Ah, the Kamakura Period, when the first shogunate arose in Japan, when the Mongols invaded,
and when the samurai class reached puberty and things got ugly.
So finally, after the Genpei War, we leave the Heian Period,
I thought it would last forever.
Now we’re in the Kamakura Period (1185 - 1333).
Let’s do a crash course of this period before we dive into the details in later videos.
The war treated one man very well.
Minamoto no Yoritomo (源頼朝) emerged as the ruler of a
military government in the city of Kamakura.
Yoritomo’s first order of business was to help his subjects in any way he could
like a benevolent leader should.
Just kidding, it was to destroy all threats.
He hunted down his brother Yoshitsune.
Yoshitsune eventually died by the hands of the Oshu Fujiwara in the north, who sent his
head to Yoritomo with a note saying “Don’t kill us, thank you.”
When Yoshitsune’s concubine gave birth, Yoritomo had the baby boy killed.
Yoritomo killed another brother Noriyori because he thought Noriyori had a loyalty deficit.
And he killed his own son-in-law, or at least potential son-in-law.
The guy was promised to his daughter.
Now all this may unfairly lead you to think that Yoritomo was a nasty, brutal man
who went around killing his own family members, but that’s not true.
He killed non-family members as well, like the Oshu Fujiwara.
You know, the same ones who murdered Yoshitsune for him before?
Murder, murder, murder.
In 1192, the Imperial court gave Yoritomo the title of seii taishogun (征夷大将軍),
or you can shorten it to shogun (将軍).
This officially made him commander-in-chief of Japan.
Now this was more because he was powerful rather than the court granting him power.
He was already unofficially the commander-in-chief.
The shogun title didn’t really change things.
It was a happy time in Yoritomo’s life because it was when he gave birth
to a special little boy called a military government.
His government in Kamakura came to be called a bakufu, or shogunate.
Japan’s first shogunate, isn’t he cute?
It literally means “tent government.”
But don’t get the wrong idea.
The shogunate didn’t push aside the traditional Imperial court and hoard Japan all to itself.
Instead, Japan had 2 governments running at the same time:
the traditional one in Kyoto,
and the military government in Kamakura.
Kamakura had the military power.
The greatest warriors were in the Kanto region, where Kamakura was.
But governing was shared.
Yoritomo actually made sure to get official authorization from Kyoto for his policies.
Basically, Kamakura held control over the Kanto, and Kyoto held control over the rest.
Yeah it was more complicated, but hold your tea, we’ll get to that in a later video.
Now the worst thing for Yoritomo would have been if his shogunate baby died
right after his death,
so he put in place policies to make sure that didn’t happen.
And it did work, technically.
He died in 1199.
The shogun position passed to his son Yoriie.
But like for many strong leaders in history, his family didn’t stay in power for long.
Yoritomo’s wife was Hojo Masako (北条政子), and her clan the Hojo wasn’t really fond
of Yoriie being shogun.
Fortunately for them, murder is always an option.
They forced Yoriie to resign in favor of his underage brother, then killed him.
And since the new shogun, Sanetomo, was too young, the Hojo said,
“I guess we have no choice but to rule for him” while sighing convincingly.
Thus began the era of Hojo Regency, where shogun became a figurehead position
and the Hojo ruled as regents of the shogun.
This would last until the end of the Kamakura Period in 1333.
After her husband died, Hojo Masako became a nun and devoted the rest of her life to
prayers, worship,
and totally taking control of the Hojo clan with her brother becoming
the power behind the shogunate rallying troops and playing politics
like she was born to do it.
She became known as the Nun Shogun.
There was a lot of sweet, sweet intrigue and betrayals in the time after Yoritomo’s death.
So there is a popular notion that in Japan the shogun held real power and the emperor
was just a figurehead.
But after Yoritomo, the shogun also became a figurehead.
The only shogun in the Kamakura Period who had real power and used it was Yoritomo.
In 1221, Retired Emperor Gotoba (後鳥羽) had a problem,
and it rhymed with “lotion it.”
He thought the shogunate was getting too strong, so he proceeded to gather an army
and lose a war against the actual warriors.
This was the embarrassing Jokyu War.
Afterwards, the shogunate’s response was to take all the lands of the losing side.
Over time, Kamakura’s power eclipsed that of Kyoto’s.
Kamakura even decided who sat on the throne a few times.
In 1274, Kublai Khan launched an invasion of Japan.
They had been going back-and-forth a few times saying,
“Become our vassals or there’ll be hassle.”
And Japan was like, “Ay yo come at me bro. Bit of a breeze here though.”
And the Mongols were like, “Only a coward fears a little wind.
Take up your bow, your death we’ll seek downwind.”
And Japan was like, “You can’t rhyme wind with wind!”
The invasion started in Tsushima and moved towards Kyushu, but the Mongols had to retreat
because the Japanese were pretty good they’re not gonna lie.
Stories afterward said that the Mongols left because of a typhoon but most scholars believe
this was only a story, and there was no typhoon.
In 1281, the Mongols returned again with a bigger army, thinking this should be enough,
and got demolished by a real typhoon this time.
As his ship was sinking, the Mongol commander wrote a poem about his big army which read,
“It’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean.”
The Japanese called the typhoon kamikaze (神風), or “divine wind,” because they thought
the gods had intervened.
But although they pushed back the invasion, it gave the shogunate a big headache.
Kamakura was running out of land to pay the samurai defenders.
And the friggin Buddhist temples also wanted payment,
claiming that their prayers brought the typhoon.
Trouble was brewing in the country.
Samurai who fought in the war were like,
“Hey where are the lands and titles that you promised us?”
They thought the shogunate failed to keep up its end of the contract.
Also, many samurai saw the lavish way the court aristocrats lived.
One look at an ox carriage with those rims that keep on rolling even when the wheels stop,
and they were like, “Bruh.”
But they couldn’t afford those kinds of things.
Since their landholdings stayed the same, their income stayed the same or even dropped
when they gave pieces of their land to their children.
Fortunately, murder is always an option.
Land conflicts and raiding broke out in the provinces.
Now that Yoritomo was Yori-NOmo, the samurai families who fought for him back in the day
all of a sudden ran low on loyalty, and they couldn’t find an outlet nearby.
They became more greedy for land and more open to challenging the shogunate.
Women’s rights took a blow around this time.
Kamakura declared that the land of its samurai could only be passed down to one male heir.
So a piece of land could only have one man as its lord, and everyone else living there,
like children, siblings, or pokemon, became his subjects.
Women could still inherit land through their mothers, but you can see how over time, this
system lowered the amount of land owned by women.
The popularity of Buddhism exploded at this time.
Buddhism came to Japan from China.
But that meant it was laced with the views of that famous men’s rights activist, Confucius.
Women were seen as flawed and able to spread their impurity.
They were even forbidden to enter the grounds
of major Buddhist worshippy places like Mount Hiei.
In the previous Heian Period,
Buddhism was mostly practiced by the upper class, by the elites.
In the Kamakura Period, it spread to the commoners.
This was after the Genpei War, a military government was gaining power.
It was a time of unrest.
The common folk needed a religion that catered to them.
So new Buddhist sects popped up.
The main ones were Pure Land Buddhism, Nichiren Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism.
Pure Land Buddhism was a Buddhism for the masses.
It gave people a path to the Pure Land, a Buddhist paradise.
It was seductive to people who wanted to escape the suffering of the world, which was everyone.
They worshipped a Buddha called Amida over all others.
They believed that you could enter the Pure Land by repeating Amida’s name.
This is why you might have seen monks say Namu Amida Butsu (南無阿弥陀仏)
or just Amida Butsu (阿弥陀仏).
Similarly, the Chinese Pure Land Buddhists say Namo Amituofo (南无阿弥陀佛)
or just Amituofo (阿弥陀佛).
Nichiren Buddhism taught that you achieved salvation through reciting the Lotus Sutra.
Its father was a priest named Nichiren.
Picture a Buddhist priest who was calm, friendly, and tolerant,
then picture the opposite of all of that, and you got Nichiren.
He and his followers were militant and super nationalistic.
He hated all other Buddhist sects.
His was the one true sect.
Oh and Japan was the place where the single world religion would come from.
His religion.
A lot of samurai saw that aggressiveness and loyalty to country and said,
“Where do I sign up?”
Then we had Zen Buddhism, where the goal was not entering paradise, but reaching enlightenment
by understanding one’s true nature and the nature of reality.
You did this through meditation and focus instead of reasoning and logic.
It sounds simple, but it takes hard work and discipline and not understanding any of this.
Zen was mostly practiced by samurai because it really fit their way of life.
It was all about simplicity, acting in the moment, and self-reliance.
You relied on yourself for salvation, not some outside force.
You can see Zen influence all over Japanese culture.
This focus on simplicity, discipline, and intense concentration you can see in the tea
ceremony, gardening, sword making, painting, and bunch of other stuff.
At the end of the period, another emperor decided that the shogunate was really annoying,
and that was Emperor Godaigo (後醍醐).
The shogunate actually helped put Godaigo on the throne.
He said “thanks,” then led an anti-shogunate movement in the Imperial court.
He finally overthrew the Kamakura shogunate in 1333 and returned Japan to rule by the
Imperial Family, which lasted for like 3 years.
Alright, I wanna give a shoutout to this YouTube channel called The Shogunate.
Link in the description.
There aren’t many Japanese history channels, at least when I was looking for them a year
or 2 ago, so let’s promote the ones we find.
He goes through the Sengoku Jidai in detail, so you may like the channel.
Check it out.
Okay so we’re finally starting the Kamakura Period.
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To catch up on what happened in the Heian Period, check out this playlist.
So we have new patrons this week, Moose, Anthony Penna, and João Aliao.
Thank you so much you guys.
Alright, much love, and spread the knowledge.