Yamamoto Yae (
山本 八重) (
pr. Yah-eh) (1845-1932; Niijima Yae after her second marriage ) may well be one of the most obscure military history figures I’ve ever come across, and I believe that might even have been true in her native Japan until relatively recently. She shouldn’t be, at least IMHO. She might be the first woman of the gunpowder era to
openly fight in a war as a female rifleman and soldier,
without resorting to gender blending disguise (as some women did during the American Civil War, to give one example of women who fought in armies during that time).
Born to a lower level samurai in her native Aizu in the Tohoku (northeast) region of Japan (in what is today Fukushima prefecture), she was fascinated by and obsessed with the Yamamoto family’s hereditary vocation of artillery and firearms from a very young age. Needless to say, her father Gonpachi and her social circle were not exactly encouraging of this interest, and she resorted to stealing her father’s gunnery books to study them on the sly, teaching herself the basic knowledge of how cannons and rifles worked. At some point, either her father or her much older brother Kakuma (by 17 years) finally relented and began to teach her how to actually handle and fire these weapons, and by her late teens she had become a very skilled marksman. But her activity was limited to firing at targets in her home firing range and helping out in their gunsmith shop with maintenance and weapons development with her by-then husband Kawasaki Shonosuke, a peer of her brother and also a weapons expert (perhaps the only man who would consent to marry this “oddball” of a woman, as he himself put it).
Her limited firearms activity changed dramatically in 1868, when the final vestiges of the decaying Tokugawa shogunate collapsed during the Boshin War and Japan entered the Meiji era and rapid cultural, technological/industrial, and military change that transformed the small feudal country into a world power in just a few decades. The Boshin War was the final paroxysm in a process that really began when Admiral Perry sailed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay in 1853, beginning a period of social/political upheaval that culminated in the multiple rebellions and conflicts of the 1860s, in which several feudal clans (acting both independently and then in league) brought down the military government that had kept Japan at peace since the 1600s.
Unfortunately for Yae, her family, and her entire clan, the Aizu feudal lords were descendants of blood relations from the Tokugawa ruling family and fiercely loyal to the Shogun. So, when the last Tokugawa Shogun, Lord Yoshinobu, abdicated and submitted to the “Imperial” forces (in reality rebel/rival clans who had coopted the young emperor in a bid for power), the Aizu were branded the new “rebels.” Their once substantial army (one of the most powerful of the feudal clans) was forced to flee from Kyoto (where they were stationed as military peacekeepers) back to their homeland to await the inevitable punitive invasion force. In fact, the last remnants of Shogun-loyal clans (mostly from the north with close ties to Aizu) formed an alliance to defend themselves from whom they considered usurpers to the legitimate government, even though the new government now had formal imperial support.
(Confused yet? Don’t feel bad, it’s ridiculously complicated and byzantine and took me months to figure out, and I’m making an effort to keep it as simple as possible for people unfamiliar. I still don’t really know it well.)
When the last of the outer defensive perimeter cities and blocking forces were defeated by October of 1868, Aizu lay wide open to the imperial forces who quickly tried to press home their advantage with momentum. But Yae and her fellow compatriots had other ideas. Aizu had been slow to modernize with modern weaponry and tactics, but they were by no means totally unprepared. The French had been staunch supporters of the shogunate and had supplied them with at least 3000 of their breech-loading Chassepot rifles, as well as with military advisers some of whom ended up staying and fighting alongside their clients. However, most of Aizu’s soldiers were still equipped with older muzzle-loading muskets, and many samurai still relied on their katana and yari spears for combat. The rival clans Satsuma and Choshu were far more aggressive in acquiring modern weaponry, including Armstrong cannons and thousands of Minié rifles, as well as Enfields and Snider-Enfield breech loaders. More importantly they completely reorganized and rearmed using larger units of peasants trained to use them alongside their samurai, while the Aizu/shogunate side still clung to a more traditional samurai/ashigaru-reliant military model.
Yae’s younger brother volunteered early in the conflict and was sent to Kyoto where he was killed at the Battle of Toba-Fushimi, a crushing turning point where a small but well-armed Satsuma/Choshu force defeated a much larger but poorly equipped and led shogunate army. According to the TV series
Yae no Sakura (more on this later), Yae put on her brother’s bullet riddled uniform, cut off her hair (and by that I mean down to the length of a modern long ponytail, which was considered short for a woman) and took her trusty Spencer repeating carbine (a gift from her elder brother Kakuma that he acquired from German arms dealer Carl Lehmann) with her into the main castle, joining the women, children, and elderly of all the samurai families who were required to enter the castle during times of siege. Many of these families did not, believing they would be a burden to the fight and over two hundred women and children of these samurai families committed ritual suicide in their homes rather than submit to the conquerors.
During the month-long battle, Yae fought as one of the rifle corps, occasionally leading squads due to her extensive tactical knowledge on how to deploy musket armed troops, as well as helping to direct artillery fire. She also helped the other samurai wives and daughters with their tasks of tending to the wounded, putting out fires, cooking, cleaning, washing, etc., and in some incredible instances extinguishing delayed-fuse cannonballs with wet blankets at extreme mortal peril. She participated in night raids into enemy camps, where her Spencer carbine held a distinct advantage. But perhaps most importantly, she fought as one of the men, using a rifle and leading them in western style line-fire or maneuver tactics. She did not wield a katana or naginata, or wear traditional armor and participate in glorious heroic combat, which would have followed a notable but limited heritage of the
onna-bugeisha (female warrior). And she survived. Her father, a senior artillery officer, was killed in a virtually suicidal resupply mission, and her elder brother was long ago captured by the enemy and tortured to within an ounce of his life (he would recover, maimed and blinded, and eventually become a pillar of Meiji era Kyoto and educational reform). After a month of brutal shelling and pitched battle, the castle and the lord of Aizu finally capitulated, and most of the surviving clan forcibly moved to another domain while the rest scattered throughout Japan.
Yae would live a long and almost unbelievably eventful life, as if fighting with a rifle in war as a woman in 1868 Japan wasn’t incredible enough. She would: reunite with her brother in Kyoto; learn English; marry an American-educated Japanese Christian minister (Joseph Niijima, who stowed away on a ship and landed in Massachusetts where he graduated from Amherst) and convert to Christianity herself; help him found one of the first private English-language-based schools in Japan which eventually became an university system (the Doshisha in Kyoto); become a military nurse with the newly formed Japanese Red Cross, where she became a senior member who helped train nurses because of her experiences with battlefield wounds during the Boshin War; participate as a nurse in both the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars around the turn of the century; and become the first non-royal woman to be given an Imperial medal (actually, two of them) for her nursing service during those wars (a most ironic thing given her past association with those Aizu “rebels”). Oh, and she also became one of the first female tea masters ever, as well as becoming proficient at flower arrangement.
Yae in her forties, long after the war and during her "happy years" in Kyoto:
An elderly Yae, holding a rifle once again (not a Spencer I don't think):
