Jinbo Yukiko

Jinbo Yukiko was born in 1845 (Kōka 2), the daughter of Inoue Okazumi, a retainer and military scholar of the Aizu domain. She married Jinbo Shuri, son of the Aizu chief retainer (karō) Jinbo Toshitaka; Shuri was reputed to have had unusually broad knowledge of international affairs and to have been involved in organizing the Byakkotai (White Tiger Corps). In 1868 (Keiō 4), however, following the Battle of Toba-Fushimi, Shuri was held responsible for having advised submission to the new imperial government; facing backlash within the domain, he was made to commit ritual suicide (seppuku) at the domain's lower residence in Mita, Edo. Yukiko was still in her early twenties when she lost her husband.

Soon after her husband's death, the Boshin War (the Aizu War) entered its decisive phase: in the eighth month of 1868 (Keiō 4), the imperial army closed in on the castle town of Aizu-Wakamatsu. The Aizu domain effectively fought a total war involving the families of its retainers, and many women are said to have taken part in fighting both inside and outside the castle, or in supporting roles behind the lines. Yukiko has long been said to have joined the all-female unit led by Nakano Takeko and others — variously called the Jōshitai or Fujotai — and to have taken part in fighting outside the castle walls. Later research, however, has cast doubt on this point. Prompted by the testimony of Mizushima Kikuko that Yukiko never joined the group, Yamakawa Kenjirō — an Aizu-born figure who later became a physicist and served as president of Tokyo Imperial University — re-examined the matter; he could not confirm that Yukiko had joined the women's unit, but concluded that she certainly died in battle near Namida-bashi ("Bridge of Tears"), the same place where Takeko fell. A separate account, said to have been related after the war by the Tosa domain retainer Yoshimatsu Hayanosuke, describes an even more tragic course of events: that Yukiko was captured by soldiers of the Ōgaki domain and held at Chōmei-ji in Aizu-Bange, and that she took her own life with a short sword she had begged Yoshimatsu to lend her.

Given these accounts, it cannot be stated with certainty whether Yukiko actually took part in organized combat as a member of the women's unit, nor where or how she died; several differing versions coexist, and they cannot be narrowed down to a single established fact. With the scarcity of sources acknowledged, she continues to be remembered as one of the figures who symbolize the tragedy of the Boshin War in Aizu, in which women who had lost their husbands one after another were nonetheless drawn inexorably into a fight for the survival of their domain.