Women of Aizu: Yae and Takeko, Inside and Outside the Castle

Aizu, 1868. Yamamoto Yae joined those holding Tsuruga Castle and fought the government’s forces. Her image with a firearm became a defining scene through which her name was remembered. Yet her life continued for many years after the fighting at the castle had ended. That later time also belongs to her history.

Three years later she moved to Kyoto and became involved in women’s education. Later still she joined the Japanese Red Cross Society and helped care for soldiers wounded or made ill in war. From Aizu to Kyoto, her work moved from handling a firearm toward classrooms and the learning and practice of nursing.

Nakano Takeko, also remembered for the fighting in Aizu, followed a different path. She fought while heading toward the castle and received a fatal wound. Combining the two women into one heroic image makes it harder to see the different places they occupied and the different time available to them afterward.

This article follows events inside and outside the castle, the work of sustaining daily life, and learning after the war. In that sequence, it seeks to return the history of Aizu’s women to individual lives. Their actions shared a setting, but their experiences and outcomes should not become interchangeable.

Yae was born into the household of Yamamoto Gonpachi, a gunnery instructor serving the Aizu domain. Kakuma was her elder brother. The family names introduced in Doshisha University’s account recur when following her life from Aizu toward Kyoto. Family provided connections across otherwise very different stages of her life.

Access to an environment in which gunnery was learned offers an entry into considering her work during the siege. Handling a firearm amid conflict is preceded by time spent learning and acquiring skills. Yae’s actions had a background of knowledge connected with her household, rather than beginning only at the castle.

That experience cannot be extended to the women of Aizu as a whole. Even among people inside the same castle, the families in which they grew up and the skills they had acquired differed. Yae used a firearm as one person with that particular background. She does not establish a uniform pattern for everyone around her.

Later accounts also show her involved in education and learning nursing. When looking across the ways knowledge became work during her life, growing up in a gunnery instructor’s household belongs among its early stages. The later work should be followed in sequence rather than read back into childhood as a predetermined outcome.

Aizuwakamatsu City’s Boshin 150th-anniversary publication introduces Yae’s involvement in cooking and caring for injured people during the siege. Work attending to daily needs thus overlaps with the record of a person who used a weapon. The same biography contains several kinds of contribution.

Preparing food in an encircled castle and supporting those who were hurt enabled people to face another day. The expression defending a castle can include work maintaining the lives of its occupants. Its meaning is broader when the people eating, resting and receiving care remain in the account.

Those using weapons and those sustaining daily life cannot always be divided into separate groups. The cooking and care associated with Yae prompt us to consider several roles undertaken by one person. A division useful for describing tasks should not automatically become a division between different sets of people.

Knowing of her later relief work draws attention to this care during the siege. Yet migration, educational work and many years lay between the two periods. Those intervening stages matter. The path from one setting to the other needs to be followed in order rather than compressed into one immediate change of purpose.

Takeko’s grave is at Hokaiji Temple in Aizubange. The town also introduces belongings associated with her that remain at the temple. After the fighting, her name continued to be remembered through such places and objects. They provide a way of approaching her memory without reconstructing an exact scene of death.

Looking back from the grave places the image of a warrior beside a life cut short. Takeko did not have the years in Kyoto or the new work that Yae subsequently experienced. The difference concerns the continuation of a person’s time, not simply a different ending to a battle scene.

That difference does not fit a scale for comparing courage. One person died in Aizu; another survived and later moved elsewhere. Setting their outcomes beside one another helps reveal what war did to the time of individual lives. It does not require ranking the women’s actions against one another.

Keeping Takeko’s remembered name at Hokaiji in Aizu, the account next follows Yae’s movement. Three years after 1868, in 1871, she traveled to Kyoto, where her brother was living. The shift in place begins another period of work and relationships in her life.

The Nyokōba belonged to the educational setting for women in Meiji-era Kyoto. Kyoto City’s explanation describes the opening of the Shin’ei Gakkō Nyokōba in 1872, teaching English and domestic studies. Yae’s educational work took place in a period when such institutions were emerging; the institution’s curriculum does not identify every subject she personally taught.

She subsequently married Niijima Jō and became involved in Doshisha’s activities. The National Diet Library describes a school for girls as contributing to the foundation of what became Doshisha Women’s College. The account thus extends from work in one educational setting toward another associated with Doshisha.

Her work at the Nyokōba, life with Jō and involvement in women’s education connected with Doshisha formed different settings for her activity. Years supporting places of learning became part of the life of someone who had known gunnery. The continuity of a life did not mean that its tasks remained unchanged.

Moving from Aizu to Kyoto was a movement on a map and also a change in where she worked. In 1890, after Jō’s death, Yae widened her activity into another field. The later transition belongs after these educational years, rather than immediately after the castle’s surrender.

The Japanese Red Cross Society’s historical exhibition dates the beginning of its relief-personnel training to 1890 and a standardized nursing textbook to 1896. Systems for teaching and learning developed alongside the work of caring for sick and wounded people. This is an institutional history that provides a setting for the discussion.

That training history cannot simply be assigned to Yae as an individual course record. The Red Cross newspaper separately states that, besides obtaining a certificate of study, she served as an assistant instructor at a nursing school. Her particular record and the organization’s general chronology need to remain distinguishable.

Yae, who had been involved in women’s education in Kyoto, also undertook learning and teaching in nursing. Developing people able to give care can pass knowledge toward subsequent workers as well as support immediate relief. Teaching therefore adds another kind of work to the account of care.

Beyond a description of someone who fought bravely are acquired skills and work continued over time. Gunnery, women’s education and nursing belonged to different settings in Yae’s life. Following her between them carries the account beyond the fighting in Aizu, without assuming that she completed every stage of the general training system.