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Updated: June 24, 2025
Both possessed high courage and intellectual endowments of an extraordinary order, and both were profoundly ambitious. Maki saw no reason why her husband, Hojo Tokimasa, should lend all his great influence to support the degenerate scions of one of his family in preference to the able and distinguished representative of the other branch. Tomomasa was both able and distinguished.
As a consequence there happened the most serious political catastrophe in the history of Japan, a division of the imperial house against itself. The unscrupulous despotism of the Hojo regents had prepared the possibility of such an event. During the last years of the thirteenth century, there were living at the same time in Kyoto, besides the reigning Mikado, no less than three deposed emperors.
Being descended from the Taira of Ise and having occupied the domains long held by the Hojo, he adopted the uji name of "Hojo," and having extended his conquests to Sagami province, built a strong castle at Odawara. He is often spoken of as Soun, the name he adopted in taking the tonsure, which step did not in any degree interfere with his secular activities.
Finally, on the occasion of his expedition against the Hojo of Odawara, when the sailors of Mishima, in Sagami, objected to carrying war-horses in their boats on the plea that the god of the sea, Ryujin, hated everything equine, Hideyoshi did not hesitate to remove these scruples by addressing a despatch to the deity with orders to watch over the safety of the steeds.
Thus, this second order to take the field found him disposed to join in the overthrow of the Hojo rather than in their support. Learning something of this mood, Takatoki demanded that the Ashikaga chief, before commencing his march, should hand in a written oath of loyalty, and further, should leave his wife, his children, and his brother-in-law as hostages in Kamakura.
By a prompt and vigorous exercise of military talent he had crushed a Heike rising in Ise, which had threatened for a time to become perilously formidable. His mother may well have believed herself justified in representing to Hojo Tokimasa that such a man would make a much better Minamoto shogun than the half-witted libertine, Yoriiye, or the untried boy, Sanetomo.
Crafty and astute as was Hojo Tokimasa, his son Yoshitoki excelled him in both of those attributes as well as in prescience. It was to the mansion of Yoshitoki that Sanetomo was carried for safety when his life was menaced by the wiles of Tokimasa.
It is said to have begun about 1333, when the last of the Hojo regents, Takatoki, performed suicide, and a number of his retainers took their own lives by harakiri, in order to follow their master. It may be doubted whether this incident really established the practice. But by the sixteenth century junshi had certainly become an honoured custom among the samurai.
Now the Hojo chief's second wife, Maki, had borne to him a daughter who married Minamoto Tomomasa, governor of Musashi and lord constable of Kyoto, in which city he was serving when history first takes prominent notice of him. This lady Maki seems to have been of the same type as her step-daughter, Masa.
Fire completed what the sword had begun, destructive flames attacked the frame dwellings of the city, and in a few hours the great capital of the shoguns and their powerful regents was a waste of ashes. Many of the vassals of the Hojo killed themselves rather than surrender, among them a noble named Ando, whose niece was Nitta's wife. She wrote him a letter begging him to surrender.
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