Nanboku-chō (the Southern Court)

A throne carried into exile

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

When Ashikaga Takauji installed Kōgen as a rival emperor in Kyoto in 1336, Go-Daigo refused outright to accept that anyone but himself held the throne. He left the capital carrying the sacred imperial regalia - the physical objects Japanese political tradition held to be inseparable from legitimate sovereignty itself - and continued to reign as what he, and generations of Japanese historians after him, would insist was the only real emperor in the country.

A dispute settled, in theory, by two men alone

Nitta Yoshisada, still fighting for Go-Daigo's cause, once tried to end the whole war with a single gesture. Encamped opposite Ashikaga's own army, he rode out alone and proposed that the conflict - though it had arisen from the rivalry of two emperors - be settled by personal combat between himself and Ashikaga rather than by the deaths of the countless soldiers caught up in it. Ashikaga's own retainers talked him out of accepting the challenge, and the war continued exactly as it had been fighting: an argument over legitimacy conducted at the scale of a national civil war rather than a duel.

A court whose whole claim was to be the true one

What made Go-Daigo's own court different from a mere rebel faction, in the eyes of everyone who continued to fight for it, was precisely its claim to legitimacy rather than to territory. It held the regalia. It held the true line of descent, by its own reckoning, from the sun-goddess herself. It held, in the person of scholars like Kitabatake Chikafusa, an articulate case for why the throne in Kyoto was a puppet and its own exiled court the only rightful government Japan actually had. Whether that claim could survive contact with fifty-six years of war fought largely by men who had stopped caring which emperor they were technically dying for was a separate question entirely.

Two deaths the country still honors

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

Kusunoki Masashige had made it the purpose of his life, from the age of fifteen, to overthrow the Kamakura shogunate and restore the mikado to direct power. He fought for Go-Daigo from 1330 onward, survived repeated sieges by Hōjō forces, and helped drive Ashikaga's own troops out of Kyoto three separate times once the rebellion began. When his superiors ignored his advice to pursue and finish Ashikaga's retreating army while the chance existed, the rebel forces regrouped, returned by land and sea with an army several times the size of anything Kusunoki commanded, and forced a battle at Minatogawa, near Hyōgo, that his own side had no realistic chance of winning.

An honorable end chosen deliberately

Defeated and with his own tactical counsel disregarded throughout the campaign, Kusunoki judged that life was no longer honourable to continue. He said a formal farewell to his wife and infant children, handed his son Masatsura the sword the mikado himself had once given him, charged him to follow the soldier's calling and avenge his father's death, and calmly ended his own life. A hundred and fifty of his companions, and sixteen of his own relatives, followed his example rather than survive him.

A single combat with a hundred men

Nitta Yoshisada's own death, two years later in 1338, matched Kusunoki's for deliberate courage if not for the scale of the forces against him. Ambushed in a narrow rice-field path near Fukui by roughly three thousand of the enemy while marching with only about fifty men of his own, he refused every suggestion that he flee on horseback. He charged the ambush with his sword, took an arrow between the eyes, and, rather than let his enemies claim his head, cut it off himself before he died

• a feat warriors of the age deliberately trained themselves to perform. His body went unidentified until searchers found, sewn into a bag beneath a heap of his own men's self-inflicted dead, a letter in Go-Daigo's own hand naming him commander against the rebels.

Two names that outlasted every emperor either one served

Neither Kusunoki nor Nitta lived to see the war's outcome, and neither is remembered chiefly, in later Japanese memory, for which side ultimately prevailed. A nineteenth-century American teacher living in Japan, asking his own students and friends which figure in the whole of their history they considered noblest, found them answer, unanimously, with Kusunoki's name alone - a devotion to duty and calmness under certain death that outlived, in popular memory, the imperial cause both men actually died fighting for.

A war that forgot its own purpose

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

The conflict began with a clearly defined stake: which of two claimants was Japan's rightful emperor. By the time Go-Murakami had succeeded his father as the Southern line's sovereign and reigned across nearly three decades of continued fighting, that original question had begun to matter less and less to the men actually doing the fighting.

A national free-for-all wearing an old label

What had opened as a war of imperial legitimacy gradually degenerated into a general melee fought on a national scale for reasons that had little to do with either emperor. Local strongmen used the cover of northern or southern allegiance to seize land from their neighbours, settle old grudges, and expand their own holdings, regardless of which court's cause they nominally claimed to serve. Even the rival emperors themselves, by the war's later decades, took diminishing interest in conflicts that had become, functionally, private property disputes conducted under an imperial banner.

Two lines still standing, and a country largely indifferent to why

By the time Go-Kameyama inherited the Southern claim, most of the figures who had actually cared about the dynastic question at the war's outset - Kusunoki, Nitta, Go-Daigo himself - were long dead, and the war persisted largely from inertia and the accumulated territorial stakes of two generations of local fighting rather than from any remaining conviction that the outcome would settle a real constitutional question. A conflict that began over who held the sacred regalia had become, in practice, a war almost nobody remembered starting for that reason.

The regalia goes back to Kyoto

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

By 1392 an Ashikaga envoy judged the moment right to end a war that had already outlived every original participant's stake in it. He persuaded Go-Kameyama, the reigning Southern emperor, to travel to Kyoto in person and hand the sacred regalia directly to Go-Komatsu, the Northern emperor the Ashikaga had backed from the schism's very beginning.

Terms that promised more than they delivered

The settlement gave Go-Kameyama the honorific title of ex-emperor and formally declared Go-Komatsu the sole reigning sovereign, with a further promise that the throne would thereafter alternate between the two imperial branches in turn. The ceremony itself - abdication and surrender of the regalia on one side, investiture on the other - was conducted with full solemnity in one of Kyoto's great temples, and the fifty-six-year war ended in that single formal exchange.

Whose victory it actually was

The alternation promised at the settlement never in fact took place; the Northern line, and the Ashikaga shogunate that had sponsored it throughout, retained the throne going forward. The plainest verdict on the whole affair is blunt: the outcome redounded to the glory and power of the Ashikaga rather than to either imperial branch, a fitting result for a war the shogunate had done more than anyone to prolong and had now ended on terms suited entirely to its own advantage.

A verdict later generations would still argue over

Japanese historians would go on debating for centuries which line had actually held legitimate authority throughout - the Dai Nihon Shi itself defended the Southern emperors as the true descendants of the sun-goddess and dismissed their Northern rivals as usurpers, a judgment modern Japan came to accept as authoritative even though it was the Northern line, propped up by Ashikaga arms from the beginning, that held the actual throne when the fighting finally stopped. The Southern court's own claim outlived it in the history books far more comfortably than it had ever managed to on the battlefield.