Family, women, and gender in medieval societywork emphasizes the notion of “ie no tsuma,” or “house- wife,” the matriarch of the house, akin
to Japan’s modern term, shufu. The medieval version of “house- wife” was more tsuma (caretaker)
of the ie, than of the husband. The tsuma, together with the male household head (kachō), co-
administered the house business, including the servants’ tasks, children’s education, and commu-
nication with temples. In time, the diminished budget also reduced the practical authority of
tsuma.^49
Another new area challenged the previous study of warriors, which typically considered
women as wives, mothers, and daughters. A seminal collection of essays appeared in 2004 under
the title, Sensō, bōryoku to josei 1: Ikusa no naka no onnnatachi (“War, Violence, and Women 1:
Women in War”). Edited by Nishimura Hiroko, the featured topics include women’s participa-
tion in early and late medieval wars, observations made by Christians, female hostages in Hidey-
oshi’s Korean invasions, women’s war avoidance strategies, women’s promotion of peace,
violence by jitō (land stewards) in villages, and women’s resistance to and denial of violence. Alto-
gether, the volume highlights the complexity of the relationships among war, violence, and
gender: women defended homes, supported battle efforts from behind the scenes, and worked in
camps as laborers and even fighters.^50
In Japan and the West, scholars have searched eagerly for signs of female warriors in various
sources, including tales, chronicles, diaries, images, and artifacts. The case of female riders, or
nyoki, serves to illustrate the new cautionary attitude toward this popular concern and hasty
conclusions.
Ebisawa Miki, who, along with Fujiki Hisashi, had earlier interpreted the term nyoki to mean
“female cavalry for combat,” reinvestigated the etymology of the term and the context in which
it appears more than eighty times in various ancient and medieval sources. She concluded that
usage before the fourteenth century nearly exclusively related to purification and other ceremo-
nial processions. In late medieval Japan, the term appears less frequently, but in the context of
battles, it is used to denigrate and feminize an enemy force, or is associated with the mythical
Empress Jingū, who began to be represented as an armored warrior after the twelfth century.^51
Of course, these rhetorical representations do not necessarily deny the possibility that real
female warriors or riders existed. Tabata Yasuko’s voluminous study of medieval women, for
instance, points to recorded cases of female combatants, such as Ichikawa no Tsubone, who, in
the late sixteenth century, defended the home region by donning armor and commanding her
troops, who were female. But the term “nyoki” itself only means “a rider who is female,” and not
“female warrior.” Women riding horses may have been ritual specialists or packhorse laborers on
the battlefields. The term alone does not indicate there were female troops.^52
Interdisciplinary English- language scholarship on women and gender
The 1980s and 1990s were also a time in which English- language works on women and gender,
situated at the intersection of literature and religion, flourished, represented by Bernard Faure,
Rajyashree Pandey, Lori Meeks, Keller Kimbrough and many others.^53 Female entertainers, their
sexuality and spirituality also received welcome attention in Western- language works of authors
such as Jacqueline Pigeot, Janet Goodwin, Michel Marra, and Terry Kawashima.^54
The richness of early medieval sources offered by female aristocrats has afforded close inter-
pretations of women’s court service, literary activities, and life patterns. For the thirteenth
century, Christina Laffin introduces the life of the nun Abutsu (1222–1283), known for “The
Nursemaid’s Letter” (Menoto no fumi) and “The Diary of the Sixteenth- Night Moon” (Izayoi
nikki) among others, who traveled to Kamakura to defend the property rights of her son. The
same period produced Towazugatari (The Confessions of Lady Nijō), a personal account of the