Treacherous Women - Sex, temptation and betrayal (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr

Yoshiko Kawashima
     
     
     
     
    She was known as Eastern Jewel and was one of the most extraordinary women of the 20th century, helping to foment war between China and Japan. Working as a spy, throughout her life she seduced countless men, many of them rich and powerful. Not for nothing was she known as the eastern Mata Hari.
    She was born a Manchu princess in 1906, fourteenth daughter of Prince Xu who ruled Inner Mongolia and claimed to be descended from the emperor who founded the Qing Dynasty in 1616. However, she was adopted by one of the Prince’s Japanese advisers, Naniwa Kawashima, who changed her Chinese name, Jin Bihui, to the Japanese Yoshiko Kawashima. Educated in Japan, learning judo and fencing, she effectively became Japanese, forgetting her origins and being taught to hate China. When her father died in Port Arthur, her mother, deprived of a position in society, committed suicide. Eastern Jewel was reported to be unmoved on hearing the news.
    She did begin to demonstrate some odd behaviour, however, at the age of seventeen, when she started wearing men’s clothing. It is said by some that she began to do so after being raped by her adopted father. However, by now, she was a striking woman – like a film star, some said, with a strong personality.
    The Japanese decided to dispatch Yoshiko to Manchuria to marry a Mongol prince, Kanjurab. They surmised that with her there, they would have a grip on what happened in Manchuria. Unfortunately, however, the marriage was short-lived. Eastern Jewel tired of her new husband after just four months and left Mongolia for the Chinese coast before returning to Tokyo, where she lived in the student quarter. There, she adopted yet another identity, calling herself Yang Kuei Fei.
    Tiring of Tokyo, in 1928 she persuaded a member of the Japanese ruling elite to take her with him to Shanghai where, at a New Year party, she bumped into the Japanese Major General Takayoshi Tanaka, of the Shanghai Special Service. Eastern Jewel, in her customary garb of riding breeches, black knee-high boots, army jacket and riding crop, pushed Tanaka into a back room and proceeded to make love to him. To their delight, the couple discovered that they shared a fetish for boots and he was never allowed to take his off. They began a passionate affair.
    Tanaka worked for Major-General Kenji Doihara, a man known as ‘Lawrence of Manchuria’ because of his knowledge of that country. Doihara had established an intricate network of spies in China and Eastern Jewel was perfect for it, especially as she was acquainted with the boy-emperor, Pu Yi, who would be the ‘Last Emperor’ of China. The Japanese wanted Pu Yi to return to his homeland, Manchuria, to allow them to use him as a pretext for invading the country. She was, after all, close to him and he had told her that his home was her home.
    First, however, she was engaged by Tanaka in 1931 to create enough of a disturbance in Shanghai to justify an invasion by Japanese troops to keep the peace. She was given $10,000 which she used to pay thugs to attack Japanese businesses. The Japanese army duly arrived to protect Japanese interests and citizens. They were eventually forced to withdraw when diplomatic pressure was brought to bear by countries around the world.
    At this point, Doihara decided to make use of Eastern Jewel’s friendship with Pu Yi. She was told to persuade him to move to Mukden in Manchuria, where the Japanese would install him as a puppet emperor who would fully support their move into the country. They believed that he would be so fed up with his treatment in China at the hands of Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomintang that he would do anything to take revenge.
    Eastern Jewel’s first effort was to tell him that his life was in danger if he did not move, but he refused to go. She then orchestrated assassination attempts that she thwarted – finding poisonous snakes in his bed or discovering bombs in a basket of fruit. Still,