Minamoto no Yoritomo

Minamoto no Yoritomo won the Genpei War and invented the shogunate, the form of government under which Japan was ruled for the next seven hundred years. He was thirteen when his father was killed in a failed coup and he was exiled to Izu rather than executed, on the intervention of the widow of the man who had beaten them - a piece of clemency the Taira had reason to regret. He spent twenty years there and married into the local Hojo family, which mattered more than anyone expected. He raised the eastern warrior houses in 1180, lost his first battle, and then did something no previous claimant had done: instead of marching on the capital he stayed in the east at Kamakura and built an administration - a board of retainers, a board of inquiry, and confirmed land tenures granted in his own name, which bound the warriors to him by property rather than sentiment. His cousin and his brothers did the fighting. Yoshitsune, the most gifted commander of the age, destroyed the Taira at Ichi-no-Tani, Yashima and finally Dan-no-ura in 1185, and Yoritomo hunted him down and forced him to suicide four years later for accepting court office without permission. In 1192 he took the title of shogun. He died in 1199 after falling from a horse, and within a generation his Hojo in-laws had reduced his own line to figureheads, which was the pattern he had established applied to himself: a real ruler governing behind a legitimate one who did not. His widow Hojo Masako, the nun shogun, ran the government through two sons and outlived them both. The emperor remained in Kyoto throughout, reigning and not ruling, which is what Japan meant by government until 1868.

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