CHAPTER XXIII

THE BUDDHISM OF KAMAKURA

KAMAKURA is connected with Yoritomo and the Regents of the Hojo family. Yoritomo, the first of the Minamoto Shoguns (1147-1199), was the son of that Yoshitomo who, after leaguing himself with the Taira against his own clan, and bearing arms against his own father, ended by breaking with the Taira for their want of gratitude, and perished miserably at the hands of one of his own retainers, who hoped to earn the favour of Kiyomori by sending him the head of his misguided master.

His wife, Tokiwa Gozen, who had once been a consort of the Emperor Konoe, and had escaped with her three children from the massacre in which her husband had perished, sacrificed her own person to the vindictive Kiyomori, in order thereby to save the three children whom she had borne to Yoshitomo. One of these children was Yoritomo; the other was Yoshitsune, the favourite hero of Japanese history and romance.

Yoritomo was about thirteen years old when his father died. His mother's self-sacrifice induced Kiyomori to spare him; but he was banished to Izu, where he did not behave very well; though he managed to secure the affections of his guardian's daughter, the beautiful and capable Masa-ko, who ran away from home to join her lover on the outbreak of his war against the Taira, and who may be said to have laid the foundations of the Hojo

family, by procuring for her father the nomination to the office of Regent (Shikken). Yoritomo's arms were successful; he and his associates defeated the Taira partisans at Ichi-no-tani (1184), at Yashima (1184), and finally at Dan-no-ura (1185), after which he found himself practically master of Japan, being invested in 1192 with the title of Sei-i-tai Shogun, a title which for seven successive centuries continued to designate the personage in whose hands nominally lay the practical administrative and military power in Japan.

But long before that, in the early part of his campaigns, after his defeat at Ishibashiyama in 1181, he had (under Hojo Tokimasa's advice) made Kamakura his headquarters, and had there organized the samurai who rallied round the Minamoto standard into a compact military body, which assured to him the victory over his rivals throughout Japan. The Kamakura Bakufu--a state within a state--organized by the genius of Hojo Tokimasa--was to the rest of Japan in those days what Prussia was to the rest of Germany in 1866, better organized, better drilled, better disciplined, and it was thanks to the Hojo genius that the Minamoto secured the hegemony of the Empire.