What a Friend We Have in Jizōs 18

Before the consequences of that denial would become obvious one other event would stir the sand on Shichirigahama. In 1271, the Buddhist monk, Nichiren, condemned to death for his Treatise on Peace and Righteousness, was pardoned when his executioner, ready to carry out the sentence on Shichi’s beach, was struck by lightening. 
Three years later, 900 Mongol ships carrying 33,000 troops were destroyed in the middle of a northern Kyushu battle by a typhoon. In 1279, the eighth Hōjō regent, Tokimune, beheaded five Mongolian emissaries in Kamakura. This threw Kublai Khan into the rage that, two years later, sent an invasion force of 4,000 ships carrying 140,000 soldiers, only just stopped again by another kamikaze ‘divine wind’ typhoon.
Though peace was restored, the Kamakura government had been financially drained. The warlords who had fought against the invaders were unhappy with the inability of the Hōjōs to provide the customary territorial rewards, in recognition of service rendered. The Shogunate had nothing left to grant. The disappointed warlords began to create disputes inside the government, and the Hōjō regime began to slide.
Strangely, none of this was showcased in the contemporary classic thirty year enchanting memoir of The Confessions of Lady Nijo, which chronicled the life of the Emperor’s favorite Minamoto concubine, her other lovers and pregnancies, expulsion from the court, and spiritual struggle as an old wandering Buddhist nun. The rich narrative is a lucid, subtle, intimate portrait of a very human emperor, a court obsessed with nostalgia for the glorious Heian past, and the often turbulent life of a beautiful woman, pursued from all sides by the amorous advances of well-placed suitors. She grew old without being able to see her children and, prevented from attending the funeral procession of her beloved emperor, ran barefoot after it instead, through the streets of Kyoto. Through the various common people she met on her travels, prostitutes and warlords and nuns and Shinto priests and musicians, Lady Nijo transformed from a vain aristocrat into a compassionate human being.

                              ‘How much longer will pity
                               Lead you to this garden,
                               As choked with weeds
                               As my thoughts with pain?’

“So what finally happened to the Hōjō, and the Kamakura Shogunate?” Robyn asked. “And why the bodies and the swords in the sand?” I pointed down the beach to a headland.
“Inamuragasaki Cape.” I said. “Believed impassable.”