Last Princess of Manchuria
Page 20
"Death to the Eastern devils!"
"An eye for an eye!"
"Death is too good for them!"
Many of the condemned were dead by the time they reached the execution ground, but some of them still clung to life. They awaited death, punished to the last by the pain of their broken bodies. Among them was Shunkichi Uno. His death was even more miserable than Yoshiko's.
China's people would never forget the harsh lessons of history.
* * *
Disillusioned by the corruption and ineffectiveness of the Nationalist government, Yun Kai made his way to Yen'an, where he joined the Communists. There he was neither Yun Kai nor Ah-fu, and what he did with the rest of his life remains a mystery.
Pu-yi, the "emperor" of Manchukuo, was apprehended in 1946 by the Soviet Red Army at the Shenyang airport as he tried to flee. They brought him to the International Military Tribunal in Tokyo, where he was tried. Later, while serving out his sentence at a reeducation camp in the Northeast of China, he wrote an account of his life.
Yamaga, who had defied his top-secret orders to assassinate Yoshiko, was detained the moment he reported to headquarters. After his interrogation, he was imprisoned for a time. He lay low until the end of the war, afraid to show his face lest he be branded a war criminal and shipped back to China to stand trial. The dignified gentleman who once strolled around elegantly in a Chinese scholar's robes, wearing a felt hat, carrying a staff, and speaking perfect Mandarin, was now just a down-and-out Japanese debtor, with creditors at his heels.
In January of 1950, the Morning Sun Weekly featured the following lead story:
A wild dog was found gnawing on the head of a man in the slops of a pigsty! Several spots on the skull still bore traces of hair, but the face and neck had already been chewed down to the bone. This was big news in the tiny town of Hsishan in Shanli county, and the locals hastily mounted a search for the rest of the body. It was finally discovered in a grove of pines, a headless corpse bound to a tree trunk with hemp rope. Beside the body was a black satchel containing some sleeping pills, a few papers, and six letters. . . .
It was Yamaga, dead at fifty-three. He didn't believe the fortune-teller:
"Born in 1894 . . . noble in appearance. In ten years he will die miserably because of a woman. He will commit suicide, his body left in the wilderness to be eaten by wild dogs."
The medium instructed him:
". . . if he can avoid this disaster, his luck will change and he will know untold riches."
Fate worked in mysterious ways, inexorably. In the end, the fortune came true, but did it have to be that way? Did he have to die, all because of one woman? And what really happened to her? Was she dead or alive?
Time is like a river, flowing ever on, leaving us behind on the shore. And when we are gone, all that remains of us are shadows dancing on the wind. Our successes and failures, our victories and defeats, truths and falsehoods, loves and hates—in the end, they are all the same. China's three thousand years of history has been one long tale of death and destruction—year after year, century after century, flowers have turned to dust, white bones have turned to ash. But the river flows on, and the red leaves of autumn dance in the wind and come fluttering down.
Years passed. There was civil war in China, followed by more internal strife. Chinese people ruthlessly attacked each other for the real and imagined sins of the past. The blood never stopped flowing.
Japan lost the war and knew the humiliation of rebuilding a nation from the ground up; but in the end Japan became rich and powerful, the envy of the world.
Afterword
The busiest and most lively part of Tokyo is the Ginza. A forest of skyscrapers, a commercial and financial center, it is also home to a bevy of famous apartment stores: Mitsukoshi, Matsuzaka-ya, Seibu, and Tokyu, to name just a few.
On Sundays, a few of the streets in this bustling district are blocked off, and the area becomes a "strollers' paradise" where a holiday atmosphere prevails. It is always packed with prosperous shoppers in high spirits, all of them wandering around and having a good time eating, drinking, shopping, or just taking in the scene.
Sometimes you might catch a glimpse of the retreating figure of an old woman. She wears a white kimono, and a little monkey perches on her shoulder. Dignified, but a bit forlorn, she is gone in the blink of an eye, swallowed up in the sea of weekenders, gone without a trace.
Who is she? you might ask yourself. You didn't get a very good look at her. Maybe it was just your imagination, a ghost of the distant past.