Nakano Takeko

Daughter of an Aizu Retainer

Nakano Takeko was born in Edo (Musashi Province) as the daughter of Nakano Heinai (Tadayori), a retainer of the Aizu Domain. Her year of birth is unsettled: some sources give 1847 (Kōka 4) and others 1850 (Kaei 3). Her mother was Kōko, and she had a younger sister, Yūko, and a younger brother, Toyoki. Takeko studied the naginata and the short sword under Kurokōchi Kanenori, reaching a level described as full mastery of the school. She was equally accomplished in letters, studying calligraphy under Sase Tokusho and completing the Confucian classics and histories by the age of fourteen or fifteen. She is also recorded as having served as a scribe to the wife of the lord of the Niwase Domain.

The Boshin War and a Company of Women

In the eighth month of 1868 (Keiō 4), as the imperial army closed in on the castle town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, Takeko resolved to take the field alongside her mother, her sister, and other women of the family. Unable to enter Wakamatsu Castle, she formed a naginata-armed company with Kōko, Yūko, and others, and marched out attached to the Shōhōtai commanded by Furuya Sakuzaemon. Later tradition calls this company the Jōshitai (also written Jōshigun or Fujotai), but the name was never a fixed official designation within the domain's military organization, and sources vary in how they render it. In an age when women were barred from formal military service, women taking up arms and standing on the battlefield was an exceptionally rare occurrence.

The Battle at Namida-bashi and Her Death

On the twenty-fifth day of the eighth month (10 October by the modern calendar), while advancing from Aizu-Bange toward Wakamatsu, the company engaged imperial troops near Yanagi-bashi, the bridge known as Namida-bashi ("Bridge of Tears"). Takeko fought with her naginata but fell after taking a bullet to the forehead; one account instead says she was shot in the chest. To keep her head from falling into enemy hands, her sister Yūko performed the coup de grâce and carried the head from the field. Her age at death is usually given as twenty, though eighteen and twenty-two are also recorded, reflecting the uncertainty over her birth year. Her head was buried at Hōkai-ji in Aizu-Bange.

The Surviving Naginata and Her Death Poem

Hōkai-ji preserves a naginata transmitted as Takeko's own. Its shaft measures five shaku three sun (about 151 cm) and its blade one shaku five sun (about 30 cm); the point is chipped, bearing the marks of actual combat. A naginata said to have been used by her sister Yūko is held by the Aizu Bukeyashiki museum. Tradition holds that when she went out to fight, Takeko had tied to the shaft of her naginata a strip of paper bearing her death poem:

　Compared with the fierce hearts of warriors, my own self does not even count.

The verse is one of self-deprecation, yet it carries considerable weight as the words of someone who had placed herself on the battlefield.

Later Commemoration

At Hōkai-ji stand both her grave and a memorial stone inscribed "Aa Sōretsu" (Ah, valiant). In 1938 a monument marking the place of her death, the Nakano Takeko Junsetsu no Chi monument, was erected at Yukawabata, inscribed with her death poem. The town of Aizu-Bange has continued to commemorate her through publications such as a short biography and through walking routes linking sites associated with her. Her portrayal in the 2013 NHK historical drama Yae no Sakura brought her wider recognition as one of the emblematic figures of Aizu in the closing years of the Edo period. The image of a woman going to war with a naginata in hand is also of interest in the history of Japanese arms, as concrete evidence of how broadly martial training extended within samurai society.