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Thread: Women warriors in Japan. A tantlizing article

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    Default Women warriors in Japan. A tantlizing article

    Has anyone seen this article? I know it's from 2011, but I just stumbled on it.
    http://www.military-history.org/arti...i-warriors.htm
    The archeology it refers to suggests that in at least 1 battle, women made up a substantial portion of the combatants.
    Peter Boylan
    Mugendo Budogu LLC
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    I haven't seen much on "onna bugeisha"

    In Oyamazumi Jinja (which has more than two-thirds of Japan's designated national treasures in swords, spears, armors,....), I was able to see the only surviving example of women's armor in Japan.

    It also has the Naginata from Tomoe Gozen (female samurai warrior who fought in the Genpei War).
    Guy Buyens
    Hontai Yoshin Ryu (本體楊心流)
    BELGIAN BRANCH http://www.hontaiyoshinryu.be/

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    That article is one of dozens of web pages or blogs that repeat the paragraph verbatim (or translated into Russian, Japanese, Arabic etc) from Stephen Turnbulls short work 'Samurai Women 1184-1877'. Easy to spot with the spelling 'Senbon Matsubaru' instead of Senbon Matsubara as the reading of 千本松原, put that spelling into google and all of the entries are essentially clones.

    Question is, is there any evidence that they were actual combatants, as opposed to decapitated in the aftermath? I spent a short time rummaging around and couldnt find any sources one way or the other, only references to there being a decapitated head mound. Of itself the presence of a large number of women in a mass head burial doesn't tell me anything except that the medieval Japanese were quite thorough in dealing with opponents when it got down to the end game.
    Aden Steinke
    University of Wollongong Kendo club
    http://www.kendo-wollongong.com/

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    Quote Originally Posted by Aden View Post
    That article is one of dozens of web pages or blogs that repeat the paragraph verbatim (or translated into Russian, Japanese, Arabic etc) from Stephen Turnbulls short work 'Samurai Women 1184-1877'. Easy to spot with the spelling 'Senbon Matsubaru' instead of Senbon Matsubara as the reading of 千本松原, put that spelling into google and all of the entries are essentially clones.
    Thanks for that bit of sleuthing. The article that Peter linked to had just enough specific details (of the wrong sort, of course) to give it a veneer of credibility. I did a fair bit of searching to try to find a possible source in the English language literature and couldn't find a thing.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aden View Post
    Question is, is there any evidence that they were actual combatants, as opposed to decapitated in the aftermath? I spent a short time rummaging around and couldnt find any sources one way or the other, only references to there being a decapitated head mound.
    Can you post what you did find, if it's still handy?

    There's a comprehensive academic piece out there on the Aizu rebellion and the role of women in it, which provides some great details from some of the women themselves about what they did during the combat. I highly recommend it: Wright, D.E. "Female Combatants And Japan's Meiji Restoration: The Case Of Aizu." War In History 8.4 (2001): 396-417.

    -Beth
    Beth's Buki
    Walk softly and carry a big stick.

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    NHK are devoting this year's Taiga Dorama to female combatants in the Aizu war. NHK devotes much research into these semi-historical reenactments of actual events. For those who read Japanese, details are here: http://www9.nhk.or.jp/taiga/
    Peter Goldsbury,
    Forum Administrator,
    Hiroshima, Japan

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    I give the utmost respect to those Onna bugeisha..

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    I found that article extremely dubious, even before I found out (here) that it relied on Turnbull. If women fighters were prevalent, so would women's armor - and it's not. There would have been numerous accounts of women warriors, artistic renditions and the like. Yes, I'm aware of the exceptions, like Tomoe Gozen (who if she even lived, did not by any account, use a naginata). The Aizu squad of women warriors was a small militia band. I have a chapter on the extant historical information on women fighters in Japan in Old School Expanded Edition.

    Ellis Amdur

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    Couldnt many have simply worn men's armor?

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