Role of women as rulers and fighters in ancient Japan. The great Japanese epic, Heike Mono-gatari (Tale of the Heike), celebrates many women warriors. The naginata, a heavy blade on the end of a staff, was their favored weapon. If the naginata were to fail, female samurai carried a kai-ken (a long dagger) for last-ditch defense or, if capture seemed inevitable, for ritual suicide.
According to Japanese tradition, in the fourth century A.D., Empress Jingo-Kogo, although pregnant, led her forces in a victorious campaign against Korea. The medieval warrior Lady Yatsushiro also reputedly went into battle while pregnant, mounted on horseback and accompanied by her attack-wolf, Nokaze. The most renowned female warrior of medieval Japan, however, was Tomoe Gozen. Among her legendary exploits was the presentation of the head of the shogun Uchida Iyeyoshi to her husband, Miyamoto Musashi. Gozen decapitated Iyeyoshi in hand-to-hand combat. She also single-handedly defended a bridge against a multitude of attackers using only her naginata. Other legends assert that after the defeat of her husband, Gozen fled with his severed head and cast herself into the sea in order to prevent her husband from being dishonored, to avoid the dishonor of possible capture, and to die with him.
Among the many women warriors recorded in Japanese history are: Masaki Hojo (115 7— 1225), the widow of the first Minamoto shogun; Koman, a late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century warrior; Fujinoye, who defended Takadachi Castle in 1189 by blocking the stairs with her naginata; and Hangaku, the daughter of a samurai, who rained down deadly arrows on the attackers of Echigo Castle in 1201. Dressed in men’s clothing, Hangaku mounted the tower of the castle and "all those who came to attack her were shot down by her arrows which pierced them either in their chests or their heads. Their horses were killed and their shields were broken into pieces from their arms." An archer finally avoided her by circling to the rear of the castle and, undetected by Hangaku, was able to wound her with an arrow. The shogun Yoriye described her while in captivity as "fearless as a man and beautiful as a flower" (Beard 1953, 72-73).
Inazo Nitobe, a nineteenth-century commentator on the samurai Bushido, wrote, Young girls . . . were trained to repress their feelings, to indurate their nerves, to manipulate weapons—especially the long-handled sword called nagi-nata, so as to be able to hold their own against unexpected odds. . . . [A] woman owning no suzerain of her own, formed her own body-guard. With her weapon she guarded her personal sanctity. . . . Girls, when they reached womanhood, were presented with dirks (kai-ken, pocket poniards), which might be directed to the bosom of their assailants, or, if advisable, to their own. . . . Her own weapon lay always in her bosom. It was a disgrace to her not to know the proper way in which she had to perpetrate self-destruction. (Nitobe 1979, 89-90)
Nitobe, however, cautioned that "masculinity" was not the Bushido ideal for women. He saw no contradiction between being a warrior and being feminine. He asserted that central to the code was self-sacrificing service and that for women this was primarily to home and family. For a woman, he wrote, "the domestic utility of her warlike training was in the education of her sons" (Nitobe 1979, 89-90).
