss. Without the mechanical stress of movement and weight-bearing, bones thin and weaken. Compression fractures of the spine become likely — and may themselves contribute to that permanent forward curve.
The teeth and gums deteriorate in the same process. Bone metabolism slows throughout the body, including in the jaw. Teeth weaken and begin to dissolve. The immune system, compromised by malnutrition and disuse, can no longer contain infection. Pus drains from the gums — and, in advanced cases, from elsewhere on the body.
Bowel control is eventually lost. The smell is unmistakable.
This is what the historical record describes. This is what prolonged bedridden addiction does to a human body. The woman Hiro Saga remembered as slender and exceptionally beautiful, who had stopped a car leaving Tianjin to retrieve her fox fur stole, ended in this condition. I do not write this to shock. I write it because I think it matters to understand, concretely, what was done to her — and what she walked into.
The woman in the film is a symbol — defiant, tragic, recognizable. The woman in the historical record is something harder to look at: a human body systematically destroyed, over years, by isolation and addiction. Both images are true to something. But only one of them is history.
The People Who Stayed: Hiro Saga and the Servants
There is one dimension of this story that tends to disappear in Chinese sources and in film: the people who stayed beside Wanrong.
Hiro Saga — Pujie’s Japanese wife, who lived within the imperial household — witnessed Wanrong’s deterioration at close range. When Manchukuo collapsed in 1945 and the household fled in chaos, it was Hiro Saga and the remaining servants who somehow managed to move Wanrong through the confusion of collapse and flight. The physical reality of what that meant is not difficult to imagine. The historical record tends to pass over it quickly.
Chinese accounts, and most Western films, focus on Wanrong as victim — which she was. But the people beside her were not symbols. They were human beings managing an almost impossible situation, with no good options, in the final days of a collapsing state.
[My Interpretation]
I find it worth saying plainly: what Hiro Saga and those servants did was not easy. Moving a person in that condition — unable to stand, unable to walk, unable to control her body — through the chaos of a collapsing empire requires a kind of commitment that does not get acknowledged in most accounts of this story. The narrative focus stays on Wanrong as tragedy. The people who had to live beside that tragedy, and who carried her when everything fell apart, are largely invisible. I think they deserve to be seen.
When the Soviet forces captured the imperial party, one soldier demanded to be taken to the empress. He had heard she was beautiful, and he wanted to see her for himself.
The others tried to stop him. He would not be stopped.
According to Hiro Saga’s account, he went in. Then he fell silent. Then he backed away.
He said nothing. He left.
I do not think he went to look at her out of curiosity. The behavior of soldiers toward women in the final days of a collapsing front is not difficult to understand. What stopped him was not a change of heart. It was what he saw.
That unnamed soldier’s retreat is, in its way, the most precise record we have of what Wanrong had become by the end. No description captures it as clearly as his silence.
Puyi’s Remarriage: A Caretaker, Not a Bride
Puyi remarried during the Manchukuo period. According to some accounts, his new consort was chosen less as a bride in any conventional sense than as a caretaker for Wanrong — someone to manage the daily reality of her condition. For this practical role, it is said, a woman of high noble birth was not required. What was needed was someone willing and capable of performing care that no one else in the imperial household wanted to perform.
[My Interpretation]
If this account is accurate, it reveals something about how Wanrong was perceived by this point — not as an empress to be honored, but as a problem to be managed. The title remained. The person had been reduced to a burden. That, too, is part of what the portable shrine logic produces: once the object is no longer useful, it is not discarded openly. It is simply left to become invisible.
Chapter 3: A New Target — Pujie and Hiro Saga
Shifting the Plan from Puyi to His Brother
With the Puyi succession plan destroyed by Wenxiu’s testimony, the strategy was revised.
The new target was Puyi’s younger brother, Pujie (Pu Chieh).
Pujie had already been married. That marriage was apparently ended — by force, according to some accounts — and the records of it were erased.
In 1937, Pujie married Hiro Saga, a Japanese woman from the aristocratic Saga family.
Why the Saga Family
Hiro Saga was not simply a Japanese woman. The Saga family was part of the Meiji-era nobility, distantly connected to the imperial household. A child born to Pujie and Hiro Saga would carry Qing imperial blood on one side and connections to the Japanese imperial family on the other.
This marriage was coordinated with the Imperial House Law of Manchukuo, enacted in 1937, which stipulated that if Puyi died without an heir, Pujie would inherit the throne. In practical terms: the child of Pujie and Hiro Saga was being positioned as the future emperor of Manchukuo.
The plan had not been abandoned. It had been refined.
[My Interpretation]
Looking at the full sequence — from the removal of Wenxiu to the marriage of Pujie and Hiro Saga — I do not see a series of accidents or improvisations. I see a plan that was modified when one path closed, then continued on another. Who designed it? The Kwantung Army is the most obvious answer. But whether the decision-making went higher — whether there were architects above the Army level — remains unclear. The carriers of the shrine stayed in the shadows. They may be there still.
Conclusion: The Architecture of Untraceable Power
Looking at these events together, a consistent pattern emerges.
The capable are eliminated. Puwei performed his ancestral rites too well — and ended up dying mysteriously in a hotel room before he could meet the emperor. Wenxiu was too perceptive — so she was ground down until she left on her own. Pujie’s first wife was erased from the record entirely.
No one gets their hands dirty. No one is directly killed or exiled by decree. Instead, jealousy is cultivated, pride is exploited, humiliation is administered in carefully calibrated doses — until people move themselves. The mechanism stays invisible.
No accountability is left behind. The shrine carriers are never identified.
This is the portable shrine logic in practice. Manchukuo was built on it. Puyi stood in front — lightweight, manageable, expendable. Puwei, the heavier shrine, was rejected from the start. And the people who carried Puyi, who arranged the marriages and the opium and the floor assignments and the allowances — they left almost no trace.
I do not think we will ever know who they really were. That, perhaps, was the point.
One final note. The plan to place Japanese blood on the Manchukuo throne was never formally abandoned — it was simply overtaken by history when Manchukuo collapsed in 1945. Pujie and Hiro Saga had daughters, not sons. But their lineage continues. There is, in Japan today, a male descendant of that line — a grandson who, in another version of history, might have been considered heir to the Manchukuo throne. He lives quietly, and his existence is not widely known. For reasons that are not difficult to imagine, it is better that way — for him, and for the delicate politics that still surround this history.
(Sections marked “My Interpretation” reflect the author’s personal analysis. Please distinguish these from documented historical fact.)