JAMES MURDOCH' HISTORY OF JAPAN FROM THE ORIGINS

TO THE ARRIVAL OF THE PORTUGUESE IN 1542 AD

 

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE ATTEMPT TO RESTORE THE OLD CIVILIAN GOVERNMENT.

 

FOR the first three months after his escape from his island prison Daigo II remained in Hoki, where his Court was presently thronged by many of the section of Court nobles attached to his cause. Early in July he left Hoki, and passing through Mimasaka, journeyed up along the coast of the Inland Sea by easy stages and reached Kyoto on the 20th of the month.

Kogon Tenno was not deposed; the theory was that he had never reigned. But he was now accorded the same treatment as Toba II’s brother, Prince Morisada, and made Dajo- Tenno. Thus there were again three ex-Emperors all of the Senior line. They retired to the Jimyo-in, Daigo II assigning them the Chokodo estates and the other property designated for their support by the will of Saga II retaining however the provincial taxes of Harima as a civil list for himself. So far all this did not seriously depart from the spirit of the famous will. But the nomination of one of Daigo’s own sons as Crown Prince certainly did so. Here again it is plain that the claims of primogeniture were of comparatively little consequence, for some half-dozen elder half-brothers were passed over in favour of the Emperor’s son by his favourite consort, the Fujiwara Lady Renshi, who had accompanied him to Oki, and who had exercised a considerable influence over him for the past fourteen years. According to the gossip of the Taihei-ki the Empress’s ascendancy over Daigo II had by this time become complete; it was upon her good will or enmity that advancement at Court and in the official world mainly depended. Accordingly she has been held largely responsible for the disastrous failure of the restored government to grapple with the problems by which it was presently confronted. But in this connection two remarks must be made. In the first place, the Taihei-ki is no history; it is mostly a romance. The publication of contemporary official and other records enables us to test certain of its most assured assertions; and these turn out to be so glaringly false that it becomes almost hopeless to repose any confidence in the narrative when unsupported by other accounts or evidence. Then in the second place, even if there had been no Empress in the case at all, the attitude of the Court towards the great social and political problems of the times was such that a successful solution of them from that quarter was not to be expected.

The chief idea that now occupied the minds of the Court nobles was delightfully simple. It was that the day of the Buké was completely over; and that the Kugé had come by their own again. Things were to revert to the conditions of the year-period of Engi—or in other words of the early half of the tenth century. “Back to Engi.” That was a formula easy to remember and to repeat; and it provided a full solution for all the problems of the day and a complete cure for the accumulated social and political maladies of four hundred years. Now what the state of Japan was under the rule of Fujiwara Tadahira—he of the Cuckoo fan—has already been set forth. Then Kyoto was everything; the rest of the Empire was of no consequence except in as far as its resources ministered to the needs of the luxurious world of civilian rank and fashion in the magnificent capital. In those days most of the great mansions of the Fujiwara nobles had their Samurai-dokoro, or “waiting-upon place,” a humble apartment for the accommodation of the military men who had the honour of protecting the house from thieves. Great captains were often to be found occupying these apartments, and acting as modern police constables specially hired by wealthy people as night-watchmen. Now the upstart descendants of these humble private police inspectors and constables owned the greater part of the soil of the Empire, for which they paid no taxes to Kyoto, while the civilian authorities dared not set foot in their manors. Not only had the Buké become an imperium in imperio with a great capital of their own, with a system of jurisprudence of their own, with a highly efficient and far-reaching system of administration of their own, but in the highest of issues they frequently laid down the law to Kyoto. For more than a century the proudest Kugé had been constrained to go cap in hand to Kamakura on the most important occasions, while even in Kyoto itself the real masters for the last century or more had not been the Court or the courtiers, but the two military commandants in the Rokuhara. Now there had been a clean sweep of Kamakura, the Rokuhara, Shogun, Shikken, Bakufu, and all! Therefore “Back to Engi!” with Kyoto once more the sole and single centre of the universe; with the Kugé once again the lords of the earth, and with the Buké in their proper places of obsequious servitors and humble family watch dogs! Of course this delicious programme could only be carried out by stripping the bushi of their manors, or at all events subjecting them to very heavy fiscal liabilities. The revolution just effected was mainly the work of military men; and the notion that these should have drawn sword for the express purpose of reducing themselves to a position of indigence and dependence for the benefit of a class they heartily despised as effeminate incompetents was too ludicrous for words.

That Daigo II personally cherished these childish illusions and delusions, and fancied that the hands of the clock of Time could be thus easily and arbitrarily thrust back a matter of four centuries of vigorous national life, does not appear. Apart from his remark that he intended to establish a precedent for future ages—the indications are that he did not; and that his purpose was merely to bring Buké and Kugé alike under direct control of the Crown on a fair and equable footing. That indeed was a serious problem, requiring time and thought for a lasting solution. Meanwhile, now that the Bakufu had fallen, the Kyoto administration was the only one in existence. As Daigo II intended to rule as well as to reign, no Kwampaku was appointed. Neither was any Chancellor of the Empire,—but apart from this the Dajo-kwan was reorganised on the model of the ninth century, with Ministers of the Left and of the Right, Naidaijin, Dainagon, Chunagon, and Sangi, while the old Eight Boards were recalled to life and their Chiefs entrusted with onerous duties. The Dead of the revived Board of War was the Emperor’s eldest son, the former Abbot of Hi-ei-zan, now known as Prince Morinaga, who had raised the Ku Peninsula and Yoshino against the Hojos and whom the priests were clamouring to have back again as their abbot. As a glance at the Kugyo Bunin (1333) will show, the Cabinet was almost entirely com­posed of Court nobles; the chief and almost the only exception being Ashikaga Takauji, who held the very subordinate office of a Sanyi. That is to say, while his opinion might be asked for, he had no actual vote or voice in the decision of any question.

However, behind all the open and orthodox administrative machinery, Daigo II had an unofficial and private cabinet­council of his own,—the three “Fusas,” and one or two others. And behind this again stood the Empress, while several of the secondary consorts and concubines were not entirely destitute of influence in what were considered small matters. Now, although the recorded u gossip of the time can easily be shown to be at fault in many particulars, it seems here to point in the right direction in one important matter at least. Daigo II was perhaps not as great a slave to the pleasures and blandishments of the harem as his grandfather, Kameyama, the founder and ancestor of the Junior line, had been; but the plain and regrettable fact is that he spent time and effort in the harem which a truly patriotic sovereign would have devoted to the interests of the nation he was supposed to govern. He trusted far too much to his favourite consort, the Lady Renshi, whose great aim from first to last had been to secure the Imperial succession to a son of her own, an effort in which she was successful on two occasions. This brought her into collision with Prince Morinaga, who had been born eleven years before her connection with the Emperor began in 1319. Morinaga’s appointment as Abbot of Hi-ei-zan seemed to have disposed of him as a candidate for the succession; but he had since allowed his locks to grow again, and had re-entered active public life. This step had been taken without consulting Hi-ei-zan; and the monks were making great trouble over it. The Prince had shown himself a gallant, if somewhat unfortunate soldier; and many samurai cherished the hope of seeing him made Shogun. These samurai were mostly non-Kamakura men. The favourite of the latter for the office was Ashikaga Takauji. The story is that the Prince began to plot to have Takauji put out of the way, but without any success. It seems that the Lady Renshi and Takauji had quickly perceived that they might prove of great mutual assistance to each other, and that in many things they were now acting in concert.

One of the first great questions to be faced by the restored government was the settlement of the provinces. Here the general policy was either entirely to suppress, or to curtail as much as possible, the powers of the Shugo and to make the Governor supreme in everything. Here be it noted once more that the Governors had never been appointed by the Bakufu; from first to last they had been Imperial officers; and, furthermore, in theory they were civil, and not military, functionaries. However, at this time, for many obvious reasons, many of the military leaders prominent in the revolution were now invested with Governorships. Ashikaga Takauji was entrusted with the administration of Musashi, Hitachi, and Shimosa; his brother Tadayoshi with that of Totomi; Kusunoki Masashige with Settsu and Kawachi, and Nawa Nagatoshi with two Sanindo provinces. It is to be observed that the provinces were not given as fiefs; on the contrary the appointment of these Governors was a negation of the feudal system. Some three centuries later when Hideyoshi or Iyeyasu assigned a “province” to one of their vassals it was a vastly different matter. The grant was for no fixed term of four years; it was often not only for life but actually hereditary. Then the grantee had the power of legislation, of administering justice, or imposing what taxes he pleased, and doing with them what he pleased; he had both proprietary and administrative rights. In fact he was absolute master within the bounds of his domains. The chief, and sometimes the only, obligation under which he lay was that of furnishing a military contingent at his own cost. In those days the gift of a province was really a substantial reward. But a mere provincial governorship was in itself no very weighty recompense after all. It was merely for a term of four years; and it conferred no proprietary rights beyond the use of the land attached to the official residence during these four years. It was certainly not the matter of the award of governorships that provoked the bitter heart-burnings and quarrels that ensued. It was the distribution of manors that proved the burning question of the time.

At the date of its fall, the great Hojo family with its six or eight septs held wide private domains in almost every quarter of Japan. These had just been all confiscated, as had been those of most of the Kamakura samurai who had fought on the losing side. Not a few military men had remained in a non-committal attitude throughout the struggle, and their landless neighbours who had rallied to the Imperialist cause saw their opportunity in this. Hence the comedy of witnessing the prudent stay-at-homes claiming rewards for having refused to support the Hojos, while their needy acquaintances were clamouring for their summary expropriation. As all these questions were to be decided in the capital, Kyoto presently began to be thronged with a rustic army of claimants and counter-claimants.

The tribunals to deal with all this had been originally composed of Court officials alone; and the various attempts that had been made to re-organise the Kyoto law-courts towards the end of the thirteenth century had shown that the Court nobles were incompetent as men of affairs. The Taihei-ki asserts that now after the lapse of several months some twenty odd rewards had been determined, and some others after having been determined and announced had been recalled. Although authentic contemporary documents conclusively prove that this assertion must be added to the mass of glaring inaccuracies in the Taihei-ki, yet it is true that the original commission was very inefficient and dilatory. It gave place to a new board of four sections, each dealing with a section of the Empire; and on two of these Kusunoki and Nara found seats, while the name of yet one other military member appears. Even so, things moved too slowly; and the number of bureau was increased to eight, each dealing with a circuit. Now we not only meet with many military men among the commissioners; but besides some temple-officials we find former Bakufu councillors occupying prominent places! This is a very significant fact, indeed; it indicates that the hope of carrying on a successful government of purely Kuge personnel was beginning to wane.

Long before this, however, it had become plain that in many parts of the country the decisions of Kyoto were not to be passively accepted. The surviving Hojos, and their vassals just stripped of their lands, began to form into organised bands, and the guerilla warfare they were prosecuting threatened to develop into something more serious. It was true the disturbances were sporadic; but it was no less true that at one time they were serious in localities so far apart from each other as Mutsu, the Home Provinces, and Kyushu. In the last-named, where an attempt had been made to re-establish the old Dazaifu system of three centuries before, they were so formidable that Takauji successfully insisted that it was inexpedient to abolish the office of Shugo there; the result being that his three fast friends Shoni. Otomo, and Shimadzu were reinstated in their functions, the only modification being that Higo was withdrawn from Otomo’s control and its administration entrusted to Kikuchi, who was appointed Governor,—not Shugo.

But although so far there had as yet been no great outbreak there, it was the Kwanto that constituted the gravest problem. Nitta had been made Shugo of Kozuke; and, as has been said, Takauji had been appointed Governor of Musashi, Hitachi, and Shimosa,—combining with his governorships the office of Shugo as well, according to some accounts. But what about Kamakura itself ? It was certainly no part of the policy of the Court nobles to re-establish the Shogunate there; but the very few intelligent minds among them presently began to perceive the futility of the “Back to Engi” shibboleth, and to recognise that there was such a thing as “The Spirit of the Age,” and that this was a very formidable thing indeed. By the Kuge with no armed force to rely on, it could never be openly flouted with impunity; at best it could only be mani­pulated deftly and adroitly. The Buké would insist on having a Shogun as their own head; that soon became abundantly plain. The only thing to be done was to make the Shogun as weak as it was possible to do. Divide et Impera. Accordingly the whole of Northern Japan, which had been a Kamakura appanage since Yoritomo’s time, was now divorced from the Kwanto and put under a civilian Kyoto Governor of its own. The new administrator of Mutsu was a Court noble of the mature age of sixteen years! Yet the strange thing is that a better choice could not have been possibly made, for this Kitabatake Akuye proved himself, before he fell on the battlefield four years later on (1337), to be one of the prodigies of Japanese history. Almost immediately a great migration of Kamakura bushi into Mutsu began, where they appear to have got very liberal inducements to Bettie themselves permanently. At the same time, about the end of 1333, or the beginning of 1334, Daigo II’s tenth son, Prince Narinaga, then nine years of age, was sent down to the Kwanto, not as Shogun, but as Kozuke-taishu or Imperial Governor of Kozuke, while Nitta shortly after went up to Kyoto with 7,000 men, and was thereupon, as it would appear (for the records are conflicting), appointed Governor of Harima, the province whose taxes had been specially appropriated for the support of the Court. A significant fact was that Prince Narinaga was entrusted to the charge of Takauji’s brother Tadayoshi, who was now nominated Governor of Sagami. As the Governorship of this province and of Musashi had always been held by the Hojo Regents, it seemed as if the Shogunate was about to be re-established with Ashikagas as Shikken. And shortly after the young Prince was invested with the Shogunate, and installed in Kamakura with a brilliant Court. But there was no intention of restoring the Bakufu system with its complete control over the military class. That class generally was to be brought under the direct rule of Kyoto; the re-establishment of the Shogunate was only in form, and was merely a makeshift to put the Kwanto in good humour.

In the capital, the Mushadokoro had been re-established, and Nitta appointed its chief. This was to be the real centre of Imperial control over the bushi. But it soon became apparent that the bushi were not to be controlled by any such machinery. By 1335 Kyoto was simply swarming with crowds of armed men, mostly brought hither by captains and land­owners who had come up to push their claims for “rewards” or to defend their titles, or to profit in some way or other in the mad scramble for manors then going on. According to the Taihei-ki, estates had been lavishly granted to worthless intriguers, and by the time it came to rewarding the meritorious officers there was not in the sixty odd provinces of Japan as much unappropriated land left as would suffice to “stick a carpenter’s awl into.” Of course this is merely a rhetorical way of saying that the action of the commissioners had occasioned profound general dissatisfaction. It is not strange then to find that armed claimants began to take the law into their own hands, as the only means of rectifying its deficiencies and the partiality and other shortcomings of its administrators. Kyoto presently assumed the aspect of a captured city in the hands of a victorious enemy; and instead of finding that their Golden Age had returned, the Court nobles discovered that the sword and the mailed fist had never been so powerful in the streets of the capital as they were now. It was even dangerous for them to venture out-of-doors; especially after nightfall. And all this, too, after they had held Court functions in the fashion and in the robes of the Engl period, and had legislated as to what shape of hat the military men were to wear!

In the provinces things were almost equally ominous. The Jito often defied the Governors; would neither give up their lands, nor submit to taxation, and the special impost levied on them and proprietors generally for the construction of a new palace could rarely be exacted. Boundary disputes were now and then fought out with arms almost under the very eyes of the Imperial representatives; while possession was coming to be regarded not as nine points of the law, but the whole corpus juris. In the general unrest aggressions upon the country manors of the Court nobles, which would have been promptly repressed in Bakufu times, became not infrequent. The Age of the Kugé indeed! And then among the Kugé themselves the old factions began to appear, and one great noble was executed and several banished for intriguing to restore the Elder line to the throne. Naturally enough in this state of things the expropriated saw their opportunity, in seizing which they could moreover count upon the support of many of the disappointed. Only lately, Hojo revolts had had to be put down in Nagato and Iyo; now Shinano, whither Takatoki’s son Tokiyuki had escaped, was in a ferment. This proved to be really a very serious matter indeed, for in the autumn of 1335 the insurgents not only captured Kamakura, but chased Ashikaga Tadayoshi and the young Shogun over Hakone and along the sea-board as far as Mikawa. (It was at this time that Prince Morinaga was murdered. He had been exiled to Kamakura; and Tadayoshi caused him to be killed before evacuating the city).

During all this time Ashikaga Takauji had remained in Kyoto. He now requested to be sent to deal with the Hojo revolt and to recover Kamakura. The commission was given and promptly and efficiently executed; but Takauji, instead of returning to Kyoto thereupon, stayed on in Kamakura, a circumstance which excited suspicion against him and gave his rivals at Court an opportunity they had been eagerly looking for. As a matter of fact Takauji’s conduct was peculiar in several respects. He reared a mansion for himself on the site of what had been the Shogunal Palace; he interfered in the affairs of Hitachi and Mutsu, which were outside the scope of his commission, and he undoubtedly bestowed manors as rewards upon some of his officers for their services in the campaign; a proceeding which was a contravention of the recently established rule that henceforth all questions of recompense for military merit should be decided in Kyoto alone. But the tongue of slander was also at work; a former retainer of Prince Morinaga’s who had gone down to Kamakura as a member of a mission sent there being pointed to as the chief author of the false or exaggerated reports, one of which was that Ashikaga was to place, or had placed a Shugo of his own in Kozuke, of which Nitta was Vice-Governor, according to some documents, Shugo according to others. Lately the two great Minamoto chiefs had been on bad terms; and the inevitable open breach between them was now assured. The steps presently taken by Nitta led to Takauji’s making his brother Tadayoshi send out circular letters to the Ashikaga supporters to assemble for the purpose of punishing Nitta. Many of these documents, which were scattered all over the country, even to Kyushu, still survive.

The Court, after much discussion, at last took action early in November 1335, when the Emperor’s second son Prince Takanaga, then 24 years of age, was appointed “Shogun to Subdue the East.” The real commander, however, was Nitta Yosliisada. The first battle or series of battles took place in Mikawa, where Nitta drove Ko Moroyasu, the Kamakura commander, out of the province, and, foil wing up vigorously, broke the “rebels” in Suruga. Thereupon the Easterners entrenched themselves on the west slopes of the Hakone mountains; and when the Imperialists endeavoured to turn this position by seizing the Ashigara Pass, they were met by a strong force which had just arrived from Kamakura under Takauji himself; and just about this time Otomo Sadanori who was serving under Nitta with a considerable Kyushu contingent, went over to the enemy. The result was that the Imperialists met with a bloody and disastrous repulse; and the whole region then rose for the Ashikaga cause.

Presently huge masses of Kamakura troops were directed against Kyoto. Here Nitta was joined by Kusunoki and Nawa, while the monks of Hi-ei-zan also donned their war-harness. On February 14 the opposing forces came into touch, and for eleven days all round the east and south of the capital the fighting was fierce, desperate and incessant.

Meanwhile the whole of Japan was in commotion, and in addition to strong bodies of hostile partisans afoot in every circuit of the Empire, two great armies were hurrying up to Kyoto to reinforce their respective parties there. Akamatsu Enshin of Harima, who had fought so vigorously for Daigo II in 1333, being a priest was not eligible for a civil appointment; and so had not been made a Provincial Governor, and had received but a single manor as a reward. Whether he was discontented with this is not clear; but it is clear that he and Takauji had been on the best of terms ever since the latter had gone over to the Imperialists. Akamatsu had now rallied the troops of Harima and other Sanyodo districts to the support of his friend; and pushing up rapidly seized Yamazaki, and repeated his former exploit of penetrating into the capital. This settled the direction of the seething, surging eleven days’ turmoil of strife; and the Imperialists had to abandon Kyoto perforce.

Hi-ei-zan however stood fast; and Daigo II was sheltered there. The first attempt to carry the mountain fortress failed; and just at this time the Loyalists were strongly reinforced.

The seven teen-year-old Governor of Mutsu, Kitabatake Akiiye, had been made Chinjufu Shogun at the beginning of the troubles; and mustering a formidable army he had advanced upon Kamakura from the north. But learning on his march of the rout of Hakone, he left Kamakura (now in charge of Shiba Takatsune) alone; and hurried westward towards the capital by forced marches. His unexpected arrival there now served to place an entirely new complexion on the situation. Thanks mainly to this new force, and to the singularly able dispositions of Kusunoki, the Imperialists not only raised the siege of Hi-ei-zan, but in their turn drove the Easterners out of Kyoto, Takauji having to make his escape by the Tamba road, from which he soon diverged and made for Hyogo. Just as he was rallying his beaten forces there he was furiously assailed by Kusunoki and Nitta and had to make for Tomo in Bingo.

It was only his previous shrewdness and foresight that enabled Takauji to extricate himself from this disaster. During the two years he had been influential in Kyoto he had always exerted himself to befriend the Shugo, and to save the office from being suppressed where possible. The three Kyushu Shugo, Shoni, Otomo, and Shimadzu, were exceedingly grateful to him for his highly successful services on their behalf; and we have seen Otomo’s son, Sadanori, carrying over his command to the Ashikagas in the crisis of the battle of Hakone. All three had been ready to respond to Tadavoshi’s circular summons. But the Kyoto Court had managed to give them more than enough to do at their own doors by summoning all the gentry of Kyushu to rise in support of the throne. In Chikugo the Haradas and Akidzukis, in Higo the Kikuchis and Asos, in Hyuga the Kimotsukis and Itos responded at once, for all these and other local Daimyo were impatient of being interfered with and domineered over by neighbours of their own class and rank, merely because they happened to hold a Shugo’s commission. Here it must again be insisted upon that a Shugo did not at this date own the provinces “given to him. He usually was in his own right a land-owner; sometimes indeed by this date a very great land-owner with manors covering some square miles of territory. But some of his neighbours often owned broader acres. A Shugo qua Shugo was something like the contemporary English Sheriff, or the Lord-Lieutenant of, say, 1550 AD,— neither of whom “owned” the country which was the sphere of their administrative duties.

Takauji could not any longer be regarded as a mere rebel, for he had obtained a commission from the ex-Emperor Kogen while in occupation of the capital. From Tomo he dispatched his officers to raise troops in Shikoku and in the west of the main island in virtue of this commission, while he and his brother hurried down to Kyushu. There things were going none too well for their cause; the Imperialists had actually raptured Dazaifu and killed Shoni, the Shugo. The two brothers soon retrieved the situation however; in a hard-fought and desperate battle at Tatarahama near Hakata they utterly routed the Loyalists, with the result that the waverers in the north west of the island and even in Higo had to rally to their standard.

In about a month (May 1330) the brothers were again strong enough to essay another attempt on the capital. Even when beaten out of it their rout had been by no means so complete as it had seemed to be. Many of their troops surrendered indeed; but their adhesion proved to be of merely temporary advantage to the Imperialists. By the end of June, bands of Ashikaga partisans had overrun Kawachi and Izumi while a strong force of them was operating not unpromisingly in Tamba. Furthermore, the redoubtable Akamatsu threw himself into Shirohata keep, in Harima, and Shiba Fuyori into Mitsuishi citadel, in Bizen, and these places of arms were held most desperately, tenaciously and successfully. Still they were ultimately both hard pressed; and urgent couriers that had managed to make their way through the beleaguering lines warned the Ashikaga brothers that they must advance promptly to the relief. The latter meanwhile had crossed the straits to Chofu in Nagato, and there completed their arrangements for the great effort. More than one contemporary record supplies evidence that they studied Yoshitsune’s Yashima-Dan-no-ura campaign very closely; and hence, no doubt, the great exertions they made to equip an Inland Sea fleet. In this effort they were eminently successful; on the night before the (second) battle of Hyogo (July 3-4, 1336) the whole expanse of water between Awaji Isle and the Akashi-Suma strand,—even on to the present Kobe—seemed to be ablaze, for the lights and signal-fires on 5,000 craft of all kinds,—war-junks, transports, dispatch-boats, and what not,—went a long way towards turning night into day. Naturally this immense naval force did much to make the Ashikaga brothers masters of the immediate strategic and tactical situation; at all events until they advanced inland from what is now the city of Osaka. On the same night (July 3-4), the centre of a huge land force encamped on the ground where Doi Sanehira had lain before the attack on the Taira host at Ichi-no-tani a century and a half before, while the van stretched far on towards Hyogo. There along the Minatogawa, and occupying Kiyomori’s “island” were bivouacked something less than 20,000 Imperialists under Nitta and Kusunoki. Nitta was there because he knew no better; Kusunoki was there under imperative instructions from the Court and sorely against his will, for he knew perfectly well what was bound to happen, if they persisted in clinging to a position which could only prove a veritable death-trap.

After the first battle of Hyogo the Imperialist commanders had withdrawn to Kyoto to give their men a fortnight’s rest there. Of such a rest they stood badly in need,—for instance, many of Nitta’s troops who had fought at Hakone had not been able to doff their armour on more than three occasions in the course of as many months. Shortly afterwards Kitabatake Akuye was sent back to Mutsu, first to quell disorders there and then to advance on Kamakura, and Nitta was commissioned to deal with the Ashikaga partisans in the West. Nitta is blamed for dallying in Kyoto with the Koto no Naishi, the most beautiful woman of her time; but a simple examination of the dates suggests that this is merely another instance of Taihei-ki embroidery. At the same time Nitta failed disastrously; for the truth is that he was merely a dour, determined, hard-hitting fighter, good at the head of a charge or a forlorn hope or even perhaps in command of a division, but incompetent to plan and direct operations on a grand scale. A strategist he was emphatically not. In Shikoku parties were evenly balanced; and a small expedition would have enabled Nitta to decide the fate of the island easily. As it was, 500 Shikoku war-junks and other craft with 5,000 samurai on board joined the Ashikaga brothers on their way up from Tomo. Of the importance of obtaining and holding command of the sea-way Nitta never dreamed. He had had to fall back from one position to another; and, as Kusunoki insisted, the only thing that now remained to be done was to get away from the sea, all the more so as the Ashikaga forces on Izumi on the one hand and Tamba on the other might meanwhile close in on the line of retreat to the capital.

On July 4, great masses of Ashikaga troops disembarked where Kobe now stands; and the Imperialists were at once effectually hemmed in. Kusunoki, covered with wounds, committed the happy dispatch, while Nitta managed to cut his way through the enemy and escape to Nishinomiya and thence to Kyoto. Although many of the Imperialist officers knew that the situation was hopeless, all fought gallantly enough; but in spite of this, the army as an effective force was practically annihilated; and Kyoto was uncovered. All that remained to defend it were the monks of Hi-ei-zan and the levies of Nawa and the Kugé general, Rokujo Tadaaki, for, as has been said, young Kitabatake had departed for Mutsu with his command.

The Ashikagas were soon in the capital, whence Daigo II had fled to take refuge in Hi-ei-zan. The great monastery held out stubbornly and the siege had to be converted into a blockade. In some of the sallies and attempts to relieve it, Nawa and Rokujo fell, and when the Ashikagas were on the point of completing their investing lines, Nitta, taking with him the Crown Prince and a younger brother, made a successful dash for Kanzaki Castle on Tsuruga Bay, while Kitabatake Chikafusa escaped to Ise with the former priest, Prince Munenaga. By November Hi-ei-zan could hold out no longer on account of famine; and Daigo II then proposed terms of peace.

Meanwhile, two months before, Kogon Tenno’s younger brother, then fourteen years, had been set up as a rival Emperor,—(Komyo Tenno),—and to this new Sovereign two of Daigo II’s Ministers, acting on his behalf, surrendered the Sacred Sword and Seal on November 12, 1336. But it afterwards turned out that these were not the genuine emblems; they were merely duplicates fabricated for the occasion.

During the next month or two Daigo II’s partisans were active on his behalf in Kawachi, in spite of his professed abdication. But the really formidable man was the old Kita-bataké, still no more than forty-three, however, who soon made himself master of the three provinces of Iga, Ise, and Shima, and presently opened up secret communication with his master. Suddenly on January 23, 1337, Daigo II, taking with him the real sacred emblems of Imperial authority, escaped from Kyoto, and was welcomed by Kitabatake to Yoshino,  where a palace was constructed and a Court organised. For the next six-and-fifty years the unhappy country was to be racked and riven by bitter armed strife between two rival Sovereigns and their respective supporters.