Yoshiko Kawashima - Espionage Career

Espionage Career

In 1927, Kawashima married Ganjuurjab, the son of Inner Mongolian Army General Jengjuurjab, leader of the Mongolian-Manchurian Independence Movement based in Ryojun. The marriage ended in divorce after only two years, and Kawashima moved to the foreign concession in Shanghai. While in Shanghai, she met Japanese military attaché and intelligence officer Ryukichi Tanaka, who utilized her contacts with the Manchu and Mongol nobility to expand his network. She was living together with Tanaka in Shanghai at the time of the Shanghai Incident of 1932.

After Tanaka was recalled to Japan, Kawashima continued to serve as a spy for Major-General Kenji Doihara. She undertook undercover mission in Manchuria, often in disguise, and was considered "strikingly attractive, with a dominating personality, almost a film-drama figure, half tom-boy and half heroine, and with this passion for dressing up as a male. Possibly she did this to impress the men, or so that she could more easily fit into the tightly-knit guerrilla groups without attracting too much attention".

Kawashima was well-acquainted with former Qing Emperor Pu Yi who regarded her as a member of Royal Family and made her welcome in his household during his stay in Tianjin. It was through this close liaison that Kawashima was able to persuade Pu Yi to return to the Manchu homeland as head of the newly Japanese-created state of Manchukuo.

After the installation of Pu Yi as Emperor of Manchukuo, Kawashima continued to play various roles and, for a time, was mistress of Major General Hayao Tada, who was chief military advisor for Pu Yi. She formed an independent counter insurgency cavalry force in 1932 made up of 3,000-5,000 former bandits to hunt down anti-Japanese guerilla 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.

Kawashima became a well-known and popular figure in Manchukuo society, making appearances on radio broadcasts, and even issuing a record of her songs. Numerous fictional and semi-fictional stories of her exploits were published in newspapers and also in the pulp fiction press. However, her very popularity created issues with the Kwantung Army, as her utility as an intelligence asset was long gone, and her value as a propaganda symbol was compromised by her increasingly critical tone against the Japanese military's exploitative policies in Manchukuo as a base of operations against China in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and she gradually faded from public sight.

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 Peking by the Chinese counter-intelligence officers." In 1948, Kawashima was tried as a traitor (Hanjian) by the Nationalist Government under her Chinese name (Jin Bihui). She was executed by a shot into the back of her head.