Bessho Nami

Bessho Nami is the wife of Bessho Yoshichika, the uncle of Bessho Nagaharu, lord of Miki Castle in Harima Province. As the wife of Yoshichika, who served as guardian and karō to Nagaharu and held a central role in the castle's defense, she is said to have been involved in the Siege of Miki (Tenshō 6–8, 1578–1580). She is a different person from the castle lord Nagaharu's principal wife (said to be named Teruko). Shinchō Kōki records Yoshichika's wife as a daughter of Hatakeyama Sōshū.

The Siege of Miki is known as a siege by supply starvation led by Hashiba (later Toyotomi) Hideyoshi, the Miki no Hikoroshi (the starving-out of Miki). From Tenshō 6 (1578), the castle was besieged for about two years, and it is said that food within the castle gradually ran out. The records of the Bessho-ki line, which were expanded and revised in later times, preserve anecdotes conveying Nami's valiant fighting. In the 4th month of Tenshō 6 (1578), she is said to have charged into the enemy camp on horseback with a ni-shaku shichi-sun (about 82 centimeters) sword in hand and cut down several enemy soldiers. Also handed down is an anecdote of her as a messenger who, disguised as a beggar, slipped through the enemy encirclement and relayed contact to the reserve force. In the fighting of the 1st month of Tenshō 8 (1580), it is also said that she shot arrows from atop a turret (yagura), felling more than twenty of the attacking soldiers, and then rode out herself on horseback and fought valiantly. However, these specific battle descriptions do not appear in Shinchō Kōki or Bessho Nagaharu-ki, which are highly contemporary, and appear only in the Bessho-ki line, to which embellishments were added later. It is therefore appropriate to treat them as traditions derived from war chronicles rather than as historical fact.

In the 1st month of Tenshō 8 (1580), with food supplies exhausted, the Bessho side finally decided to surrender the castle, and many of the clan, including Nagaharu, took their own lives. It is also said that at this time Nami took the lives of her children, said to be two sons and one daughter, with her own hands, and then took her own life. The accuracy of her real name and her year of birth are uncertain, but she is remembered in the sengoku history of Harima as one of the women of the Bessho clan who died in the fall of the castle.