Early Life
Aisin Gioro Xianyu was born in Beijing as the 14th daughter to Shanqi, the 10th son of Prince Su (肅親王) of the Manchu imperial family and a concubine. She was given for adoption at the age of eight to her father's friend Naniwa Kawashima, a Japanese espionage agent and mercenary adventurer after the Xinhai Revolution, but she was raised and educated in her grandfather's home at the Matsumoto, Nagano in Japan. Her step father changed her original name Aisin Gioro Xianyu to (Kawashima) Yoshiko. She didn't find an appropriate family either. As a teenage girl, she was raped by Kawashima's father, and ended up having an affair with Kawashima himself. Meanwhile her biological father Shanqi Su died in 1921. His concubine, who had no official identity, committed the traditional suicide. Yoshiko was sent to school in Tokyo for an education that included judo and fencing and then lived for some years a bohemian life in Tokyo next of a series of rich lovers both men and women.
Read more about this topic: Yoshiko Kawashima
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)