The first military government in Japan was founded in 1185, after a civil war.
Not many people outside of historians are experts in this period, but even the most
casual anime watchers know that a military government took over Japan at some point,
and that it was ruled by shapely girls with large bosoms.
The man who came out the winner in the war was Minamoto no Yoritomo 源頼朝,
and when you win a war, it’s only polite to create your own government.
He made a government of badass warriors based in Kamakura, kicking off the Kamakura Period.
Now the traditional civilian government, the Imperial Court where the emperor lived, was still there.
If Yoritomo had really wanted to, he could have wrapped his iron balls around the Court
and brought those tea drinking nobles under his control, or he could have just gotten rid of it.
But he didn’t.
From then on, two governments shared the rule in Japan.
The Imperial Court in Kyoto and the military shogunate in Kamakura.
So why did Yoritomo agree to share power?
There were a lot of possible reasons, like the Court gave him legitimacy,
but let’s talk about the idea of lineage, of bloodlines.
When you hear the word bloodline, you automatically think of powers passed down within a family,
like the Sharingan, and that’s 100% true.
That’s what happened back then.
But also back then, which house you were born to pretty much determined your life and your career.
If you came from a high status house, the sky was the limit, you could marry into the Imperial Family.
If you came from a low status house, you married into some other noble house.
And if you came from a peasant house, you married Annabelle the Cow.
In a society where everyone thought that way, destroying the Imperial Family and the Court
was so taboo that they made dirty videos about it.
The Imperial Family had the most precious blood of all.
The nature of the world was that they ruled over Japan.
Who was Yoritomo to upset the natural order?
He himself was legitimate because he came from the main branch of the Minamoto,
an old and famous warrior clan.
Fun fact: Yoritomo didn’t accomplish much for the first 33 years of his life.
He only became this badass war hero at a pretty old age for the time.
So if you ever feel like you haven’t done much so far in your life,
you probably never will because you’re not Yoritomo.
So there were two governments.
Most of Kamakura’s influence was in the east, and Kyoto’s influence was in the west.
They shared a lot of responsibilities, sometimes working together, sometimes arguing together.
The shogunate tried to stay out of the Court’s hair unless it was really necessary,
like if the Court tried to take over shogunate land or something.
Now even though the shogun was the head of this new military government, the founder
Yoritomo was the only shogun that held real power and used it.
The next 2 shoguns were his sons, and although they did have authority,
they were often checked by Kamakura elites and the rising Hōjō family.
The shogun eventually became a figurehead.
The shogun title wasn’t even that important at first.
Yoritomo actually dropped the title later on and it changed nothing.
He never intended for the shogun title to be the symbol of leadership.
He never meant for it to be passed down to his heir and start a long line of shoguns.
It was the Hōjō clan that painted the title with gold.
After Yoritomo’s death, the Hōjō slowly took control and kept it for the rest of the Kamakura Period.
Their problem was that they could not seize the leadership position themselves,
they came from a low status family. Lineage is a bish.
But don’t worry, if you listen to your heart and work hard, you too can become dictator.
The Hōjō realized that the next best thing was being regents,
people who ruled on behalf of a leader.
So they tied the shogun title to Yoritomo to lend it legitimacy.
They were like, You guys, Yoritomo was a shogun, shoguns are really cool.
And so shogun became the title of the lord of Kamakura, and for the rest of the Kamakura Period,
the Hōjō clan ruled as regents to mostly puppet shoguns.
They settled on the strategy of finding a really young boy of premium blood from the
court nobility or even the Imperial Family and making him shogun.
Then when he grew old enough to learn ambition, they kicked him out of office and found another boy.
A puppet is useless when he becomes a real boy.
The youngest shoguns were 3 years old and shoguns were kicked out in their late 20s or early 30s.
Kamakura and its warriors were bound by a vassalage system.
You had a vassal and his lord.
The vassal gives his loyalty to the lord, and the lord gives back protection and rewards such as land.
Warrior society was built on this system.
It was a multilevel marketing network of samurai leaders and vassals, with the shogun at the top.
This is important.
The lord-vassal relationship was a social contract that both sides had to honor.
Everyone understood that if one side broke the contract, the relationship could end.
So if a vassal was disloyal, the lord could kill him or whatever.
But if the lord violated the contract, like he didn’t provide enough rewards,
only sent him a card for Christmas, then the vassal was justified in leaving him or even slitting his throat.
The idea you see in movies about samurai being loyal no matter what,
like they would shove their mothers aside, cut off their own arm,
and throw it in front of their lord just to stop the lord from stepping in a puddle,
that’s a myth. I can safely say that never happened.
It was supposed to be a relationship that benefited both sides.
If a vassal thought he could get better rewards elsewhere, he’d leave,
and maybe bring with him the head of the old lord as a gift to the new one.
Direct vassals of the shogun were very high status.
And at the time, shogunate warriors were often seen as the “true” warriors,
different from those wannabe non-shogunate warriors that were still around in the west.
The Kamakura shogunate was structured this way.
They had the shogun, the big boss man himself, first of his name, protector of the realm, at the top.
He stood on top of three boards.
The mandokoro, or the Board of Administration, was the most important.
It was a council of people who governed and passed down policies, the usual government things.
The samurai dokoro was the Board of Samurai.
They handled military and policing issues, and investigated criminal cases.
The monchūjo was the Bureau of Investigation.
They handled civil lawsuits, like if two people couldn’t agree on who owned a piece of land.
At some point, the Hōjō clan sneaked in the hyōjōshū, or the Board of Councillors.
It basically did the same things as the mandokoro, but it stood above the other three.
The Hōjō pretty much said, This is now the heart of the government, and by the way, we control it.
Now this chart makes it look like there was clear separation of powers between the different
parts of the government, but no, they weren’t that strict about it.
For example, the hyōjōshū often heard cases brought to the monchūjo, and the regent could
interfere with the other boards if he wanted to.
Kamakura ruled its lands using two types of officials, the shugo 守護 and the jitō 地頭.
The shugo were military governors.
Each shugo took care of a province.
They crushed rebellions, kept the peace, and investigated criminal cases.
A shugo was like the leader of the military and the police in a province.
Where things got confusing was that the Imperial Court had its own governor for each province.
The governor and shugo had a lot of the same duties,
so a strong sense of camaraderie and cooperation didn’t exist at all.
They fought a lot.
And then we had the jitō, which everyone who played Ghost of Tsushima Googled when they heard it in-game.
The jitō were land managers.
Each jitō was given a piece of land.
They came in different sizes but they were smaller than a province.
Jitō collected taxes, managed the land, and served as local police.
This office was how the shogunate kept up its end of the contract with its vassals.
The shogunate rewarded its vassals with jitō positions, giving them land to manage and
collect income from.
Land to a samurai were like subscribers to a Twitch streamer, the more you had,
the more money you could squeeze out of them.
The jitō didn’t actually own the land, the property already had owners.
So they had this weird situation where the jitō managed land owned by someone else,
but they were not under the landowner’s control.
A jitō could break local laws and the landowner could do nothing about it except open a lawsuit
with the shogunate every time the jitō does something uncool, and hope that they win.
And it was never clear who had authority over what between the jitō and the landowner.
Now you may think that this system would cause all kinds of problems, and you’d be right.
People sent endless lawsuits to Kamakura.
Jitō abused their powers and broke laws and bullied the locals all the time.
Like they would line their pockets by charging people fines for breaking rules they just made up.
Turns out warriors are huge dicks.
For more videos about the Kamakura Period check out this over here.
Alright, I love you, and spread the knowledge.