The right answer is the first one: women and children were recruited and trained to fight by government militias. This occurred in 1945, when the People's Heroic Fighting Corps, or Volunteer Fighting Corps (Kokumin Giyūtai) were created in order to protect their members against the foreseeable invasion of Japan by the Allied forces at the end of World War II. Boys and girls as young as 12 years old, and even elderly people, were members of this civilian militia, instructed to fight until the end, even with bamboo spears as their only weapons.