Kawashima Yoshiko (spy)

Yoshiko Kawashima

Kawashima Yoshiko ( Japanese 川島 芳子 ; born May 24, 1907 in Beijing ; † March 25, 1948 in the Hebei Model Prison Peiping) was a Manchu princess who grew up in Japan and was a spy for the Japanese Kwantung in the 1920s and 1930s -Army and Manchukuo State . Her birth name was Aisin Gioro Xianyu (Chinese 愛新覺羅 · 顯 玗), her court name was Dongzhen (Chinese 東 珍, literally “Eastern Jewel”). Her Han Chinese name was Jin Bihui (chin. 金璧輝). After the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War , she was arrested by the Kuomintang and executed for high treason .

biography

Aisin Gioro Xianyu was the 14th daughter of Shanqi, the 10th son of Prince Su (Chin. 肅 親王), a member of the imperial family of the Qing Dynasty . She was adopted by Japanese agent and businessman Naniwa Kawashima after the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 and raised under the name Kawashima Yoshiko in the Japanese city of Matsumoto .

At the age of 17 she began to dress up as a man after a failed suicide attempt. The reasons for this are controversial.

Because of its origins, it was used by its Japanese adoptive parents as a "tool" to establish Japanese hegemony over China. In 1927 she married the Mongolian Ganjuurjab, the son of the leader of the Mongolian-Manchurian independence movement General Jeng. The marriage ended in divorce after two years, and Kawashima moved to the Shanghai International Concession . There she met the Japanese military attaché Tanaka Ryukichi, who used her contacts to the Manchurian and Mongolian nobility to expand his own espionage network.

In 1931, on behalf of the Japanese, she established close contact with the former Chinese emperor Puyi , who had fled to the Japanese concession in Tianjin . At the instigation of Doihara Kenji and other high-ranking Japanese spies, the last emperor of China was to become head of state of the newly created state of Manchukuo. With the help of bogus assassinations, Kawashima was able to persuade Puyi to flee Tianjin. At the beginning of 1932 she personally drove him to the port of Tianjin, where he was smuggled onto a Japanese gunboat.

A little later, together with Tanaka and other Japanese spies, she caused the outbreak of the First Battle of Shanghai , which led to the end of the boycott of Japanese goods in the city. Before Puyi's inauguration as president of the newly created Manchukuo, she returned to Manchuria and participated in the crackdown on Chinese resistance to the pro-Japanese regime. For this purpose she created her own equestrian department. In the press she was therefore glorified as " Joan of Arc of the East" .

In 1933 she offered her unit to combat the troops of warlord Zhang Xueliang when he tried to recapture his former territory. However, this was refused by the commanders of the Japanese Kwantung Army. The unit continued to exist until the late 1930s.

Public display of Yoshiko Kawashima's body in front of the Hebei Model Prison in Peiping (now Beijing) after her execution on March 25, 1948

She used her popularity for appearances on radio broadcasts and for the release of a record. Various fictional and semi-fictional stories from her work as an agent have been published in newspapers. Because of its high profile, which made further espionage activities impossible, and its increasingly critical statements against the aggressive imperialist policies of Japan, which led to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in the summer of 1937, it lost its value to the Japanese. Because of this, it disappeared from the public eye in the second half of the 1930s.

After the dissolution of Manchukuo State during the Soviet offensive Operation Auguststurm in August 1945, Yoshiko Kawashima hid in Shanghai. There she was arrested on November 11, 1945 by agents of the Kuomintang Secret Service. After a trial that lasted from 1946 to 1948, she was sentenced to death by shooting and executed on March 25, 1948.

literature

Scientific literature

• Richard Deacon: Kempei Tai. A History of the Japanese Secret Service. 1st american edition. Beaufort, New York NY et al. 1983, ISBN 0-8253-0131-9 .
• Philip S. Jowett: Rays of the Rising Sun. Armed Forces of Japan's Asian Allies 1931-45. Volume 1: China & Manchukuo. Helion & Company, Solihull 2004, ISBN 1-874622-21-3 .
• Yamamuro Shinichi: Manchuria under Japanese Domination. Translated by Joshua A. Fogel. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia PA 2006, ISBN 0-8122-3912-1 .

Novels

• Maureen Lindley: The private papers of Eastern Jewel. Bloomsbury, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-7475-9116-0 .

Web links

Commons : Kawashima Yoshiko  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Yamamuro: Manchuria Under Japanese Domination. 2006, p. 98 ff.
2. ↑ Deacon: Kempei Tai. 1983, p. 150 ff.
3. ↑ Deacon: Kempei Tai. 1983, p. 150.
4. ^ Jowett: Rays of the Rising Sun. Vol. 1. 2004, p. 31.

Remarks

1. ↑ After the Kuomintang conquered Beijing in 1928, the city was renamed Peiping. The city was renamed after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949.

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Kawashima is the family name, Yoshiko the first name.