Kamakura period

Older textbooks gave 1192, the year Yoritomo received the title sei-i taishōgun, and the mnemonic 'ii kuni tsukurō Kamakura bakufu' (1192) was learned by generations of Japanese schoolchildren. Most historians now prefer 1185, when the Taira were destroyed and the court authorised Yoritomo to appoint military governors (shugo) and land stewards (jitō) throughout the provinces – the moment when warrior government acquired real nationwide authority. Some date its foundations even earlier, to 1180 or 1183. The period ends in 1333 with the fall of Kamakura.

Yoritomo's government was built on personal bonds with his vassals (gokenin), who received protection of their land and appointments as stewards in return for military service – the relationship of 'favour and service' (go'on to hōkō). After his death in 1199 power passed to his widow Hōjō Masako and her father Hōjō Tokimasa. When Yoritomo's second son, the shōgun Sanetomo, was assassinated in 1219, the Minamoto line ended; thereafter the shōguns were aristocrats or princes brought from Kyoto, while the Hōjō ruled as regents (shikken).

In 1221 the retired emperor Go-Toba tried to overthrow the shogunate in the Jōkyū War and was defeated within weeks. The shogunate confiscated the lands of his supporters, installed its own office in Kyoto at Rokuhara, and extended its stewards into western Japan. In 1232 the regent Hōjō Yasutoki issued the Goseibai Shikimoku, a concise code of 51 articles for warrior society that remained a model of warrior law for centuries.

After conquering Korea, Khubilai Khan demanded that Japan submit. The regent Hōjō Tokimune refused, and in 1274 a Mongol-Korean fleet landed at Hakata Bay in northern Kyushu. Japanese warriors, used to individual combat, faced massed formations and explosive projectiles; after a day of fighting the invaders withdrew to their ships, and a storm is said to have wrecked part of the fleet. The shogunate then built a stone defence wall along the bay.

In 1281 a far larger force, including a fleet from southern China, attacked again. The wall held, fighting dragged on for weeks, and a typhoon destroyed much of the fleet. The storms were later remembered as kamikaze, 'divine winds', and fed a belief in Japan's divine protection. The victory, however, brought no captured land with which to reward the vassals, and the cost of continued defence strained the shogunate's finances and loyalties.

Warrior households, based on the land they held as stewards, became the leading class in the provinces, while court nobles and temples still drew income from their estates. Divided inheritance among all children, including daughters, was common at first but fragmented holdings; by the end of the period inheritance increasingly passed to a single heir, and women's property rights narrowed.

Agriculture improved with double cropping of rice and barley in western Japan, the use of draught animals and fertiliser. Periodic markets held three times a month became common, craftsmen and merchants organised in guilds (za), and imported Song coins spread a money economy. Many vassals fell into debt, and in 1297 the shogunate issued a debt-cancellation decree (tokuseirei) that only deepened economic confusion.

The Kamakura period saw the emergence of Buddhist movements that offered salvation to everyone through a single, accessible practice. Hōnen taught that sincere recitation of the name of Amida (nenbutsu) was enough for rebirth in the Pure Land; his disciple Shinran went further, stressing faith alone and allowing clergy to marry, and founded what became the Jōdo Shinshū. Ippen spread the nenbutsu through dancing and itinerant preaching. Nichiren proclaimed the Lotus Sutra as the only true teaching and attacked other schools and the authorities, predicting foreign invasion.

Zen arrived as a distinct school with Eisai, who introduced Rinzai Zen and promoted tea drinking, and Dōgen, who founded the Sōtō school and the monastery of Eihei-ji. Rinzai Zen won the patronage of the Hōjō regents, who invited Chinese masters and built the great Zen monasteries of Kamakura. The established Tendai and Shingon schools and the temples of Nara remained powerful and also experienced reform movements.

The rebuilding of Nara's temples, burned by the Taira in 1180, gave rise to a new school of sculpture. Unkei, Kaikei and their workshop produced dynamic, realistic figures, above all the two guardian kings of Tōdai-ji's Great South Gate, carved in 1203. The Great Buddha of Kamakura, a seated bronze Amida cast from 1252, stands in the open air since its hall was destroyed in the fifteenth century.

Literature turned to the fall of the Taira and the impermanence of all things. The Tale of the Heike, spread by blind lute-playing monks, opens with the bell of Gion Shōja tolling the transience of all things; Kamo no Chōmei's An Account of My Hut (Hōjōki, 1212) meditates on disaster and withdrawal from the world. The imperial anthology Shin Kokinshū (1205) represents the high point of court poetry of the time, while illustrated scrolls recorded the lives of monks and the Mongol invasions.

By the early fourteenth century the shogunate faced impoverished vassals, factional strife within the Hōjō and a disputed imperial succession that it arbitrated between two rival lines. Emperor Go-Daigo, determined to restore direct imperial rule, plotted against Kamakura, was exiled to the Oki Islands in 1332 and escaped the following year. Warriors who had lost faith in the Hōjō rallied to him: Ashikaga Takauji captured the shogunate's Kyoto headquarters, and Nitta Yoshisada stormed Kamakura in 1333, where the last regent and hundreds of his followers took their own lives.

The Kamakura period established the pattern of Japanese history until 1868: an emperor in Kyoto who reigned, and a warrior government that ruled. It created the ethos of the warrior household, a body of warrior law, and the Buddhist schools – Jōdo, Jōdo Shinshū, Nichiren, Rinzai and Sōtō – that still account for most of Japan's temples.

Kamakura itself, with its Zen monasteries, the Tsurugaoka Hachimangū shrine at the heart of the old town and the Great Buddha, preserves the memory of the first warrior capital.