In such a society, stories of women warriors defending their homes
and their families were a means toward an end. Women trained with the
naginata less for the purpose of combat than to instill in them the idealized
virtues necessary to be a samurai wife. Women’s work was unremitting in
serving the males of the household and in trying to teach proper behavior
to their children, who were legally considered to be the husband’s alone.
However, unlike the women of Victorian England, who were expected to
be subservient and frail, the bushi women were expected to be subservient
and strong. Their duty was to endure.
When a bushi woman married, one of the possessions she took to her
husband’s home was a naginata. Like the daisho(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 a spirit
of self-sacrifice, of connecting with the hallowed ideals of the warrior class.
As men were expected to sacrifice themselves for the state and the mainte-
nance of society, women were expected to sacrifice themselves to a rigid,
limited life in the home.
Meanwhile, in rural villages, women sometimes used naginata to
maintain order. An elderly woman, for example, recalled that when she was
a small girl in a village in Kyûshû, the southernmost major island of Japan,
men were often gone from the village to work on labor crews. When there
was a disturbance at night or a suspicious character entered the village, the
women would grab their naginata hanging ready on one of the walls of the
house and go running outside to search the town for any danger. The
woman’s grandmother was the leader of this “emergency response squad,”
and this squad was a naturally autonomous group within the village. Pro-
tecting the neighborhood was simply assumed to be a woman’s job.Tendo-Ryû: One Foot on the Battlefield, One in the Modern World
Perhaps the best way to understand the role of martial training within Edo-
period society and in subsequent periods of Japanese history is to examine
the historical records and practices associated with some of the traditional
ryû. (The author employs the term ryûin order to avoid the connotation of
faction within a style that may be carried by the term ryûha.) Tendo-ryû
naginata-jutsu, in particular, embodies many of the most significant
changes in martial training from the late sixteenth century to the present,
including- A transition from a warrior’s art (Ten-ryû), incorporating many weapons,
to a martial tradition with a decided emphasis on a single one - An increasing emphasis on the naginata as a weapon associated with
women - A transition from combative training to a training of will and spirit
696 Women in the Martial Arts: Japan