Talk:Onna-musha

Martial art?

I have a small problem translating bugeisha as martial artist - the term donates something a little bit more professional.Peter Rehse 10:13, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Important discussion

This paragraph "During the earlier Heian and Kamakura periods, women who were prominent on the battlefield were the exception rather than the rule. Japanese ideals of femininity predisposed most women to powerlessness, in conflict with a female warrior role.[2] Women warriors were nonetheless" is incomplete. Perhaps someone could look over the edit history and restore what was said? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Missed the Action (talk • contribs) 00:30, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

I am a bit concerned about this article. The one source no longer works and I have been unable to find information on the internet. Yes, there were "women warriors" in Japan, but is this term more the view of one academic?

I'm hesitating over nominating for deletion. Although I won't state this is a completely "false" term, I'd like to see it being widely used to deserve an entire article on it. John Smith's (talk) 11:18, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

The following three sites came up in Google searches for governmental and academic sites:

• 時代小説の冒頭表現　野浪正隆
• 2005 年度図書館だより
• 近代語データベース ファイル名一覧

All three are related to Ikenami Shōtarō's Kenkaku Shōbai.

Fg2 (talk) 11:52, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Can you give some more detail? Is this a term conned by one person, or something academics use widely? John Smith's (talk) 11:59, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't have any more detail. The links I found all come back to one fiction writer. Fg2 (talk) 05:59, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I see a problem, in that case. If there is to be an article on a single term it needs a decent amount of academic use. Maybe it should be deleted? John Smith's (talk) 10:32, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Doesn't matter much to me; I didn't start the article. I'd suggest merging into the article Shōtarō Ikenami and keeping a redirect. The value of a redirect is that it keeps a record of this discussion right here so that if a future editor wants to create the article again, they can see why we don't have one (without having to search for a deletion discussion or to read Shōtarō Ikenami, which they wouldn't do prior to starting an article). Better than deleting the whole thing and repeating the whole discussion later. Fg2 (talk) 20:15, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

So he's the guy that coined the term? John Smith's (talk) 21:40, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Don't know. However, he did use the term, and the academic and government sites that come up point to him. There might be a better place to redirect, for example, Jidaigeki. Any thoughts? Fg2 (talk) 10:02, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

The Japanese Wikipedia has categories for "women in war" (ja:戦争における女性) and as a subcategory of that, "female soldiers" (ja:女性軍人). In their introductions two of the Heian-era figures (Tomoe-gozen and Hangaku-gozen) are described as "women who were made military leaders" (武将とされる女性). The corps of Aizu women that defended Tsuruga castle were called the Women's Corps (婦女隊 or 娘子軍).

Other than these exceptions, there don't appear to be any buke women that engaged in fighting, and since they were separated not only by 650 years of history but also in their purposes and modes of fighting, it seems silly to try to force connections between them. There probably ought to be an article on the life, status, and role of women in samurai families, and it ought to refer to these exceptional figures, but "female warriors in feudal japan", whichever ersatz Japanese word you want to call it, simply does not hold water as a historical concept. I'll support a deletion of this article since I don't have the expertise to make a proper one about upper class women during the feudal period.

As an aside, the picture is incorrectly labeled, to boot. It a print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi depicting the wife of Oboshi Yoshio from the story of the 47 ronin. She does not actually fight anybody in any version of the story I've seen. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.48.89.183 (talk) 09:24, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

You guys got to be kidding me. If the title is incorrect (I have no idea about this), just change it. Like, move the article to an other name. Or in the worst case, merge. Not delete. --Asperchu (talk) 16:25, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

gozen as personal name

isn't gozen just japanese for 'dame'? 79.220.92.196 (talk) 17:03, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Another example

There is a wiki article about Hangaku Gozen as well. Should it be added to the list of notable female warriors? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.71.204.79 (talk) 07:49, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

comments moved from article space

• Needs revision/clarification Masako Hojo was not a warrior or onna bugeisha but a political figure
• The preceding passage reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles. "Fearless devotion and selflessness are often directly related to quiet and passive obedience. Nor is this limited to women warriors, this has to do with interpretation of Confucian principle laid out in didactic texts used at the time. Also needs revision. It also bears mentioning that political marriages had been the norm much farther back than the Edo period.
• Women were not allowed to be samurai. Samurai are a male only hereditary position passed from father to sons, typically on sons of his primary wife should he have multiple. Noblewomen, like those of the samurai/bushi, were not to leave the home unaccompanied or risk sullying the reputation of their house. Also, it was forbidden by law for anyone, male, female, commoner, or noble to travel between domains of different daimyo without the consent of the shogun/the proper travel documents. This whole section is misleading in implying that female samurai existed during the Edo or Tokugawa period. For reading discussing women with martial training the book "Women of the Mito Domain" discusses noblewomen being trained with naginata but they were not samurai or soldiers.

Special:Contributions/167.160.159.178 p.p. -KTo288 (talk) 11:22, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Feel free to integrate corrections and references into the body of article, however the operative word is integrate, this is an article not an essay, the discursive style where previously introduced ideas and assertions are examined and repudiated is not how articles are written here. Please use the talkpage for discussion. If you think something is factually wrong, Be bold and rewrite it especially as you seem to be able to reference your edits.--KTo288 (talk) 11:22, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Will do. This article is shameful. 77.183.0.38 (talk) 08:25, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Katana overrated?

The article says:

In contrast to the katana used universally by their male samurai counterparts, the most popular weapon-of-choice of onna-bugeishas are the naginata...

As far as I know, this is a misconception - the katana was never the primary weapon of the samurai; the samurai's primary weapons were the bow and the spear. Is this correct? SpectrumDT (talk) 08:23, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

You are correct. Samurai fought in battle primarily with ranged weapons (yumi/bows, teppou/arquebuses) and polearms (yari/spears, naginata/glaives), with conventional swords being mere backup weapons. Which is why I deleted that erroneous statement. The misconception (for both samurai and knights) probably derives from swords also being easily worn in peacetime and thus elevated to a symbol of their status. Twincast (talk) 12:49, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• Myorin (Yoshioka Myorinni).jpg

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 09:51, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Copyediting & Questions

Hello Wikipedia Community,

I wanted to explain both what I did and ask a few questions.

First, the explanation. I edited a few words and phrases I thought were already had emphasis. One example is a sentence that described a clan "powerful and prominent" I decided to only keep "prominent" because inherently prominence includes power in a specific area. If anyone disagrees, I'm definitely fine with that. I also added hyphens between a few mentions of Onna-bugeisha to keep with the page's consistency. Also, I made all appearances in the beginning of the entry proper by making the "O" capital since it is a title.

Now, my questions. As I scrolled through the entry I noticed there were weapons that were lower-cased. I just want to bring up the question: Are they all' not suppose to be proper? Another thing I noticed is the word shogun often being lower-case even when mentioning a specific shogun. I was not sure so I did not take the liberty to change what I wanted. I saw the same pattern when the word shinobi was mentioned as well. I do not know everything but I am pretty sure being a Shinobi is a title and should be capitalized but I would like someone to co-sign this before assuming.

There is a passage I want to bring attention to as well. It states the following: "The existence of these two prominent female generals confirms that the status of women during this time was still less unequal than future periods." This seems more like someone is making connections and not using a source to validate this assertion. A source would be excellent here. I did not delete this before consulting another Wikipedian.

Hope this explains some of what I changed and addressed some questions. Jalapinata (talk) 05:07, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 15 December 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved, unopposed (non-admin closure) BegbertBiggs (talk) 16:11, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

---

Onna-bugeisha → Onna-musha – The idea that onna-bugeisha is a term used by Japanologists or anyone else to describe historical/legendary Japanese woman warriors appears to be a WP:HOAX. At the time this article was created, it was almost immediately tagged as unsourced,[1] and since that day it has been drastically expanded with "sourced" content from sources that seem to uniformly fail to use the phrase onna-bugeisha. A quick Googling of the phrase in Japanese brought up a number of popular historical novels (時代小説)[2] and some academic papers that seem to mostly be about such historical novels.[3] At least one uses the phrase to refer to women in the pre-modern popular media of China. As for English (maybe, like with Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jigai, the English term had a history separate from its Japanese root?), a blank Google Books search brings up a lot of hits, but limiting it to books predating the creation our article decimates those results.[4][5] Conversely, the term onna-musha (女武者, the less-problematic equivalent term used in both the Asahi Nihon Rekishi Jinbutsu Jiten and the Nihon Jinmei Daijiten to describe Tomoe-gozen[6]) actually does appear to have been used in English-language scholarship prior to 2006,[7] and continues to be used today[8] (though seemingly much less so, perhaps because since this article was created non-specialist sources have come to Wikipedia and thus used the phrase onna-bugeisha rather than consulting specialist sources). Noteworthy books that use it include Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll,[9] Gender Matters: Discourses of Violence in Early Modern Literature and the Arts,[10] and several works on the Noh and kabuki theatres.[11][12][13] Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:01, 15 December 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. BegbertBiggs (talk) 10:59, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Somewhat tellingly, Japanese Wikipedia doesn't have an article of this title, and, more disturbingly, most of the other foreign-language Wikipedia articles seem to be varying levels of translation of our article, and, even worse, the Google News hit-count comparison for 2006 and 2020 is even worse than that of Google Books.[14][15] Spanish National Geographic is not inherently a reliable source on pre-modern Japanese history and I don't see anything on the author's resume to indicate that he has enough of a specialist knowledge on this topic to debunk Wikipedia, but it is always unsettling to see things like this find their way from Wikipedia into popular magazines that are theoretically reliable sources of information. (Needless to say, I have been unable to find any instance of National Geographic using the phrase prior to 2006.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:00, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

• Alternative idea Maybe we could go with what an IP-editor suggested ten years ago a few sections up? There probably ought to be an article on the life, status, and role of women in samurai families, indeed, but onna-musha would not be a good title for such an article. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:36, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Concern over non-admin, no consensus move of this page.

I have just noticed that this page has been moved in January 2021 by the non-admin proposer of the move, @BegbertBiggs. As per the opening line of WP:Requested moves/Closing instructions#Non-admin closure: Experienced and uninvolved registered editors in good standing are allowed to close requested move surveys. This guidance has been broken here and subsequently the move should potentially be reverted.

Additionally, I have concerns about the justification for the move having been due to a WP:HOAX claim which seems too strong. A search on Google Books will show that the previous page name of Onna-bugeisha has been used prominently in publications numerous times, for example: Onna Bugeisha (2014) [16]; Japanese Women in Warfare: Naginata, Empress Jingu, Onna Bugeisha, Matsudaira Teru, Tomoe Gozen, Komatsuhime, Kunoichi, Mochizuki Chiyome (2010) [17]; Women Warriors Tales of the Onna Bugeisha [18]; Bushido Code, The Way Of The Warrior In Modern Times: Chapter 3 - Onna-Bugeisha - The Female Samurai Warriors (2019) [[19]; History as They Saw It Iconic Moments from the Past in Color (2012) [20].

Whether or not the move was inherently 'correct' or not the term 'Onna bugeisha' seems to be fully in common usage by this point in English and needs to be mentioned, otherwise you have an article in which none of the references include the title of the page. You can see the term 'Onna bugeisha' across many popular news/magazine articles using the term [21] [22] [23], as well history exhibitions such as this one in Turin [24], as well as sites such as Alamy [25], which has 32 images tagged for Onna Bugeisha compared to 5 for Onna musha.

My question to @BegbertBiggs: how can you disregard these sources? Seemingly because you feel they were influenced by this article title, when it was a stub until very recently. At the very least the term 'Onna bugeisha' should be referred to and bolded in the lead or there could be a section on the term to describe the terms 'onna-musha', 'onna-bugeisha' or even better 'Female warriors in Japanese history'. In fact, the only other editor to comment on your move proposal was @Hijiri88, who explicitly said that they didn't feel Onna-musha was a good title for an article on the lives of 'samurai women' (which this article effectively is at this stage, though the term samurai shouldn't be used for women).

The article needs a re-work and complete re-reference and in my opinion a move to a more general title such as the one proposed above Female warriors in Japanese history would solve a lot of the issues here and fit better alongside/within the existing category:Japanese women in warfare. Mountaincirque^talk 12:33, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

@Mountaincirque: All of those sources seem to post-date the creation of this article. Anyway, thank you for misquoting me -- I said that "onna-musha" is not an ideal title for an article on women of the warrior class in pre-modern Japan, since it refers to women who fought, but I was very, very clear that "onna-bugeisha" is substantially worse for the same reason as well as a plethora of others. Anyway, have you managed to locate a single source written by a Japanese-speaking historian before this Wikipedia article was created, that uses "onna-bugeisha" the way you seem to think? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:52, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict)BTW, BegbertBiggs did not propose the move. They were an uninvolved RM closer; I proposed the move on 15 December, BB relisted after no one supported or opposed the move for eight days, and then after another 19 days with no one saying anything BB implemented the move. Moreover, the fact that you have now opposed the move over two months later (based on very flimsy evidence) doesn't really count for much, given that this page and its title have been fairly controversial since its inception (scroll up the page, or check the first few edits to the article). You have had well over a decade to respond to the concerns raised by Fg2 and 68.48.89.183; the fact that they didn't get around to actually fixing the article (as I started to do) doesn't invalidate the fact that the same concerns were raised on the talk page as far back as 2008 (and in the article proper back in 2006). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:22, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: thanks for your comment, I pinged you into the response so that you could contribute, I'm sorry that you feel that I misquoted you but I don't really see a big difference between what you've just said I said that "onna-musha" is not an ideal title for an article on women of the warrior class and what I said said that they didn't feel Onna-musha was a good title for an article on the lives of 'samurai women'. I think you've mistaken me for someone arguing for the page title to be what it previously was, rather than an editor who has noticed a page move that broke the rules.

Are you suggesting that the above published books over an 11-year period should be disregarded as sources for the use of the term Onna bugeisha in English because this article has existed (mainly in stub form) since 2006? It seems incredibly unlikely that this article (which for a long time was very brief) could have really influenced those books which run into thousands of pages of content. Even if the page is meant to be 'Onna musha' (which is may well be), then the fact that there are tens or even hundreds of reliable sources including printed media that use 'Onna Bugeisha' for the same concept means it should be at last mentioned, rather than excised from the article. Otherwise it looks a lot like original research and/or personal preference. The sourcing on this page is frankly awful but if you are going to call the page 'Onna musha' then surely at least one source needs to use that term, which at present I don't think is true. 13:13, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Well, given that at least one of the books you mentioned is explicitly a Wikipedia clone, and the others appear to be mostly self-published e- or print-on-demand books -- yeah, I'd say we should disregard them. You don't seem to be familiar with the concept of WP:CITOGENESIS: sources of dubious merit that post-date the information being put on Wikipedia all have a certain level of likelihood of simply duplicating what their authors read on Wikipedia, thus creating a destructive loop. If the term "onna-bugeisha" was in use among historians to refer to female warriors of old Japan prior to 7 April 2006, sources for that should be fairly readily available. I showed above that they certainly do not appear to exist (the only Google Books hits prior to that date appear to be referring to fictional martial artists in historical novels and/or wuxia films); the burden is on you to demonstrate otherwise.

Anyway, taking someone's words but removing the word "but" and everything thereafter to imply that they agree with you is highly disruptive. I already asked you not to do so once (well, technically I "thanked" you for doing so, but I assumed you would understand my meaning) and you responded by doubling down and doing so again. Please do not do it a third time.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:22, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

this page has been moved in January 2021 by the non-admin proposer of the move, @BegbertBiggs: I did not propose the move. I was an uninvolved editor and I closed the move as unopposed, because it was. If you prefer a different title, feel free to open a new request with your sources. BegbertBiggs (talk) 13:35, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

I apologise to @BegbertBiggs, the way that you had relisted the move request showed up on my android tablet display made it appear (to me) you were the original one who requested the move, I can now see having logged in to my PC that is not the case, the way that OP had twice responded to their own post conversationally also confused me. I am withdrawing from this page as I am intimidated by Hijiri 88 whose aggressive comments both here and on my talk page have been highly incommensurate to my civil attempt to check the veracity of this page move, I hope that others can use comprehension to see that my comments were well-meant and not intended to mislead anyone. I hope that some other brave editors in the future can look at the terminologies used here and come to a fair representation of this concept (and work out what concept this page is trying to cover which seems to have no consensus), as well as taking into account the most commonly used terms in English as noted at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English). Mountaincirque^talk 14:33, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

• Just gonna add this as an addendum to this whole mess: the fact that third parties have been duped by English Wikipedia's "onna bugeisha" hoax is an argument for undoing the hoax, not an argument for restoring it. Thankfully, this is a fairly obscure topic, and unlike, say, this affair no putatively academic works by scholars seem to have been duped. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:13, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Just to add another view here. First, I think it's important for everyone to remain calm and not seek to point fingers at each other.

Second, the problem with this topic is that there was or is no consensus on how to refer to Japanese female warriors because the topic has been neglected for so long. Instead works about Japanese women focused on their involvement in court life, literature, politics, etc.

It is, however, not a hoax to say that there were female warriors in Japanese history or that they were prominent in a way that they weren't in other societies. My reading of WP:HOAX is not that you shouldn't have an article title that isn't commonly used in academic circles, but that you shouldn't try to make ficticious articles to encourage that disinformation to spread.

If we really want to get the Wikipedia rulebook out, we should probably be using "female samurai" on the basis of WP's rules on common names and because it's the thing that best explains the article immediately to an uninformed reader. That's why WP uses "ninja" as the title of the article and not shinobi, despite the fact that shinobi is the correct reading from the Japanese. The point of that article isn't to force the reader into understanding they're stupid for using the word ninja.

Yes, generally speaking only men were samurai. But at the same time Ii Naotora was a woman and a daimyo, and I'm struggling to think of a daimyo that was also not a samurai. So it seemed that there were rules that stoppped women being samurai until those rules were broken.

Personally I think that it doesn't really matter all that much whether the article is called Onna-musha or Onna-bugeisha for now. However, I think there shouldn't be any further title moves, especially to something as uninspiring as "female warriors in Japanese history" just as it would be to have an article called "dried leaf water" instead of tea. John Smith's (talk) 13:30, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

The topic has not been neglected. Tomoe-gozen has been a massive source for Japanese theatre for centuries. She is called an onna-musha. No sources have been presented to indicate that the word onna-bugeisha was used in the way this article defined the term prior to this article's creation. Hence, I think it's very likely that this originated as a Wikipedia hoax. The majority of your comment seems to be based on the assumption that my use of the word "hoax" referred to the existence of female members of the samurai class or that there were women who engaged in martial activity. The former would be ridiculous, and I hope you did not intend to make such an accusation (although I'm struggling to think of a daimyo that was also not a samurai leaves little room for interpretation); the latter is a somewhat iffier matter, given that the archetypal examples are to a large extent more "legend" than "fact" (indeed, even the new example you name seems to be mostly known from various pop culture properties, doesn't have an entry in any of the encyclopedias on Kotobank, and at least one historian questions whether she was a woman at all -- that's the second hit for "井伊直虎" site:.ac.jp), but that's not an argument I have ever attempted to make on this page. There is, of course, no arguing against the historical existence, and female gender, of the fujo-tai, and the sources for Tomoe-gozen are relatively good and probably establish her historicity as a female military commander, but that is completely irrelevant to whether or not such people were called "onna-bugeisha" prior to 2006. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:21, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

First, I'm going to say this. You have a bit of an attitude problem and come across as being confrontational for no obvious reason. I'm only the second other person to discuss this with you, and the first one also felt you were aggressive. Try to engage in a more friendly way.

Second, I meant neglect in terms of historical research and/or publications, rather than simple story-telling.

Third, in any event, I did not say you thought the subject of the article is a hoax. I said Wikipedia's policy was "that you shouldn't try to make ficticious articles to encourage that disinformation to spread", rather than having it apply to the article title. You can disagree and say that includes the article title. However, as I then pointed out, the common name policy might dictate that onna-musha is not suitable either and that women/female samurai would be more understandable to the public, even if one would argue that women weren't samurai, or not all female fighters in Japan were samurai.

So, unless there's anything further to add on the subject, shall we leave it there? John Smith's (talk) 12:37, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

You still didn't apologize for trying to make up the term onna bugeisha. You are not a nice person and should refrain from speaking in public. 77.183.164.134 (talk) 12:00, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• Ohori-Tsuruhime-Statue-Onna-Musha.png

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 08:20, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

this article is a hoax

Hi! i checked all sources and searched on google and findout, that the sources cited are fictitious. Only this article called japanese warriors onna musha. I find out that real name for female warriors was onna bugeisha. So my conclusion is that this article is a hoax, therefore, this article can be deleted. --90.128.39.199 (talk) 18:27, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

You can't delete an entire page without sufficient evidence. Why not just change the title to onna-bugeisha? Threedotshk (talk) 13:56, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

I agree that much of the information in this article is a hoax. It was devised by someone back in 2006 in order to trick people into believing that women warriors played a much bigger part in Japanese history than any serious historian (including virtually all Japanese feminist historians) would admit, and that such women warriors were called "onna-bugeisha", a word that did exist prior to that date (in works of fiction, mind you), but that meant something quite different. I do not know if this was done for shits and giggles and to make people on the Internet (who don't know anything about Japanese history, the history of feminism in Japan, or even seemingly the history of images of Japanese and "Asian" women in western media) make what they no doubt thought were "feminist" statements but were in fact equating Japanese women with "geisha". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:55, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

On a reread (ironically some weeks after someone vandalized my comment and I reverted them...), the final sentence of the above was poorly constructed. I don't remember quite what I meant, so I won't alter it, but I probably meant to say I do not know if this was done just for shits and giggles or by a rightist with the intent of embarrassing "the Internet feminists" by tricking them into inadvertently equating Japanese women with "geisha". There are, no doubt, fake "feminists" on the Internet who don't actually know about women's issues in Japan or anything in Japanese history for that matter (I won't name names, but I first came to this article because a white male YouTuber I occasionally watch "ironically" seemingly got a lot of his information from this article, while his other videos make it it pretty clear that he's not an actual feminist), but it wouldn't make sense to say that such people were the ones being trolled. It would be non-Japanese authentic feminists who would have been the actual targets of this trolling, if trolling was even the intent. It might have just been for "shits and giggles". Or it might not have been a hoax at all but a case of someone falling victim to a telephone game. (Back in 2006, just two years after I started studying Japanese, I definitely would have believed Ikenami's novels were an accurate reflection of Japanese history can definitely could have misinterpreted 女武芸者 as referring to something it didn't.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:15, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I have to ask, has there been any update? How has this article been allowed in its current form all this time?

There have been some recent "ambitious" edits with the article for Tomoe Gozen (which I've been keeping an eye on recently) that truly introduced me to the scope of the wider problem on this topic a little while ago.

The fact that this article literally has no Japanese version fills me with nothing but apprehension at the sheer number of people that are being misled, the longer this article and many that link to it happen to go by without being properly edited. The English Wikipedia appears to be one of the few versions of the article to even use the term "Onna-musha". Many versions at least feature examples such as Nakano Takeko more prominently, who was known for leading the Jōshitai in the Aizu War, as well as Yae Niijima, who I'm sure you are also familiar with.

The misinformation in this article has led to huge inaccuracies on this article, as well as many outright lies being peddled on articles that are also linked (particularly on the articles for Tomoe Gozen and Ueno Tsuruhime) where people have tried to embellish accounts in Japanese epics as pure historical fact without another word, while the corresponding Japanese articles themselves sometimes openly question their very existence.

What's worse, is that in the amount of time that this article has been left in its current form, some of the misinformation has started being translated into other languages, along with the inaccurate term "Onna-musha".

In addition, to put it mildly, the language on some of these edits has been rife with said "creative embellishment", that in certain cases appears to purposely fly in the face of any and all historical fact or sources.

I have spent time looking at the Japanese language Wikipedia itself to find some data sources.

The two articles below contain the most relevant information that I have managed to find during my quite limited search:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%E5%A5%B3%E6%80%A7%E5%8F%B2

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AB%E3%81%8A%E3%81%91%E3%82%8B%E5%A5%B3%E6%80%A7%E3%81%AE%E5%90%88%E6%88%A6%E5%8F%82%E5%8A%A0%E3%81%AE%E5%B9%B4%E8%A1%A8

I am no expert on this topic, but I would implore you to use your greater expertise on this topic in order to make some edits on this article, as well as perhaps a few others.

Could I ask you to check the accuracy on some of the recent edits on the article for Tomoe Gozen? (there appear to have been a few very recent "creative edits" from a certain individual) and especially Ueno Tsuruhime, which is perhaps one of the single most egregious examples here (please consider reviewing the deletion note that I have left on the page).

Is it possible we could organize to get a few more qualified editors here to deal with these issues? This has gone far enough now. There are not even sources for some of these edits on the Japanese Wikipedia itself, but when some of the misinformation starts getting translated into other languages, it adds an entire different dimension to this problem. Ghost1824 (talk) 08:48, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Figuring out things for this article

To get things moving along, let's make some lists. Feel free to contribute to them. This way, we can figure out which sources use these words and ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 22:30, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

@Nihonjoe: Is this really necessary? The original title was a hoax (it never existed in Japanese or English prior to 2006) and now the title has been changed to a better one (a term that actually exists in Japanese). (女武芸者 appears to actually come from Ikenami Shōtarō's fiction, but it means something different there; the "female samurai" sense does not appear to predate 2006. 女武芸者 is used in Japanese, but seemingly only in reference to Ikenami's novels and others like them, where it seems to mean "female martial artist".[26]) There is at least one English-language scholarly publication on this topic (although it seems to address it as a fictional topic -- the most notable example appears to be of questionable historicity[27][28]) that uses onna musha (no hyphen) as a romanization of the Japanese term (which it translates as "woman warrior"). In the seven months since the move, more and more English-language (and other) blogs and online magazines have started using "onna-musha" in place of "onna-bugeisha", which is definitely an improvement since the word "onna-musha" at least existed before Wikipedia made it up. If you opposed the move when I originally proposed it (and notified WT:JAPAN immediately), why didn't you chime in in the full month the RM was open? If you are not opposing it now, then why even bring this up? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:31, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

BTW, I think we should address the issue with the article content before talking about the title. I already did a source check on this article's sources in December (they overwhelmingly did not use the term "onna-bugeisha" but rather verified bits and pieces of the article content relating to "individual examples" of what the article was calling by that term. Content problems that should be given priority over what word we use include:

• the question of the historicity of Tomoe-gozen (who is the best-known example of an 女武者 in Japan, but mostly from outright-fictional works, and the only quasi-historical work mentioning her seems to be the Heike Monogatari[29]);
• the question of the historicity of Ōhōri Tsuruhime (who is even worse-attested than Tomoe despite living in -- or at least shortly before -- a more literate/historically-accessible time period);
• the apparent conflation of two different women called Hōjō Masako (the 12th/13th-century figure was one of the de facto rulers of Japan, but she wasn't a "martial artist" and was only a "warrior" in the sense that she was born into a warrior clan; the 16th-ish-century figure is obscure and I don't think I ever heard of her before reading this article; I removed the outright conflation, but we are now left with a reference to the mother of the poet Minamoto no Sanetomo as a "woman warrior" with no evidence that she ever engaged in any kind of martial activity, and seemingly only found her way into this article as a result of the conflation);
• the classification of Okinagatarashi-hime ("Empress Jingū", who seems not to have been given that name until roughly 500 years after she allegedly lived) as a "woman warrior" solely because she supposedly ruled Japan (Was she a sovereign in her own right or just a consort and regent? The primary sources disagree...) during a period when Japan supposedly invaded Korea (an obviously problematic issue by itself -- certainly the early Yamato state had a degree of influence on the Korean peninsula and probably some Korean states, especially Paekche, had influence on the archipelago around the same time);
• the apparent conflation of female castellans, who essentially acted as caretakers while their fathers and brothers (and maybe sons) were fighting, with women warriors, despite the fact that, by definition, a woman who looks after the house when the men are off at war is the opposite of a woman warrior (being born into the military caste and having martial arts training might justify such a classification, but this is not made clear in the present article); and
• other minor flubs of language that completely alter the meaning of key parts of the article, such as the claim that Yodo-dono challenged the Tokugawa clan, thus leading the Siege of Osaka (emphasis added).

Given all of the above, I don't think it's worth wasting time trying to figure out if the previous title was valid, or whether the current title is valid (I proposed it solely as a placeholder, based on the Nihon Jinmei Daijiten Plus and Asahi Nihon Rekishi Jinbutsu Jiten entries on Tomoe[30], and in close to a month no one presented an alternative, so it seems fruitless to complain about it), or whether some other title would be better: the article needs attention, I might have been able to give it that attention, but if I'm wasting time arguing about titles (and defending myself against bogus accusations that I myself perpetrated a hoax!), I will not only not have the time but will lose all motivation to do so. (If I'm being frank, I already have lost my motivation to do so months ago because of the aforementioned SPA trolling, hoax accusations, etc.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:47, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi, I recently found out about this issue, and as a regular at the Hispanic Wikipedia I am worried that the title Onna bugeisha is still used by every other language of Wikipedia. So, I decided to give a look over here, since whatever you lads decide will probably set precedent elsewhere.

I think that right now the article is failing conceptually. The intro still reads «These women engaged in battle alongside samurai men mainly in times of need. They were members of the bushi (samurai) class in feudal Japan and were trained in the use of weapons to protect their household, family, and honour in times of war.»

Even if we take the legends at face value, a lot of the examples listed weren’t really born into the samurai class. Ōhōri Tsuruhime was supposedly a priest’s daughter, for instance.

As of right now, the article is simply a compilation of evidence for women in warfare at various points of Japanese history. If the article can be saved, I think it would be good to drop any pretense of fanciful Japanese names and simply accept what the article is about: History of Female Warriors in Japan.

With an intro and a title that describes what the article really is about, we can then move to discuss and arrange the various examples and references presented--Plank (talk) 20:31, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

English references that use "onna-musha"

Please be as detailed as possible when adding a reference to the list below.

English references that use "onna-bugeisha"

Please be as detailed as possible when adding a reference to the list below.

English references that use some other term

Please include the other term used. Please be as detailed as possible when adding a reference to the list below.

Japanese references that use "女武者"

Please be as detailed as possible when adding a reference to the list below.

Japanese references that use "女武芸者"

Please be as detailed as possible when adding a reference to the list below.

Japanese references that use some other term

Please include the other term used. Please be as detailed as possible when adding a reference to the list below.

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• Tachibana Ginchiyo Armor.jpg

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 05:51, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• Nakano-Takeko-Portrait-Hokaiji-Temple-Kyoto.png

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 18:53, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Removed reference to Besshikime

Although it's correct that there were female guards in the Ōoku, I'm not certain how wide this practice was in the wider samurai community. Given we haven't had a citation since October 2022 I've taken it out. Besides, it's not a vital piece of information givne there's no discussion of it later in the article. John Smith's (talk) 05:08, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Onna-daimyo removed

I've removed two paragraphs. The text was mostly uncited except for the dispute over Ii Naotora's identity, and I don't think that particularly adds anything to the page. John Smith's (talk) 05:18, 10 June 2024 (UTC)