Early History
The battle tales of Japan, chronicles of wars in the Heian, Kamakura, and Muromachi periods, focus almost completely on the deeds of the nobility and warrior classes. These tales, passed down by blind bards much as Homer’s Iliad was, present warriors as archetypes: the tragic Loser-Hero, the Warrior-Courtier, the Traitor, the Coward, and so on.
Women’s roles in such tales are slight:
• The Tragic Heroine who kills herself at the death of her husband.
• The Loyal Wife who is taken captive.
• The Stalwart Mother who grooms her son to take vengeance for his dead father.
• The Merciful Woman whose “weak, feminine” qualities encourage a warrior chieftain to indulge in unmanly empathy, dissuading him from killing the family of his enemy, who later grow up to kill him.
• The Seductress, who preoccupies the warrior leader, diverting him from his task with her feminine wiles.
Only in passing does one hear about women in the mass: slaughtered, or “given” to the warriors as “spoils of war.” That they were surely raped and often murdered was apparently considered too trivial a fact to even mention in later warrior tales, once the conventions of the genre had been codified.
Still, unless one is willing to imagine a conspiracy of silence in which women’s roles on the battlefield were suppressed in both historical records and battle tales, it is a fair assumption that onna-musha (women warriors) were unusual. This is borne out by the prominence given to the few women about whom accounts are written. Interestingly, in the cases of both of the most famous of these women, the naginata (a halberd associated with women’s martial arts today) was not their weapon of choice.
Japan’s most famous women warriors are Tomoe Gozen and Han-gaku, also called Itagaki. In the Heike Monogatari, Tomoe Gozen was a general in the troops of Kiso Yoshinaka, Yoritomo’s first attack force. She was described as exceptionally strong and hauntingly beautiful, with pale white skin like that of a court lady. Her last act, on the verge of Yoshinaka’s defeat, is the subject of many plays and poems. She was ordered to retreat. Rather than simply leave, however, she instead rode directly into a group of the enemy, singling out the strongest. She matched his horse’s stride, reached over, sliced off his head with her sword, and cast it aside. Tomoe, has not, however, ever been proven as a historical figure, although not for lack of trying. Although Tomoe is claimed by more than a few naginata traditions as being either their founder or one of their primordial teachers, there is no factual justification for such a claim. It is, instead, merely an attempt to associate their tradition with a powerful, romantic figure who lived long before their system was even dreamed of.
Hangaku, daughter of the Jo, a warrior (bushi) family of Echigo province, was known for her strength and accuracy with the bow and arrow. During an uprising of Echigo against the central government, she held off the enemy from the roof of a storehouse. After being wounded in both legs by spears and arrows, she was captured, then released in the custody of a famous warrior. There is an account of her later defending the Toriza-kayama Castle with 3,000 soldiers. The enemy numbered 10,000, and she was defeated and killed.
Thus, at least in the earlier periods of the Heian and Kamakura periods, women who became prominent or even present on the field of battle were exceptional. This does not mean, however, that Japanese women were powerless. There is a common image of Japanese femininity based on the accounts we have of those women of the Imperial court, swaddled in layers of kimono and rigid custom, preoccupied with poetry and moon viewing. Such a picture obscures just who the bushi women were during the ascendancy of their class. They were originally pioneers, helping to settle new lands, and if need be, becoming fighters, like women of the Old West in American mythology. Women at one time or another even may have led some bushi clans. This can be inferred in that women had the legal right to function as jito (stewards), who supervised land held in absentia by nobles or temples.
These women trained with the naginata because, generally speaking, they defended their homes rather than marching off to battle. Therefore, they only needed to become skilled with a few weapons that offered the best range of tactics to defend against marauders attacking on horseback or in small groups with swords.
The Warring States Period
From the tenth until the seventeenth centuries, Japan can never be said to have been at peace. However, from 1467 until 1568, the whole country was swept into chaos, in what became known as the Sengoku jidai, or Warring States period. This was a time in which all social classes were swept up into war, and feudal domains were sometimes stripped of almost all healthy males.
One result of this rampant warfare was that women were often the last defense of towns and castles. Thus there are accounts of wives of warlords, dressed in flamboyant armor, leading bands of women armed with naginata. In an account in the Bichi Hyoranki, for example, the wife of Mimura Kotoku, appalled by the mass suicide of the surviving women and children in her husband’s besieged castle, armed herself and led eighty-three soldiers against the enemy.
It was at this time that the image of women fighters with naginata probably arose. However, as Yazawa Isako, a sixteenth-generation headmistress of the Toda-ha Buko-ryu, wrote in 1916, the main weapon of most women in these horrible times of war was not the naginata, but the dagger (kaiken). Bushi women carried a kaiken with them at all times. Yazawa states that women were not usually expected to fight with their dagger, but rather to kill themselves.
Japanese female suicide (jigai) was as wrapped in custom as the male warrior’s seppuku (cutting the abdomen). In seppuku, a man was required to show his stoicism in the face of unimaginable pain. In jigai, women had a method in which death would occur relatively quickly, and the nature of the wound would not be likely to cause an ugly distortion of the features or disarrangement of the limbs, thus offending the woman’s dignity after death. The dagger was used to cut the jugular vein.
Women did not train in using the kaiken with sophisticated combat techniques. If a woman was forced to fight, she was to grab the hilt with both hands, plant the butt firmly against her stomach, and run forward to stab the enemy with all her weight behind the blade. She was to become, for a moment, a living spear. Thus, she was not supposed to boldly draw her blade and challenge her enemy. Instead she had to find some way to catch him unawares. If she were successful in this, she would most likely be unstoppable. But men knew this, and so a woman could not realistically expect to face a single foe or have the advantage of surprise. Furthermore, if she were captured alive, even after killing several enemies, she would be raped, displayed as a captive, or otherwise dishonored. In the rigid beliefs of this period, this caused shame to attach to the family name. In these grim times, the only escape from what was believed to be disgrace was death at one’s own hands.
The Edo Period: An Enforced Peace
In the mid-seventeenth century, when Japan finally arrived at an enforced peace under the authoritarian rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, the need for skill at arms decreased. The turbulent energies of the warrior class were bound up in an intricate code of conduct, based on laws governing behavior appropriate to each level of society. The rough codes of warriors were organized into the doctrines (for there was not simply one) of bushido (the way of the warrior). Self-sacrifice, honor, and loyalty became fixed ideals, focusing the warrior class on a new role as governing bureaucrats and police agents of a society at enforced, totalitarian peace. The role of the warrior was mythologized, and certain images were held up as ideals for all to emulate.
During the Edo period (1603-1867), all women, not only those of the samurai class, became increasingly restricted. In this world, everyone had to fill an immutable role in society, fixed at birth and held until death. The rules and social conventions governing conduct between men and women, formerly more egalitarian, became more rigid than at any other period of Japanese history, and a woman’s relationship toward her husband was said to mirror that of a samurai toward his lord. The bushi woman was expected to center her life on her home, serving her family in the person of her husband first, his male sons second, and her mother-in-law third. Studies and strong physical activity were considered unseemly.
Work was almost completely gender divided, and men and women became increasingly separate from one another. There was usually a room in each house reserved for men that women were forbidden to enter, even to clean or serve food. Husbands and wives did not customarily even sleep together. The husband would visit his wife to initiate any sexual activity and afterwards would retire to his own room.
In such a society, stories of women warriors defending their homes and their families were a means toward an end. Women trained with the naginata less for the purpose of combat than to instill in them the idealized virtues necessary to be a samurai wife. Women’s work was unremitting in serving the males of the household and in trying to teach proper behavior to their children, who were legally considered to be the husband’s alone. However, unlike the women of Victorian England, who were expected to be subservient and frail, the bushi women were expected to be subservient and strong. Their duty was to endure.
When a bushi woman married, one of the possessions she took to her husband’s home was a naginata. Like the daisho (long and short swords) that her husband bore, the naginata was considered an emblem of her role in society. Practice with the naginata was a means of merging with a spirit of self-sacrifice, of connecting with the hallowed ideals of the warrior class. As men were expected to sacrifice themselves for the state and the maintenance of society, women were expected to sacrifice themselves to a rigid, limited life in the home.
Meanwhile, in rural villages, women sometimes used naginata to maintain order. An elderly woman, for example, recalled that when she was a small girl in a village in Kyushu, the southernmost major island of Japan, men were often gone from the village to work on labor crews. When there was a disturbance at night or a suspicious character entered the village, the women would grab their naginata hanging ready on one of the walls of the house and go running outside to search the town for any danger. The woman’s grandmother was the leader of this “emergency response squad,” and this squad was a naturally autonomous group within the village. Protecting the neighborhood was simply assumed to be a woman’s job.
Tendo-Ryu: One Foot on the Battlefield, One in the Modern World
Perhaps the best way to understand the role of martial training within Edo-period society and in subsequent periods of Japanese history is to examine the historical records and practices associated with some of the traditional ryu. (The author employs the term ryu in order to avoid the connotation of faction within a style that may be carried by the term ryuha.) Tendo-ryu naginata-jutsu, in particular, embodies many of the most significant changes in martial training from the late sixteenth century to the present, including
• A transition from a warrior’s art (Ten-ryu), incorporating many weapons, to a martial tradition with a decided emphasis on a single one
• An increasing emphasis on the naginata as a weapon associated with women
• A transition from combative training to a training of will and spirit
A late-nineteenth-century depiction of the match at the dojo of Chila Skusaku between Naginata & Shinai.
• The use of martial arts in mass education
• The development of sportive forms of martial training
Therefore it is a worthy exemplar.
First developed for warriors during the 1560s, Tendo-ryu had a rather violent history, and many of its early members were involved in duels. Significant changes occurred during the late 1800s, however, under the tenure of Mitamura Kengyo, headmaster of one line of Tendo-ryu. Chief among them was that Mitamura singled out the naginata for the purpose of training women and girls.
The motivation was the desire to combat the steady influx of Western influence, and in 1895 Mitamura joined the newly formed Dainippon Bu-tokukai, a Kyoto-based martial arts regulating body. After he displayed his methods for group instruction in 1899, a women’s school in Kyoto contracted with him to teach naginata on a regular basis, and subsequently the Tendo-ryu came to be known as specializing in the study of the naginata. Women took prominence as teachers (most notably, Mitamura’s brilliant wife, Mitamura Chiyo), and over time the practice weapon was made lighter.
Tendo-ryu kata instill a sense of fighting awareness; Mitamura Takeko, the granddaughter of Mitamura Kengyo, calls this the “cut and thrust spirit.” She believes that practicing in this way can help one to reach deep inside oneself: “I don’t just practice the naginata, it is a part of me.” She states that even though a student practices killing, “the gentleness and softness inherent in a woman is not lost. In fact, the training is aimed at focusing those traits into a strength which can be used for fostering and protecting as well as taking life” (personal communication 1982).
Unlike some schools that claim to have remained largely unchanged since their inception, it is likely that Tendo-ryu is far different from the original Ten-ryu practiced by the wild founder Saito Denkibo Katsuhide. Nonetheless, perhaps the best of his spirit still resides in the hands and hearts of the women of Tendo-ryu, a courage and integrity in movement anyone would do well to emulate.
Jikishin Kage-ryu Naginata-do and the Development of Meiji Budo
During the 1860s, Satake Yoshinori, a student of the Jikishin and Yanagi Kage-ryu, developed a new naginata school with his wife, Satake Shigeo, who had studied martial arts since she was 6 years old and was famous for her strength with the naginata. Between them, these two developed the forms of the present-day Jikishin Kage-ryu Naginata-do. An innovative work, Jikishin Kage-ryu Naginata-do bears no discernible relation to Ippu-sai’s kenjutsu system, which tradition says preceded it. Furthermore, the addition of the suffix -do (way) indicates that the founders saw their school as a budo, a means of martial practice meant for the purpose of self-perfection rather than self-preservation.
During the 1920s, the succeeding chief instructor, Sonobe Hideo, introduced Jikishin Kage-ryu into girls’ schools. (Until the American reforms of the late 1940s, Japanese schools were rarely coeducational.) Sonobe taught at major schools in the Kyoto area, and was one of the first teachers to popularize mass training. “There is no fear on the part of the woman who is well trained [in wielding naginata],” Sonobe told the Japan Times in July 1925. “She is strong and confident. Her body is in perfect condition, muscles hard, body constantly alert, eyes and mind keenly following the movements of the blade.”
Since World War II, the Jikishin Kage-ryu has continued to grow and has the most students of any of the traditional schools of naginata. The present head teacher is Toya Akiko.
The forms of Jikishin Kage-ryu are done in straight lines in a highly defined rhythm. The kiai (vocal expressions of spirit) are traded back and forth, in almost a call-and-response, adding to a sense of dancelike structure. The forms project a sense of crisp elegance, but the emphasis appears to be on correct performance rather than development of martial skills: Perfection of the form as it is given rather than an ability to improvise freely is the aim of the school.
Despite this seemingly noncombative orientation, Jikishin Kage-ryu first made its name in matches against kendo practitioners. Both Satake Shigeo and Sonobe Hideo became famous through their many victories in such contests. Although Jikishin Kage-ryu no longer emphasizes competition against kendo practitioners, matches still do occur, and many members happily participate in competitions in the modern sports-oriented atarashii naginata (see below). Thus, perpetuating the tradition is clearly a valued part of its practitioners’ lives. Overall, the Jikishin Kage-ryu has been more successful than any other system in appealing to a large population of Japanese women. In its forms and practice, they find a kind of semimartial training that encourages and strengthens their will and sense of a strong, graceful femininity.
Modern Competitive Martial Sports
During the 1870s, the Japanese began thinking of themselves in terms of a national identity. Before this time, one’s feudal domain was, in many senses, one’s country. Toward this end, the central government began to manipulate the doctrines of bushido to make them apply to the entire populace rather than just the warrior class. Through this, the government encouraged the development of a militant and obedient society.
Language, religion, and especially education were brought under the control of the government, and the newly created public school system became a great propaganda machine. As in all societies, the school system’s purposes were manifold, but in imperial Japan, the primary emphasis was on submission to the emperor and the needs of the state. Education was seen as a means of gaining skills and knowledge for the good of the country. Students were taught that cooperation, standardization, and the denial of personal desires were the most productive ways of serving the nation.
After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, martial arts were made a regular part of the school curriculum. The classical disciplines, however, were not considered completely suitable for the training of the mass population. The older martial traditions encouraged a feudalistic loyalty to themselves and their teachings, and in addition, often focused on somewhat mystical values not directly concerned with the assumed needs of imperial Japan.
So in 1911, judo and kendo, both Meiji creations, were introduced into boys’ schools. As early as 1913, there was a judo class at Seijyo Girls’ High School in Tokyo, but the idea of women’s wrestling did not prove very popular, for as late as 1936 there were only a few dozen dan-graded female judoka in Japan.
However, working-class women were not necessarily bound by convention, and during the early Meiji period, a time when many people lost their means of livelihood, there arose a phenomenon known as gekken ko-gyo (sword shows). In these, former samurai, down on their luck, joined forces to create what amounted to circuses in which they gave demonstrations and took challenges from the audiences. Mounting the stage, fighters would challenge all comers from the audience, using wooden or bamboo swords, naginata, spear, chain-and-sickle, or any other weapon selected by the challenger. These fights were very popular and well written up in the newspapers. And, even though the fighters probably tried to exert some control, there were many injuries.
In addition to challenge matches, members of the troupe would engage each other in contests, pitting women armed with wooden naginata against men armed with wooden or bamboo swords. One of the most remarkable of these female fighters was Murakami Hideo, who became a seventeenth-generation headmistress of the Toda-ha Buko-ryu. Murakami’s life story cries for a novel. Born in Shikoku in 1863, she studied Shizuka-ryu Naginata-jutsu as a girl. When her teacher died, she left home while still teenaged to study other systems. Then this staunch, tiny woman continued her wanderings in Honshu, traveling alone, testing her skill against other fighters, studying as she went. Imagine, if you will, a young woman, little more than a girl, marching through the Japanese countryside alone, without employment, walking from one dojo to another.
Murakami reached Tokyo while in her early twenties and became a student of Komatsuzaki Kotoko, and possibly Yazawa Isako, the fifteenth-and sixteenth-generation teachers of the Toda Ha Buko-ryu. By now she was very strong, and so she was awarded the highest license (menkyo kaiden) in the school while still in her twenties.
Unable to read or write, Murakami was unable to make much of a living, so she joined the gekken kogyo. Fighting with a chain-and-sickle or naginata, she took all challenges from the audiences. There are no reports of her ever losing. In her later years, she was able to make ends meet as a teacher—her dojo in the Kanda area of Tokyo was called the Shusuikan (Hall of the Autumn Water)—but she was always poor. According to those who knew her in her old age, she was a tiny, kind, but wary woman, always ready to invite one to supper. She could drink anyone under the table. As far as is known, she lived alone and she died alone.
As these matches were for the paid entertainment of the audience, they soon degenerated to what must be considered the pro wrestling of the Meiji period (1867-1910), with waitresses serving drinks in abbreviated kimono and drunken patrons cheering in the stands. Matches became dramatic exhibitions, vulgar parodies of the austere warrior culture from which they had emerged. Discouraged at times by the police, who regarded them as a threat to public order, the gekken kogyo were disbanded by the 1920s. Nonetheless, they can be regarded as the first precursors of modern martial sport in Japan—competition for the sake of comparing skills and entertaining an audience.
Women’s Martial Art Training, 1920-1945
As martial arts continued to be integrated into public education, the practice of naginata came to a crossroads. Judo, kendo, and later karate were designed to be practiced in standardized formats. While this had not happened to naginata practice yet, it did as it began to be featured in public schools, since when taught en masse to groups of young people, even the most conservative traditions must change. Pre-World War II photographs show lines of children diligently swinging weapons in unison, while other pictures show young children phlegmatically plodding their way through kata. Form practice means something very different to warriors trying to get an edge in upcoming battles and to teenagers attending gym class at the local high school. So, to make the training relevant to young people, competitive practice became more and more popular.
A sparring match between Murakami Hideo and Kobayashi Seiko of the Toda-ha Buko ryu.
Competition led to modifications in equipment. The light wooden naginata covered with leather was used first; later, for safety’s sake, bamboo strips were attached to the end of a wooden shaft, in imitation of kendo shinai. This weapon replica is light and whippy, allowing movements impossible with a real naginata. As rules developed and point targets were agreed upon, the techniques useful for victory in competition began to differ from those used by the old ryu, each of which had been developed for different terrain, varied combative situations, and a welter of sociopolitical objectives. Naginata practice began to develop into something new— a competitive sport.
Not all teachers were opposed to this universalistic trend, given its congruence to the strong centralization of state power at this time. During World War II, some naginata teachers, notably Sakakida Yaeko, in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, created the Mombusho Seitei kata (standard forms of the Ministry of Education). Sakakida had been (and remains) a student of Tendo-ryu and was an avid participant in matches pitting naginata against kendo. She states that she found that the different styles of the old ryu were not suitable to teach to large groups of schoolgirls on an intermittent basis. Given the conditions in which she had to teach, she felt that it was too difficult for the girls to learn the sword side of the kata, so she began to emphasize solo practice with the naginata. In addition, she was concerned that they might study one style in primary school and another in secondary school, thus being required to relearn everything each time they switched schools.
As a result of these difficulties, she and several associates created totally new kata that focused on naginata versus naginata. The Mombusho forms, made for the express purpose of training schoolgirls and adopted for use in 1943, were the result. Something, however, seemed to be lost in the process. Geared for children rather than warriors, these forms are, as a result, simplistic and somewhat lacking in character. The singularity that made the old ryu strong was sacrificed in favor of a generic mean.
Teachers and students of the classical ryu received basic but scanty instruction in the new kata and were assigned “territories” made up of several grammar schools. As part of their preparation, the teachers were instructed in how to give pep talks to the girls. These talks included warnings about the barbarism of invading armies and the need for girls to protect themselves and their families. Yet the protection was not intended for the sake of the integrity of the girls themselves, but for the sake of being “mirrors of the Emperor’s virtue.”
Nitta Suzuyo, nineteenth-generation lineal successor to the Toda ha Buko-ryu, subsequently recalled teaching these forms to girls aged 12 to 17 years. She stated that, although still a young woman herself, she was dispatched to teach because her teacher, Kobayashi Seiko, had no desire to teach the Mombusho kata, preferring to continue to teach her traditional ryu in private. As part of the training for teachers, Nitta was told that the most important thing was to boost the girls’ morale and strengthen their spirit in case of an enemy landing. Nitta said that the girls professed to enjoy the training, which was done in place of “enemy sports” such as baseball or volleyball.
Training after World War II
In 1945 the war ended for Japan. The occupation forces were fearful of anything that seemed to be connected to Japan’s warlike spirit, and the Americans severely restricted martial studies. Thousands of swords were piled on runways, run over with steamrollers, and then buried under concrete construction projects. Donn Draeger, noted martial arts practitioner and scholar, recalled the sight of those swords, flashing in the sun in shards of gold and silver, crackling and ringing under the roar and stink of the steamrollers.
After a few years, however, these bans were lifted, and the first All Japan Kendo Renmei (federation) Tournament was held in 1953. At a meeting held afterwards, Sakakida and several of the leading naginata instructors of Tendo-ryu and Jikishin Kage-ryu made plans for the institution of a similar All Japan Naginata Do Renmei. It was decided to adopt the Educational Ministry kata as the standard form of the federation, with only a few minor changes. They also decided to eliminate the writing of naginata in the traditional characters, which had meant “long blade” or “mowing blade,” and, to indicate their break with the past, they used the syllabary, whose characters only have sound values. This martial sport has come to be called atarashii naginata (new naginata).
This change in the way of writing naginata may seem to be a trivial one, but it is not. The change in how naginata is written states decisively to practitioners that atarashii naginata is no longer a martial art, using a weapon either to train combat skills or to demand, through its paradoxical claim as a “tool for enlightenment,” a focused and integrated spirit. Instead, they have created a sports form, martial in both appearance and “sound,” but not in “character.”
Atarashii naginata is composed of two elements: kata and shiai. According to some of their leading instructors, particularly those of this generation, the kata were created by taking “the best techniques from many naginata ryuha.” This is propaganda at best, absurd at worst: The forms of the various ryu are not mere catalogues of separate techniques, to be selected like bonbons in a corner candy store, but interrelated wholes, permeated with a sophisticated cultivation of movement and designed for combative effectiveness and spiritual training. Sakakida herself only states that she observed the old ryu and tried to absorb their essence. Then, forgetting their movements entirely, she devised the new kata.
Atarashii naginata contests are an imitation of kendo competition. The matches between heavily armored opponents scoring points only at specified targets often resemble a game of tag, and the practitioners rarely utilize kata movements. Thus kata are no longer relevant to combat. So, by removing the considerations of one’s own death (and one’s responsibility for another’s fate), atarashii naginata may have removed the major impetus for the development of an ethical stance toward the world. All that may remain for many trainees is a sport, with the emphasis on winning or losing a match.
Be that as it may, many naginata teachers have entered the modern association and have attempted to teach both their old tradition and atarashii naginata. However, only a few of their students are willing to practice the old kata. This has resulted in the abandonment and demise of most of the old martial traditions; often the only reason young people practice the old school at all is “just so it won’t be forgotten.”
It must be noted, however, that the demise of the old traditions is the responsibility of practitioners themselves, as they either could not find a way to make their art relevant to the younger generation or have no idea themselves of the value of the tradition passed on to them. But there is hope. In the words of one outspoken teacher, Abe Toyoko:
I see lots of people today, jumping from one new thing to another, not getting settled. I really think people need something in the foundation, some deeply rooted place in their lives. I see this even in the judging of naginata matches. It used to be so different, this judging. There were only two per match, and they were deliberate and subtle, not jumpy and conforming like the ones today. Even their movements had more meaning. The judges used to have individual styles, their own way of signaling points. Now everyone has to do it the same way. You won’t believe this. They stopped a match once, one I was judging, and asked over the loudspeaker if I would raise my arm a few more degrees when signaling. Do you believe it? And just a couple of years ago, I was judging with another teacher. One of the competitors moved, just moved a little, and the other judge signaled a point. I asked the two women in the match if a point had been made and they both said no. But because the judge had ruled for it, it was declared valid! I haven’t judged since. I don’t want to be a part of teaching people how to win cheaply or lose unfairly. (personal communication 1982)
