ers of kimono and rigid custom, preoccupied with poetry and moon view-
ing. Such a picture obscures just who the bushiwomen were during the as-
cendancy of their class. They were originally pioneers, helping to settle new
lands, and if need be, becoming fighters, like women of the Old West in
American mythology. Women at one time or another even may have led
some bushi clans. This can be inferred in that women had the legal right to
function as jitô(stewards), who supervised land held in absentia by nobles
or temples.
These women trained with the naginata because, generally speaking,
they defended their homes rather than marching off to battle. Therefore,
they only needed to become skilled with a few weapons that offered the
best range of tactics to defend against marauders attacking on horseback
or in small groups with swords.The Warring States Period
From the tenth until the seventeenth centuries, Japan can never be said to
have been at peace. However, from 1467 until 1568, the whole country
was swept into chaos, in what became known as the Sengoku jidai,or War-
ring States period. This was a time in which all social classes were swept
up into war, and feudal domains were sometimes stripped of almost all
healthy males.
One result of this rampant warfare was that women were often the
last defense of towns and castles. Thus there are accounts of wives of war-
lords, dressed in flamboyant armor, leading bands of women armed with
naginata. In an account in the Bichi Hyôranki,for example, 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.
It was at this time that the image of women fighters with naginata
probably arose. However, as Yazawa Isako, a sixteenth-generation head-
mistress of the Toda-ha Buko-ryû,wrote in 1916, the main weapon of most
women in these horrible times of war was not the naginata, but the dagger
(kaiken). Bushiwomen carried a kaiken with them at all times. Yazawa
states that women were not usually expected to fight with their dagger, but
rather to kill themselves.
Japanese female suicide (jigai) was as wrapped in custom as the male
warrior’s seppuku(cutting the abdomen). In seppuku, a man was required
to show his stoicism in the face of unimaginable pain. In jigai, women had
a method in which death would occur relatively quickly, and the nature of
the wound would not be likely to cause an ugly distortion of the features
or disarrangement of the limbs, thus offending the woman’s dignity after
death. The dagger was used to cut the jugular vein.694 Women in the Martial Arts: Japan