This episode we're taking a break from the chronology to highlight some of the amazing women of Ancient Japan--and most of those just up through the end of the 4th century--there are others that we'll get to in the Chronicles, but I think we are able to make the points we needed to make.  There are stories of women leaders, of women who fought, and women in early STEM fields--such as they were at the time.  Really, there's no reason for me to believe that women weren't doing everything that men were doing, at least early on.

For more go to: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-37-badass-women-of-ancient-japan

Rough Transcript

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua and this is episode 37:  The Badass Women of Ancient Japan

Before we get started, thank you to Momo for donating to support the show.  If you’d like to join them, you can drop us a few dollars over at ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo—that’s K-O-Dash-F-I.com/sengokudaimyo—or find a link over at our website, sengokudaimyo.com/podcast.

Now, this episode comes out in the middle of March, which is Women’s History month here in the US, and it got me thinking about several things that I’ve seen online and in popular media recently.  For example, there have been several topics popping up in various forums on why we don’t tend to see women’s personal names in Japanese historical documents, particularly in later centuries.  And there have been a few comments I’ve seen that have wrongly suggested that women’s history is strictly the domain of women’s studies, and that women’s studies are specifically for women, with the implication seemed to be that women naturally study about women and men study about men.  And I can’t tell you how much this rubbed me the wrong way.  Roughly half the population of the planet are women, and when we talk about history it is the history of everyone.  So to say that women’s history is somehow the realm only of women’s studies seems to miss the point entirely.  Women’s studies are certainly a specialty, but history—the history of human beings—is absolutely about the history of men AND women—and those who don’t fit into the gender binary as well—no matter how much historical texts decide to leave them out or downplay their accomplishments.  This is really just an extension, in my mind, of the “Great Man” theory—it is easy to focus on the story of just the few people—and usually those people are male—at the top of the social hierarchy that they built for themselves.  But there are a lot of other people, and to the best we can, we need to recognize them.

To put it in a more modern context, think about a viral video.  Sure, a handful of people may have been the ones who created it, but a handful of people don’t make a thing just go viral.  Rather, it is how it gets picked up and shared between thousands or even millions of individuals.  It is all those individual choices, aggregated together, that build on each other change the narrative.  Those individuals are informed through their own lives and experiences.  The cultural concepts that shape their vision and the effects on their own lives, coming together with whatever message that cute cat video seems to be tapping into.

Similarly, the Yayoi wasn’t just some dude coming over from Korea and saying “hey, guys, you should check out this rice stuff.  It’s really cool!”  Neither was the Kofun period about people blindly following the dictates of some heavenly-descended sovereign.  Even back then, there were people who were just trying to get on with their lives, and people throughout the archipelago who were doing so.  I mean, let’s face it, unless you are palling around with the top 1% of society, you probably wouldn’t have gotten a mention in most histories, and yet it is the common people that keep society going.

And, once again, half of those people are women.

And here’s this thing: there are some badass women in ancient Japanese history.  There are rulers of large swaths of land.  Women who wear armor and march their armies into battle.  There are women who hold their ground, no matter who may come against them.  And there are intelligent women who use strong engineering skills to outshine their rivals.

Strong, powerful women are scattered throughout the stories that were being captured and written down in the 8th century, not to mention the many female rulers, particularly between the 5th to 8th centuries.  And yet more often, it seems, the image many people seem to get is of women more as a prize or trophy to be won or given away.  The sovereigns have lists of wives, but the women have very little agency in these stories, and so it is easy to assume that they were weak and submissive.  Without clearly defined actions, we tend to project our own, modern ideas of gender onto people of the past, which is understandable.  We process the human experience through our own lens and therefore we naturally fill in the blanks with what we think we know.  And I’m sure it doesn’t help that the mainland literary traditions that the Chroniclers were attempting to emulate no doubt had their own patriarchal views.

And yet, if we take a step back, we’ll notice that most of the characters we’ve met so far are, in fact, two dimensional.  What do we know of Takechi Sukune, for example?  He was sent to survey the East before Yamato Takeru went on his campaign.  He was good friends with Waka Tarashi Hiko and kept the palace safe.  Later he was made Oho-omi—essentially “prime minister”.  But that is hardly a fulsome picture of any individual, and that is more than we get on most.  And this is largely due to the purpose of the Chronicles—they aren’t there to tell the history of Japan, so much as the history of the Royal Family.  They are concerned almost exclusively with the dealings of the line of sovereigns, especially in the mytho-historical periods.  In the Fudoki, they are more concerned with explaining how places were named, which means the collected stories are often even more fragmented—like they are merely the ghost of a story, leftover in the naming of a place.

If all we wanted to do was tell the story of the royal line, that would be fine, but I’d like to think we are doing something more, and I want to try to explore some of the areas beyond just what we see on the surface.  And we may confront some of our own cultural biases along the way.

Now another factor that can creep into this discussion is this:  Alright, so women weren’t written about, but that’s because they weren’t given power in a patriarchal society.  It’s not our fault that they weren’t influencing the events of their day—blame that on the society that they lived in.  And to a certain extent, you’d be right.  Women often weren’t granted formal status or position in the ruling apparatus, and so it is easy to assume they weren’t making things happen, but that would be a mistake.  People are smart and ambitious, regardless of gender, and though culturally, those gendered female may have had to work within a different socio-political space, that doesn’t make them any less innovative at using the rules of that space to make things happen.  Trust me:  Japanese history is full of smart, cunning women working within the cultural boundaries of their day to accumulate power and to change the direction of history.

Finally, we have to remember that much of what we think we know is simply inferred by our current cultural understanding.  For instance, because we thought we knew what roles women and men held in ancient Norse culture, archaeologists would often make assumptions of gender based purely on the items found with a skeleton in a grave.  So if there was a spear and a shield, that must be a man, and if they had household goods then that person must be a woman.  While there may have been some challenges, this was considered good enough for the time, but modern DNA testing has turned this on its head, and suggested that the “shield maidens”—who are directly referenced in Norse sagas, I mean they literally told us they were there—were definitely a thing.  Now people are looking at a bunch of graves and wondering what else they may have been mistaken about.

Similarly, we should question what we see historically with a critical eye, and even the point of view of the Chroniclers who were writing this stuff down.  Let’s face it, I’m not sure that the Chronicles acrually pass the Bechdel Test, which, itself, is an incredibly low bar, not the gold standard of narrative equality.  We’ll talk more about this later, but there is the language of the time, the cultural assumptions of the people who were writing it down and then our own cultural assumptions on top of all of that—particularly if we are reading it in translation, which most of the time we are.  But we’ll talk about all that later, let’s get into some of the actual stories, shall we?

Now, we aren’t going to go into the entire story for everyone here.  For one, we wouldn’t have time, and many of these incredible women will have one or more episodes dedicated to them.  What, you thought we were only talking about women for one episode in the month of March?  That would be crazy.

No, think of this as more of a highlight reel, shining a brief spotlight on a lot of the stories of women that demonstrate what women could be, and then we’ll examine what else we have and discuss what else we might find—what else could be missing.

To begin with, let’s revisit perhaps the most famous of our ancient sovereigns:  Queen Himiko herself.  A lot has been made of the fact that one of the first real, in depth mentions of Japan is of Himiko, in the 3rd century.   We know she was the Queen, and that she apparently ruled through some shamanic practices, but there is still a lot we don’t know.  Did she come to power at the head of an army?  Was she out there fighting during the chaotic period mentioned before her reign?  Or was she handling the more spiritual side of government?  Or both?

Personally, I don’t think it really matters in the long run.  Because we see that there was a person (whom we assume was a man) who apparently ruled before her, then she came to power, and then another person (whom we again assume was a man) who came to rule after her, though they were relatively quickly overthrown in favor of a young woman, named Toyo, who had been part of Himiko’s court.

So we see here a woman wielding enough power to be recognized by the Wei court as the sovereign of Japan.  Even if all she really had was the largest state in the region, nestled at the base of Mt. Miwa, it is still significant that she thought enough of herself to interact with the Wei in this manner and they recognized her sovereignty.  In fact, it is almost more impressive, given the lack of actual physical, archaeological evidence for the kind of extensive state and unified political system that the Chinese chronicles would otherwise seem to suggest. 

Furthermore, her position does not seem to have been strictly reserved for women, but rather it seems to have alternated between men and women, which is significant, to me.  Now it could be that there was a division of labor, as has been suggested by the idea of ruling gender-pairs.  That theory supposes that there really were male and female co-rulers, and that the male ruler may have been more involved with the actual administration and even military functions, while the woman was more of a religious leader—others have built on this but suggested that this system of co-rulership does not need to have been built along gender lines.  In fact, we see plenty of example of ruling pairs, and sometimes they are a Hiko-hime pair, and other times it is simply elder-younger distinction, with no indication of the individuals’ specific gender (though of course, in English we continue to default to male).

Some have even suggested that the “unity” of the archipelago, attested to in the Wei Chronicles, was one more of a religious nature—perhaps similar to something like the Catholic church, where significant religious authority was vested in an individual, even though the individual countries still held on to their individual local traditions.  As we’ll see, however, women weren’t confined to the realm of the religious or the position of shaman, and while it seems a co-rulership may have existed, there is no firm evidence to suggest that it was a specifically gendered role.

And that brings me to another awesome woman whom we have already talked about:  Yamato Totohi Momoso Hime.  A possible candidate for Queen Himiko herself, Yamato Totohi Momoso Hime might be overlooked in the Chronicles as just the aunt of the sovereign, Mimaki Iribiko, except for a few things.  First off, she seems to be there at every major point where the gods need to be contacted or appeased—it is clear that she was thought to have some influence with the kami, and thus access to supernatural forces.  But even putting that aside, the description of her burial mound seems particularly striking.  They say that when Hashihaka Kofun was built, people lined up during the day to pass rocks from the quarry all the way to her tomb, and when the sun went down, the kami took their place.  And it isn’t just any other kofun that she’s supposed to be buried in, but the largest of the early round-keyhole shaped tombs.  Even the 8th century chroniclers must have had some idea of the significance of that fact.  Whatever else they may have left out of her story, she was a powerful woman to have commanded such labor for her tomb in death.  Likely a quite prominent and well-respected religious figure.

Of course, speaking of religion, we have to look at our next badass woman—a literal goddess, Amaterasu Ohokami.  Now, of course, as a goddess, Amaterasu is hardly someone we can point to as an historical figure, exactly.  But I still want to look at a particular event in the stories about her, and that was how she stood up to her brother.  According to the story, she basically donned the garb of a warrior, with weapons and everything.  She didn’t summon a champion, she didn’t use her “feminine wiles”.  She was out there to defend Takama no Hara, ready to fight her own brother if it came to it.

And perhaps if that were it, we could discount it.  After all, anything could happen in those fantastical tales.  However, are we really going to use that explanation for every time we see women in military roles?  Or was it perhaps just that this is what a chieftain or sovereign was supposed to do:  you defend your land, and if that means you fight, you fight, leading your troops into battle.  If we try to ignore our own cultural biases to what is considered “appropriate” for men and women, then the easiest answer would seem to be that they fought, and it should be on us to prove otherwise.  Still, I’ll mention a few other examples that we see in various stories.

First off, there is Okinaga Tarashi Hime, whom we will be talking about in a few episodes, at least.  Perhaps more popularly known as “Jinguu”, she is the ruler who is credited with the first campaign on the Korean peninsula, and while there are a lot of questions around her—including her actual existence and how much is tied up with the Chroniclers trying to match up their records with the records of the Wei court—it definitely shows that the Chroniclers at least believed that there was a woman who marshalled the forces and led them to fight.  We’ll talk about all the stories about her, and even how she was treated as a sovereign in some ways and yet is also not counted as one of the rulers in the line of Japan, instead considered a regent for her son.  Nonetheless, she does appear to have a royal pedigree (but then, so does every other member of the court if you believe all the genealogies in the Chronicles), and the language used for her is the same as used for later sovereigns—including women.

And it wasn’t just the fighting on the peninsula.  Even the Harima Fudoki mentions an apparent battle in that area, in the country of Harima itself.The battle itself is not described, but her preparations for it, exhorting her troops to go into battle stealthily—that part is.  So once again we see her at the head of an army.  We also see various other tales of her moving the army through and around Harima, so this isn’t just something we find in the Chronicles, but the legend of her status as a warlord is captured in the fudoki as well.

Of course, because of Jinguu’s involvement in Korean affairs, she isn’t necessarily the most politic choice we could make, so let’s look at a few others.

How about we go back and take a look at Saho Hime?  If you remember, she was the one married to Ikume Iribiko, the 11th sovereign.  She got caught up in her brother’s treasonous plotting, and ended up by her side.  To save her son from the certain death that no doubt awaited her and her brother, she went out of the gates of their inaki, their “rice fortress”, and took him out to her husband’s forces.  To make sure she wasn’t captured she specifically sewed break away clothing, beads, and even a wig of her own hair, so that they couldn’t get hold of her and she could get back inside.  What happened is unclear, but it seems she stayed with her brother to the end, dying with him as they made their last stand against the royal forces.

I mean, that really takes some guts.  She could have gone back to her husband and lived well in the royal enclosure, but she decided to stay with her brother and go down with his ship.  Maybe it was guilt over the part she had played, but that still takes conviction.

But there are also women who weren’t in the royal line who were more than just marriage opportunities for the Heavenly Descendants.  For instance, how about Kamuhashi Hime?  She is treated as a mere chieftain, but we are told she basically ruled the country of Toyo, along the northeast coast of the island of Kyushu—a territory so large that it was later broken up into multiple provinces.  So at a time when the Yamato sovereign probably had direct control of the area of the Nara Basin, and perhaps the Kii peninsula and a few other nearby territories, she was in charge of a comparable area.  And it wasn’t all peace and love, either—it seems she had been dealing with brigands and outlaws, or possibly even rival chieftains.   She even represented herself with a sword, a mirror, and a jewel, hung from a tree—generally considered the regalia of the Heavenly Descendant.

We don’t have much on her because, of course, the Chronicles aren’t telling us about the entire archipelago, but rather just about the lives of the sovereigns, but I think we can infer that she was a powerful force in Kyushu—I even wonder if maybe she had invited Yamato as an ally to come and help her with some local bandit problems.  Either way, she had some level of clout and influence.

And then there is Haya tsu Hime, who is the chieftain of a region along the eastern coast, near Beppu.  She also seems to have some local power, though it is unclear how far her domain actually extends.  Was she a subject of Kamuhashi Hime?  Or was she far enough away that she was more or less independent? We don’t really know, but it is clear that whatever the truth may be, we see powerful women running parts of the archipelago.

In the Fudoki, we have even more examples of explicitly female chieftains.  In the Harima Fudoki we see tales of the “Tome”—Harima Tome and Tanba Tome—a title that is explicitly given to female chieftains.  In one story, a kami, named Sanuki, started to make advances upon Hikami Tome, the Chieftain of Hikami, in the land of Tanba.  She rebuked his advances, but he wouldn’t go away.  Rather than give in, she did what anyone else might do under the circumstances.  She raised and army and kicked him out of her territory.

There were also some badass women among the Tsuchigumo, even if they weren’t always victorious.  The Hizen Fudoki mentions a few stories we didn’t get to when talking about Oho Tarashi Hiko.  First, there was Mirukashi Hime, who resisted Oho Tarashi Hiko and his men.  She stood up to them, and so Oho Tarashi Hiko sent one of his generals to destroy her.  They approached under a fog and thus carried out his orders.  I can only imagine from everything else we’ve seen that Mirukashi Hime and her warriors fought bravely, but in the end Yamato won out.

Likewise, there was a village called Ukiana, named for their former chief, Ukianawa Hime.  When Yamato demanded tribute—Yamato called it “taxes”—she refused to pay up.  In return, Yamato forces came and killed her, but the village was said to take her name after that.

Similarly, there was a group of women who lived at the tops of several hills that resisted the royal authority.  The translation calls them “wizards”, which sounds awesome, but I’m not sure how they are deriving that from the text, but I love the idea that they were sending magical fireballs down the hillside.  Still, as I read it, there were 80—aka “many”—Tsuchigumo women who were resisting Yamato.  It got to the point that Oho Tarashi Hiko sent his armies against them to destroy them.  I want to point out that this wasn’t just one single woman who may have had an army of men, but they are talking about multiple women resisting him together.

In the Harima Fudoki, you get numerous stories of women fighting or using weapons, though often they are classified as legendary stories or stories of goddesses.  For instance, the story of Iwata tsu Hime, who was shooting with a bow and arrows.   Her draw was so powerful that when the arrows hit the ground they sunk in so far that only about a fist’s length remained to be seen above ground. 

Once, she was in a competition with her brother, Iwata tsu Hiko, to see whose village would get the water from the river.  Iwata tsu Hiko dammed up the waters and redirected them to his chosen village, but Iwata tsu Hime wasn’t about to give up.  She devised a series of underground water pipes that carried the water to *her* village instead.   Ancient STEM for the win!  Using her brain and technology she developed plumbing for agriculture.

And while this is likely an apocryphal story—though we do have examples of underground pipes made of clay that were used to direct the flow of water—it also suggests to us a few things.  Besides the idea of Iwata tsu Hime organizing the labor she would need for such a project, women are often seen as closely tied to agriculture in the early stories of Japan.  And of course it is agriculture that defines the Yayoi period, and which is often attributed with having really increased the capacity of the land and allowed the countries of the archipelago to flourish, eventually developing into the polities we see in the Kofun period.

Then there was the “Great Goddess”, Mikage, of Izumo, who terrorized an area of the land, killing half of the travelers that passed through her territory, which sounds suspiciously like old tales of a woman bandit or brigand—or perhaps just a conflict between the local people and a woman of Izumo.  Obviously not the most flattering of stories, but there you go.

The point to all of this is that, while the Chronicles themselves often take a patriarchal view, one heavily influenced by imported continental thoughts, women had long been an important part of the archipelago and its history, and not simply as mothers and daughters to be married off—though certainly that happened as well.  Women were powerful figures, just as capable of wielding power and leading people, whether in politics, war, or any other endeavor.

There is something else that strikes me in a lot of this as well, and it is a problem that I think we need to understand.  You see, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, are not gendered languages in the way that we usually think of such things in English—and certainly not as we see in many Romance languages.  While certain words might denote gender—for example “Hiko” certainly refers to a man, today, and “Hime” to a woman, and given their frequent pairing I suspect this goes back for some time—well, that doesn’t mean that gender is always clear.  Often we assume gender, and when we do, a neutral gender is often assumed to be male.  This is true in most of the English speaking world and seems to have been true for the Chroniclers who were writing down the stories.  However, there are cases where it is hard to really know.  Take the name “Michi no Ushi”, which is thought to have later been something like “Michinushi”:  The master of the roads.  This is a name given to one of a royal prince, whose daughters married Ikume Iribiko, the 11th sovereign.  Well, it is assumed that this is a male name and a male title.  But what if I were then to mention a Michinushi in the Harima Fudoki, who is explicitly a woman?  Now where does that leave us?  What about any other so-called “Master” or “Lord” using the title “Nushi”? 

There is another example in the Harima Fudoki:  Arasaka Hime.  She is given as the mother of Una and Kuha.  Arasaka Hime’s name is given as “Inaba no Kuni no Miyatsuko no Arasaka Hime”, but the English translation, by Michiko Yamaguchi Aoki, in 1997, tells us that this means she is actually the daughter of the Inaba no Kuni no Miyatsuko—the governor of the province of Inaba.  Compare this to the entries given for “Kuni no Miyatsuko no Toyo Oshi Wake” or “Tajima no Miyatsuko no Akone no Mikoto”, where both Toyo Oshiwake and Akone no Mikoto are assumed to be the actual governors, and there is no attempt to indicate that they might actually be the son of the governor.  Add to that the fact that there is another entry, in the same fudoki, that explicitly does address a woman as the daughter of a provincial governor.  In discussing a woman named Ne-hime it says something that could be read as “Kuni no Miyatsuko no Koma no Onna, Ne Hime no Mikoto”.  That “no Onna” (or possibly “no Me”?  Honestly, trying to figure out the best way to read this is sometimes more than a bit frustrating)—anyway, that “no Onna” is explicity saying that she is the Woman—onna—of Koma, the Kuni no Miyatsuko.  It is the same construction we would expect to see in Arasaka Hime’s case.  Of course, it is always possible that those characters were accidentally dropped somewhere along the way.  But I would suggest it is also possible that our modern idea of what a “provincial governor” is—that is,  the idea that it was specifically a male position—may be incorrect.  Personally, I prefer to go with the straight reading of the actual document, these days.

And that’s pretty big, right?  That the province of Inaba might have had a woman at its head?

So that’s the problem.  If we use the masculine pronouns and assume that the default neutral gender is male, we certainly see a lot of men everywhere.  But if we assume that these stories hold some kernel of truth, then we must challenge that assumption.  But how far do we go?  Shouldn’t we trust our translators?  How many women have entered the narrative and been erased because we assume a default of male, and, more importantly, what do we do about it?

It is a tough question.  For my part, I try to examine where I am making assumptions.  When you have a male and a female ruler—a Hiko-Hime pair—in an area, do you assume that they are father and daughter? Or perhaps they are married?  But then what does it mean, then, when the “Hime” marries our sovereign, the protagonist?  Well, that would seem to indicate she was the -HIko’s daughter…. UNLESS we strip away the need for co-rulers to be anything but equal partners in the political structure.  If that is the case, then we can simply assume that there was a marriage alliance made with the female co-ruler of an area, and there doesn’t even need to be an immediate familial bond between the two.

This also gets to the issue that when we see things like “Hiko” and “Hime”—especially when they are translated into English with the common “Prince” and “Princess”—we may have certain assumptions of what those titles mean based on our own concept of gender roles amongst royals.  Princes are dashing and charming—they fight the dragon, slay the monster, and get the girl.  Princesses are beautiful and delicate.  They sit in their tower and wait for a worthy prince. 

Furthermore, “Prince” can sometimes indicate an adult ruler, as in Machiavelli’s famous treatise.  However, when you think of “Princess” do you automatically conjure a picture of a woman or of a young girl?  While a “Prince” might be sovereign over some territory, how often do you think the same of a “Princess”?  And then there are other issues.  Outside of Hiko and HIme, most actual titles in ancient Japan are not gendered, as far as we can tell.  So the various titles that mean something akin to “Chief”, “Lord”, “Master”, or even “Provincial Ruler” aren’t necessarily gendered in Japanese—and yet in English there is a strong associated gender with all of these words, and often the feminine version does not carry the same weight.  Consider “Lord” versus “Lady” or “Master” versus “Mistress”.  And so, when these non-gendered terms appear, but now in English with the neutral male gender, what do we assume?

I will try to challenge these assumptions where I can in the narrative, though I am not immune from cultural biases.  Furthermore, in some cases, especially with the time constraints I have on production, I am often going to the English translation rather than working through the Japanese, so in some cases I may be pulling in the biases of the translators and not always realize it.  And, of course, there is the view of the 8th century Chroniclers who were writing things down, and who also were likely to have their own thoughts as to whether it was likely (or not) that a given person was either male or female based on a variety of factors that may or may not correspond with reality.

I think it helps, though, to realize what we see here.  We see women who were more than just wives and mothers and daughters.  They were warriors, and leaders.  They governed huge swaths of territory.  They were also agricultural pioneers, who engineered solutions to large problems.  In other words, without evidence to the contrary, we should assume that women were just as active in all spheres of life as any man.  Now that doesn’t mean that there weren’t certain roles for men and women that may have seen them gravitate to one or the other, and certain societal functions—such as giving birth and caring for children—were likely considered particularly in the domain of women.  But that didn’t mean they were restricted to those functions, solely.

And so I think I will leave it there, for now.   A few examples of women whom I think look pretty badass.  And not only that, but we have enough evidence to suggest, at least to my mind, that these women were not exceptions, even if they were, themselves, exceptional.  Their stories may be hidden from us by layers of time and later assumptions, but we should not simply assume that they didn’t exist.

Next episode, we will be looking at the next couple sovereigns and what they did.  And we are going to prepare for some more interactions with the content.

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That’s all for now.  Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.