The Onna-bugeisha. Or, Why Every Samurai Castle Needed Armed Women
The knowledge that since the ancient times it was the men who were engaged in war is so common that it has become somewhat of a cliché. The vision of heavily armed men has become so heavily associated with the art of war that, despite the many evidence throughout history of many female fighters, strategists and leaders, the association between women and war are still mostly seen as somewhat of a novelty even to this day. Many stories of ancient female warriors are relegated to legends and folklores with minimal historical accounts attached to their lives, which leads to doubts on whether these women actually existed. The lives and exploits of notable warrior women in history such as Artemisia I of Caria, Boudicca, or Joan of Arc are mostly considered examples of exceptional personal valor instead of reflections of the societies in which they lived.
However, a research into onna bugeisha (“women who practiced the art of war”) in Japan tells us that the culture of female warriors were, in fact, a more common occurrence than we know. The employment of women in warfare is generally caused by a society’s acknowledgement of women’s combat potential and willingness to utilize them in war. For this, that society needs to recognize the presence of a combat role that can be effectively filled by the women. Another factor is the appearance of circumstances which require complete mobilization of all members of a community – men and women. Onna bugeisha were women who were trained and fought as recognized combat components in their society rather than exceptions to their contemporary military arrangement.
Understanding Onna Bugeisha: The Real Women behind the War Chronicles
However, one cannot readily be informed of all this by relying on ancient chronicles alone. Chronicles of the ancient wars in Japan, much like those of ancient Greece and Rome, present many different kinds of male warriors such as the tragic hero, the warrior-courtier, the traitor, the coward and many others. On the other hand, women’s roles in these tales are slight and set far from the battlefields. There is the tragic heroine, or the loyal wife, who kills herself at the death of her husband or lover, the grieving mother who grooms her son to avenge his father’s death, the merciful woman who encourages a warrior chieftain to empathize, against his better judgment, and dissuade him from slaughtering his enemy’s children who later grow up to kill him, and the seductress who diverts the warrior from his task with her feminine wiles – all intriguing roles, of course, but they are stereotypes which realistically would apply to only very few women.
Then there are the “ordinary women” who are either slaughtered or taken by the warriors as spoils of war. The fates of these women were rarely, if ever, mentioned. The likelihood of these women being raped and murdered were considered such a matter of course that frequent references to them would only disturb the flow of the story. However, long before the existence of the established samurai class, Japanese history was dominated by women trained in martial arts and highly educated in science, mathematics, and literature.
The rare female warriors were depicted as superheroines. The life of Empress Jingu (c. 169-269 CE), as with many ancient female warriors, was shrouded in mystery. According to legends, aided by a pair of divine jewels which allowed her to control the tides, Empress Jingu led a successful invasion to Korea without shedding a single drop of blood from the Korean or the Japanese. However, the belief that Korea was invaded during this time is widely rejected historically as the historical evidence of Japanese rule in Korea during this time are somewhat debatable. Her legend became more incredible as her son Ojin was born upon her return to Japan in 203 CE. Ojin remained in the Empress’ womb for three years as he was conceived before she went to battle and was born upon her return. Legend has it that Ojin was actually Hachiman, the god of war, and he remained in her womb for three years to give her the time she needed to conquer Korea.
The descriptions of Tomoe Gozen are also unbelievable. Not only was she described as a woman of great beauty, intellect and battle skills, Tomoe Gozen was also a perfect archer, brilliant horse rider, an expert of the sword and a very competent politician – in short, a perfect war machine with the face of an angel. Nevertheless, she proved herself in combat as, leading only 300 samurais, she fought more than 2000 warriors and survived.
Tomoe Gozen is noted as one of Japan’s rare woman warriors who engaged in offensive battles. However, again, this is not completely true as Empress Jingu was also engaged in offensive battles. There was, in fact, a whole class of women who were engaged in offensive battles – they are known as onna musha (“women warrior”). The excavation of three battlefield head-mounds from the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru between Takeda Katsuyori and Hojo Ujinao in 1580 CE and DNA tests on 105 bodies revealed that 35 of the warriors were female. Two subsequent excavations elsewhere produced similar results. As none of these findings was a siege situation, this leads to the conclusion that women fought in offensive armies even though their involvement was seldom recorded.
The word bugeisha can also give us a clue to the lives of these women. The word geisha isn’t a gendered term as it merely refers to “one who practices the arts,” where art is defined as aesthetic forms. There are also some references in the Heike Monogatari to men being called bugeisha instead of bushi or budoka (“one who practices the way of war”). The word bugeisha literally means “one who practices the art of war.” Art, in this case, refers to an aesthetic perfection through martial practices, treating the martial arts as an art form on par with poetry and dance – making it an art to be learned by those who occupy a certain class in society. Therefore, the full context of the word “bugeisha” are those individuals who have incorporated a high degree of self expression into the martial practice regardless of whether or not they were employed as a professional warriors. Although some women adopted male dress and hairstyles, wore two swords, and served full-time in the army of the daimyo (feudal lord) to whom they pledged their service as onna musha, most onna bugeisha wear women’s clothes and lived as ordinary women except when danger required them to take up arms to defend their homes.
The Ladies’ Art of War: Weaponry and Skills
In Japan, women of the samurai class were trained to use the sword, the naginata (a pole arm with a curved blade on one end), and the bow and arrow since their childhoods. Due to its length, naginata became very popular as it useful to keep attackers at bay and counter attackers riding on horseback at top speed at some distance which allowed them to make up for any lack of strength. A well trained naginata wielder would be difficult to overpower as the male attacker would find hand to hand or close quarters combat against them to be difficult. Another popular weapon was the kaiken dagger – a double-edged blade with a length of up to 10 inches which an onna bugeisha had to have on her person at all times. They were also equipped with the knowledge of tantojutsu, a fighting system in which they were trained from an early age.
In 1467, Japan was swept into chaos in what became known as the Sengoku Jidai (Warring States Period, which lasted to c. 1568). It was a time in which all social classes were swept up into war and feudal domains were sometimes stripped of almost all healthy men were drafted into armies or slaughtered in battle. As a result of this rampant warfare, women were often the last defense of towns and castles. This period gave accounts of the wives of warlords, dressed in armors, leading bands of women armed with naginata. In an account in the Bichi Hyoranki, 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, “whirling her naginata like a waterwheel.” She challenged a mounted general Ura Hyobu, who edged backwards muttering, “She is a demon!”
The use of kaiken also featured prominently during this period. In 1916, Yazawa Isao wrote that, in moments of desperation, a woman was to grab the hilt of the kaiken with both hands, plant the butt firmly against her stomach, and run forward to stab the enemy with all her weight behind the blade – becoming, for a moment, a living spear. However, realistically one could not always expect to face a single foe nor have the advantage of surprise in a combat situation. If she were captured alive, even after killing several enemies, she would be raped, displayed as a captive, or otherwise dishonored, thereby allowing shame to attach to her name. The only escape from what was believed to be disgrace was death at one’s own hands. For a woman, this is known as jigai, the female equivalent of the more famous practice of seppuku. While in seppuku a man was required to show his stoicism in the face of pain by disemboweling himself, in jigai death would occur quickly as the dagger would be used to cut the jugular vein. The practice also had the added aesthetic advantage as the nature of the wound would not cause an ugly distortion of the woman’s features or disarrangement of the limbs that would offend the woman’s dignity after death.
In the mid-seventeenth century, when Japan finally arrived at an enforced peace under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, the rules and social conventions governing conduct between men and women became more rigid than in any other period of Japanese history. A woman’s relationship towards her husband came to mirror that of a samurai towards his lord. Studies and strong physical activity were considered unseemly for women. The stories of women warriors defending their homes and their families became means to define a woman’s role in society – to defend her family as her husband defends his lord. The women still trained with the naginata. However, this was less to prepare for combat than to instill them with the idealized virtues necessary to be a samurai wife. A women’s work became solely a service to the males of the household and effort to teach proper behavior to her children, who were legally considered to be her husband’s alone. However, unlike the upper-class women of Victorian England, who were expected to be subservient and frail, the Japanese women were expected to be subservient and strong as their duty was to endure.
Women, War and Ancient Societies
The onna bugeisha of Japan were only one of the latest in a long history of society-sanctioned female warriors. In Histories, Herodotus describes steppe nomads named the Sauromatae, descendants of the Scythians, whose women hunted and fought alongside the men on horseback. This description is confirmed by archeological evidences of female warriors in Scythian cultures. Excavations of 44 Sauromatian and Sarmatian kurgan burial mounds along the Khazakstan-Russia border in the 1990s discovered several skeletons of women buried with daggers and bronze tipped arrows.
As many other female skeletons unearthed at the same site were buried only with more typically feminine goods like beads and earrings, this is significant as these excavations revealed the martial aspect of at least some of the Scythian women. Such women of nomadic steppe cultures appear to have been trained in warfare from childhood and would have been proficient in the Scythian practice of mounted archery. In times of war, these women would have ridden alongside the men into battle, shooting at their foes from horseback and occasionally being shot themselves. The wounds found on a few of the excavated female skeletons confirmed this.
Accounts of the nomadic Cimbri tribe on the European continent by their Roman adversaries provide insight into their martial culture. Plutarch’s record of the life of Roman general Caius Marius during the invasion of the Germanic Cimbri, Teuton, and Ambrone tribes in 103 CE sheds some light on the roles of the Germanic women in combat. Plutarch recorded that Cimbri women accompanied their husbands to the Battle of Vercellae, apparently well trained enough in combat to guard the Cimbri baggages and entrenchments as their men marched onto the field to meet Marius’ army. Upon witnessing the defeat of the Cimbri by the Romans, the women shocked the pursuing Romans by slaying both their fleeing husbands and themselves rather than enduring capture.
This culture persisted until the 1400s and early 1500s in the Carribean. According to Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus the explorer, during his second voyage to the Antilles, Columbus found that in the absence of men highly skilled women defended the tribal villages of the Carib Amerindians with bows and arrows.
