, born Xianyu, was a Qing dynasty prince of the Aisin-Gioro clan. He was raised in Japan and served as a spy for the Japanese Kwantung Army and Manchukuo during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He is sometimes known in fiction under the pseudonym "Eastern Mata Hari". After the war, he was captured, sentenced, and executed as a traitor by the Nationalist government of the Republic of China. He was also a notable descendant of Hooge, eldest son of Hong Taiji.
He was born in the Aisin-Gioro clan, the imperial clan of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty. His birth name was Aisin Gioro Xianyu and his courtesy name was Dongzhen (literally "eastern jewel"). His Sinicised name was Jin Bihui. He is best known by his Japanese name, Kawashima Yoshiko (å·Â島 è³åÂÂ), which is read as ChuÃÂndÃÂo FÃÂngzàin Chinese. After 1925, Yoshiko occasionally used the male name Ryà Âsuke.
He was born Aisin Gioro Xianyu in Beijing in 1907 as the 34th child of Shanqi (1866âÂÂ1922), a Manchu prince of the Aisin Gioro clan, the imperial clan of China's Qing dynasty. His mother was Lady Janggiya (), 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.
After the Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1912, Xianyu was given up for adoption in 1915 at the age of eight to his father's friend, Naniwa Kawashima, a Japanese espionage agent and mercenary adventurer. His adoptive father changed his name to "Yoshiko Kawashima" and took him back to Tokyo, Japan, to be raised and educated in the Kawashima family house. As a teenager, Kawashima was sent to school in Tokyo for an education that included judo and fencing.
In 1922, around the time his adoptive family moved to Matsumoto, Kawashima's biological father, Shanqi, died. As Kawashima's mother had no official identity as Shanqi's concubine, she followed Manchu tradition and died by suicide to join Shanqi in death.
On 22 November 1925, Yoshiko said that he had "...decided to cease being a woman forever." Earlier that day, he 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 his hair cut into a crew cut, 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 he had shot himself in the chest with a pistol given to him by .
Several explanations have later been given as to what triggered his decision, including the death of his parents, failed romances or alleged sexual abuse from his foster father.
Kawashima explained in another article two days after the first that "I was born with what the doctors call a tendency toward the third sex, and so I cannot pursue an ordinary woman's goals in life. People criticize me and say that I am perverted, and maybe theyâÂÂre right. I just canâÂÂt behave like an ordinary feminine woman."
Earlier in his life, it had been remarked upon that he had "boyish habits" despite his feminine beauty. He would use only the male style of Japanese grammar, even though that contributed to him not being re-admitted to his school after his biological father's death.
In November 1927 at age 20, his brother and adoptive father arranged for his marriage in Port Arthur (also known as Ryojun) to Ganjuurjab, 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. Kawashima moved to the foreign concession in Shanghai. While in Shanghai, he met Japanese military attaché and intelligence officer Ryukichi Tanaka, who utilised his contacts with the Manchu and Mongol nobility to expand Kawashima's network. He was living 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 the general Kenji Doihara. He undertook undercover missions 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 a passion for dressing up as a male. [He] possibly did this in order to impress the men, or [he] may have done it in order to more easily fit into the tightly-knit guerrilla groups without attracting too much attention".
Kawashima was well-acquainted with Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, who regarded him as a member of the imperial family and welcomed him into his household during his stay in Tianjin. It was through this close liaison that Kawashima was able to persuade Puyi to become a figurehead ruler for Manchukuo, a puppet state created by the Japanese in Manchuria. However, Kawashima privately criticised Puyi for being too amenable to Japanese influence.
After Puyi became Emperor of Manchukuo, Kawashima continued to play various roles and, for a time, was a lover of Hayao Tada, the chief military advisor to Puyi. He 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, he offered the unit to the Japanese Kwantung Army for Operation Nekka, but it was refused. The unit continued to exist under his command until sometime in the late 1930s.
Kawashima became a well-known and popular figure in Manchukuo, making appearances on radio broadcasts and even issuing a record of his songs. Numerous fictional and semi-fictional stories of his exploits were published in newspapers and also as pulp fiction. However, his very popularity created issues with the Kwantung Army because his utility as an intelligence asset was long gone, and his value as a propaganda symbol was compromised by his 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 he 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 Beijing by counter-intelligence officers". He was held at Hebei Model Prison.
The Supreme Court of Hebei originally addressed Kawashima as "Chuandao Fangzi" (the Chinese pronunciation of his Japanese name's kanji). When his trial began a month later, Kawashima identified himself by his Chinese name, "Jin Bihui", which eventually became the name court officials used. However, in accordance with his lawyers' strategy to deflect his charge of treason, he gradually began to emphasise a Japanese or Manchu banner identity. The court rejected the defence's bid to have him tried as a war criminal rather than as a domestic traitor, based on a combination of jus sanguinis and Kawashima's failure to formally renounce his citizenship through China's Department of Civil Affairs.
Charged with treason as a hanjian on 20 October 1947, he was executed by a bullet shot into the back of his head on 25 March 1948, and his body was later put on public display.
His body was collected by a Japanese monk to be cremated. His remains were sent back to his adoptive family and later buried at Shà Ârinji temple in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.
Two books titled The Beauty in Men's Clothing have been published about Yoshiko, the first a partly-fictionalized novel by Muramatsu Shà Âfà « published in 1933, the second by Shà Âfà «'s grandson Tomomi in 2002 about the composition of the former.