In a Man’s Voice: The Documents of the Nun Jukei and the Imagawa Warlords in the Sixteenth-Century

The life of the woman known to us as Jukei-ni (the nun Jukei [d. 1568]), was likely extraordinary, but what is indubitably extraordinary is the body of missives she left behind. The widow of the powerful warlord Imagawa Ujichika (d. 1526*) and the mother of his heir(s), Jukei-ni issued more than two dozen documents in her own name over the course of several years, when she twice (or thrice!) took the reins of the Imagawa house during succession crises. Governing on behalf of her young son (and perhaps her ailing husband), orchestrating another son’s ascent to the house headship, Jukei-ni exercised power with a degree of visibility uncommon—if not unique—among women of the warrior class. Other wives and widows may well have played similarly active political roles on occasion, and it is possible that, unbeknownst to us, some issued directives and rulings as Jukei-ni did. But if that was the case their output has not survived, leaving us with Jukei-ni’s corpus precariously poised between representative and exceptional. Spafford’s presentation analyses a sampling of this corpus as an unusual window onto warrior houses’ internal dynamics and the role of wives and mothers within kinship networks. 

This event will take place in-person only event.

Reischauer Institute Japan Forum