Fall of the Kamakura Shogunate and the Rise of the Ashikaga
Emperor Go-Daigo took power back from the shogunate in 1333 and lost it within three years. The Kamakura shogunate had governed Japan for a century and a half and had been weakened by the Mongol invasions, which had cost enormously and produced no conquered land with which to reward the warriors who had fought. Go-Daigo had been placed on the throne on the understanding that he would abdicate in favour of a rival line, and declined. He plotted twice, was exiled to a small island in 1332, and escaped in a fishing boat. The rising that followed succeeded because two commanders sent to suppress it changed sides: Ashikaga Takauji turned on the shogunate's headquarters in Kyoto, and Nitta Yoshisada took Kamakura, where some 870 members of the ruling Hojo family killed themselves in a temple. Go-Daigo then attempted to restore direct imperial rule of a kind that had not existed for four hundred years. The restoration failed for a simple reason. The warriors who had fought expected land, and the emperor distributed offices and titles to court nobles instead, spent money on palace building, and set up an appeals system that could not process the claims. Takauji broke with him in 1336, installed a rival emperor, and became shogun. Go-Daigo escaped to the mountains at Yoshino with the imperial regalia and declared a rival court, and Japan had two emperors for the following fifty-six years. Go-Daigo's failure settled the constitutional question for five centuries. No emperor attempted personal rule again until 1868, and the Meiji restoration deliberately took its name and its precedents from this one.
- Year: 1333 CE
- Category: Civil War
