encyclopedia-amazonica:The warrior women of Hondo (Print: Female warrior, Takeuchi Keishu)
encyclopedia-amazonica:The warrior women of Hondo (Print: Female warrior, Takeuchi Keishu) In 1589, minor landowners of the Amakusa Islands, Japan, rebelled against the feudal lord Konishi Yukinaga. A military expedition was thus sent to attack the castles of Shiki and Hondo, and women put up a desperate resistance. Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis, who may have been present in Hondo, describes the fight of the castle’s women, many of whom had seen their husbands killed and wounded. The wife of the castle’s commander and the wives of his senior retainers gathered other women. They made their confessions to the priests, as many people in Hondo had converted to Christianity, and resolved themselves to die in battle.As Fróis told:“In order to fight freely and without any hindrance, as a group they cut off their hair, and so that their long kimonos would not get in the way they discretely tied up the hems. Certain of them put on armor, others wore swords at their belts, others too had spears, still others had various weapons on their persons, and in addition they had rosaries and reliquaries hanging round their necks”.The women went out the broken castle gate and immediately attacked the enemy: “One section of the moat was almost filled with the enemy soldiers killed by the women. Yet, whatever the immediate outcome may have been, Toranuske’s soldiers possessed numerical superiority, and even though the women had overcome some male enemy soldiers, they could not tolerate the dishonor of defeat by the surviving women and children, so in a scene that must have been terrifying they responded with a fierce attack, and out of the 300 women there were only two survivors, both of whom were severely wounded. (…) Later the enemy soldiers would remark: “The warriors of Hondo were not men. They were women and children, yet the men who were fighting were surpassed by the dauntless courage of these warriors”. Bibliography:Friday Karl F., Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850Turnbull Stephen, Samurai women 1184-1877 -- source link