Turnbull - Samurai Women 1184-1877

WARRIOR 151

Series editor Marcus Cowper

The lives and exploits of the samurai warriors of Japan are among the bestrecorded accounts of fighting men anywhere in the world. Chronicles, diaries and gunkimono (epic war stories) abound, relating in immense detail both their individual prowess and their contribution to the development of military technology in medieval and early modern Japan. Yet to a very large extent these eyewitness accounts, stories and legends about the samurai are an all-male affair, making the female samurai warrior a very elusive creature. The womans role seems to be exercised only behind the scenes: in palaces, council chambers and living quarters where decisions were made, alliances arranged and intrigues unfolded. In those situations the influence of women, both directly and indirectly, has long been recognized to have been considerable, because, as wives, daughters and mothers, the women of the samurai class could exert a huge influence over the political process. In their less welcome roles as pawns in the marriage game, negotiators or go-betweens, women also played a vital and hazardous part in the drama of medieval Japan. The samurai woman as a fighting warrior, by contrast, appears to be almost non-existent.

However, even though authentic accounts of fighting women are relatively rare when compared with the immense amount of material on male warriors, they exist in sufficient numbers to allow us to regard the exploits of female warriors as the greatest untold story in samurai history. Over a period of eight centuries female samurai warriors are to be found on battlefields, warships and the walls of defended castles. Their family backgrounds range across all social classes from noblewomen to peasant farmers. Some were motivated by religious belief, others by politics, but all fought beside their menfolk with a determination and bravery that belied their gender, and, when the ultimate sacrifice was called for, they went willingly to their deaths as bravely as any male samurai. Some women achieved fame by employing their skills in the martial arts to seek revenge for a murdered relative; others sought mere survival and, when combined with the exploits of women whose role in warfare was of a more indirect nature, the female contribution to samurai history is revealed to be considerable.

The written evidence for samurai women being involved in actual fighting covers two different situations. The first was that of a defended castle where the commander was absent and the responsibility for defence had to be assumed by his wife. In nearly all such cases the castellans wives roles involved actual fighting as well as administrative duties, which suggests that women of the samurai class were highly trained in the martial arts to prepare them for exactly such an emergency. Invariably this female castellan role was displayed either by the wife of the daimyo (the feudal lord) or one of his most senior retainers to whom the control of a subsidiary castle had been entrusted.

Tomoe Gozen is the most famous samurai woman warrior of all. In this striking print she is shown to good effect, with attractive features, wearing a red-laced suit of armour and carrying a naginata, the traditional weapon for a woman warrior.

The second situation takes us to the opposite end of the social spectrum in Japanese warfare, because the daimyo fought not only other daimyo but also the armies of the ikki, or leagues, where allegiance was not to a daimyo but to a social group, a religious ideal or a locality. Although often led by members of the samurai class an ikkis membership typically encompassed a very wide range of society from small landowners down to landless peasants. The wars conducted by daimyo against ikki tended to be savage and ruthless affairs, and in the desperate situation of an ikki fortress or community coming under attack everyone was involved with little distinction being made between male and female either in fighting or in becoming victims of war.

The archaeological evidence, meagre though it is, tantalizingly suggests a wider female involvement in battle than is implied by written accounts alone. This conclusion is based on the recent excavation of three battlefield head mounds. In one case, the battle of Senbon Matsubaru between Takeda Katsuyori and Hojo Ujinao in 1580, DNA tests on 105 bodies revealed that 35 of them were female. Two excavations elsewhere produced similar results. None was a siege situation, so the tentative conclusion must be that women fought in armies even though their involvement was seldom recorded.

To sum up: samurai women went to war but war also came to them. They fought bravely and skilfully as authentic female samurai warriors.

During the 8th century AD the dominant lineage in Japan that identified itself as the imperial line commissioned its own written history. The results of this activity, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Nihon shoki or Nihongi (History of Japan) contain a number of stories that linked the ruling family directly to divine ancestors, and we do not have to read far into these ancient creation myths before we encounter the combined images of a woman and a sword. The woman is Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, and the sword is the weapon named Cloud-Cluster that was hewn from the tail of a fierce serpent by Amaterasus brother Susano-o. This was the sword that Amaterasu was to pass on to her grandson Ninigi when he took possession of the earth. As one of the three sacred treasures, the crown jewels of Japan, the sword was in turn passed to Ninigis grandson Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan.

Among the accounts of the early and legendary emperors of Japan may be found a number of powerful empresses who ruled either jointly or in their own right, including one very prominent female warrior figure in the person of Empress Jingu. She reigned from AD 170 to 260 according to the traditional chronology, and was the widow of Emperor Chuai, the 14th emperor, who had received a divine commission to conquer a land identified as Korea. Following her husbands death Jingu resolved to carry out the expedition herself, even though she was pregnant. In the