The Kamakura Period

The Kamakura Period, 1185 to 1333 CE, began when Minamoto no Yoritomo, victorious in the Genpei War, established Japan's first shogunate, a military government based in the city of Kamakura, far from the imperial court at Kyoto, inaugurating nearly seven centuries in which real political and military authority in Japan rested with a shogun and the samurai warrior class rather than the emperor. Following Yoritomo's death the Hojo clan controlled the shogunate as regents in a pattern echoing the earlier Fujiwara regency over the emperor. The period's defining military crisis came from outside Japan: Mongol invasion fleets sent by Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281 were both repelled, the second decisively by a typhoon the Japanese came to call kamikaze, "divine wind," though the enormous cost of defense without conquered territory to reward loyal warriors left the shogunate financially and politically weakened. The period ends in 1333 when Emperor Go-Daigo, with samurai support, overthrew the Kamakura shogunate in the brief Kenmu Restoration.