Onna-Bugeisha, the Female Samurai Warriors of Feudal Japan

 In 1868 a group of female samurai took part in the fierce Battle of Aizu for the very soul of Japan.

Her formerly snow-white clothes were stained red. She had cropped her long hair and tied it into a knot above her head. Her hands held a heavy halberd. Kawahara Asako had just killed her mother-in-law and young daughter to prevent them from falling into the enemy’s hands. Drenched in their blood, she marched onto the battlefield, ready to die defending her home.

Kawahara fought in the Battle of Aizu, named for a region in the northern part of Japan. It was one of the deadliest conflicts of the Boshin War, the civil conflict that shook Japan from 1868 to 1869. It saw the Imperial forces of Emperor Meiji face the Tokugawa shogunate, the military regime that had governed Japan since 1603. The shogunate, to which the Aizu were allied, wanted to preserve Japan’s insularity, its traditional way of life, and curtail Western influences. The emperor, on the other hand, was spearheading the country’s transformation into a modern nation-state in a revolution from above.