The emperor and the shogun: A power struggle across the centuries

Japan Times

17-05-2025

In the second month of the third year of the Bunkyu era — March 1863 — there occurred perhaps the oddest beheading in the long history of righteous indignation. Nine swordsmen stormed the Toji-in temple in Kyoto. The victims were utterly defenseless. They were statues — three wooden statues of men — shoguns — dead some 500 years. Historian Anne Walthall, in 'The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration,' recreates the scene:
The swordsmen 'tied up the monks on guard, then invaded the hall where the statues were enshrined. One man suggested that the statues' bodies be destroyed, but the others objected because they were carved in full court dress. Out of respect for the emperor they should remain unscathed. ... Having been fashioned from a separate block of wood, the heads were simply yanked out of the bodies. ... Clasping the heads ... the nine men departed as noisily as they had come. Once outside the temple, (one of their number) led them in a chorus of war cries, then they ran back through the city, pausing briefly to bow before a gate to the imperial palace.'
Historian Donald Keene, in 'Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan,' adds this detail: The swordsmen 'then exposed the heads on the banks of the Kamo River, following the common practice at the time of 'patriots' exposing for all to see the heads of men accused of being traitors. Beside the heads of the three shoguns, placards were set up enumerating the crimes of each.'
Mid-19th-century Japan was a seething cauldron. For 250 years, the country had been sealed shut against the outside world. Perhaps no other major culture in world history had developed in such splendid isolation, feeding only on itself, neither influenced nor influencing, not preyed upon and not preying. For two centuries, those who chose myth over reality faced no rude awakening from their conviction that theirs was 'the land of the gods,' its ancient divine inheritance inviolable and eternal.
Then came the rude awakening. The U.S. Navy's Black Ships are a familiar symbol of the force that opened Japan — a crack in 1853, then wider, then wider still. Foreign feet trod the sacred soil, their numbers growing, their rights and privileges expanding. Was this to be permitted? It was, declared the shogun ruling in Edo (present-day Tokyo) — if only because Japan was powerless to resist. It was not, said the emperor reigning politically impotent in Kyoto, divine guardian of the divine nation's divine myths.
Assassins roamed the land — in the emperor's service, they said — cutting down foreigners and Japanese deemed collaborators, traitors to Japan's sacred past, sacred present and sacred future. Imperial restoration was their aim. They scarcely foresaw the Meiji Restoration they themselves were hatching, neither its imminence — it lay a scant five years down the road at the time of the attack on the statues — nor the modernizing and Westernizing direction it ultimately took, scarcely less noxious in their nostrils than the shogunate it toppled. Those who propelled history forward were turned by history into such anachronisms that to modern eyes they seem as archaic as an earlier restoration they hoped to reproduce: the Kenmu Restoration of 1333-36.
Three ancient characters, larger than life for better or worse, were in spirit very much alive to the 19th-century avenging swordsmen who made life intolerable and ultimately impossible for the Edo shoguns helpless to stem the foreign incursion. The three are Emperor Go-Daigo (1288-1339), the guerrilla warrior Kusunoki Masashige (1294-1336) and shogun Ashikaga Takauji (1305-58).
Go-Daigo: living symbol of everything the 19th-century swordsmen fought for — an emperor not only reigning but ruling, no mere figurehead but a god ruling the land of the gods and its people of the gods.
Kusunoki: the ultimate loyalist hero, leading followers numbered in hundreds against shogunal armies numbered in tens of thousands, knowing his cause was doomed and fighting all the more fiercely, leading his men forward crying, 'Would we had seven lives to give that we may destroy the enemies of the Court!'
And Takauji, the villain of the drama — the ultimate traitor, 'enemy of the Court' number one, founder of the Ashikaga shogunate that ruled from 1336 to 1573 and (thus Keene's title) creator of 'the soul of Japan.' Takauji's greatness as warrior and statesman stand him in little stead in historical memory: his fate is sealed, he it was who betrayed Go-Daigo. Posterity judged him and wreaked its vengeance on his statue 500 years later; the two others were of his immediate successors, his son and grandson.
Go-Daigo's Kenmu uprising against the Kamakura shogunate (1185-1333), precursor of the Meiji uprising against the Edo shogunate (1603-1868), was a hopelessly muddled, comically bungled affair, doomed to certain and instant failure, yet, for a time, triumphant — how? Thanks to Takauji, whose first betrayal — not of Go-Daigo but of the shogun whose leading general he was — turned the tide. The contemporary anonymous court chronicle 'Masukagami' ('The Clear Mirror') says of him (in George Perkins' translation), 'Takauji had given the shogunate a solemn written pledge of unswerving loyalty when he left Kamakura, but his true intentions were said to be in doubt. ... It had been whispered that Takauji might try to use the present national crisis to elevate his own position, and the whispers proved to be well grounded.'
Suddenly he was an imperial loyalist. An ambitious man thwarted in his ambitions, he sought their fulfillment elsewhere — in the imperial camp. Turning against his former masters, he freed Go-Daigo from wretched and ignominious exile on a remote island and stormed Kamakura. 'The attackers' battle cry was like a thunderclap, a noise loud enough to shake the earth. ... Emperor Kogon (the shogun's puppet, installed in the exiled Go-Daigo's stead), and (other courtiers) were utterly distraught. Accustomed only to the strains of musical instruments, they were stupefied by a sound so extraordinary and sinister.'
The Kamakura Period was over. Go-Daigo enthroned and ruling not only in name but in fact would give our story a happy ending. It was not to be. The Kenmu Restoration 'was an unmitigated fiasco,' writes historian Ivan Morris in 'The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan.' Go-Daigo's tragic flaw was his inability to come down from his divine clouds and understand human beings. Takauji he grievously misjudged, according him to whom he owned his otherwise impossible triumph scant honor. Cut to the quick, Takauji turned again, seizing the shogunate in open defiance of the imperial will. Japan was at war.
'The Battle of Minato River,' Morris writes, 'was fought on a sweltering summer day in 1336 and lasted from ten o'clock in the morning until about five in the evening': the loyalist guerrilla warrior Kusunoki versus Takauji the rebel shogun. The loyalists had no chance and knew it. Our story opened with a display of heads and now closes with one. 'Masashige's head,' we read in the contemporary chronicle 'Taiheiki' ('Chronicle of Great Peace,' translated by Helen McCullough), 'was exposed in the river bed at Rokujo. ... Subsequently Lord Takauji sent for the head and despatched it to Masashige's home with a message saying, 'It really grieves me when I think how long he and I were close associates' — as enemies, but what does that matter? In Japanese history, the 'association' of enmity is as dear and intimate as the association of friendship.
And Emperor Go-Daigo? He fled the capital and set up a 'Southern Court' in the mountains of Yoshino, where the cherries bloom. Takauji ignored it as Go-Daigo ignored him, Takauji giving his sanction to the 'Northern Court' in Kyoto and being sanctioned by it in turn; it confirmed his appointment as shogun, in which office he died in 1358.
The two courts remained divided until 1392.
Michael Hoffman is the author of 'Arimasen.'