Kenmu Restoration and the rise of the Ashikaga shogunate

Go-Daigo, who came to the throne on 29 March 1318, wanted to rule without the warrior government in Kamakura, where the Hōjō regents had long held real power and whose authority had been weakened since the Mongol invasions: the defensive war had yielded no lands with which to reward the warriors who fought it. His plots were discovered in 1324 and 1331, and he was exiled to the Oki Islands, but loyalists such as Kusunoki Masashige and the emperor’s son Prince Moriyoshi (Morinaga) kept up the fight. In 1333 Go-Daigo escaped, and the commander sent against him, Ashikaga Takauji, declared for the emperor on 12 June and on 19 June destroyed the shogunate’s headquarters at Rokuhara in Kyoto. In the east Nitta Yoshisada marched on Kamakura and, using a low tide to pass the cape of Inamuragasaki, broke into the city; on 4 July Hōjō Takatoki, head of the clan and a former regent, killed himself with his kin at their family temple, Tōshō-ji — more than 870 people died there, according to the Taiheiki, a figure that may be exaggerated.

Go-Daigo re-entered Kyoto on 17 July 1333 and set out to govern through his own edicts and offices, such as the Records Office and a tribunal for land suits; the era name Kenmu, adopted on 5 March 1334, gave the regime its name. The demand that every land title be confirmed by imperial edict flooded the capital with claimants and had soon to be abandoned, rewards seemed unfair to many warriors, and the plan for a new palace brought heavy new taxes; satirical verses posted at Nijō-gawara in 1334 or 1335 mocked the disorder. Older accounts, following the Taiheiki, blamed the regime’s fall on its neglect of the warriors, while recent research stresses the continuity of its institutions with late Kamakura practice. When Hōjō Tokiyuki seized Kamakura on 14 August 1335, Takauji marched east without the emperor’s leave, retook the city on 6 September, stayed there and began to reward his followers himself — an open break with the court.

In the war that followed Takauji entered Kyoto on 23 February 1336 but was soon driven out and fled to Kyushu. Having won at Tatarahama on 13 April, he returned with an army and a fleet, and on 4 July 1336 he crushed the loyalists at Minatogawa, where Kusunoki Masashige took his own life. Takauji set Kōmyō of the rival imperial line on the throne on 20 September; Go-Daigo surrendered on 13 November and on 5 December handed the regalia to Kōmyō, and on 10 December the Kenmu Shikimoku set out the principles of the new warrior government. On 23 January 1337 Go-Daigo escaped to Yoshino, declaring the regalia he had surrendered false, and on 24 September 1338 the Northern Court named Takauji shogun.