Mochizuki Chiyome: Not a Ninja
Yoshimaru Katsuya dissects a modern fabrication
A few months back I covered the topic of the alleged female ninja, the kunoichi. Reading through Yoshimaru Katsuya’s discussion of the topic and exploring some of the wilder claims in the English-language literature, my conclusion was that, as Yoshimaru argues, kunoichi did not actually exist. The murderous seductress of popular ‘ninja’ lore is not an historical phenomenon; it’s better viewed as a combination of ‘60s pulp fiction and lurid sexual fantasies about ravishing yet lethal Oriental beauties.
The easiest way to disprove this thesis, of course, would be to provide a documented example of an actual kunoichi from Japanese history. And if you read through the pop literature, you might well think that there exists a great candidate in the shape of Mochizuki Chiyome (or possibly Chiyojo). Chiyome, it’s claimed, was a female ‘ninja’ in the service of Takeda Shingen, a major warlord in the mountainous provinces of central Japan during the late 16th century. Chiyome was supposedly a miko, or shrine maiden, and led a network of many other miko who engaged in spying and information-gathering for Shingen.
I’ve been meaning to write about Mochizuki Chiyome since we covered the kunoichi a while back, but what prompted me to do so now is that she’s come across my radar twice since I wrapped up the kunoichi discussion. The first instance was this post from another Substack I subscribe to, Samurai History and Culture, which features Chiyome amid a range of other historical claims about the kunoichi (she’s there at the bottom, if you scroll down). The other time was a couple of weeks ago at the Arizona Matsuri, an annual event celebrating Japanese culture just next door to me in Phoenix. I went, obviously, and next to a booth for Bujinkan ninjutsu at the Matsuri with lots of shuriken on display…
…was a booth from a local high school, Benjamin Franklin, with an exhibit on Japanese folk tales. This is awesome - I love that the BFHS kids were doing this, because it’s great whenever anyone gets into Japanese literature and/or history - but I did happen to notice this amid the otherwise excellent presentation of folk-tales:
Mochizuki Chiyome is also in at least one pop English-language book, Yoda Hiroko and Matt Alt’s 2012 Ninja Attack from Tuttle. Yoda and Alt’s account describes her existence as “confirmed” and leans pretty hard into the ‘kunoichi as seductress’ thing, giving us the stripper-ish depiction at the top of this page:
So it’s pretty clear that the story of Mochizuki Chiyome and her kunoichi is alive, well, and circulating in 2025.
The Basics of the Mochizuki Chiyome Thing
Before we go any further, let me make something clear. I am absolutely not criticizing Chris at Samurai History and Culture or the kids at the high school - they are each working in good faith with the information that’s available to them.1 The problem is that the quality of that information is terrible, and Mochizuki Chiyome is in no way an exception to that observation.
The main public challenge to the Mochizuki Chiyome thing came in 2017 in Japanese scholar Yoshimaru Katsuya’s piece “The False Story of Mochizuki Chiyome,” published in the essay collection The Birth of the Ninja, which Yoshimaru co-edited with historian Yamada Yūji.2 Yoshimaru’s piece is short, six pages in the original, so here I’ll translate and summarize as much of Yoshimaru’s argument as I can, while adding my own commentary. We begin with this:
It appears to be commonly accepted nowadays that there was a miko-slash-female ninja known as Mochizuki Chiyome during the Warring States period [1467-1600]. On Takeda Shingen’s orders, she nurtured a group of ‘travelling miko’ (aruki miko) who served as intelligence-gatherers, or so the story runs. I will claim in this article that this story is not true.3
The basics of the story, as summarized in Yoshimaru, are as follows:
Mochizuki Chiyome was a descendant of the Mochizuki clan of the Koga region - which as everyone knows, was one of the heartlands of the historical shinobi. She was the wife of a Takeda-allied warrior named Mochizuki Moritoki, who was killed in the Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima, a battle between the Takeda and Uesugi clans, in 1561.4 Shingen rewarded Chiyome for her husband’s sacrifice by making her the head of all miko, shrine maidens, in the (mostly) Takeda-held provinces of Kai and Shinano. Miko in those days were not necessarily attached to a specific shrine, but tended to wander (hence, ‘travelling’ miko), and this made them potentially useful intelligence agents. In the version of the story that Yoshimaru gives (and indeed in the version illustrated above), Chiyome grew her network to between two and three hundred female spies. Some of these, in the version recounted by Yoshimaru, used their sexual wiles to extract information from unsuspecting male targets.
So basically female ninja, or as they came to be known from the 1960s, kunoichi.
The TL:DR - This is Probably Bullshit
Let me give the main problems with this story, for those who just want the payoff from Yoshimaru’s piece:
The earliest recorded suggestion that Mochizuki Chiyome was a female ninja is a 1971 pop history, Kōshō Nihonshi, by a Japanese author named Inagaki Shisei.5
Inagaki’s history, in Yoshimaru’s view, is awful. It is sloppy, seemingly unserious, and makes assertions that are not backed up with historical evidence. (I know! A sloppy ‘ninja’ history? I’m as shocked as you are).
There does exist a document dated to the fifth month of Eiroku 12 (1569) written by Takeda Shingen and purporting to grant a person named Mochizuki Chiyome a superintendent position over miko. This document does not appear to be extant at present, and there are doubts over its reliability.
The idea of Mochizuki Chiyome being a ‘ninja’ or otherwise engaging in spying appears to be Inagaki’s own conjecture and is not supported with any evidence.
It’s unclear who Chiyome’s supposed husband, Mochizuki Moritoki, actually was or if he did in fact die at the Battle of Kawanakajima.
Inagaki’s dubious assertions about Mochizuki Chiyome were signal-boosted by an equally unreliable ‘ninja’ historian, Nawa Yumio, in his 1991 book Everything About Ninja: The Definitive Edition.6 This may well be the main point of origin for the present-day story.
This whole sequence of events appears to really piss Yoshimaru off; as he writes in conclusion:
If there is anyone out there who has any concrete historical evidence relating to Mochizuki Chiyome, I would very much like for that to be made public. Unless and until that happens, we should take the position that Mochizuki Chiyome is a story without foundation, concocted by Inagaki Shisei and Nawa Yumio with no basis in historical evidence, and that she is a fictional ninja much like Sarutobi Sasuke or Kirigakure Saizō. This reproduction of baseless ideas and spreading of erroneous information needs to stop.
As I have written elsewhere in this volume, female ninja did not exist in premodern Japan. That the story of Mochizuki Chiyome has nevertheless circulated as far as it has is probably because there are a lot of people who want female ninja to have existed. We might say, perhaps, that those who believe in Mochizuki Chiyome have been snared by the wiles of the kunoichi.7
So there you go. Basically, it’s not clear whether Mochizuki Chiyome existed, and if she did, there’s no solid information to support any of the claims about her beyond her connection to miko. The methodology on display here is, depressingly, pretty much par for the course with ‘ninja’ history.
As I said, this is the TL:DR version, so in the next couple of installments I’ll walk you through Yoshimaru’s arguments (with my own comments) in considerably more detail, so you can get a clearer sense of how this whole mess came about in the first place.
On the other hand, I do think Yoda and Alt deserve some criticism; they are obviously capable of reading and working with Japanese sources, and their book also suggests they are aware of the tendency for ‘ninja’ stories to conflate fiction with history. It’s disappointing that they didn’t attempt to track down the primary source for the Mochizuki Chiyome thing, because if they had that might have tipped them off that the whole thing is most probably horseshit. Yes, I know Ninja Attack is a fun book for general audiences, but if anything that makes it more important to make sure your info is reliable.
Yoshimaru Katsuya 吉丸雄哉, “Mochizuki Chiyome-den no kyomō” 望月千代女伝の虚妄[The False Story of Mochizuki Chiyome] in Yoshimaru, Yamada Yūji 山田雄司, eds., Ninja no tanjō 忍者の誕生 [The Birth of the Ninja] (Bensei Shuppan, 2017).
Yoshimaru Katsuya, “Mochizuki Chiyome-den no kyomō,” p. 281. Japanese text: 世間では、戦国時代に望月千代女という巫女かつ女忍者がいたことになっているらしい。武田信玄の命により「歩き巫女」を養成して情報収集につとめた、という話が流布している。本稿はこれは虚妄であることを述べるのである。
Mochizuki Moritoki 望月盛時. No dates, as it’s unclear if he existed.
Inagaki Shisei 稲垣史生, Kōshō Nihonshi 考証日本史 (Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha, 1971).
Nawa Yumio 名和弓雄, Ketteiban: Ninja no subete 決定版・忍者のすべて Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha, 1991.
Yoshimaru, p. 287. Japanese text: 望月千代女に関して、具体的な史料をお持ちの方は是非公開していただきたい。それが出揃うまでは、望月千代女が女忍者であったとするのは、稲垣史生や名和弓雄により創作された事実の裏付けのない虚説であり、望月千代女は猿飛佐助や霧暮才蔵のような架空忍者であるという態度をとるべきであろう。裏付けのない説を再生産して、虚説を広めるのは、やめるべきである。
前近代に関していえば女忍者は別章で述べた通り実在しなかった。にもかかわらず、ここまで望月千代女伝が広まったのは、女忍者に実在して欲しい願望を多くの人が持っているからであろう。望月千代女を信じる人はくのいちの忍法にかかっているといえるのかもしれない。