(Part 1 of 2) Note for avoiding confusion: In this post, I’m using some primary sources that give ages in the old Japanese calendar reckoning, by which a child is aged one at birth then ages one year every New Year’s. However, I’ll use modern Western-style ages in my own writing, and when quoting a primary source, note the Western age equivalents.

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In the Edo period, marriage between the ages of seven and twelve was not particularly common. I’m guessing your survey of Wikipedia articles is skewed by daimyo family marriages. These high born ladies are the samurai women most likely to have their own Wikipedia articles, but are not representative of the entire warrior class. Much like European royals and high nobility, marriage alliances might need cementing at the earliest age possible. So, for example in 1685, the “dog shogun” Tsunayoshi married his daughter Tsuru-hime to the heir of Kii Domain (a branch of the Tokugawa family), when she was eight years old and the groom twenty. The hope was that Tsuru and her husband would produce an heir for the otherwise childless shogun. Despite her early marriage age, though, Tsuru-hime's first recorded pregnancy (which she miscarried) was in 1696, at age 19.

A bit more insight on these early marriages: Another adopted daughter of Tsunayoshi’s married at age ten, but only moved in with her husband at age thirteen. Daimyo marriages throughout the Edo Period are not my area of interest but I think even in these childhood marriages, you can see delays of first pregnancies and actually living together. You might want to google Cecilia Segawa Seigle’s writings on women related or married into the shogun’s family for more details.

Figuring out the average age of marriage for samurai in the Edo Period is almost impossible. There simply aren’t enough consistently kept records to do that. I took a look at some literature on Edo Period marriage age and found that while demographers/historians have taken a shot at the average for peasant marriage, there is no data (in English at least) about the average age of marriage among samurai. However, it is often mentioned that samurai women generally married younger than their peasant counterparts.

In his paper “Rediscovering Women in Tokugawa Japan”, Yutaka Yabuta sums up some marriage-age estimations for peasants:

As a pioneer of demographic research in Japan, Professor Akira Hayami contributed to women’s studies by investigating peasant-class family histories in Mino (Gifu prefecture) that covered a period of nearly one hundred years. He found that by the 19th century it had become usual for women to postpone their marriages by working outside the family for a few years. As a result, the average marriage age of the middle to lower classes rose to 25, while upper-class women usually married at the age of 21. (p. 3)

(This trend of women leaving their birth home to work before their marriage isn’t completely unrelated to samurai marriage. Middle and lower samurai in Edo often sent their teenage daughters into service in higher houses, as a sort of “finishing school” where they’d be polished up, acquire some culture, and learn domestic skills. So, there are a lot of Edo-based samurai women who were a little older than the following estimates at first marriage.)

My own impression from reading so many biographies and poring over family trees is that a very normal age for a samurai girl’s first marriage was fourteen to seventeen, with boys commonly married between seventeen and twenty. But I’ve put my recollections to the test, and here’s what some of the few sources I’ve found have to say.

Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life by Kikue Yamakawa, translated by Kate Wildman Nakai, is one of the best books we have on the everyday life of samurai women. The book is based on the documents and recollections of Yamakawa’s mid 19th century samurai grandparents’ generation. Yamakawa relates that women largely married between fourteen and seventeen (between thirteen and sixteen by our reckoning).

As an example of how young these Mito samurai considered way too young, she relates an incident where the daimyo of Mito tried to arrange a marriage between two mid-level samurai families whom he favoured. Neither family approved of the marriage. The young girl in question had some health problems/may have had a level of mental retardation (judging by the description), so in respectfully declining the daimyo’s generous plans for a marriage, the families explained that despite being in her mid teens the girl seemed too young for marriage “like a child of twelve or thirteen” (eleven or twelve, by our reckoning).

Another piece of evidence for marriage age expectations I found in Tokugawa retainer Katsu Kokichi’s 1843 introduction to his autobiography. He addresses his grandchildren with advice:

Girls — from the age of ten learn how to arrange men's hair in proper samurai style and to fix your own hair as well. Take up sewing. From about thirteen do things for yourself and learn to read and write as well as the average person. For then, even after you are married, you will have no trouble managing your household.”

–p. 3 Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai

Kokichi thus expected his granddaughters to marry some while after they turned thirteen (twelve by our reckoning) and started really immersing themselves in household management.

Katsu Kokichi’s life itself, btw, is illustrative of how an ordinary samurai family might deal with a marriage contracted in childhood. Although Kokichi officially married his wife Nobuko when he was sixteen, he was contracted to marry her at age seven, when he was adopted as the heir of the Katsu family. (I don’t know Nobuko’s age, but she was also a young child.) Nobuko and her grandmother were the last surviving members of the Katsu family, so they moved into the large compound of Kokichi’s birth family. From then on, young Kokichi had to live in the rooms belonging to his adoptive grandmother/grandmother-in-law and his future wife. So, although these two children weren’t officially married, they lived together until they could be. Kokichi had many issues with this set-up, but they were with the grandmother, he never mentions Nobuko as a child.

Another insight on samurai marriage ages comes from a samurai of Tosa domain:

Minoura Yukinao wrote that by the start of the nineteenth century, families were rushing everything for their children, including arranging their marriages at younger and younger ages. “Because they do not yet know the way of adulthood, the husband looks askance at his wife and then they divorce, leading to relations between hitherto friendly families suddenly ceasing in a morning” (Minoura 2010: 64). One strategy that families used to deal with this was to have the daughter live informally in the groom’s home for some months beforehand to see if the couple compatible. Sasaki Takayuki writes that the daughter of a fellow samurai came to live with him in informal marriage when he was sixteen, but even so after four months they divorced. His second marriage, begun at age seventeen, lasted only until he was nineteen (Sasaki 1970: 30–31, 33, 47). In 1760 Mori Hirosada engaged his thirteen-year-old daughter Otsune to Inoue Saemon, the son of a close friend, but she remained at home until she was old enough to actually marry.

-p. 55-56 “Growing Up Manly Male Samurai Childhood in Late Edo-Era Tosa” by Luke S. Roberts, in Child’s Play Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan Edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall

Luke Roberts’ examples show how even teenage marriages could be implemented by steps, and the fragile experimental nature of many first marriages. Reading samurai biographies I'm always struck by how often there's a first teenage marriage that doesn't last. The initiative for ending these short "trial marriages" would have come from the families, not the young people themselves, but indirectly, the behaviour and satisfaction of the young couple could make the situation work or not for their elders.