Ah, for some bold warrior to match with, that Kiso might see how fine a death I can die!”
Tomoe Gozen was the prototypical Japanese female warrior.
She had “long black hair and a fair complexion, and her face was very lovely; moreover she was a fearless rider, whom neither the fiercest horse nor the roughest ground could dismay, and so dexterously did she handle sword and bow that she was a match for 1,000 warriors, fit to meet either god or devil.”
A woman so dashing deserves to be better known. She figures, all too fleetingly, in the “Heike Monogatari,” the 13th-century chronicle of the 12th-century Genpei War, the classic confrontation between the Taira and Minamoto military clans.
Minamoto won, which resulted in a power shift from Kyoto, the ancient capital, to the remote eastern encampment of Kamakura.
Tomoe Gozen was — what? the mistress? wife? servant? the extant descriptions vary — of a Minamoto ally whose insubordination got him eliminated fairly early in the campaign. This was Minamoto Kiso Yoshinaka, who, surrounded and facing certain death, called Tomoe to him and said: “As you are a woman, it were better that you now make your escape.”
“As you are a woman!” He scarcely knew her, obviously. But then, Japan has always scanted its female warriors. They seem at times almost an embarrassment, their very existence a blow to masculine pride. Bushido, the “Way of the Warrior,” is “a teaching primarily for the masculine sex,” wrote Inazo Nitobe in his book “Bushido” (1900), the classic English-language text on the subject.
But to return to Tomoe, bristling at Kiso’s blindness to her finer qualities, “She drew aside her horse, and waited,” continues the “Heike Monogatari.”
“Presently, Onda no Hachiro Moroshige of Musashi, a strong and valiant samurai, came riding up with 30 followers, and Tomoe, immediately dashing into them, flung herself upon Onda and, grappling with him, dragged him from his horse, pressed him calmly against the pommel of her saddle and cut off his head. Then, stripping off her armor, she fled away to the Eastern Provinces.”
Nitobe’s is the general view, but is it true? An old samurai tale, told by the novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-93) in “Tales of Samurai Honor” is apropos.
Samurai boy and samurai girl hear of each other and, sight unseen, fall in love. The parents’ objections are overcome; they marry.
When their lord falls ill and dies, the young husband is bent on seppuku (ritual suicide) to prove his limitless loyalty.
“Well, die bravely,” says his wife. “I am a woman, and therefore weak and inconstant. After you’re gone I’ll look for another husband.”
Embittered by this unexpected proof of worldly vanity, the husband is all the more determined to die. He commits glorious seppuku — and his wife follows him in death, having written: “At our final parting I spoke coldly, faithlessly, in order to anger my husband so he could die without regret at leaving me.”
The moral of the story? Japanese men never knew their women.
The truth is, or seems to be, that women were every bit as imbued with the spirit of Bushido as men, though they got little recognition for it. All Japanese women were warriors.
What was a Japanese warrior?
“The idea most vital and essential to the samurai,” wrote the 17th-century warrior Daidoji Yusan in “A Primer of Bushido,” “is that of death.” A warrior lived as though dead, because any minute he (or she) might be, by his (or her) own hand if not by an enemy’s. “Think what a frail thing life is,” said Yusan, “especially that of a samurai. This being so, you will come to consider every day of your life your last.”
To that add one more concept, unconditional loyalty, and the ideology of Bushido is basically exhausted.
“Woman’s surrender of herself to the good of her husband, home and family,” wrote Nitobe, “was as willing and honorable as the man’s self-surrender to the good of his lord and country. Self-renunciation … was the keynote of the loyalty of man as well as of the domesticity of woman … In the ascending scale of service stood woman, who annihilated herself for man, that he might annihilate himself for the master, that he in turn might obey Heaven.”
“The good of his lord and country,” said Nitobe, but in fact until modern times the concept of “country” was abstract to the point of nonexistence. Loyalty was purely personal. As for annihilation, there was that in profusion, notwithstanding the archipelago’s security from hostile neighbors. Slaughter and self-slaughter mar the history of Japan — or brighten it, if you share the eerily necrophilic bushi ethic — from the Genpei Wars until the early years of the long peace of the Edo Period (1603-1867).
‘The archaeological evidence, meager though it is,” writes historian Stephen Turnbull in “Samurai Women 1184-1877” (2010), “tantalizingly suggests a wider female involvement in battle than is implied by written accounts alone.”
Armor and weapons have been found in the tombs of 4th-century female rulers. Do they support the historicity of the legendary Empress Jingu? They might — or might not; scholars disagree.
The 8th-century “Nihon Shoki” chronicle credits her with invading Korea in the 3rd or 4th century A.D. — though the dating (in fact the event itself) is uncertain. Pregnant but undeterred, she “took a stone,” says the “Nihon Shoki,” “which she inserted in her loins, and prayed, saying, ‘Let my delivery be in this land (Japan) on the day that I return after our enterprise is at an end.'”
And so at the head of her army she made the crossing, watched over by two guardian spirits, a “gentle spirit” and a “rough spirit.” The invasion was successful, and the empress returned to give birth to the future Emperor Ojin, later deified as Hachiman, the Shinto god of war.
The gentle spirit and the rough spirit parted company. The Nara Period ( 710-784) and Heian Period (794-1185) were as uninterruptedly peaceful as history gets. During these centuries in which Japan acquired, assimilated and Japanified Chinese culture, the gentle spirit ruled unchallenged. The Genpei War marked its abdication or overthrow.
Now it was the rough spirit’s turn. “Chaotic spirit” may be a better name. Historians despair of making sense of Japan’s “Middle Ages,” from the late 12th century to the early 17th. Territorial lords led their unconditionally loyal, eagerly self-sacrificing samurai against neighboring territorial lords leading their unconditionally loyal, eagerly self-sacrificing samurai. The outcome in the fullness of time was the unification of Japan under the Tokugawa Shoguns early in the Edo Period — but it took centuries of seemingly endless and purposeless slaughter and suicide.
The climax was the Sengoku Jidai (the “Age of the Country at War”), from the late 15th century to the late 16th. The whole spectacle looks from this distance like nothing so much as the pursuit of death as an ideal superior to life. If this environment bred women whose like it would be hard to find elsewhere, is it surprising?
What the sword was to a man — a weapon embodying his soul — the halberd-like naginata was to a woman. Picture, says Turnbull, “a cross between a sword and a spear with a curved blade rather than a straight one.”
“When a bushi (warrior) woman married,” writes martial-arts historian Ellis Amdur (in “Women Warriors of Japan,” 2002), “one of the possessions that she took to her husband’s home was a naginata. Like the daishō (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 the spirit of self-sacrifice, of connecting with the hallowed ideals of the warrior class.”
“Young girls,” Nitobe adds, “were trained to repress their feelings, to indurate their nerves, to manipulate weapons, especially the naginata” — not, he says, for service on the battlefield, but rather, “With her weapon she guarded her personal sanctity with as much zeal as her husband did his master’s.”
That may be true, but Amdur, citing a 16th-century chronicle, shows us a bushi wife who, “appalled by the mass suicide of the surviving women and children in her husband’s besieged castle” — a scene fairly typical of those years — “armed herself and led 83 soldiers against the enemy, ‘whirling her naginata like a waterwheel.’ “
source:
japantimes
Tomoe Gozen was the prototypical Japanese female warrior.
She had “long black hair and a fair complexion, and her face was very lovely; moreover she was a fearless rider, whom neither the fiercest horse nor the roughest ground could dismay, and so dexterously did she handle sword and bow that she was a match for 1,000 warriors, fit to meet either god or devil.”
A woman so dashing deserves to be better known. She figures, all too fleetingly, in the “Heike Monogatari,” the 13th-century chronicle of the 12th-century Genpei War, the classic confrontation between the Taira and Minamoto military clans.
Minamoto won, which resulted in a power shift from Kyoto, the ancient capital, to the remote eastern encampment of Kamakura.
Tomoe Gozen was — what? the mistress? wife? servant? the extant descriptions vary — of a Minamoto ally whose insubordination got him eliminated fairly early in the campaign. This was Minamoto Kiso Yoshinaka, who, surrounded and facing certain death, called Tomoe to him and said: “As you are a woman, it were better that you now make your escape.”
“As you are a woman!” He scarcely knew her, obviously. But then, Japan has always scanted its female warriors. They seem at times almost an embarrassment, their very existence a blow to masculine pride. Bushido, the “Way of the Warrior,” is “a teaching primarily for the masculine sex,” wrote Inazo Nitobe in his book “Bushido” (1900), the classic English-language text on the subject.
But to return to Tomoe, bristling at Kiso’s blindness to her finer qualities, “She drew aside her horse, and waited,” continues the “Heike Monogatari.”
“Presently, Onda no Hachiro Moroshige of Musashi, a strong and valiant samurai, came riding up with 30 followers, and Tomoe, immediately dashing into them, flung herself upon Onda and, grappling with him, dragged him from his horse, pressed him calmly against the pommel of her saddle and cut off his head. Then, stripping off her armor, she fled away to the Eastern Provinces.”
Nitobe’s is the general view, but is it true? An old samurai tale, told by the novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-93) in “Tales of Samurai Honor” is apropos.
Samurai boy and samurai girl hear of each other and, sight unseen, fall in love. The parents’ objections are overcome; they marry.
When their lord falls ill and dies, the young husband is bent on seppuku (ritual suicide) to prove his limitless loyalty.
“Well, die bravely,” says his wife. “I am a woman, and therefore weak and inconstant. After you’re gone I’ll look for another husband.”
Embittered by this unexpected proof of worldly vanity, the husband is all the more determined to die. He commits glorious seppuku — and his wife follows him in death, having written: “At our final parting I spoke coldly, faithlessly, in order to anger my husband so he could die without regret at leaving me.”
The moral of the story? Japanese men never knew their women.
The truth is, or seems to be, that women were every bit as imbued with the spirit of Bushido as men, though they got little recognition for it. All Japanese women were warriors.
What was a Japanese warrior?
“The idea most vital and essential to the samurai,” wrote the 17th-century warrior Daidoji Yusan in “A Primer of Bushido,” “is that of death.” A warrior lived as though dead, because any minute he (or she) might be, by his (or her) own hand if not by an enemy’s. “Think what a frail thing life is,” said Yusan, “especially that of a samurai. This being so, you will come to consider every day of your life your last.”
To that add one more concept, unconditional loyalty, and the ideology of Bushido is basically exhausted.
“Woman’s surrender of herself to the good of her husband, home and family,” wrote Nitobe, “was as willing and honorable as the man’s self-surrender to the good of his lord and country. Self-renunciation … was the keynote of the loyalty of man as well as of the domesticity of woman … In the ascending scale of service stood woman, who annihilated herself for man, that he might annihilate himself for the master, that he in turn might obey Heaven.”
“The good of his lord and country,” said Nitobe, but in fact until modern times the concept of “country” was abstract to the point of nonexistence. Loyalty was purely personal. As for annihilation, there was that in profusion, notwithstanding the archipelago’s security from hostile neighbors. Slaughter and self-slaughter mar the history of Japan — or brighten it, if you share the eerily necrophilic bushi ethic — from the Genpei Wars until the early years of the long peace of the Edo Period (1603-1867).
‘The archaeological evidence, meager though it is,” writes historian Stephen Turnbull in “Samurai Women 1184-1877” (2010), “tantalizingly suggests a wider female involvement in battle than is implied by written accounts alone.”
Armor and weapons have been found in the tombs of 4th-century female rulers. Do they support the historicity of the legendary Empress Jingu? They might — or might not; scholars disagree.
The 8th-century “Nihon Shoki” chronicle credits her with invading Korea in the 3rd or 4th century A.D. — though the dating (in fact the event itself) is uncertain. Pregnant but undeterred, she “took a stone,” says the “Nihon Shoki,” “which she inserted in her loins, and prayed, saying, ‘Let my delivery be in this land (Japan) on the day that I return after our enterprise is at an end.'”
And so at the head of her army she made the crossing, watched over by two guardian spirits, a “gentle spirit” and a “rough spirit.” The invasion was successful, and the empress returned to give birth to the future Emperor Ojin, later deified as Hachiman, the Shinto god of war.
The gentle spirit and the rough spirit parted company. The Nara Period ( 710-784) and Heian Period (794-1185) were as uninterruptedly peaceful as history gets. During these centuries in which Japan acquired, assimilated and Japanified Chinese culture, the gentle spirit ruled unchallenged. The Genpei War marked its abdication or overthrow.
Now it was the rough spirit’s turn. “Chaotic spirit” may be a better name. Historians despair of making sense of Japan’s “Middle Ages,” from the late 12th century to the early 17th. Territorial lords led their unconditionally loyal, eagerly self-sacrificing samurai against neighboring territorial lords leading their unconditionally loyal, eagerly self-sacrificing samurai. The outcome in the fullness of time was the unification of Japan under the Tokugawa Shoguns early in the Edo Period — but it took centuries of seemingly endless and purposeless slaughter and suicide.
The climax was the Sengoku Jidai (the “Age of the Country at War”), from the late 15th century to the late 16th. The whole spectacle looks from this distance like nothing so much as the pursuit of death as an ideal superior to life. If this environment bred women whose like it would be hard to find elsewhere, is it surprising?
What the sword was to a man — a weapon embodying his soul — the halberd-like naginata was to a woman. Picture, says Turnbull, “a cross between a sword and a spear with a curved blade rather than a straight one.”
“When a bushi (warrior) woman married,” writes martial-arts historian Ellis Amdur (in “Women Warriors of Japan,” 2002), “one of the possessions that she took to her husband’s home was a naginata. Like the daishō (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 the spirit of self-sacrifice, of connecting with the hallowed ideals of the warrior class.”
“Young girls,” Nitobe adds, “were trained to repress their feelings, to indurate their nerves, to manipulate weapons, especially the naginata” — not, he says, for service on the battlefield, but rather, “With her weapon she guarded her personal sanctity with as much zeal as her husband did his master’s.”
That may be true, but Amdur, citing a 16th-century chronicle, shows us a bushi wife who, “appalled by the mass suicide of the surviving women and children in her husband’s besieged castle” — a scene fairly typical of those years — “armed herself and led 83 soldiers against the enemy, ‘whirling her naginata like a waterwheel.’ “
source:
japantimes
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