The Women's Martial Arts of Aizu: Where Did Takeko Learn the Naginata?

In 1847, Nakano Takeko was born at the Edo residence of the Aizu domain. Her father Nakano Heinai was an Aizu retainer, and due to his Edo posting the family lived in Edo.

In her girlhood, Takeko received full-fledged education in the naginata tradition at this Edo residence.

Her instructor was Takahashi Shūtarō. As martial-arts education for a warrior-house woman at the time, it was exceptional in its serious character.

The Aizu domain had its own tradition of giving martial-arts education to women retainers as well.

In many other Edo-period domains, martial arts for warrior-house women stayed at the level of formal self-defense, but in the Aizu domain full-fledged combat training centered on naginata and kodachi (short sword) was given to daughters of retainers.

This tradition was a house style of the Aizu domain since the domain's founder Hoshina Masayuki (1611-1673), based on the warrior ethics of the Yamaga Sokō school.

Women as well were required, as members of the warrior house, to conduct themselves as combatants in time of emergency.

The naginata is a long-shafted weapon with a curved blade attached to the tip, used from the Heian period through the Sengoku period.

Entering the Edo period, it was positioned as a weapon for warrior-house women.

It had the advantage of distance compared with the sword, and of being able to compensate for differences in strength with technique and weapon length.

In the Aizu domain, dōjō teaching the women's naginata technique were operated with domain recognition.

Takeko is said to have completed the naginata art learned at the Edo residence to a mature level at around twenty.

From the Toba-Fushimi combat of January 1868 (Keiō 4), the Boshin War expanded. The Aizu domain became one of the main targets of the New Government army.

Takeko and her family, who had been at the Edo residence, returned to Aizu-Wakamatsu in preparation for the domain's crisis.

The twenty-one-year-old Takeko, in this period, positioned herself as a 'combatant.

' As a young woman practitioner of martial arts, the preparation for standing in the place of actual combat had been made.

The Aizu women's martial-arts education tradition came to hold historical significance at this point.