Fall of the Kamakura Shogunate and the Rise of the Ashikaga
The Kamakura shogunate, which had survived two Mongol invasion attempts in the 1270s-80s (see event:mongol_invasions_japan:1274) only to face crushing debts from the military mobilisation those invasions required, had by the 1330s alienated much of the samurai class it depended on for support -- the Mongol wars had produced no plunder or new territory to reward loyal vassals, unlike Japan's earlier civil wars. Emperor Go-Daigo, who had long chafed at the shogunate's dominance over the notionally supreme imperial institution, allied with disaffected samurai commanders including Ashikaga Takauji and Nitta Yoshisada to overthrow the Kamakura regime in 1333, executing its regents and briefly achieving what no emperor had managed in over a century: direct imperial rule, known as the Kemmu Restoration. Go-Daigo's restoration proved short-lived. His attempt to reward loyal courtiers over the samurai who had actually done the fighting alienated Ashikaga Takauji, who rebelled in 1335-36, drove Go-Daigo from Kyoto, and installed a rival emperor from a competing branch of the imperial line -- while Go-Daigo fled south to Yoshino and continued to claim legitimacy as a rival 'Southern Court,' beginning nearly sixty years of parallel Northern and Southern imperial courts (the Nanboku-cho period). Takauji formally took the title of shogun in 1338, founding the Ashikaga (or Muromachi, after the Kyoto district where its headquarters stood) shogunate, Japan's second warrior government.
- Year: 1333 CE
- Category: Civil War
