Japanese history has a remarkable record of women who excelled in the martial arts, despite the overall legacy of Medieval patriarchy that co-existed for so long. Many stories of female generals and warriors only appear briefly in the historical sources, and cloud the details of such women’s lives. And this is one of the reasons that Nakano Takeko’s life is so fascinating: we have multiple sources attesting to her short but bravely lived career as a warrior.
Nakano Takeko, whom you see pictured here, (1847-1868) was a child of a government officials and granddaughter of a samurai. Before she was ten years old, her family had arranged for her education — it included Chinese Confucian classics, calligraphy, literature, and a rigorous martial arts training. Nakano excelled in particular in the weapon known as a “naginata,” a type of polearm with a lethal blade at the end, favored by monks and other Japanese women fighters.
In Nakano’s time, Japan was divided into civil war between the old samurai classes who favored tradition and the Meji emperor who favored a pro-Western and modernized government. Nakano belonged to the former group. She had excelled so much in the art of weaponry that she gave instruction to other women in the use of the naginata, including her mother and sister. This all came in handy when, during the civil “Boshin” War, at the Battle of Aizu, Nakano led a group of women warriors against the Meji forces.
These women fought in rain and against opponents they knew had gun firepower. On October 16, 1868, Nakano led a charge against Imperial troops, who at first hesitated to shoot the women, so surprising was the attack. Nakano used this hesitancy to press her advantage and killed about five opponents with her blade (see second picture of Nakano from the 19th c) before she took a fatal bullet to the chest.
Nakano’s little sister, fighting alongside her, managed to decapitate the fallen warrior so that the head wouldn’t fall shamefully into enemy hands. Nakano Takeko’s legacy in Japan is such that the town where she was from dress like Nakano and her female army (“Jōshitai”) in commemoration of this female fighter during the Autumn Festival.
