Go-Toba
Go-Toba was made emperor as a child without the regalia, and lost the war he started to take the country back. He was enthroned at three in 1183 while his half-brother Antoku was still alive and still emperor, carried west by the fleeing Taira with the sword, the mirror and the jewel - so for two years Japan had two emperors and one set of regalia, and when Antoku drowned at Dan-no-ura the sword went to the bottom of the sea with him and was never recovered. He abdicated in 1198 and then governed as a retired emperor, which was the ordinary way real power was exercised, and he was a formidable one: a horseman, a swordsman who kept smiths at the palace and is said to have forged blades himself, and the finest imperial poet of the age. He ordered the Shin Kokin Wakashu and edited it personally for years, and it is one of the great anthologies of Japanese verse. In 1221 he declared the Kamakura regent Hojo Yoshitoki an outlaw and called on the eastern warriors to abandon him. The Jokyu war lasted a month. Hojo Masako reminded the assembled housemen what her husband's house had given them, the eastern armies marched on Kyoto, and the court's forces collapsed. He was exiled to the Oki islands and never allowed back. He spent nineteen years there writing, and refused to the end to acknowledge the settlement. That settlement left the emperors ceremonial for six hundred years, and gave Kamakura the right to appoint them. His vengeful ghost was blamed for disasters in Kyoto for decades afterwards, and a shrine was built to placate it.
- Lived: 1180 CE – 1239 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_state
