Nitta Yoshisada

Nitta Yoshisada took Kamakura in 1333 and ended the shogunate that had ruled Japan for a hundred and fifty years, then spent his remaining five years losing to the man who took the credit. He was a minor Minamoto-descended lord in Kozuke who had been serving the Hojo regents at the siege of a loyalist castle when he broke with them, reportedly over a tax collector's insolence, and raised the eastern provinces for the emperor Go-Daigo. The assault on Kamakura took eight days; the tradition holds that the beach approach at Inamuragasaki was impassable until he threw his sword into the sea and the tide went out, which is the episode every Japanese schoolchild knows. Some eight hundred of the Hojo and their retainers killed themselves in a cave at Tosho-ji. The Kenmu Restoration that followed put Go-Daigo in direct control and lasted three years, failing because it rewarded courtiers rather than the warriors who had won. Ashikaga Takauji, who had turned on the Hojo in Kyoto at the same time, broke with the emperor in 1335, and Yoshisada became the loyalist commander against him. He won at Hakone and lost at Minatogawa in 1336, where Kusunoki Masashige was killed covering a retreat Yoshisada had ordered. He was killed two years later at Fujishima, shot through the head by an arrow while his horse was stuck in a paddy field, and is said to have cut off his own head before he fell. Takauji founded the Ashikaga shogunate. Nitta was promoted by later nationalist historiography as a model of loyalty against Takauji the traitor, which flattens a rivalry between two provincial lords with the same ambitions.

• Lived: 1301 CE – 1338 CE
• Nationality: Japanese
• Roles: military