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700 Women in the Martial Arts: Japan
newspapers. And, even though the fighters probably tried to exert some
control, there were many injuries.
In addition to challenge matches, members of the troupe would engage
each other in contests, pitting women armed with wooden naginata
against men armed with wooden or bamboo swords. One of the most remarkable
of these female fighters was Murakami Hideo, who became a
seventeenth-generation headmistress of the Toda-ha Buko-ryû. Murakami’s
life story cries for a novel. Born in Shikoku in 1863, she studied Shizukaryû
Naginata-jutsu as a girl. When her teacher died, she left home while
still teenaged to study other systems. Then this staunch, tiny woman continued
her wanderings in Honshu, traveling alone, testing her skill against
other fighters, studying as she went. Imagine, if you will, a young woman,
little more than a girl, marching through the Japanese countryside alone,
without employment, walking from one dôjô to another.
Murakami reached Tokyo while in her early twenties and became a
student of Komatsuzaki Kotoko, and possibly Yazawa Isako, the fifteenthand
sixteenth-generation teachers of the Toda Ha Buko-ryû. By now she
was very strong, and so she was awarded the highest license (menkyo
kaiden) in the school while still in her twenties.
Unable to read or write, Murakami was unable to make much of a living,
so she joined the gekken kôgyô. Fighting with a chain-and-sickle or
naginata, she took all challenges from the audiences. There are no reports
of her ever losing. In her later years, she was able to make ends meet as a
teacher—her dôjô in the Kanda area of Tokyo was called the Shûsuikan
(Hall of the Autumn Water)—but she was always poor. According to those
who knew her in her old age, she was a tiny, kind, but wary woman, always
ready to invite one to supper. She could drink anyone under the table.
As far as is known, she lived alone and she died alone.
As these matches were for the paid entertainment of the audience,
they soon degenerated to what must be considered the pro wrestling of the
Meiji period (1867–1910), with waitresses serving drinks in abbreviated kimono
and drunken patrons cheering in the stands. Matches became dramatic
exhibitions, vulgar parodies of the austere warrior culture from
which they had emerged. Discouraged at times by the police, who regarded
them as a threat to public order, the gekken kôgyô were disbanded by the
1920s. Nonetheless, they can be regarded as the first precursors of modern
martial sport in Japan—competition for the sake of comparing skills and
entertaining an audience.
Women’s Martial Art Training, 1920–1945
As martial arts continued to be integrated into public education, the practice
of naginata came to a crossroads. Jûdô, kendô, and later karate were