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 containing the words early and/or life:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)