There was this book written by Stephen Turnbull which said that some archeological findings in Japan showed that out of 105 graves (possibly head graves), 35 were women and he then concluded that 1/3 of all Samurai were actually women.
Surprisingly he did not issue a source for this. However battlefield graves do not necessary imply they were warriors, they could’ve been prisoners who were killed in battle for example. Many were known to kill tens of thousands of prisoners. They were also head graves (apparently) they found.
There seems to be a stark contradiction—Stephen Turnbull also says that the written records indicate Samurai were overwhelmingly male, but he uses this archeological finding to deduce that 1/3 of Samurai were female. What do you think about this contradiction?
(2) was Japan during the Samurai male dominated?
This is quite a divergence from what I had learned about the Samurai. I seemed to have learned about female oppression by the Samurai and Japanese males during this time as this time was very regressive for women, however Stephen Turnbull paints a different picture. What do you think?
His book is called “Samurai Women 1184-1877”. The archeological reference was in the introduction.
EDIT: Also note there were many negative reviews on this book online criticizing his logic about the head graves and assuming they were all warriors etc etc.
Note that I have not (and have no plans to) actually read Turnbull's book because...Turnbull.
But we've addressed this claim before here.
The Numazu mound (the burial mound in question) is said to be the burial of heads from the dead in the 1580 campaign in the area. The original mound began washing into the sea in the Meiji and so they were reburied in the current location. Compared to the others mentioned in the research, the Numazu mound is not special that it contained a significant number of female skulls (IDed by shape of bone, not DNA), but that there were no children present among the dead.
But back to the topic. All we can tell from the dead excavated at Kamakura, Haraichi, Edosaki, and Numazu is that about a fifth to a third of the victim of violent deaths buried in these mounds were female, not that a fifth to a third of the regular combatants were female. That's a huge difference. Considering the Numazu mound's male:female ratio is more-or-less in line with the other three, where the female would be the women caught in a siege when the defences fell, it says to me that they were just women of the local population caught in the crossfire. In fact, Haraichi and Edosaki were castle sieges and had 20% and 25% of female dead respectively. Kamakura was a vibrant city that fell to an assault and had 30% female. That Numazu was in line with Kamakura, with 33%, rather than Haraichi and Edosaki might be due to the fact that the castle's native population would make up a smaller portion of the besieged population, and therefore the vast majority of the reinforcements that entered the castle to bolster the garrison before the siege, the vast majority of whom were probably regular combatants, would be male. So the Haraichi and Edosaki excavations with significanty fewer females than males and slightly fewer proportion of females than Kamakura in fact is evidence in my eyes that the vast majority of regular combatants were male. Numazu’s ratio is closer to Kamakura’s than the other two because, being the dead from a field campaign, the native (general) population made up of a larger portion of the dead than in the castle sieges. That’s my hypothesis anyway.
Mind you many of the women likely actively resisted, just as the women caught in sieges all over the world played a vital part of the defensive effort, including combat in many cases. But that didn't make them soldiers or warriors in the traditional sense.
We do in fact know that throughout Japanese history, as with throughout history of the rest of the world, there were female combatants. We have mentions of them in recorded history. However we have fantastic record keeping from the Sengoku period, included a lot of mobilization records. While obviously incomplete, it does give us an idea about who's usually called up for war. And I do not know of a single mobilization records that list women combatants. When names are mentioned in mobilization records it's always men. It doesn't mean mobilization records mentioning women don't exist, but if they do they must be the exception. And I believe the written record of some women's exceptional performance as combatants throughout history show that women in active combat was the exception, not the rule. If it was the rule and widespread, no one would pay attention to it.
So in short: