The male commanders of Aizu had already said no. There would be no formal unit of women warriors, no official role for the daughters and wives of samurai who wanted to stand in the castle's defense. The military structure of Aizu domain had no provision for it, and the commanders were not inclined to improvise. The answer was no, and it was final.

Nakano Takeko (中野竹子, Nakano Takeko) heard the answer and walked onto the battlefield anyway.

She was 21 years old. Born in April 1847 into a samurai family of Aizu domain, she had trained in the naginata (薙刀, naginata) — the curved-blade polearm traditionally mastered by samurai women — since childhood. She had become skilled enough to teach it, running her own classes in Edo. The naginata was not merely a weapon for her; it was the axis of her life's training, the physical expression of a tradition that stretched back centuries through the samurai class. When the Boshin War (戊辰戦争, Boshin Sensō) swept north in 1868, she returned to Aizu to fight.

By late September 1868, the situation was dire. Imperial forces — armies from Satsuma (薩摩, Satsuma), Choshu (長州, Chōshū), and allied domains — had moved through northern Japan, crushing domain after domain. Aizu-Wakamatsu (会津若松, Aizu-Wakamatsu) was now the last major holdout of the pro-Tokugawa north. The Aizu lord had been installed as protector of Kyoto specifically because of his unswerving loyalty to the shogunate — and now that loyalty was about to cost his domain everything. The formal siege of Tsuruga Castle (鶴ヶ城, Tsuruga-jō — also known as Aizu-Wakamatsu Castle) would begin on October 6.

Takeko did not wait. She organized approximately twenty to thirty women — her sister Yūko (優子, Yūko), her mother, and others who refused to remain passive — into an informal corps armed with naginata. The male commanders who had declined to grant them official status made no attempt to physically stop them. The women took up positions alongside the castle's defenders as the imperial ring tightened.

The corps would later be named the Jōshitai (娘子隊, Jōshitai — 'Girls' Army'), though not until decades later, when Admiral Dewa Shigetō formally commemorated them in the 1920s. At the time, they had no name. They were simply women with blades, fighting for the only home they had ever known.

The climax of Takeko's story came on October 16, 1868. She led her corps in a charge against imperial troops from Ogaki Domain at the Yanagi bridge in the Nishibata area outside the castle walls. What happened next became one of the most striking moments of the entire Boshin War: the imperial commanders, seeing women advancing with naginata, ordered their men to hold fire. Whether from chivalry, shock, or simple hesitation, the rifles stayed down.

Takeko did not waste the opening. She drove her corps into the imperial lines, and she killed at least five soldiers — possibly six — before a bullet finally caught her in the chest.

Mortally wounded, she did not ask for help or surrender. She turned to her sister Yūko, still standing on the battlefield, and made a single request: cut off her head before the enemy could take it as a trophy.

Yūko obeyed. With the help of an Aizu soldier named Ueno Yoshisaburō (上野義三郎, Ueno Yoshisaburō), she carried out her sister's final wish. Then she carried Takeko's head on foot to the nearby Hōkai Temple (法界寺, Hōkai-ji) — the family temple — and buried it beneath a pine tree.

The grave is still there today. A cherry tree has since grown over it, and every autumn the Aizu region honors Nakano Takeko's memory at festival.

Aizu itself surrendered on November 6, 1868. The Jōshitai women who survived were taken prisoner with the rest of the castle's defenders. But the story of the woman who had been turned away and gone anyway — who had used her enemies' hesitation to fight and died demanding control of her own ending — refused to stay buried with her.