Kamakura Shogunate

The first of the Japanese military governments, and the one that invented the arrangement Japan used for seven hundred years: an emperor who reigned in Kyoto and a warrior who governed from somewhere else. Minamoto no Yoritomo destroyed the Taira in 1185 and took the title of shogun in 1192, ruling from a coastal town chosen because it was defensible and far from the court. The line he founded lasted two generations. After his death his widow Hojo Masako and her family took control, and the shogunate was run by regents for shoguns who were themselves figureheads for emperors who did not rule - a chain of delegation four deep that worked for a century. Masako, a nun after her husband's death and known as the nun shogun, held it together through two successions and rallied the vassals in 1221 when the retired emperor tried to overthrow the regime. Its lasting institution was law. The Goseibai Shikimoku of 1232 set out warrior law in fifty-one articles in plain language, based on precedent and reason rather than on Chinese models, and remained the basis of samurai jurisprudence for centuries. The Mongols came twice, in 1274 and 1281, and both fleets were wrecked by storms that Japan called the divine wind. Victory ruined the shogunate: it had no conquered land with which to reward the vassals who had fought, and their debts and resentment brought it down in 1333. The period is also when Japanese Buddhism became a popular religion. Honen, Shinran, Nichiren and Dogen all taught within a century of one another, offering practices - a chanted invocation, seated meditation - that required no monastery, no Chinese and no patronage. Zen in particular took root among the warriors of Kamakura, and the great temples founded there are the reason the town is still visited.

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