Kamakura Period

For nearly two centuries, the Kamakura period (roughly 1190 to the 1330s) represented an era of social, political, religious, and cultural upheaval for Japan, a tumultuous period during which the military class, known as the samurai, consolidated its authority, rendering the emperor and the nobility of the imperial court essentially figureheads. The period was a tale of two cities separated by fewer than two hundred miles: Kamakura, a heavily fortified coastal city built from scratch to serve as the de facto capital of the emerging military empire; and Kyoto, the inland city that had served for centuries as the home of the emperor. The imperial court power structure remained intact but powerless as the samurai consolidated its power. The samurai’s governing vision was to move Japan from a sea-based economy that relied on fishing and trade to a land-based agrarian economy, an ideal that appealed to the samurai’s sense of national self-reliance.

Background

The Kamakura period began with the ascendancy of Minamoto Yoritamo (1147–1199), a charismatic warrior of immense skill and legendary courage who was given the title of seeii tai shogun by a grateful emperor in 1192 in recognition of Minamoto’s role in fighting tribal insurgents. However, even as Minamoto defeated these challenges, he began to organize his own administrative apparatus made up entirely of his own trusted soldiers. Minamoto headquartered in the town of Kamakura where he had made his family home, but given his growing ambitions, he recognized the coastal village would need to be significantly built up, a program he directed himself. Recognizing the growing weakness of the emperor in Kyoto, Minamoto created a new system to govern the lands he had liberated for the emperor. The samurai class, under Minamoto’s direction, organized an ambitious and unprecedented redistribution of property boundaries to create an essentially feudal system in which poor families would survive by working the land under the supervision and authority of stewards appointed by the local military rulers and assisted by a cadre of constables who were, as well, appointed by the samurai. The attempt was to impose on imperial Japan what Minamoto termed a bakufu, literally a "tent government," a moniker that underscored its military complexion. Indeed, this was a quasimilitary dictatorship in which the highest ranking samurai, the shogun, would in turn hand authority to his immediate heirs. Japan, in essence, had two governments—Kamakura had the power, Kyoto had the trappings.

Minamoto wisely directed a number of crucial civic measures to stabilize his military authority: a codification of a criminal code, a protocol for settling land disputes and inheritance claims, as well as a charter delineating the exact responsibilities of the stewards and constables. Minamoto established an aggressively paternalistic culture that celebrated the virtues of discipline, loyalty, and bravery. When Minamoto died unexpectedly in 1199 just shy of his fiftieth birthday, however, the shogunate was imperiled by the lack of a clear and powerful heir. In that vacuum, political and military authority was assumed by the family of Minamoto’s widow, the Hōjō, a dynasty that would direct the Kamakura period until its collapse more than a century later.

Impact

Under the guidance of the House of Hōjō, the Kamakura period reeled from a succession of border challenges and territorial disputes as well as internal discord; it was a dynasty riven by secret alliances, arranged marriages, political conspiracies, court betrayals, assassinations, and years of bloody Byzantine plotting among rivals within and outside the family. Not surprisingly, given the unrelenting violence and uncertainties, the Kamakura period was characterized by a broad sense of pessimism, apocalypticism, foreboding, and anxiety. To minister to a people in such a dark time, the Hōjō dynasty endorsed Zen Buddhism, imported from China that, unlike the native Confucianism, embraced a military sense of stoicism, promulgated a life of disciplined meditation, and disparaged the accumulation of wealth and power as vanity. The doctrine appealed to the military government and, under its patronage, Buddhism flourished, the sect’s monks becoming their own power structure. The shogunate directed the construction of dozens of elaborate Buddhist temples and monasteries, decorated by massive statues, many of which survive today.

A challenge from Mongol China, under Kubla Khan, provided the Kamakura period its greatest threat and its greatest triumph. Once his own military authority was secured, Kubla looked to neighboring Japan, demanding an exorbitant tribute from the Hōjō government to prevent an invasion. Japan refused. When Kubla led a massive armada of more than six hundred ships and more than 20,000 troops to invade Japan in 1274, that invasion was quickly repelled by a typhoon that ravaged Hakozaki Bay. The Khan was not deterred, however, and, in 1281, once again sent representatives to demand an exorbitant tribute. This time the offer was refused and the entourage beheaded. Almost unbelievably, Kubla’s invasion forces were once again swamped—this time after seven weeks of savage fighting—by yet another typhoon. The victory was widely interpreted as evidence of divine favor (a "kamikaze," or divine wind) for the Kamakura government and helped solidify its political position. Ironically, that victory also sealed the collapse of the Kamakura shogunate; the government was essentially bankrupt, unable to reward the soldiers who had fought so valiantly against the Mongol invasion. In addition, over the next decade, social order itself teetered close to chaos, crime rose, disease was rampant, infrastructure deteriorated, and landed families feuded over inheritances. In addition, the region was devastated by two earthquakes in 1293 that killed more than 25,000 people. In response, forces in Kyoto still loyal to the emperor—Go-Daigo—mounted a military challenge that after initial defeats ended the bakufu and restored authority to the emperor in 1333.

That restoration, however, did not endure, and Japan would return within a generation to the feudal power system of the shogunate that would last nearly seven centuries until the full restoration of the imperial house in 1868.

Bibliography

Cummins, Anthony. Samurai and Ninja: The Real Story behind the Japanese Warrior Myth that Shatters the Bushido Mystique. North Clarendon: Tuttle, 2015. Print.

Deal, William E. Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

Duus, Peter. Feudalism in Japan. New York: McGraw, 1993. Print.

Hillsborough, Romulus. Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan as Seen through the Eyes of the Shogun’s Last Samurai. North Clarendon: Tuttle, 2014. Print.

Kure, Mitsuo. Samurai: An Illustrated History. North Clarendon: Tuttle, 2014. Print.

Morton, W. Scott, and J. Kenneth Olekin. Japan: Its History and Culture. New York: McGraw, 2004. Print.

Mutsu, Iso. Kamakura: Fact and Legend. North Clarendon: Tuttle, 2012. Print.

Noguchi, Yone. Kamakura. Amazon Digital, 2010. Kindle file.