Tomoe Gozen: the woman warrior of the Genpei War

Tomoe Gozen is probably the best known woman warrior of old Japan, and one of the hardest to pin down. In the Tale of the Heike she appears in a single chapter at the side of Kiso Yoshinaka, kills an enemy champion at Awazu in 1184 and rides away. Everything else, from her family to her old age, depends on which version of the story you read, and none of those versions was written in her lifetime.¹

Kiso Yoshinaka and the Genpei War

The Genpei War of 1180 to 1185 was fought between two warrior houses: the Taira, who dominated the court in Kyoto, and the Minamoto. One of the Minamoto who rose in 1180, answering Prince Mochihito's call to arms against the Taira, was Minamoto no Yoshinaka. Born in 1154 and raised in the Kiso valley of Shinano by Nakahara Kanetō, the husband of his wet nurse, he was known as Kiso Yoshinaka.²

In the fifth month of 1183 Yoshinaka routed a large Taira army at Kurikara pass, also called Tonamiyama, and in the seventh month he entered Kyoto. The capital called him the Asahi shōgun, the rising sun general. His success did not last. He quarreled with the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa, attacked his Hōjūji palace late in 1183 and in the first month of 1184 took the title of seii taishōgun. His cousin Minamoto no Yoritomo sent an army under his brothers Noriyori and Yoshitsune, which broke Yoshinaka's men at Uji and Seta.³

Who was Tomoe Gozen in the Tale of the Heike?

The Tale of the Heike is a war tale, not a chronicle. It grew out of stories chanted by blind monks who accompanied themselves on the biwa lute, and it survives in many versions. The text most people read today, translated into English by Helen Craig McCullough in 1988 and by Royall Tyler in 2012, is the one fixed by the reciter Kakuichi in 1371, almost two centuries after Awazu.⁴

In the chapter on Yoshinaka's death, this text says he had brought two women with him from Shinano, Tomoe and Yamabuki. Yamabuki had fallen ill and stayed behind in the capital. Tomoe is described as fair-skinned, long-haired and beautiful, a strong archer and a swordswoman worth a thousand ordinary warriors, ready to face anyone on horseback or on foot. Whenever battle was near, Yoshinaka sent her out as a leading captain, and she won more renown than any of his other warriors.⁵

That is almost the whole portrait. The tale gives no age, no family and no rank. Japanese reference works add, from later tradition, that she was a daughter of Nakahara Kanetō, which would make her the sister of Yoshinaka's foster brother Imai Kanehira, and that she was Yoshinaka's concubine.⁶

The last ride at Awazu, 1184

On the 20th day of the first month of 1184 by the Japanese calendar, Yoshinaka was cornered at Awazu, near today's Ōtsu at the southern end of Lake Biwa in Ōmi province. In the Kakuichi text he cut his way through several enemy bands until only five riders were left, and Tomoe was still one of them. He told her to go: she was a woman, and it would shame him if people said Lord Kiso had kept a woman with him in his last fight.⁷

She refused at first, then said she would fight one more time so that he could see it. When Onda no Hachirō Moroshige, a strongman of Musashi province, rode up with about thirty men, she charged into them, pulled him down against the front of her saddle, held him there and twisted off his head. Then she threw off her armor and rode away toward the eastern provinces. In this version the tale says nothing more about her.⁸

Yoshinaka rode on with Kanehira. His horse plunged into a rice field of deep mud, an arrow struck him and he was beheaded; Kanehira then killed himself by leaping from his horse with the point of his sword in his mouth.⁹

What happened to Tomoe Gozen after Awazu?

Here the versions part ways. The Genpei seisuiki, an expanded reading text of the Heike story in 48 books, probably compiled late in the Kamakura period and about three times as long as the Kakuichi text, gives Tomoe a much fuller career. Later tellings credit her with leading about a thousand riders in the campaign of 1183, and at Awazu they add more fights: she kills Uchida Ieyoshi, and Hatakeyama Shigetada catches the sleeve of her armor before she breaks free.¹⁰

The Genpei seisuiki also follows her afterward. Summoned to Kamakura by Yoritomo, she is spared at the request of the warrior Wada Yoshimori, becomes his wife and bears him a son, Asahina Yoshihide. When the Wada family was destroyed in the fighting of 1213, she became a nun at Ishiguro in Etchū and, tradition says, lived to 91.¹¹

Other traditions differ again. Several Japanese dictionaries say only that she moved to Echigo, one makes her a nun at an Ishiguro in Echigo rather than Etchū, and others say she went home to Kiso. The Wada story also has a problem with dates. The Azuma kagami, the shogunate's own chronicle, gives Asahina Yoshihide's age as 38 in 1213, which puts his birth around 1176, years before Tomoe could have been taken to Kamakura. Japanese reference works treat the marriage as legend for that reason.¹²

Was Tomoe Gozen real?

Possibly, but nothing proves it. No document written in her lifetime names her. She does not appear in the Azuma kagami, the main chronicle of the period, and every story about her comes from war tales chanted or written down long after the events. The Kakuichi text dates from 1371, and the Genpei seisuiki in its present form is also a work of the 13th or 14th century.¹³

Historians weigh this silence differently. Some treat her as a real woman around whom legends grew; others see a literary creation. The literary scholar Steven T. Brown, as quoted by National Geographic, has argued that her life is so wrapped in legend that the line between history and story cannot be drawn. The careful answer is that the Heike describes a woman whom nobody can now check.¹⁴

What the record does show is that women of warrior families could take up arms. In 1201, when the Jō family rose against the shogunate in Echigo, a woman named Hangaku fought on the front line in the defense of Torisaka castle and was famed for her archery. She was captured and taken to Kamakura, where the warrior Asari Yoshitō took her as his wife. Japanese reference works compare her skill at arms with Tomoe's. Hangaku shows that an onna-musha, a woman in arms, was possible in Tomoe's world. It does not prove that Tomoe herself existed. For women who fought in other ages, from Boudica to the Second World War, see our guide to women warriors in history.¹⁵

Tomoe on the noh stage

Tomoe also has a noh play of her own, and its author is not known for certain. In Tomoe, a monk from Kiso traveling to the capital stops at Awazu by Lake Biwa and meets a woman weeping at a shrine to Yoshinaka. That night she returns as a ghost in armor, tells the story of his last battle and asks the monk to pray for her, because she cannot let go of her grief at not having died with him.¹⁶

The play changes the story. Its Tomoe fights with a large halberd, and Yoshinaka does not fall to an arrow but takes his own life, after ordering her to live and carry word of his death home to Kiso. She sheds her armor and goes, and that moment is what holds her ghost at Awazu.¹⁷

How she is remembered

In the Edo period Tomoe became a favorite subject of woodblock artists. Ishikawa Toyonobu drew her around 1750 killing Uchida Saburō Ieyoshi at the Battle of Awazu, and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi returned to the same fight in 1865. In modern times she has moved into novels and films, in Japan and abroad, usually as a fully armed samurai heroine.¹⁸

The Tomoe of the Kakuichi Heike is a smaller figure: a few lines of description, one duel and a ride east. Read beside the later versions, she shows how a war tale can turn a name into a legend, and why it pays to keep the text and the legend apart. For the wider world of the warrior class she belonged to, see how the samurai compared with the knights of Europe.