Yoritomo’s second son, Sanetomo, took the post of shogun, at only 11 years of age. With his passion for writing tanka poetry, and his political apathy, he became a cultural favorite of the Kyoto Imperial Court. To keep the shogun only titular, the Hōjōs replaced young Kyoto aristocrats with other children as they grew up, citing one reason after another.
‘When mountains are split
And the seas run dry-
Should such a world be born,
I would not show a double heart
In the service of my Lord.’
Sanetomo
In the winter of 1219, Sanetomo was abruptly assassinated by his nephew Kugyō, under the giant ginkgo tree that still stands at the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine. Kugyō himself, the last of Yoritomo’s bloodline, was beheaded by the Hōjō just hours later. Barely 30 years into the shogunate, the dynasty which created the Kamakura shogunate was gone. For the next century, all real power belonged to the Hōjō regents, and the shogun became a hereditary figurehead.
In 1221, the Emperor Gotoba thought he would try his hand at overthrowing the Kamakura Shogunate, and was exiled, with the samurai he had recruited for this purpose, to the remote island of Okinoshima. The Hōjō established a military station called Rokuhara Tandai in Kyoto, to check any further ambitions of the Imperial Court. In 1225, Yoritomo’s widow, Masaka, became the Nun Shogun, and every successive regent was a legitimate son of the Hōjō. The family crest is ubiquitous in Kamakura, on its most prestigious temples and shrines. By 1250 the city was the fourth largest in the world, with 200,000 people.
But the sun doesn’t shine on the same heads forever. The Hōjō’s control of the Shogunate would be ultimately weakened by their parceling out land to favored patrons, in ways they had not forseen. In 1268, Kublai Khan sent an envoy to Japan, to convince Kamakura to accept Mongol suzerainty. The Hōjō’s refused this overture, and many successive ones.
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