The Kamakura Shogunate

A curtain around a general's tent

formationDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Minamoto no Yoritomo did not set out to seize the military control of the whole empire. It was his chief minister, Ōe no Hiromoto, who saw how a set of practical administrative fixes could be turned into something far larger than their stated purpose.

Jingo-ji, Kyoto · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Fujiwara no Takanobu (attributed) · Public domain

A tax that paid for permanence

Hiromoto's proposal was straightforward on its face: since the Kantō region was already peaceful and prosperous under Yoritomo's own government, a special levy across every province could fund a permanent garrison, sparing the expense of repeatedly calling out the Eastern army whenever trouble arose elsewhere. Attached to this financial fix came two further innovations with far larger consequences - a military governor, the shugo, placed in every province alongside the existing civil governor, and a steward, the jito, appointed directly from Kamakura to administer individual districts. Yoritomo filled both kinds of office with his own kinsmen and loyal retainers, answerable only to him.

Why the court agreed to its own eclipse

The mikado's court had every reason to resist an arrangement that so plainly diminished its own authority, and every reason, in the circumstances, to accept it anyway. Half the empire already sat tranquil under Yoritomo's military government while the rest remained unsettled, and the reigning emperor, Go-Toba, owed his own throne in no small part to the same family's victory. The government at Kamakura took its name, bakufu - literally curtain government, after the cloth that anciently surrounded a Chinese or Japanese general's field headquarters - and the name stuck for the whole span of military rule that followed.

A father who could not pass on his own gift

Yoritomo held every civil function the Fujiwara had once monopolised and more military power than the Taira had ever wielded, and in 1192 he received the title that crowned it: Sei-i Tai Shogun. He died seven years later, and what followed proved that the office he had built depended entirely on the man who held it. His own eldest son and heir, Yoriie, unable to wield his father's personal authority, was pressured within two years by his own mother and grandfather into surrendering real power to an infant nephew and a twelve-year-old brother - forced into a monastery and strangled there before he turned twenty-three. The shogunate that would rule Japan for nearly seven centuries had not yet completed its first decade before the pattern that would define most of its history was already set: a nominal ruler on the seat of power, and someone else's hand directing every real decision behind him.

A double usurpation

peakDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Sanetomo, Yoritomo's second son, took his murdered brother's place as shogun at twelve years old, cared nothing for the military exercises that had defined his father's life, and spent his time on poetry and football while the Hōjō family - his own maternal grandfather's line - governed in his name. He too was eventually killed, cut down at a shrine by his own dead brother's son - the last of Yoritomo's direct line to hold an office his father had built for a family that could not keep it.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Ocdp · CC0

Vassals of vassals

What the Hōjō built in the vacancy that followed amounted, in substance, to a double usurpation. Properly, the Hōjō were vassals of the shogun, who was himself a vassal of the mikado - a chain of formal subordination running all the way to the throne. From that point onward the Hōjō installed a succession of nominal shoguns too young or too disconnected from military affairs to govern in fact, while the actual government of Japan passed permanently into Hōjō hands without the family ever claiming the shogunal title for itself. Twelve Hōjō regents across seven generations governed this way, the ablest among them devoted seriously to public administration in a way their later descendants would not be.

A fortnight that settled a century

peakDrafted from Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910)

The Hōjō's double usurpation had one obvious weakness: it rested on force the throne itself had never formally sanctioned, and in 1221 the retired Emperor Go-Toba decided to test it by war.

An outlawry answered with an army

Go-Toba declared the regent Hōjō Yoshitoki an outlaw and summoned every loyal subject to join in putting him down. Word reached Kamakura within days. The Kwantō's leading vassals, uncertain whether loyalty to the Hōjō or to the throne itself should come first, were gathered before Yoritomo's widow, the nun Masako, who put the choice to them directly and had their pledges within the hour. Against the counsel of those urging a purely defensive stand behind the mountain barriers east of the capital, two elder statesmen of Yoritomo's own generation argued for an immediate offensive, and Masako backed them.

Minase Jingū, Osaka · Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Fujiwara no Nobuzane · Public domain

Three armies numbering a hundred thousand men converged on Kyoto by three separate roads. The campaign lasted barely a month: Hōjō Yasutoki left Kamakura on the thirteenth of June and was in possession of the capital by the sixth of July, after a single hard-fought stand at the Uji river was outflanked and broken. It looked, in retrospect, like an easy Bakufu victory. It was closer than it appeared - a considerable part of the population along the northern road had already declared for Go-Toba, and had Kamakura simply held its passes and waited, the rest of the country might well have rallied to the throne before the Hōjō could respond at all. What decided it was the speed of the counter-attack, ordered before the rebellion had time to spread.

Three emperors sent into exile

The settlement that followed was harsher than the fighting. Go-Toba himself was banished to the remote island of Oki; his son, the retired Emperor Juntoku, who had actively supported the rising, was sent to Sado; a third retired emperor who had taken no part in the plot at all was moved first to Tosa and then to Awa, on the reasoning that his mere presence in the capital might become a focus for future trouble. The reigning child emperor was removed from the succession altogether and was not even formally recognised as having reigned until 1870. Court nobles judged complicit were executed on the road to Kamakura or exiled outright.

It was the first time since the shogunate's founding that the court had tried to overthrow it by force, and the first time the Bakufu had answered by deposing and exiling emperors rather than merely managing them from behind the throne. For the century that followed, no one at court seriously attempted it again.

Fifty-one articles for a country the old law never anticipated

The other half of what made Hōjō rule durable was written down eleven years later. Japan already had law - a slow accumulation of Nara and Kyoto edicts stretching back five centuries - but by 1200 there was scarcely a working jurist left in the old capital competent to apply any of it, and none of it had been drafted with a warrior class in mind at all. The two statesmen who had argued for the offensive in 1221, Ōe Hiromoto and Miyoshi Yasunobu, had carried their legal training out of Kyoto's court society, which prized courtly manners over legal knowledge, and into Kamakura, where it was put to use settling disputes among a military class the old imperial code had never been designed to govern.

In Kamakura the first half of every month was set aside for judicial business, verdicts delivered on fixed days after the hardest cases had been argued before the full Council of Government; a bell hung at the gate of the Record Office, and a petitioner who struck it was guaranteed a hearing. Working from precedent going back to Yoritomo's own day, Hōjō Yasutoki and Miyoshi Yasutsura presented the finished code, the Goseibai Shikimoku, to the council in 1232 - fifty-one brief articles built not from the old imperial law but from the customs the warrior class had actually been living under for two generations.

Tōyō Bunko, Tokyo · Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Underbar dk · CC BY-SA 4.0

The Bakufu was careful to say the code bound only its own vassals and its own domains, leaving the estates of the court, the great monasteries and independent military houses to their own law. It did not stay that way. Within a few generations, landholders outside Kamakura's direct authority found the code's provisions better suited to their own circumstances than the old imperial statutes, and adopted them anyway - a warrior class's customary law quietly displacing the law of the court that had once claimed to govern everyone.

An insult answered six times, and then by the sword

peakDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

The most consequential test of Hōjō rule came from outside Japan entirely. Kublai Khan, having conquered China and overthrown the Sung dynasty, sent envoys through Korea demanding tribute and homage. Hōjō Tokimune rejected six successive embassies, and when nine Chinese envoys announced they would remain in Japan until receiving a definite answer, Kamakura's reply was to strike off their heads. An initial Mongol landing force of ten thousand men was driven back from Kyushu; further envoys sent to demand tribute met the same fate as the first, their heads falling at Dazaifu in 1279.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

A wind that ended the question for good

The Mongols answered with an armada, and in 1281 more than a hundred thousand Chinese, Mongol and Korean troops arrived off the Japanese coast. Individual Japanese sailors matched the invaders' superior numbers and siege engines with personal daring - boarding enemy junks under fire, cutting down crews in hand-to-hand combat - but could not by themselves prevent the fleet from establishing itself offshore. What finally destroyed the invasion was a typhoon that struck as the emperor and ex-emperor sent prayers to the shrine at Ise, wrecking the Mongol fleet against the coast and drowning the greater part of an army no one on shore had yet managed to defeat outright. No army from the continent would ever again attempt a landing on Japanese soil, and Tokimune's own energy and valor in the crisis earned him credit, in the words of one contemporary chronicler, sufficient to atone for whatever his family's earlier seizure of power had cost it in legitimacy.

Imperial Household collection · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

Not a single extra yard

contractionDrafted from Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910)

A Japanese historian's verdict on the great storm of 1281 is that it did more than wreck a Mongol armada. Within two generations it had shaken the whole fabric of Hōjō authority, because the wind had left the Bakufu with a problem no earlier victory ever had: how to reward an army for winning a war that produced no spoils.

A defensive war pays nothing

Every Japanese war of the previous century had been a civil war, and in a civil war the confiscated lands of the losing side had always supplied ample recompense for the winners. The repulse of the Mongols put not a single extra yard of soil at Kamakura's disposal, and the years of keeping the whole nation, Kyushu above all, on a war footing against a second invasion that never came had left the Bakufu's own resources badly depleted before the reward question was even opened.

The temples and shrines whose prayers were credited with the typhoon went first, and were treated generously - forfeited domains restored, mortgaged estates cleared, new grants made on top. What that left for the men who had actually fought was very little. Kamakura spent the better part of two decades fielding petitions from Kyushu vassals for recompense it could not provide, referring claims back and forth between offices, and finally, near the end of the century, simply declared the whole question closed. Meanwhile those same vassals were still paying to keep the coast defences in repair and still standing under arms at Hakata, decades after the invasion that had ruined them was over.

Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Saigen Jiro · CC0

Extravagance, and the cure that made it worse

In Kyushu the vassals' own excuse - ruined by the burden of national defence - was largely true. In the Kwantō it mostly was not. There the greater cause was simply the fast, fashionable life Kamakura's own warrior elite had taken to living, and to keep up with it needy samurai mortgaged their family holdings to merchants, money-lenders and even farmers who had managed to save money, at interest running as high as ninety-six per cent. Foreclosure suits multiplied faster than the courts could hear them.

The Bakufu's answer, after years of patchwork rules that were revoked almost as fast as they were issued, was a tokusei - an "act of benevolent government" - in 1297: all suits for the recovery of debt interest forbidden, existing mortgages simply cancelled, and any future sale or mortgage of a vassal's holding banned outright. It solved nothing. Striking at the root of credit itself only made lenders refuse to lend at all, and within a short time the same poorer vassals the act was meant to protect were more deeply in debt than before, evading the new restrictions through the same kind of subterfuge that had evaded every earlier regulation. The one real relief left to an indebted samurai family was to be on the winning side of a civil war large enough to hand out confiscated manors again

• which was not a solution so much as an incentive.

A bribed verdict in a border dispute

The same years produced a flood of lawsuits the Bakufu's own courts had lost the competence to manage cleanly. Judgements that had once run five or six pages now ran to scores of them, petitions sat unresolved for years, and a verdict, when it finally came, was as often as not deliberately "ambiguous" - leaving both sides exactly where they had started, except poorer by whatever bribes they had quietly sent the judge.

One such case, a succession dispute inside the Andō family of the northern frontier around 1320, was settled this way by Nagasaki Takasuke, the regent's own favourite and effective ruler of Kamakura in Hōjō Takatoki's name: both sides paid, both sides received an equally worthless judgement, and both sides went to war over it instead, forcing the Bakufu to send an army north to restore order in a province a competent court could have settled with a single honest ruling. It was, by itself, a minor affair. It was also exactly the kind of failure - financial, judicial, and entirely of Kamakura's own making - that Go-Daigo's rebellion a decade later would find waiting for it.

A poem carved into a cherry tree

contractionDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

The capable Hōjō regents who had governed through the Mongol crisis gave way, in later generations, to descendants given to luxury and carousal, neglecting public business while a horde of rapacious officials drained the country's resources to support their own comfort. The triple burden of supporting mikado, shogun and a self-indulgent regental house on top of them became, in the source's own words, intolerable.

A prince who chose a monastery over a scaffold

The Emperor Go-Daigo, though he had been placed on the throne by the same kingmakers he now resented, began working with his son Moriyoshi to plan the Hōjō's overthrow as early as 1327. When spies uncovered the plot, Moriyoshi escaped punishment only by retiring - ostensibly in renunciation of worldly ambition - to a Buddhist monastery, from where he continued to assist his father's planning in secret.

A mountain fortress and a general who would not be captured

In 1330, with Buddhist support, Go-Daigo fortified the stronghold of Kasagi in Yamato. Around the same time, Kusunoki Masashige rose in Kawachi with the same restoration in mind. The Hōjō answered quickly: their army burned Kasagi the following year, capturing Go-Daigo and exiling him to the remote island of Oki. Kusunoki, besieged twice, escaped both times and lived to fight again.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Asanagi · CC0

A cherry tree that carried a message no guard could read

Go-Daigo's journey into exile produced one of the most enduring images in Japanese art and memory. A young nobleman named Kojima Takanori tried repeatedly to approach the imperial convoy and failed each time, the Hōjō guard too vigilant to allow it. When his own followers gave up and turned back, Kojima alone kept pace with the convoy for days until, slipping into the garden of an inn where the party had stopped for the night, he scraped the bark from a cherry tree and wrote on the exposed white wood beneath a verse invoking an ancient Chinese king restored to his throne through a loyal retainer's faithfulness - a message meant to tell his exiled sovereign, without a single guard understanding what had been left for him to read, that his cause was not yet lost.

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Ogata Gekkō · Public domain

A defeat that did not end the cause

Go-Daigo's own first rising had failed in the field, and he himself remained a prisoner on a distant island. But neither Kusunoki nor Nitta Yoshisada, the Hōjō's own vassal who had not yet openly turned against them, had abandoned the restoration Go-Daigo's exile was meant to have ended. What the Hōjō had actually won at Kasagi was time, not victory - and the family's own later tyranny was already making sure that time would run out.

A sword offered to the sea

endDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Nitta Yoshisada, a Hōjō vassal whose loyalty had already turned, raised an army to march on Kamakura itself once Go-Daigo's cause had gathered enough strength to make the attempt worthwhile. Before the final assault, he assembled his warriors at the edge of the strand, removed his helmet, and addressed the god of the sea directly: his sovereign had been deposed by traitorous subjects and exiled to a distant island, and he asked the tide to ebb and open a path for his army's advance. He then cast his sword into the waves as an offering.

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

A path that opened, whatever the actual cause

The tide had receded by the next morning, and Nitta's army, now convinced it marched with heaven's own favour, advanced without hesitation. Kamakura was attacked from three sides at once. The fighting was severe, but every advantage went to the attackers, and Nitta himself, after conspicuous feats of personal combat, ordered the city set on fire. Within hours, Kamakura was ash.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Adolph de Meyer · CC0

A retainer's death, and thousands who followed him

As the city burned, a Hōjō vassal named Andō, observing a hundred years in which no retainer had died for his lord, resolved to end his own life rather than survive the family's fall - and did so even after his niece, Nitta's own wife, sent a letter begging him to surrender instead. He wrapped her letter around the blade before driving it into his own body. Thousands of other Hōjō vassals took the same path rather than accept defeat, bringing the recorded toll of dead and self-killed to nearly seven thousand in a single engagement.

Two commanders, two cities, one restoration

While Nitta destroyed Kamakura in the east, Ashikaga Takauji had already drawn his sword in Kyoto, joining Kusunoki Masashige to re-establish imperial rule in the west on the very same campaign - two separate attacks converging on the same result from opposite ends of the country. The Hōjō domination that had run the actual government of Japan for nearly a century and a half, through two Mongol invasions and the extinction of the very shogunal line it had first served, ended in this single coordinated collapse. What came next, at least in name, was the restoration Go-Daigo had been fighting for since long before his own exile - though how completely an emperor alone could actually govern a country used to being run by someone else was a question the Hōjō's destruction had settled without yet answering.