Tagawa met and married a Han Chinese Hoklo named Zheng Zhilong from Nan'an, Fujian, China who frequently traded with the Japanese in Hirado.

In one of them she, along with other Japanese girls from Samurai families, were waiting on the Daimyō Matsuura at an evening party when she met Zheng.

[8] Another one by Liu Xianting [zh] in Guangyang Zaji (廣陽雜記) said that Tagawa was a widow when she met Zheng.

He started crying but a Japanese widow who was standing inside the gate of her house saw him and asked him what was wrong.

[9][10] She gave birth to Koxinga during a trip with her husband when she was picking seashells on the Senli Beach, Sennai River Bank (川內浦千里濱), Hirado.

However, the group of traders working with Captain China wanted to arrange for a Chinese woman, Lady Yan to marry Zheng Zhilong.

[20] "Japan Magazine: A Representative Monthly of Things Japanese, Volume 19" attributes both sons to Tagawa and Zheng Zhilong.

Koxinga, upon hearing of the invasion, immediately returned to Quanzhou, only to discover that his mother had killed herself in a refusal to surrender to the Manchus.

[23][31] The Japanese celebrate how Tagawa committed suicide while fighting and claim that the Manchus said "If the women of Japan are of such sort, what must the men be like?"

[19][32] The Japanese play The Battles of Coxinga said "Even though she was a woman, she did not forget her old home, and paid reverence to the land that gave her birth.

"[24][33][34] The Japanese claim she committed suicide while fighting and that she preferred "death" and had the "Yamato spirit" while what really occurred is unknown because of the many different versions offered from different sources.

Some Chinese records indicated that this is because after she moved to Quanzhou, an old ironsmith neighbour, Weng Yihuang (翁翌皇),[41] treated this foreigner newcomer like his own daughter.

B Posonby-Fane pushed the theory that Tagawa was a Japanese woman from a high class Samurai background.

It is agreed by modern historians that she was neither and that she was a Japanese girl from an average Samurai family, not of high rank and not a prostitute.

"[60][61][62][63] In Koxinga Memorial Temple (鄭成功祠) in Tainan, Taiwan, Tagawa Matsu's ancestral tablet is placed in a chamber called the Shrine of Queen Dowager Weng (Chinese: 翁太妃祠; pinyin: Wēng Tàifēi Cí; lit.

Her descendants through her great-grandson Zheng Keshuang served as Han Bannermen in Beijing until 1911 when the Xinhai revolution broke out and the Qing dynasty fell, after which they moved back to Anhai and Nan'an in southern Fujian in mainland China.

[67] The "Asiatic Society of Japan" said "It was five years after the birth of Tei Seikō [Koxinga] that his father [Zheng Zhilong] left for China and accepted the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial forces.

Soon after his departure, his wife gave birth to a second son who was named Shichizaemon" who spend his life wholly in Japan and did not develop the love for adventure and renown which made his elder brother so famous. "

"The descendants of Shichizaemon served the Government for many years as interpreters of Chinese, and there reside to this day in Nagasaki certain Japanese who point with pride to their ancestor.