The Jōshitai: Unsung Heroines of the Boshin War – Expanded Edition
By Sumiko Nakano

They weren’t supposed to exist. Not officially. Not in the histories written by men with ink and authority. But when the Tokugawa order crumbled and war came to Aizu, the women of the Jōshitai didn’t wait for permission. They armed themselves with naginata, short swords, and resolve—and stepped into the fire.

This newly updated edition of The Jōshitai is more than a tribute. It’s a reclamation. An excavation of names, faces, and legacies that history tried to erase. Based on deeper research, expanded profiles, and newly crafted visual representations of the sixteen known women, this book brings the unsilenced voices of Aizu’s warrior women into full presence.

Led by Nakano Takeko—whose death at Yanagi Bridge became legend—the Jōshitai was an all-female combat unit formed during the Boshin War of 1868. But beyond Takeko stood her sister Yūko, the calm but deadly Hirata Kochō, the fiery Yoshi, the precise Jinbo Yukiko, the watchful strategist Okamura Makiko, the ink-stained blade Koike Chikyoku, and others whose stories remained buried in temple records, family altars, or simply silence.

They weren’t figureheads. They weren’t mascots. They fought. And many of them fell.

Set against the brutal backdrop of the siege of Aizu and the slow political erasure that followed, The Jōshitai challenges sanitized Meiji-era mythmaking and instead restores these women as they were: real, complex, and dangerous. Some were trained samurai. Others were mothers, daughters, concubines, even farmers—who picked up weapons when the men around them lay dead.

This book also includes a new postwar reflection on how Aizu paid the price for loyalty, how the women were written out of the restoration narrative, and why telling their story today still matters. For the first time, the known members of the Jōshitai are presented together—not as legends, but as witnesses. With newly generated portraits built from historical context, they are given back not only names but faces.

If you’re looking for glorified folklore, this isn’t it.

But if you want a field report from the shadows of history, written with reverence, rage, and resolve—The Jōshitai is waiting.

Learn their names. Carry them forward.