The Clear Mirror: A Chronicle of the Japanese Court During the Kamakura Period (1185-1333)

By Stanford University Press

The Clear Mirror (Masukagami) is an account of Japanese history from 1185 to 1333 by an anonymous author, almost certainly a court noble writing around the third quarter of the fourteenth century. During this time, the military government at Kamakura controlled the country, maintaining the emperor with his court at Kyoto as symbolic head of state. Though the imperial court had little real power, it attempted to maintain as much of its former dignity and prestige as it could.
The Clear Mirror is at least semi-fictionalized, promoting a picture of a court healthier and more powerful than it really was. Moreover, the work sees the court as guardian of its own traditional arts and lifestyle, and thus provides not only a history of imperial succession and other events but also copious examples of poetic expressions and descriptions of courtly traditions and ceremonies. Because of its attempt to exemplify the best in the courtly prose tradition (it is noted for its imitation of the style of the masterpiece The Tale of Genji), the work has long been valued in Japan as much for its artistic literary contribution as for its historical significance. The present translation makes available to English readers the last significant work belonging to the genre of "historical tales" (rekishi monogatari), another example of which is A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (translated by William and Helen Craig McCullough, Stanford, 1980).
The introduction provides a brief summary of the significant historical and political events of the period, together with a discussion of the significance of The Clear Mirror within the "historical tales" tradition, and comments on the literary strengths and weaknesses of the work. A glossary identifies people and places mentioned in the text, and an appendix discusses details concerning the work's authorship, possible dates of initial publication, and other matters relating to the original manuscript.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 1998
• ISBN: 9780804763882

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

CIP data appear at the end of the book

9780804763882

To Jenny whose patience made it possible,

and to Helen and Bill

Translator’s Preface

The translation is from the Gakushūin University Library text edited by Tokieda Motoki and Kidō Saizō in NKBT, which contains many helpful notes. Inoue Muneo’s Masukagami also proved extremely helpful in translating difficult passages and preparing notes. To avoid excessive annotation, names of personalities and places are identified in the glossary. As a rule, personalities are listed, both in the text and in the glossary, by first name; posthumous names of emperors and in several cases in names of imperial ladies are used for convenience. I have frequently abbreviated or deleted titles and offices, substituting the first name of the individual. The result is perhaps more clarity in the English than in the original, but the practice seemed justified by the excessively cumbersome nature of translated court titles. I have tried to leave titles intact in passages where they are relevant to the content, adding the first name of the individual where necessary for clarity. I have followed McCullough and McCullough (1980) in translating titles and offices, as well as clothing items and colors. I have elected not to include detailed notes on either; interested readers may consult the work above. Ages in the text follow the Japanese manner unless otherwise specified; dates in other sections are calculated in the Western manner.

I am particularly indebted to Professor Helen McCullough, who has kindly worked my earlier, lengthy introduction into a succinct yet informative discussion of the historical and literary background of the work, and whose extensive editing work on the text of my translation has resulted in many stylistic improvements without departing from the spirit of the original translation. I am also appreciative of Professors William McCullough, Makoto Ueda, and Susan Matisoff for many helpful suggestions during my initial study of Masukagami for the Ph.D. dissertation. I am, of course, solely responsible for any flaws in the final product.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Translator’s Preface

Introduction

THE CLEAR MIRROR - Preface

CHAPTER ONE - Through Tangled Thickets

CHAPTER TWO - The New Island Guard

CHAPTER THREE - Mourning Attire

CHAPTER FOUR - Three Sacred Mountains

CHAPTER FIVE - Snow on the Central Plain

CHAPTER SIX - Descending Clouds

CHAPTER SEVEN - Snow on the Northern Plain

CHAPTER EIGHT - Asuka River

CHAPTER NINE - Pillow of Grass

CHAPTER TEN - Waves of Longevity

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Ornamental Combs

CHAPTER TWELVE - Plovers by the Bay

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Hills of Autumn

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - A Farewell to Spring

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Wintry Showers

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Sarayama in Kume

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - The Dayflower

Reference Matter

Appendix: Title, Authorship, Date, Sources, and Texts

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

CIP

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Clear Mirror (Masukagami) is an account of Japanese history from 1180 to 1333 presented by an anonymous male author, almost certainly a court noble writing around the third quarter of the fourteenth century, who employs two anonymous (and fictional) voices to relate his tale: that of an improbably aged feminine narrator—a nun of apparent cultivation, now withered and toothless—who has purportedly either witnessed the events described or learned of them through other sources, including what she describes as unsubstantiated rumors; and that of an implied male author, vocal on occasion, who records the old woman’s words.¹

The nun begins and ends her remarks concerning 1180, the first year covered in her tale, with the birth of the future Emperor Go-Toba² on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month in the fourth year of the Jishō era (1180). Go-Toba’s birth was a symbolic event, and there were also other reasons, discussed below, for choosing 1180 as a point of departure for a historical work. Important to an understanding of the author’s intentions, however, and of his notion of historiography, is what the nun ignores in her treatment of that year—namely, the start of the Gempei War (1180—1185), a nationwide conflict that led to fundamental alterations in the Japanese polity, creating new relationships central to the history of the Kamakura period (1185—1333).

Not the least important of those relationships was the one between a post-Gempei military establishment in Kamakura and Retired Emperor Go-Toba, the governing power in Kyoto. Chafing under limitations imposed on his autonomy by the warriors in Kamakura, Go-Toba resorted to the use of force against them—the Jōkyū Disturbance of 1221—failed disastrously, and died in exile. The nun tells the story of his life in some detail, but her concerns are in large measure apolitical; we hear much more about his admirable character, his interest in poetry and music, and his emotions in exile than about his anti-Kamakura intrigues, his allies and opponents, and his shortcomings as politician and military planner. The same attitude informs The Clear Mirror as a whole: it is a historical narrative, to be sure, but it might equally be described as a nostalgic celebration of Heian-style court life, a treasure trove of elegant anecdote, which seeks to re-create the romantic world of The Tale of Genji and which consequently requires, for full understanding, an independent acquaintance with the main outlines of Kamakura history, and especially with the complicated system of governance characteristic of the era.³

First, it should be noted that three main sources of governmental authority coexisted during most of the period from 1185 to 1333: the reigning emperor’s court, where the most powerful figure was the imperial regent (sesshō or kampaku); the chancellery (in-no-chō), presided over by a retired emperor as head of the imperial family; and the military government (bakufu), or shogunate, in Kamakura, nominally headed by a court-appointed shogun but controlled by members of the Hōjō family, who acted as shogunal regents (shikken).

The oldest of the three was the reigning emperor’s court, which dated back to remote antiquity but which had acquired its characteristic form early in the Heian period (794—1185), when members of the powerful northern house of the Fujiwara clan secured hereditary rights to the office of regent. Thenceforth, the emperor was usually a child or young man who performed symbolic functions while the regent, his maternal grandfather, exercised power in his name, and who could expect to be forced off the throne to make way for another Fujiwara grandson.⁴

The second, the chancellery, dated from 1086, when an able retired emperor challenged the Fujiwara hegemony by establishing a separate power center known as insei (cloister government), with a chancellery whose writs carried more weight than those of the reigning emperor. Cloister governments tended to be staffed by men whom the regental house excluded from positions of influence, such as members of the imperial and Minamoto clans and lesser branches of the Fujiwara. Unlike the imperial court and the shogunate, they were not permanent features of the political landscape; however, they existed in all but 25 of the 148 years from 1185 to 1333.⁵ (See Table 3.)

The third power center, the shogunate, the most significant product of the Gempei War, came about as the result of a compromise between the victor in that conflict, Minamoto Yoritomo, and the chief figure in Kyoto, Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa (insei 1158—1192).

Earlier in his lifetime, Go-Shirakawa had witnessed the rise at court of a breed of men, aptly characterized by Jeffrey Mass as military nobles, who functioned as liaisons between imperial and aristocratic patrons, on the one hand, and their own warrior followers in the provinces, on the other.⁶ In the twelfth month of the year corresponding to 1159, one such military noble, Taira Kiyomori, disposed of his main rival, the Minamoto chieftain Yoshitomo, in a brief martial engagement known as the Heiji Disturbance.⁷ He then began a gradual rise from client of Go-Shirakawa to hegemon, a status achieved in the late 1170’s. In 1180, his autocratic behavior led one of Go-Shirakawa’s sons to issue a call to arms on behalf of his father, whom Kiyomori had placed under house arrest in a clash of wills. Restive local warriors responded, sensing an opportunity to loosen the bonds of central control, and widespread fighting broke out. In 1183, the Taira fled westward from the capital, taking along the seven-year-old Emperor Antoku, Kiyomori’s grandson; and in 1185 they suffered a final defeat at the hands of forces from the east, dispatched by Minamoto Yoshitomo’s heir, Yoritomo.⁸

Thanks to the intercession of Kiyomori’s step-mother, the thirteen-year-old Yoritomo had escaped with his life when the victors in the Heiji Disturbance meted out punishments. He was sent to eastern Japan as the ward of the Hōjō, a minor Taira family in Izu Province, and there he grew into a forceful, charismatic man, backed by his father-in-law and nominal warder, Hōjō Tokimasa, and eager to carve out a sphere of influence in the east. The Gempei War gave him his opening: by its end, his headquarters in Kamakura had assumed responsibility for maintaining order, with the court’s sanction, among the many local warriors who had rallied to his banner, and who now accepted his authority in return for protection of their land rights. As the Kamakura period progressed, he and his successors, the Hōjō regents, developed judicial machinery that promised, and usually delivered, fair treatment to bakufu retainers involved in property disputes, thus keeping a potentially explosive force in check for the court, which retained jurisdiction elsewhere.

The history of the century and a half after 1185 is, to a large extent, a history of interplay between the three centers of power—the emperor’s court, the retired emperor’s chancellery, and the shogunate—and of changing relationships within each. Although it is too complex to trace here, a review of some of its main features and significant figures may help to keep the nun’s account in perspective.

In Kyoto, the course of events tended to be shaped by questions of imperial succession and by the nature of relations between the shogunate and the court as a whole. At the outset of the Kamakura period, Yoritomo sought to build a friendly faction in the capital as a counterpoise to Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, whose general policy was to curb the shogunate’s authority. He found an ally in the minister of the right, Fujiwara (Kujō) Kanezane, a member of the regental family who regarded Go-Shirakawa’s chancellery with a critical eye, and who had been kept in a relatively low position by the retired emperor and the Taira.⁹ In 1186, with Yoritomo’s backing, Kanezane became regent and emerged as the dominant member of the aristocracy, although Go-Shirakawa remained the most powerful figure at court.

Between Go-Shirakawa’s death in 1192. and 1198, when Retired Emperor Go-Toba established a chancellery, there was no insei, but an anti-shogunate clique persisted, led by Kanezane’s enemy Minamoto Michichika, a former close associate of the late retired emperor. Michichika succeeded in driving a wedge between Yoritomo and Kanezane in a matter involving the imperial harem, and in 1196 he secured Kanezane’s dismissal as regent. Kanezane’s daughter, the empress, had to leave the palace, and Kanezane himself suffered a permanent loss of influence. Michichika then began a campaign to persuade the youthful Emperor Go-Toba to abdicate in favor of his son, Michichika’s grandson, and to establish a cloister government. When this was accomplished in 1198, the shogunate found itself confronted with a strong anti-bakufu force headed by Michichika, who enjoyed a brief period as the supreme power at court.

Michichika’s influence waned as Go-Toba matured, leaving the way open for new figures to emerge. One such was Kujō Kanezane’s grandson Michiie, whose mother was Yoritomo’s niece. Michiie’s third son, Yoritsune, became the shogun-designate in 1219; one of his daughters became empress in 1230; his grandson, Emperor Shijō, ascended the throne in 1232; and he himself served three times as imperial regent. A favorite courtier of Go-Toba, he survived the events of 1221 despite a temporary eclipse. The first serious threat to his position occurred only in 1242, when he and the shogunate supported different candidates for the throne. But in 1246 his son, the shogun, was sent back to Kyoto in disgrace, charged by the Hōjō with treasonable activities. Michiie came under intense scrutiny, lost his key position as court-appointed liaison with the bakufu (kantō mōshitsugi), and went into retirement.

During most of Michiie’s early career, the other figure of prominence was Saionji Kintsune; during Michiie’s last years, Kintsune’s son Saneuji became a power at court; and in later generations Kintsune’s descendants continued to occupy positions of high visibility. Although they belonged to a branch of the Fujiwara whose members were ineligible for the regency, they served as chancellor, married their daughters to reigning and retired emperors, enjoyed hereditary title to the office of kantō mōshitsugi, and in general overshadowed the regental house.¹⁰ The Kujō faded into obscurity, as did most of the descendants of Minamoto Michichika, but the Saionji flourished until late in the Kamakura period, when their power finally dwindled; and the old nun has more to say of them than of any other great house.

Having married a sister of Kujō Michiie’s mother (Yoritomo’s niece, it will be recalled), Kintsune, the family founder, was on good terms with the Kamakura authorities. When Michiie grew up, a marriage was arranged between him and one of Kintsune’s daughters; and, in accordance with contemporary practice, the offspring of that union, Yoritsune, was reared in Kintsune’s house. As kantō mōshitsugi during Go-Toba’s insei, Kintsune helped the shogunate quell the Jōkyū Disturbance by providing timely news of the retired emperor’s activities. He was probably responsible for the selection of Emperor Go-Horikawa (whose mother was Kintsune’s aunt) to replace Go-Toba’s deposed grandson in 1221; and it was largely at his urging that his grandson Yoritsune became shogun in 1226. During the 1220’s, he was the most powerful man at court, serving briefly as chancellor (1222—1223); and he retained the office of kantō mōshitsugi even after taking the tonsure in 1231.

Meanwhile, he established a precedent for the installation of Saionji daughters as imperial consorts. He was the grandfather of two of Retired Emperor Go-Saga’s children, and it was he who arranged the presentation of two of his granddaughters, the offspring of his heir, Saneuji, to two successive occupants of the throne, Go-Saga and Go-Fukakusa: the older, Kisshi (Ōmiyain), received the title of empress, gave birth to Emperors Go-Fukakusa and Kameyama, and became a woman of immense influence; the younger, Kōshi (Higashinijō-in), became an empress. As the nun reports at length, he also built a magnificent temple, the Saionji (source of the family name), as well as an adjacent villa, the Kitayama Mansion, which was used as a residence by successive Saionji generations.

Kintsune’s heir, Saneuji, was assured a successful career as the grandfather of Emperors Go-Fukakusa and Kameyama. He served as chancellor in 1246, and he kept the family connection with the shogunate, both as kantō mōshitsugi (1246—1269) and as the principal member of the hyōjōshū, an organ created, on the bakufu’s strong recommendation, to serve the retired emperor as an advisory council. As Masukagami suggests, his chief rival was probably his younger brother Saneo, the founder of the Tōin house, whose three daughters gave birth, respectively, to Emperors Go-Uda, Fushimi, and Hanazono.

Because Saneuji outlived his heir, Kinsuke, it was his grandson, Sanekane, who succeeded him as kantō mōshitsugi and maintained the family’s preeminence. Sanekane was the last Kamakura-period Saionji of consequence, and the last to occupy a conspicuous place in the nun’s tale. Active during the period when the imperial house had split into two factions (a development discussed below), he tended to support the senior, or Jimyō-in, line descended from Go-Fukakusa (i.e., Fushimi, Go-Fushimi, and Hanazono), playing an influential role, as kantō mōshitsugi, in the elevation of both Fushimi and Go-Fushimi to the throne. At the same time, rivalry with the poet-politician Kyōgoku Tamekane, a forceful, difficult man close to members of the Jimyō-in line, provoked him to lend occasional support to the junior, or Daikakuji, line descended from Kameyama.¹¹ It was to his recommendation, for example, that Emperor Go-Nijō, Kameyama’s grandson, owed his position. Sanekane served short terms as palace minister (1289—1290) and chancellor (1291—1292). His oldest daughter, Eifukumon-in, was the empress of Fushimi and the adoptive mother of Go-Fushimi; his second, Shōkummon-in, was a favorite mistress of Retired Emperor Kameyama; and his third, Go-Kyōgoku-in, was the empress of Go-Daigo. (See Table 1.)

The histories of the Saionji and other courtiers play out in Masukagami within the context of a chronological narrative centering on the activities of successive emperors and retired sovereigns. As Table 3 shows, fifteen incumbents occupied the throne during the course of the Kamakura period.¹² The first, Go-Toba, established his chancellery immediately after abdicating in favor of his oldest son, Tsuchimikado, at the age of eighteen. Adept at poetic composition, the martial arts, the courtly sport of kickball, and numerous other aristocratic pastimes, Go-Toba was a gifted and intelligent but hotheaded and capricious man who flitted from one enthusiasm to another until around 1219 or 1220, when, dissatisfied with the state of court-Kamakura relations, he decided to chastise the Hōjō regent, Yoshitoki.¹³ He was aided in that ambition by his son Juntoku, the offspring of a favorite consort, with whom he had replaced Tsuchimikado in 1210, and who abdicated early in 1221 in order to play a more active role in his father’s planning.

The events of the Jōkyū Disturbance took place in the fifth and sixth months of 1221.¹⁴ By the end of the seventh month, Yoshitoki had banished Go-Toba and Juntoku to the Oki Islands and Sado Island, respectively, and had replaced the three-year-old Emperor Chūkyō, Juntoku’s son, with a nine-year-old sovereign, Go-Horikawa. A chancellery was established by the new emperor’s father, Go-Toba’s older brother Prince Morisada, who assumed the status and nomenclature of a retired emperor (Go-Takakura-in). Go-Toba and Juntoku lived out their lives in exile; the guiltless Tsuchimikado also died in the provinces, having considered it improper to enjoy the comforts of the capital alone; and Chūkyō died in the city at the age of sixteen.

In 1232, after a twelve-year reign, Go-Horikawa turned over the throne to his one-year-old son, Shijō, and established a chancellery that lasted until his death in 1234. Ten years later, in 1242, Emperor Shijō died at the age of eleven, and the Kamakura government again stepped in to decide the succession. The most powerful court figures, Saionji Kintsune and Kujō Michiie, supported the candidacy of one of Juntoku’s sons, as did most of the other courtiers, but the bakufu, unwilling to overlook the behavior of the prince’s father, forced them to accept a son of Tsuchimikado instead. Conscious that he owed his position to the military, the new emperor, Go-Saga, maintained cordial relations with them during his brief reign (1242—1246) and long insei (1246— 1272)—the latter a period during which the occupants of the throne were Go-Fukakusa and Kameyama, his first and second sons by Saneuji’s daughter Ōmiya-in.

After Go-Saga’s death in 1272, a reluctant bakufu, beset by troubles of its own, found itself increasingly involved in court intrigues centering on succession issues. The first problem was to select a replacement for Go-Saga. Was the next head of the imperial clan, the lord governing the realm (jiten no kimi), to be the physically handicapped and intellectually unimpressive Go-Fukakusa, or was it to be the reigning Emperor Kameyama, a vigorous man with a lively intelligence and many accomplishments?¹⁵ In deference to Kamakura authority, Go-Saga had left no written indication of his preference, although his special affection for Kameyama was an open secret. The Hōjō regent, Tokimune, consulted the widowed Ōmiya-in and agreed when she replied that her husband had wished Kameyama to inherit his powers.

Kameyama both reigned and ruled for the next two years: then he abdicated in favor of his son, Go-Uda (who had been named crown prince in 1268), and established a chancellery. Frustrated and humiliated, Go-Fukakusa announced in the fourth month of 1275 that he intended to take the tonsure, but Saionji Sanekane busied himself on the former sovereign’s behalf and secured the nomination of his son, the future Fushimi, as crown prince in the eleventh month of the same year. In 1287, when Go-Uda abdicated, Go-Fukakusa was able, at long last, to establish a chancellery of his own, thereby supplanting Kameyama and enjoying the nominal satisfaction of heading the state, even though all matters of consequence were decided by Sanekane and the bakufu.

In 1288, one of Emperor Fushimi’s ladies produced a son; in 1289, the child became crown prince; and later in 1289 Go-Fukakusa’s sixth son, Prince Hisaakira, was named shogun. In outraged response, Kameyama suddenly took religious vows just prior to Prince Hisaakira’s departure for Kamakura.

In 1290, with sentiments very different from those of his younger brother, Go-Fukakusa himself became a lay monk. Adoption of the religious life did not heal the breach between the two retired emperors, nor did it end their worldly efforts on behalf of their descendants, who had become irretrievably split into two competing lines, the senior, or Jimyō-in, and the junior, or Daikakuji. The military authorities did what they could to keep both factions satisfied. At their direction, Fushimi’s son, Go-Fushimi, was succeeded by Go-Nijō (Daikakuji), Go-Nijō by Hanazono (Jimyō-in), and Hanazono by Go-Daigo (Daikakuji). Perhaps because Go-Nijō died on the throne at the age of twenty-three, after a reign of only eight years, the bakufu arranged for that emperor’s son, Prince Kuninaga (or Kuniyoshi), to succeed Go-Daigo, after which the throne was to pass to Prince Kazuhito, a son of Go-Fushimi.¹⁶

But in 1326, the unexpected death of Crown Prince Kuninaga gave rise to new complications and fresh intrigues, involving not only the shogunate and the two imperial lines but also factions within the Daikakuji line. The Jimyōin line supported Prince Kazuhito, who was to have succeeded Prince Kuninaga after the latter’s reign; and the Daikakuji line split into two groups, one supporting Prince Kuninaga’s son Yasuhito, and the other, led by the reigning Emperor Go-Daigo, urging the nomination of one of Go-Daigo’s own sons.¹⁷ To Go-Daigo’s intense irritation, the authorities in Kamakura chose Prince Kazuhito (the future Emperor Kōgon).

At the time, Go-Daigo was a forceful man of 38, knowledgeable in history, literature, court ceremonial and custom, Shingon and Zen doctrines, and Sung Neo-Confucianism, and determined to return Japan to the days of Emperors Daigo and Murakami, two early Heian-period sage rulers who had presided over brilliant cultural epochs and who had governed without regents, insei chancelleries, or military overseers.¹⁸ He had been both ruling and reigning ever since 1321. No other powerful figures remained in either of the two lines, and the influence of the great houses had been curbed by the promotion of able and learned men from lesser families. Ambitious to be a model Confucian ruler, Go-Daigo had for several years been devoting much effort to governmental reform and to the personal adjudication of disputes.¹⁹ He had also, it seems, begun almost at once to explore means of overthrowing the Kamakura bakufu.

In 1324, the bakufu received word that an anti-Kamakura uprising was being plotted by a small group of courtiers, minor warriors, and monks, and that the ringleaders were two mid-level figures, Hino Suketomo and Hino Toshimoto, who were among Go-Daigo’s closest associates, and who had been traveling over the countryside in a covert search for military support. The bakufu quickly crushed the conspiracy and exiled Suketomo to Sado Island. However, it released Toshimoto after questioning, and it also accepted Go-Daigo’s protestations of innocence, which were conveyed to Kamakura in person by Madenokōji Nobufusa, a respected senior scholar-statesman.²⁰

Unchastened, and, indeed, spurred to renewed efforts two years later by anger over Prince Kazuhito’s selection as crown prince, Go-Daigo continued his clandestine activities until 1331, when the bakufu again learned of them. In the eighth month of that year, the emperor felt obliged to flee to a mountain temple on the Yamashiro-Yamato provincial border, where a military supporter, Kusunoki Masashige, constructed a makeshift stronghold. The Kamakura authorities soon captured and deposed him, and in the following year they exiled him to the Oki Islands, thus ending what is known as the Genkō Disturbance.²¹

When briefly described in this manner, the Genkō Disturbance seems not dissimilar to the Jōkyū Disturbance a century earlier: an emperor attempts to assert independence from the military and is forced into exile. But for reasons indicated below, the bakufu was far more vulnerable in 1331 than it had been in 1221. Go-Daigo spent only a year in the Oki Islands. During the intercalary second month of 1333, he escaped to the protection of a friendly warrior in Hōki Province on western Honshu Island; in the course of the fifth month of the same year, anti-bakufu armies wiped out the Kamakura government forever; and on the fifth of the sixth month there was a triumphal imperial return to the capital. The nun’s tale ends at that point.

In following the fortunes of the court from Go-Toba’s miscalculation through Go-Saga’s peaceful era to the dramatic events of the 1330’s, the aged narrator pays only intermittent attention to the Kamakura bakufu, with whose policies, problems, and changing cast of characters she does not pretend to have more than a vague familiarity. A modern reader of Masukagami need not aspire to significantly greater expertise, but it is useful to have in mind a somewhat broader frame of reference than she supplies.

Tables 5 and 6 contain information concerning the nine shoguns and sixteen Hōjō regents of the era.

The first shogun, Minamoto Yoritomo, was both an autocratic, often ruthless, ruler and a respected judge, basically fair in his discharge of the bakufu’s main function, the arbitration of land disputes. His sudden death in 1199, after a fall from a horse, inaugurated an era of instability in Kamakura that lasted for more than twenty years—a period when intrigue flourished and blood flowed freely as the Hōjō struggled with other eastern families for hegemony. Conspicuous among the early casualties of Hōjō ambition was the office of shogun itself: never again in the Kamakura period was the holder of that title to rise above the level of a figurehead.

Yoritomo’s immediate successor was the elder of his two sons by Hōjō Masako, Yoriie, who received the title in 1202, at the age of twenty. A thirteenmember council headed by Hōjō Tokimasa, Yoriie’s grandfather, had already assumed jurisdiction over judicial functions, leaving the shogun with little to do. A wild youth, Yoriie proceeded to alienate many of Yoritomo’s vassals by his headstrong behavior; and his evident preference for his wife’s family, the Hiki, made for strained relations with his maternal kin. After devious maneuvering, facilitated by a sudden, potentially fatal illness to which Yoriie fell victim in the eighth month of 1203, the Hōjō wiped out the Hiki, including Yoriie’s son Ichiman, the Hiki grandchild who would probably have been next in line for the shogunacy. They also isolated Yoriie from such other supporters as he possessed and forced him to take Buddhist vows. Late in the ninth month of the same year, Yoriie went into retirement at Shūzenji, in Izu Province, and there, less than a year later, he met his death at the hands of a man who appears to have been an agent of the Hōjō.

Meanwhile, Yoriie’s eleven-year-old brother, Sanetomo, had been named shogun. Tokimasa, who had become the first Kamakura regent (shikken) in 1203, retained that title until 1205. He was then driven into retirement by his son and daughter, Yoshitoki and Masako, after an attempt on his part to replace Sanetomo with a Minamoto warrior named Hiraga Tomomasa, who was the son-in-law of Tokimasa’s second wife. Yoshitoki took over the office of regent, and Sanetomo began a tenure marked by political impotence and strong maternal influence.

Unlike his father and brother, Sanetomo was more aristocrat than warrior. He devoted himself to literary pursuits, sending his verses to the great poet Teika for criticism; and he pressed the court for ever higher offices and ranks, despite reminders at home that Yoritomo had shunned such honors.²²

In the last month of the year corresponding to 1218, he achieved the lofty status of minister of the right; in the first month of the following year, he went to the Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine to make a formal expression of gratitude; and there he was struck down by his brother Yoriie’s surviving son, the monk Kugyō, probably at Yoshitoki’s instigation.

After negotiating in vain for an imperial prince, the bakufu accepted Kujō Michiie’s infant son Yoritsune as the next shogun. Yoritsune traveled to Kamakura in 1219, at the age of one, and received the shogunal title in 1226, when he was eight. Although a purely ceremonial figure, he appears to have become involved in some of the many intrigues of the age; and in 1244, when he was 26, the Hōjō regent, Tsunetoki (1224—1246), forced him to step down in favor of his five-year-old son Yoritsugu. He took the tonsure in 1245, but continued his political activities. In 1246, Tsunetoki’s successor as regent, Tokiyori, put him under house arrest, disposed of the men close to him, and sent him back to the capital, where he stayed for a time at Rokuhara. Later, he seems to have resumed his contacts with dissident elements in Kamakura.

Apparently suspecting Yoritsune’s son, the new shogun Yoritsugu, of also harboring hostile intentions, Tokiyori sent the boy home in 1252, when he was thirteen.

Both Yoritsune and Yoritsugu died suddenly within a few weeks of each other in 1256, under circumstances that have suggested poisoning to some observers.

In 1252, the year of Yoritsugu’s dismissal, the cooperative Retired Emperor Go-Saga was the reigning power at court, and the military government experienced no difficulty in securing an imperial prince, Go-Saga’s own ten-year-old son Munetaka, as the sixth shogun. The prince’s appointment was a clear indication, if further proof had been needed, that the shogun’s only function was to symbolize imperial sanction of Kamakura authority. Lest he develop inconvenient ambitions, the shogunate sent him home when he reached the age of 24, justifying its action with what are believed to have been trumpedup accusations of intrigue, and elevated his two-year-old son Koreyasu in his stead. When Prince Koreyasu was 25, he suffered a similar fate—in part, it appears, because members of the Jimyō-in faction wanted the position for a prince of their line.

The eighth shogun, Prince Hisaakira, was a son of Retired Emperor Go-Fukakusa. He held office for twenty years, from 1289 to 1308, and enjoyed the unique distinction of returning to Kyoto by choice. His son and successor, Prince Morikuni, was less fortunate: caught up in the tumultuous events of 1333, he resigned and took the tonsure, but lost his life soon afterward, at the age of 32.

Of the sixteen Hōjō regents, only a few need detain us. By general agreement, Yoshitoki’s son and successor, Yasutoki, was the greatest figure among them, notable for the creation of consultative bodies and judicial procedures that satisfied the great vassals and gave the bakufu a reputation for fair and expeditious settlement of disputes. His death in 1242 led to a short period of instability, but in 1247 the Hōjō crushed the Miura, their only remaining potential rivals, and achieved a position that was to remain unassailable into the 1260’s.

The regent who disposed of the Miura was Yasutoki’s grandson Tokiyori, the fifth in the line. Tokiyori’s period of influence coincided roughly with Go-Saga’s and Saionji Saneuji’s in the capital: he held office from 1246 to 1256 and, as head of the Hōjō family (tokusō), continued until his death in 1263 to control the shogunate and to enjoy a reputation for upright conduct, frugality, and concern for the disadvantaged.²³ His tenure and Yasutoki’s have together been called the bakufu’s golden age.

In 1268, only a few years after Tokiyori’s death, it became apparent that the Mongols intended to invade Japan. The regent of the day was Tokiyori’s son Tokimune, whose term extended from 1268 to 1284. The Mongols were beaten back, thanks to the exertions of the military and to a pair of timely typhoons (the kamikaze, or divine winds, of legend).²⁴ But the victory was a costly one, involving the levying of unpopular taxes, the mustering of large numbers of warriors, the preparation of defenses, the battles themselves, and the necessity of maintaining a state of readiness for the next two decades. The threat had come at a time when the shogunate was embroiled in the imperial succession disputes discussed earlier, when the rise of a money economy was causing its provincial vassals, or housemen (goke’nin), to mortgage and lose their properties, and when warriors unallied with Kamakura were growing increasingly bold in their defiance of central authority.²⁵ Besieged by complaints arising from such causes, and by the suits of those who demanded rewards for services rendered against the Mongols—exploits of a nature traditionally recognized through gifts of land seized from the vanquished—the bakufu’s courts lost their reputation for fairness and laid themselves open to charges of inefficiency and corruption.

Tokimune’s son and successor, Sadatoki, tried to control the situation by concentrating power in the hands of the tokusō, or senior member of the Hōjō family, an aim he realized in 1293. Thereafter, it was the tokusō who stood at the apex of the bakufu’s power structure—first Sadatoki himself and then his son Takatoki, the last regent. The regent, like the shogun, enjoyed only ceremonial importance, and it was either the tokusō himself or, in Takatoki’s case, the men around him, who made decisions and instituted courses of action.

As Paul Varley has pointed out, Japanese chroniclers may have been following standard Chinese practice when they depicted Takatoki, the last of his dynasty, as a decadent ruler with no redeeming qualities.²⁶ It is undeniable, however, that Takatoki was a weak man dominated by others and that the bakufu in its final days sorely missed the Yasutoki or Tokiyori who might have prolonged its existence. It was also unfortunate, from the standpoint of the shogunate, that able and determined adversaries stood ready to take advantage of its vulnerability. At court, there were Emperor Go-Daigo and his son Morinaga (Son’un), the prince who waged guerrilla warfare during Go-Daigo’s exile. Among the military, there were easterners like Nitta Yoshisada (of a Minamoto house on poor terms with Kamakura) and westerners like Nawa Nagatoshi, Akamatsu Enshin (a disgruntled houseman), and Kusunoki Masashige (a warrior in Kawachi Province who appears to have had ties in court circles). And, most importantly, there was the turncoat bakufu general Ashikaga Takauji, the head of a powerful vassal family in the east, who was later to rebel against Go-Daigo as well.

The Clear Mirror ends with Go-Daigo’s triumphant return in 1333, an event made possible primarily by Takauji and Yoshisada, with help from the others named above. But the Kemmu Restoration (so called from the era name) was to endure only until 1336, in part because the emperor overestimated the loyalty of Takauji and others who were more anti-bakufu than pro-throne. When we consider that the collapse of the restoration also marked the end of the premodern court’s role as a significant political force, it is easy to understand why our author might have resolved to write no more. For a chronicler persuaded of the court’s central importance to all that was most precious in the national heritage, and most worthy of preservation, it would have been dispiriting to continue.

Such, in broad outline, was the segment of history the author took as his subject. Writing in the fourteenth century, he had at his command a number of models for possible imitation. One was a chronological, factual, synoptic narrative, written in Chinese or an approximation thereof, that preserved brief, impersonal records of events like bureaucratic appointments, the prescribed round of imperial activities, and the appearance of omens—the type of historical writing concerning which Murasaki Shikibu had said, through her protagonist, Genji, that it provided a mere fragment of the whole truth, a less useful mirror of human life than the vernacular fictional tales (monogatari) people dismissed as unworthy of serious notice.²⁷ Its principal examples were the Six National Histories (rikkokushi), compiled under court auspices between 720 and 901, and covering the span from the age of the gods to 887.

Another potential model was an analytical interpretation of history written in Japanese. Two such works, the only premodern examples of their kind, may have been known to the author. The first, Gukanshō (Notes on Stupid Views, ca. 1220), by the monk Jien, argued that history unfolds in accordance with a natural law, or order, called dōri (reason, logic), which for Japan was to be equated with the will of the goddess Amaterasu, and which prescribed the political relationships appropriate for the state.²⁸ The second, Jinnō shōtōki (Record of the Right Line of Gods and Sovereigns, ca. 1343), by the court noble Kitabatake Chikafusa, was an attempt to prove the legitimacy of the Daikakuji line.²⁹

A third possible model was the half-historical, half-literary genre known as the military tale (gunki monogatari or senki monogatari). The earliest examples are short narratives in Chinese centering on warriors and military campaigns; later, works in the vernacular appeared, including two major classics: The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari, thirteenth-fourteenth c.) and The Record of Great Peace (Taiheiki, fourteenth c.).³⁰ The Tale of the Heike tells the story of the rise and fall of the Taira clan, with major emphasis on the Gempei War and its battles; The Record of Great Peace begins with Emperor Go-Daigo’s reign, narrates the overthrow of the Kamakura shogunate in detail, and describes the later political and military struggles of the fourteenth century until around 1368. Although the first part of The Record of Great Peace and the last part of The Clear Mirror deal with the same subjects, it is not clear which book is the older.³¹ But The Tale of the Heike was already famous in the author’s day, providing at least one model for circumstantial accounts, rich in military color, of such dramatic events as the repeated sanguinary power struggles in Kamakura; the Jōkyū, Shōchū, and Genkō disturbances; and the Mongol invasions.

The last major group of extant histories were of a kind that Murasaki Shikibu may have envisioned as a future possibility when she asserted the superiority of the monogatari to texts like the Six National Histories. Unlike the military tales, they concentrated not on warriors and the battlefield, but on the concerns of the aristocratic readers for whom Shikibu wrote, and they began to appear shortly after the Genji itself. The implied Masukagami author enumerates them as he coaxes the old nun to tell her story (p. 28).

It was such works, known to literary historians as historical tales (rekishi monogatari ), that could have been expected to prove most congenial to the author described earlier, and it was their example that he did in fact decide to follow.³²

As Table 7 shows, the historical-tale genre proper is usually considered to consist of nine works, of which six antedate The Clear Mirror: in order of approximate period covered, A Tale of Akitsushima (Akitsushima monogatari), The Water Mirror (Mizukagami), The Great Mirror (Ōkagami), A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), The New Mirror (Imakagami), and Further Chronicles (Iya yotsugi).³³ One of the six, A Tale of Akitsushima, is a short work, based mostly on the first of the Six National Histories, that the implied author apparently considered unworthy of mention; another, Further Chronicles, has not survived. Of the remaining four, our author was especially indebted to the two most important, The Great Mirror and A Tale of Flowering Fortunes. The main section (seihen) of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes was probably written soon after 1028; The Great Mirror, probably at some time between 1085 and 1125. Flowering Fortunes is thus the oldest historical tale, and it exhibits the defining features of the genre in all respects except size (it is atypically large).

For Western readers familiar with the writings of Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and other practitioners of what has variously been called the new journalism or the nonfiction novel, the literary devices employed by Akazome Emon (ca. 960?—ca. 1040?), the probable author of the main part of Flowering Fortunes, testify to the fact that writers of widely separated cultures and ages may arrive at similar solutions when confronted with similar problems—in this case, the revitalization of past events. Wolfe has identified four basic devices on which the new journalist relies: (1) first, and most important, the avoidance of flat historical narration through the use of scene-by-scene construction; (2) the inclusion of realistic dialogue; (3) the presentation of more than one point of view, so that the reader enters the minds of characters and shares their emotions; and (4) the embellishment of the individual scene with a wealth of realistic detail, in the manner of Balzac or Dickens.³⁴

Those four devices, the stock in