Samurajkvinnor – kvinnokrigarna på 1500-talet

Samurajkvinnor - kvinnokrigarna från tiden när Japan enades This lecture takes us across land and sea in 16th-century Japan, when samurai women stood at the helm, on castle walls and on battlefields, weapons in hand.

In Japanese and Western accounts of history, these female warriors have been sentimentalised and overshadowed by the powerful warlords who unified Japan – Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu Shōgun.

Drawing on written sources, oral traditions and archaeological finds, Karl-Axel Knutson (Kenjutsu Sweden) now seeks to bring the female samurai of battlefields and sieges out of obscurity and tell their story, while we debunk modern myths about how they lived and died in battle!

Karl-Axel Knutson has worked in Japan for 10 years and has been a translator for 15 years. In this lecture, we will see both documentary evidence and practical demonstrations of how the samurai passed on their secret fighting techniques almost 500 years ago.