Nakano Takeko

Three years after the American Civil War, a 21 year-old samurai woman single-handedly killed six enemy soldiers with a massive bladed polearm in an epic battle where not only the fate of her homeland but the course of an entire Empire hung in the balance. I know that kind of sounds like the blurb for some weird anime you’d stumble across on Netflix at 3am, but it’s an actual thing that happened in real life, and the woman who accomplished the feat is such a celebrated local heroine that, to this day, the city she fought so valiantly to defend holds an annual parade in her honor.

Nakano Takeko was born in Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1847.  Her family was from Aizu, a town on the western edge of Fukushima Prefecture, but she was adopted at a young age by a master swordsman named Akaoka Daisuke and began her martial arts training in Edo at the age of just six years old.  She studied literature, poetry, art, and the finer intricate details of shanking a dude in the face with a six-foot blade, and delighted in stories of ancient samurai doing badass shit all over feudal Japan.  Her favorite stories were those about woman samurai Tomoe Gozen, who I dedicated an entire chapter to in my first book, and when she wasn’t reading epic tales of ancient heroes surfing a tide of severed limbs through the corpses of their enemies she was undergoing rigorous training in sword, spear, and hand-to-hand combat.  The books describe Master Akaoka as being a disciple of the "One-Hand Sword Style," which, I can only assume, is the style where you hold a sword in one hand, but what she really excelled at was combat with the naginata – a badass Japanese bladed polearm that basically amounts to taking the blade of a wakizashi and jamming it onto the end of a giant-ass stick:

This, you might imagine, was pretty effective.  Martial arts for women was definitely not uncommon in feudal Japan (many noble families actually required that the women receive at least a little bit of combat training), and, among women warriors, the most common weapon by far was the naginata.  The extra reach and leverage you can generate with the polearm was a huge advantage over a heavily-armored sword-swinging samurai, and in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing these naginatas could very easily fuck your shit up and ruin your day.  Even among these women, however, Nakano was special – which is something you should probably expect from a person who drilled with a master swordsman eight hours a day for ten years straight.  She grinded out her training, leveled-up her naginata skills, and even worked as an instructor for a few years, instructing local Edo noblewomen in the finer points of grinding fifteen inches of tempered fucking steel through a man's humerus.  She eventually bailed on her training, however, when her adopted dad made things weird and started talking about how he wanted to arranged marriage Nakano off to his nephew or cousin or some shit, so Nakano was like, "yeah, fuck that," and dipped out back to the family home in Aizu.

Well, around the time Nakano turned 21, things in Japan started to get really gnarly.  In 1868 the Meiji Restoration hit Japan, and, while it was actually a really complicated situation with a lot of sociopolitical and economic factors at play the general TL;DR is that Japan blew up into a civil war between two factions – the traditional old-school samurai who wanted life in Japan to continue the same way it had been going for the last 250 years, and a more modernized ok boomer faction that wanted to buy machineguns, dismantle the feudal system, and stop having foreigners arrested on sight.  You probably know it best from The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise.  If you never saw Last Samurai, it's basically Avatar except with samurai swords and everybody dies at the end.  If you never saw Avatar, I got bad news for you buddy because apparently there are like six of those damn things coming out over the course of this decade.

Nakano and the people of Aizu sided with Tom Cruise and the old-school samurai in the dispute, and even after the Meiji forces overthrew the Shogun, seized control of the country, and put forth a new plan to modernize Japan, the warriors and samurai of Nakano's hometown refused to submit.  Their resistance soon became open conflict, and in October of 1868 the war finally came to Aizu – as somewhere around 30,000 Imperial soldiers, many of them now equipped with guns, closed in to force the surrender of the castle and the submission of its lords.

Gripping the well-worn haft of her trusted traditional weapon, Nakano Takeko swore she would be there to face the enemy head-on.  To do anything less would be dishonorable in the samurai code of Bushido.

Despite almost hopeless odds, the castle at Aizu somehow withstood the full might of the Meiji forces' assault for many days.  As 5,000 heroic defenders fired arrows and arquebuses from the walls, desperately trying to defend their homeland against an army that outnumbered them five-to-one, Nakano Takeko hurried through the halls and courtyards organizing and commanding a unit of somewhere between 20 and 30 women from the castle (including her mother and 17-year-old sister) called the Joshitai, the "army of women".  These women had all been trained by Nakano in hand-to-hand combat and basic military commands, and they stood ready to sortie out and defend the castle to their last breath. 

They got their chance on October 10, 1868, as the enemy broke through one of the outer defenses and began to threaten the small artillery unit attached to the Aizu defenders.  Nakano and the Joshitai were called up to defend the guns.  At first, the gunners weren't sure what to do with them, but then, as the enemy forces pushed forward, it came down to Nakano and her warriors to hold the line and defend the guns. 

Nakano went into this whole thing without any pretense about what was probably going to happen.  She was outnumbered five-to-one, carrying a spear, and commanding a unit of women with polearms against a massive force of professional soldiers armed with some of the most modern rifles available in the world at the time (think like Civil War-era rifled muskets in some cases).  Before the battle, she'd written her death poem in the traditional calligraphy style and made a suicide pact with her sister that neither of them should be taken alive by the enemy, yet don't for a second think that she didn't have every intention of cleaving her way out of this battle by any means necessary.  And so, with her hair tied up tightly and a "steely gaze" in her eyes, Nakano Takeko gripped her gleaming weapon and ordered the charge, rushing her brave warriors directly into the teeth of the unsuspecting enemy onslaught.

At first, the defenders didn't fire back.  They probably just weren't sure what the hell was going on.  It seems their first thought was that this cadre of screaming warriors rushing them with polearms was a group of teenage boys – the Joshitai had cut their hair, pulled back their hair, and they were wearing loose-fitting trousers rather than traditional Japanese women's clothing – and were hesitant to pull then trigger.  Then, when they realized this was a platoon of women soldier, the call came up among the defenders to not fire and to try and take them alive (one history book I came across very diplomatically mused that this was "probably not for chivalrous reasons"). 

The first guy who tried to get his hands on Nakano Takeko took a fucking naginata to the skull that split his helm and spiraled him to the deck in a tornado of blood. 

The Joshitai slammed into the enemy formation, their commander leading the charge in a flurry of strikes and parries.  To each side, two more men went down, slashed to shreds by Nakano's swift and deadly strikes.  She parried, weaved, and slammed another foe to the ground, hacking him apart, then wheeled and jammed the point of the naginata through another rifleman's heart.  As her heroic Joshitai dealt death all around her, Nakano killed six battle-hardened, well-trained enemy warriors in a whirlwind of destruction and mayhem – her actions inspiring the castle's defenders to resist, and showing them how a true samurai lives.

But then, as she spun to face her next adversary, a rifle shot rang out.  The bullet struck her in the chest, dropping her with a mortal wound.  Nakano's sister Yuko rushed to her aid, and Nakano made one final request – cut off my head, and don't let the enemy have it (cutting off heads as trophies was a big deal in feudal japan).  Her sister complied.

Aizu Castle still held out for several more days after Nakano's death, eventually surrendering on November 6, 1868.  It's fall effectively marks the end of the samurai and the feudal system in Imperial Japan.  Nakano's sister managed to get away, however, and Yuko buried her beloved sibling's head beneath a tree outside a quiet temple in Fukushima.  Nakano Takeko's naginata was donated to the temple as well, and even though I couldn't find a photo of it I did read a few reports saying that the weapon is still on display at Hokai Temple today. 

The warrior heroine of Aizu remains a local hero to her people, and, to this day, every year in the hometown she fought and gave her life to defend a procession of local girls participate in the Aizu Autumn Festival dressed and equipped as Nakano Takeko and her Joshitai warriors.

Links:

Medieval Japan

Rejected Princesses

The Female Soldier

Vice

Warrior Women Self-Defense

Wikipedia

Books:

Cross, Robin., and Rosalind Miles. Warrior Women. Hachette Book Group, 2013.

Toler, Pamela D. Women Warriors. Beacon Press, 2019.

Turnbull, Stephen. Samurai Women 1184-1877. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012.

Vaporis, Constantine.  Samurai. ABC-CLIO, 2019.