04/07/2025
Not TP, but celebrating these historically-forgotten female warriors who fought for their freedoms too.
The Forgotten Samurai Women
For centuries, we were told that the samurai were all men.
An elite brotherhood of sword-wielding warriors who lived and died by bushido.
But a quiet discovery in a Kyoto lab just rewrote that story.
In 2022, Kyoto University researchers conducted a DNA analysis on 105 skeletons from the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru, a little-known conflict from Japan’s feudal era.
What they found stunned historians.
35 of the warriors were women.
These weren’t camp followers or civilians caught in the crossfire.
They had died with weapons in their hands—buried in full battle gear, their bones marked by combat.
They fought, bled, and died like their male counterparts—yet their presence was erased from the written record.
Some may have disguised themselves as men.
Others might have fought openly, perhaps under regional lords who needed every capable fighter.
We don’t yet know all the details.
But this much is clear: their roles were real, and their stories were hidden.
It challenges everything we thought we knew about gender and war in feudal Japan.
The myth of a male-only samurai class no longer holds.
Because in the heat of battle, a warrior was a warrior—no matter the gender.
This study doesn’t just rewrite textbooks.
It gives voice to forgotten fighters who were written out of the scrolls—but not out of history.
Had you ever heard of the female samurai before this?
What else might history have erased?