Yoshiko Kawashima

Crowdy, Terry, The Enemy Within (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), Chapter 10

Charged with treason as a hanjian on 20 October 1947, she was executed by a bullet shot into the back of her head on 25 March 1948, and her body was later put on public display.

After the end of the war, on 11 November 1945, a news agency reported that "a long sought-for beauty in male costume was arrested in Beijing by counter-intelligence officers." She was held at Hebei Model Prison.

Two books titled The Beauty in Men's Clothing have been published about Yoshiko, the first a partly-fictionalized novel by Muramatsu Shōfū published in 1933, the second by Shōfū's grandson Tomomi in 2002 about the composition of the former.

After Puyi became Emperor of Manchukuo, Kawashima continued to play various roles and, for a time, was the mistress of Hayao Tada, the chief military advisor to Puyi. She formed an independent counterinsurgency cavalry force in 1932 made up of 3,000-5,000 former bandits to hunt down anti-Japanese guerrilla bands during the Pacification of Manchukuo, and was hailed in the Japanese newspapers as the Joan of Arc of Manchukuo. In 1933, she offered the unit to the Japanese Kwantung Army for Operation Nekka, but it was refused. The unit continued to exist under her command until sometime in the late 1930s.

In November 1927 at age 20, her brother and adoptive father arranged for her marriage to Ganjuurjab in Port Arthur (also known as Ryojun), who was the son of Inner Mongolian Army general Babojab, who once led the Mongolian-Manchurian Independence Movement there in 1911. The marriage ended in divorce after only three years and she left Mongolia, and she first traveled to teeming coastal towns of China and lived a bohemian lifestyle for some years in Tokyo with a series of rich lovers, both men and women. Kawashima moved to the foreign concession in Shanghai. While in Shanghai, she met Japanese military attaché and intelligence officer Ryukichi Tanaka, who utilised her contacts with the Manchu and Mongol nobility to expand his network. She was living with Tanaka in Shanghai at the time of the Shanghai Incident of 1932.

She was born in the Aisin Gioro clan, the imperial clan of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty. Her birth name was Aisin Gioro Xianyu and her courtesy name was Dongzhen (literally "eastern jewel"). Her Sinicised name was Jin Bihui. She is best known by her Japanese name, Kawashima Yoshiko (川島 芳子), which is read as Chuāndǎo Fāngzǐ in Chinese. In 1925, Yoshiko took the male name Ryōsuke.

On 22 November 1925, Yoshiko said that she had "...decided to cease being a woman forever." Earlier that day she had dressed in a kimono with a traditional female hair style and took a photo among blooming cosmos to commemorate "my farewell to life as a woman." That evening, Yoshiko went to a barbershop and had all her hair cut off, adopting a crew cut and from then on dressing in men's clothes. A photo of the transformation appeared five days later in the Asahi Shimbun under the headline: "Kawashima Yoshiko's Beautiful Black Hair Completely Cut Off - Because of Unfounded 'Rumors,' Makes Firm Decision to Become a Man - Touching Secret Tale of Her Shooting Herself," alluding to a prior episode in which she had shot herself in the chest with a pistol given to her by Iwata Ainosuke [ja].

Around the time her adoptive family moved to Matsumoto. Kawashima's biological father, Shanqi, died in 1922. As Kawashima's mother had no official identity as Shanqi's concubine, she followed Manchu tradition and committed suicide to join Shanqi in death. At the age of seventeen, her adoptive father raped her and later continued to abuse her.

After the Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1912, Xianyu was given up for adoption in 1915 at the age of eight to her father's friend, Naniwa Kawashima, a Japanese espionage agent and mercenary adventurer. Her stepfather changed her name to "Yoshiko Kawashima" and took her back to Tokyo, Japan to be raised and educated in the Kawashima family house. As a teenage girl, Kawashima was sent to school in Tokyo for an education that included judo and fencing.

Yoshiko Kawashima (川島 芳子, Kawashima Yoshiko, 24 May 1907 – 25 March 1948) was a Qing dynasty princess of the Aisin-Gioro clan. She was raised in Japan and served as a spy for the Japanese Kwantung Army and Manchukuo during the Second Sino-Japanese War. She is sometimes known in fiction under the pseudonym "Eastern Mata Hari". After the war, she was captured, tried, and executed as a traitor by the Nationalist government of the Republic of China. She was also a notable descendant of Hooge, eldest son of Hong Taiji.

She was born Aisin Gioro Xianyu in Beijing in 1907 as the 14th daughter of Shanqi (1866–1922), a Manchu prince of the Aisin Gioro clan, the imperial clan of China's Qing dynasty. Her mother was Lady Janggiya (張佳氏), Shanqi's fourth concubine. Shanqi was a descendant of Hooge, the eldest son of Hong Taiji (the second ruler of the Qing dynasty). Shanqi was also the tenth heir to the Prince Su peerage, one of the 12 "iron-cap" princely peerages of the Qing dynasty.