Tomoe Gozen: the woman warrior of the Genpei War

The war tales place Tomoe in two battles of the Genpei War. The Tale of the Heike puts her in Kiso Yoshinaka's last fight at Awazu, near Ōtsu on Lake Biwa, in the first month of 1184. The longer Genpei jōsuiki adds that in 1183 she commanded about a thousand riders at Tonamiyama, the battle of Kurikara pass.¹

Kiso Yoshinaka and the Genpei War

The Genpei War of 1180 to 1185 was fought between two warrior houses, the Taira and the Minamoto. Minamoto no Yoshinaka, born in 1154, was raised in the Kiso valley of Shinano by Nakahara Kanetō, the husband of his wet nurse, and so became known as Kiso Yoshinaka. In 1180 he raised troops against the Taira.²

In 1183 Yoshinaka routed a Taira army at Kurikara pass, also called Tonamiyama, and entered Kyoto, where he became known as the Asahi shōgun, the rising sun general. He soon fell out with the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa, and in the first month of 1184 he was named shōgun (seii taishōgun in the traditional account; some historians read the title as seitō 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?

In the Tale of the Heike, Tomoe is one of two women Kiso Yoshinaka brought from Shinano. The tale describes her as fair-skinned, long-haired and beautiful, a strong archer and a swordswoman worth a thousand warriors, ready to face a god or a demon. She had taken the field many times and won renown that no other warrior matched.⁴

The Tale of the Heike is a war tale, not a chronicle. Blind monks chanted it to the biwa lute, and it survives in many versions. The text most people read today is the one fixed by the reciter Kakuichi in 1371, almost two centuries after Awazu.⁵

The tale names the second woman as Yamabuki, who had fallen ill and stayed behind in the capital. It gives Tomoe no age, family or rank. Japanese reference works add that she was a daughter of Nakahara Kanetō, which makes her a sister of Yoshinaka's foster brothers Imai Kanehira and Higuchi Kanemitsu, and they describe her as Yoshinaka's concubine. Some later accounts and print titles call her his wife.⁶

What did Tomoe Gozen do at the Battle of Awazu?

In the Heike, Tomoe stays at Yoshinaka's side until his band at Awazu is cut down to five riders. He orders her to leave, since dying with a woman beside him would shame him. She charges about thirty men, pulls their leader Onda no Hachirō Moroshige from his horse and takes his head, then sheds her armor and rides east.⁷

Yoshinaka rode on with Imai Kanehira. His horse sank into an ice-covered rice field, an arrow struck him in the face and he was beheaded. Kanehira then killed himself by leaping from his horse with the point of his sword in his mouth. In this version the tale says nothing more about Tomoe.⁸

What happened to Tomoe Gozen after Awazu?

Nobody knows. The longer Genpei jōsuiki says she was summoned to Kamakura, spared at the request of Wada Yoshimori, married him, bore a son, Asahina Yoshihide, and became a nun after the Wada family fell in 1213. Japanese reference works also record traditions that she went home to Kiso or became a nun in Echigo.⁹

The Genpei jōsuiki is an expanded reading text of the Heike story in 48 books, compiled late in the Kamakura period or in the 14th century. It gives Tomoe more fights at Awazu, among them the killing of Uchida Ieyoshi, and has her live to the age of 90 or 91.¹⁰

The Wada story has a problem with dates. The Azuma kagami, the chronicle of the Kamakura shogunate, gives Asahina Yoshihide's age as 38 in 1213, which puts his birth around 1176, years before Tomoe could have reached Kamakura. Japanese reference works and the historian Hamada Kōichirō therefore treat the marriage as a later invention.¹¹

Was Tomoe Gozen real?

Possibly, but nothing proves it. No letter, diary or chronicle from her lifetime names her, and she is missing from the Azuma kagami, the main chronicle of the period. Every story about her comes from war tales recited or written down long after 1184, so historians cannot test those stories against an independent record.¹²

Scholars weigh this silence differently. The EBSCO Research Starter by R. C. Lutz says most scholars think she was a real person around whom legends grew, while the Los Angeles County Museum of Art notes that some scholars believe she was entirely fictional. The literary scholar Steven T. Brown, as quoted by National Geographic, finds it impossible to say where history ends and literary construct begins.¹³

Women of warrior families could take up arms. The Azuma kagami records that in 1201, during a rising of the Jō family in Echigo, a woman known as Hangaku fought as an archer until an arrow in the thigh brought her down. Taken to Kamakura, she was married to the warrior Asari Yoshitō. Hangaku shows that a woman in arms was possible in Tomoe's world; she does not prove that Tomoe existed. For women who fought in other ages, see our guide to women warriors in history.¹⁴

How is Tomoe Gozen remembered?

Mostly through the stage and through prints. In the noh play Tomoe her ghost appears to a traveling monk at Awazu and grieves that she could not die with Yoshinaka. Edo-period artists drew her fights; a print by Ishikawa Toyonobu from about 1750, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows her killing Uchida Ieyoshi at Awazu.¹⁵

In the play a monk from Kiso 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 and tells the story of his last battle, asking him to pray for her. Her version differs from the Heike: she fights with a halberd, Yoshinaka takes his own life, and he orders her to live and carry word of his death home to Kiso.¹⁶

The Tomoe of the Kakuichi Heike is a small 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 warrior class she belonged to, see how the samurai compared with the knights of Europe.