The Kamakura Shogunate

A curtain around a general's tent

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

An insult answered six times, and then by the sword

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.

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.

A poem carved into a cherry tree

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.