Hojo Masako

Hojo Masako was the widow of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first shogun, and ran the Kamakura government for most of the thirty-six years after his death; she is known as the nun shogun. She married Yoritomo while he was an exile under her father's guard in Izu, reportedly against her father's wishes, and the marriage tied the Hojo to the Minamoto cause in the Genpei War. When Yoritomo died in 1199 she took Buddhist vows, which is where the title comes from, and did not withdraw from politics at all. Her elder son Yoriie was removed by the family council she dominated and killed in 1204; her younger son Sanetomo was assassinated in 1219 by Yoriie's son on the steps of a shrine, which ended the Minamoto line and left the Hojo as regents for infant shoguns imported from the Kyoto aristocracy. Her father Tokimasa she also removed, in 1205, when he plotted to install a son-in-law of his own; she had him forced into monastic retirement and put her brother Yoshitoki in his place. The decisive moment came in 1221, when the retired emperor Go-Toba declared Yoshitoki an outlaw and called on the eastern warriors to abandon Kamakura. Masako addressed the assembled housemen, reminded them of what Yoritomo had given them and asked them to choose, and they marched on Kyoto; the Jokyu War lasted a month and ended with three retired emperors exiled and the shogunate appointing the throne's occupants. The land confiscated from the losers was distributed to Kamakura vassals, which extended warrior government across western Japan. She died in 1225, the year the Council of State was founded to formalise what she had run informally. The Goseibai Shikimoku of 1232, the warrior law code, came out of the government she had held together. Her personal name is one of very few from the period recorded at all.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history