The Kenmu Restoration

An exile comes home to rule

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

The first act after Kamakura's destruction in 1333 was to bring Emperor Go-Daigo back from the island where the Hōjō had banished him two years earlier. With the sovereign restored to full authority, it seemed to many that Japan's ancient and rightful government - a single throne ruling directly, without a military intermediary standing between the emperor and his own people - was about to be permanently reestablished after a century and a half of shogunal government.

A debt that had to be paid in land

Go-Daigo's first duty as restored ruler was to reward the men who had fought to bring him home. Here the new government revealed, almost immediately, how thoroughly the habits of the system it meant to replace had already taken root. Rather than devise some new form of recognition suited to a genuinely restored imperial rule, Go-Daigo followed the same feudal precedent the Minamoto and the Hōjō had established before him, apportioning conquered military fiefs to his own vassals exactly as a shogun would have done.

A prize too large for the wrong man

The single richest reward - the provinces of Hitachi, Musashi and Shimōsa - went to Ashikaga Takauji, a general of Minamoto stock whose own family had every historical claim and popular standing needed to found a shogunate of its own, should he ever choose to try. Kusunoki Masashige and Nitta Yoshisada, the two commanders whose own sustained loyalty had done the most to keep Go-Daigo's cause alive through his exile, received smaller provinces by comparison. The distribution was meant to close the war. It opened, instead, exactly the danger the restoration existed to prevent.

A concubine's word against a son's

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

The unequal division of rewards did more than disappoint two loyal commanders. It let discontent spread through the ordinary soldiers who had actually fought the campaign, many of whom began muttering that they had exchanged one set of overlords for the amusements of court concubines and dancing girls, and would rather serve a shogun outright than remain the restoration's neglected instruments. Ashikaga Takauji cultivated this resentment carefully among the soldiers who preferred war as a profession to the peace the restoration was supposed to bring.

A father persuaded to condemn his own son

Go-Daigo had named his own son Moriyoshi shogun, and Ashikaga, jealous of the appointment, found an instrument close to the emperor himself: a concubine he had bribed into repeating, at every opportunity, that Moriyoshi was plotting to seize the throne from his own father. Go-Daigo, who by this account had lost in exile much of the judgment that once marked his character while keeping all of his susceptibility to flattery, believed her rather than his own ministers, who had warned him plainly against Ashikaga from the start.

The one command no rebel could survive

The emperor's decree branding Moriyoshi a rebel against the throne carried a weight nothing else in the whole political order could match. Whoever held the mikado's favour held, in effect, the law itself: his enemies became traitors by definition, his own soldiers the loyal army, regardless of what either side had actually done. Moriyoshi, condemned by his own father's word, was seized, transported to Kamakura, and murdered in an underground cell in 1335. Only afterward, when it was already too late to matter, did Go-Daigo's suspicion turn where it had belonged from the beginning - toward the flatterer who had engineered his son's death from the safety of the throne's own favor.

A second Son of Heaven

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

Once Go-Daigo's suspicion finally turned against him, Ashikaga Takauji did not wait to be condemned in turn. He slipped out of Kyoto by night, followed by thousands of the same disaffected soldiers his own earlier patience had cultivated, and made for Kamakura, which he set about rebuilding as a base for exactly the shogunate the restoration had fought to prevent. Nitta Yoshisada, cleared of Ashikaga's own earlier accusations against him, received the emperor's commission to put the rebellion down.

A commission that could not be carried out

The campaign against Ashikaga ended in complete defeat for the imperial forces. Go-Daigo, once the returning exile whose restoration had seemed to promise permanent direct rule, became a fugitive in his own capital, fleeing Kyoto with his loyal followers and carrying the sacred imperial regalia rather than leave it behind for a victor he refused to recognise as legitimate.

A rebel who could not rule as one

Ashikaga's victory left him in an impossible position by his own country's own political logic: however great his military resources, he remained, in the eyes of the people, nothing more than a rebel against the throne, and no rebel could expect lasting success under that label. His solution was the one every earlier usurper in Japan's history had already found effective in its own way - he made himself a different Son of Heaven to serve. In 1336 he installed Kōgen, a prince of the same imperial house, as a compliant new emperor, and Kōgen promptly granted him the title of Sei-i Tai Shogun the entire restoration had been fought to make unnecessary.

Two courts where there had briefly been one

Go-Daigo, in exile from the capital but still holding the regalia and his own claim to legitimacy, refused to recognise Kōgen's throne as anything but Ashikaga's own invention. What had been, for two brief years, a single restored mikadoate answerable to no military intermediary split instead into two rival imperial courts, each insisting it alone was the rightful one - a division that would run for fifty-six years before either side could claim to have settled the question the restoration's own failure had reopened.