Into the Rising Sun 4

In the 900s, weak Heian emperors lost control of rural Japan to the provincial warrior class that, until then, had been mainly relatives or financial dependents of their landowner lords. By 1100, the samurai held effective military and political power over much of Japan. The weak imperial line received a fatal blow in 1156, when Emperor Toba died without a clear successor, and his sons destroyed each other in the Hogen Rebellion civil war.  Two samurai clans, the Minamoto and Taira, filled the vacuum, and fought each another for dominance, in the Heiji Rebellion of 1160. The Taira won the first round, banished the defeated Minamoto from the capital at Kyoto, and established the first samurai-led military dictatorship.
But the Minamoto came back from their exile stronghold in Kamakura, and won against the Taira in the five year Genpei War that ended in 1185. Minamoto no Yoritomo established the Kamakura Shogunate, and relegated the emperor to a figurehead role. The Minamotos ruled much of Japan until 1333, a reign contested by other samurai clans and, in 1274 and 1281, invasion fleets from the Mongol ruler of Yuan China, Kublai Khan. Luckily for the Kamakura, a Kamikaze Divine Wind took care of both the Mongol armadas. Unluckily, unable to offer land or riches to the other samurai leaders who rallied to Japan's defense, the weakened shogunate was overthrown by Emperor Go-Daigo in 1333. This Kemmu Restoration of imperial power lasted only three years, until Ashikaga Takauji reasserted samurai rule. But Ashikaga was weaker than the Kamakura had been and the regional daimyô constables developed considerable power, meddling in shogunate power and succession. In 1467, squabbling erupted into the decade-long Ônin War. Thousands died, Kyoto was burned to the ground, and a hundred years of chaotic and violent Sengoku, or ‘Warring States’ conflict traumatized the country. 
Order was finally restored by a serial assumption of power by the three giant samurai of Japanese history. In 1568, the warlord Oda Nobunaga marched into Kyoto. Fourteen years later he was assassinated by one of his generals, and another, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, finished the unification and ruled as kampaku regent, until his own death from bubonic plague, during his second invasion of Korea in 1598. The man that emerged from his Edo castle stronghold to become shogun, brought peace and stability for a quarter of a millennium, and set the culture in stone. Tokugawa Ieyasu, from his position of extreme power, domesticated the samurai, forcing them to either serve their lords in the cities, or give up their swords and farm, paradoxically transforming a society of governing warriors into a hereditary class of cultured bureaucrats. Never comprising more than ten percent of Japan’s population, their pay was measured in koku, 180 liters of rice, the amount necessary to feed a man for a year.
The southern kamikaze inflection point of Jo-ha-kyu samurai history arrived with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The Emperor replaced them with a conscripted army five years later, and four years after that, defeated their Satsuma Rebellion and feudal system, in the last suicidal charge of the Battle of Shiroyama. 



                                              ‘Let others hail the rising sun:
                                               I bow to that whose course is run’
                                                                       David Garrick