Origins
The transition from classical Japan (the Heian period, 794–1185) to medieval Japan was produced by the Genpei War (1180–1185), the civil war between the two major military aristocratic clans — the Taira and the Minamoto — that ended with the destruction of the Taira at the naval battle of Dannoura on 25 April 1185. The eight-year-old Emperor Antoku drowned in the battle, and the victorious Minamoto no Yoritomo established a new political form: the shogunate or bakufu (“tent government”), a military government separate from the imperial court at Kyoto.
The Kamakura shogunate (named for Yoritomo’s headquarters at Kamakura, southwest of modern Tokyo) inaugurated nearly seven centuries of dual political organization in Japan. The emperor at Kyoto retained nominal sovereignty and presided over court ritual; effective political and military power was held by the shogun, who governed through a network of provincial military governors (shugo) and estate stewards (jitō). The system was the closest Japanese equivalent to European feudalism.
The Kamakura period
The Kamakura shogunate (1185–1333) consolidated the institutional structure of medieval Japan. The Hōjō regents (relatives of Yoritomo’s wife who progressively displaced the Minamoto themselves) governed in the shogun’s name for most of the period after 1219. The political administration was effective by medieval standards; the cultural innovations of the period were substantial.
The most famous external event was the Mongol Invasions of 1274 and 1281. Kublai Khan, having completed the conquest of China, sent two successive invasion fleets against Japan. Both landed at Hakata Bay on northern Kyushu. The first, with approximately 30,000 troops, was repelled after a single battle and a damaging storm. The second, with approximately 140,000 troops, was substantially destroyed by a massive late-summer typhoon. The Japanese cultural memory of the storms named them kamikaze — “divine wind” — a term that was famously revived for the suicide-pilot operations of 1944–1945.
The Mongol invasions imposed substantial fiscal stress on the Kamakura shogunate, which had to compensate the gokenin warrior class for two campaigns of mobilization without acquiring new conquered lands to distribute. The resulting financial crisis weakened the regime and contributed to its collapse in 1333, when Emperor Go-Daigo briefly restored direct imperial rule.
The Ashikaga period
The imperial restoration failed within three years. The Ashikaga shogunate (1336–1573), also called the Muromachi period after the Kyoto district where the Ashikaga shoguns resided, replaced the Kamakura system. The Ashikaga shoguns governed from Kyoto itself rather than from a separate military capital, producing a closer integration of military and courtly cultural traditions.
The Muromachi period produced much of what Western observers recognize as classical Japanese aesthetic culture: the Zen Buddhist monastery tradition that imported Chinese Chan Buddhism and reshaped Japanese intellectual and artistic life; the tea ceremony (chanoyu) as a formalized aesthetic-spiritual practice; the Noh theatre of Zeami; the dry-landscape garden style (Ryōan-ji, Daisen-in); the formal Japanese architectural style (shoin-zukuri); and the syncretic Zen-court painting style that produced the major medieval Japanese landscape artists (Sesshū Tōyō).
The Ashikaga political system was substantially weaker than the Kamakura. By the mid-15th century the shogunate had effectively lost control of the provincial shugo governors. The succession dispute that produced the Ōnin War (1467–1477) devastated Kyoto and effectively ended the Ashikaga shogunate as a functioning central government, although the title of shogun continued until 1573.
The Sengoku period
The Sengoku (“Warring States”) period (roughly 1467–1603) was the long political fragmentation that followed the collapse of central Ashikaga authority. Approximately sixty regional warlords (daimyō) competed for territorial control through nearly continuous warfare. The period produced the institutional and cultural elements of the modern Japanese mythology of the samurai: the codified warrior ethic of bushidō, the great medieval Japanese castle (Himeji, Matsumoto), the elaborate Edo-period iconography of the lone warrior.
The first European contact occurred in 1543 when Portuguese traders landed at the small island of Tanegashima off Kyushu. They brought matchlock firearms (which were rapidly adopted by Japanese armies — Japan was within a generation one of the world’s leading producers of matchlocks) and Roman Catholic missionary Christianity (the Jesuit Francis Xavier arrived in 1549; Japanese Christianity grew rapidly through the late 16th century before being violently suppressed in the early 17th).
The reunification of Japan was accomplished by three successive military commanders. Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) used firearms and aggressive political consolidation to reduce most of central Japan to his control by 1582; he was assassinated by a subordinate before completing the work. Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) completed the military unification by 1591, conducted two failed invasions of Korea (1592–1598), and died of natural causes in 1598. Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) defeated his rivals at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and established the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603, which would rule Japan in stable peace for the next 268 years until the Meiji Restoration of 1868.
Legacy
Medieval Japan produced the institutional, cultural, and aesthetic forms that have defined Japanese identity in subsequent Japanese and Western imagination: the samurai warrior class, the shogunal political tradition, Zen Buddhism in its mature institutional form, the great medieval Japanese cities and castles, the formal aesthetic culture of the tea ceremony and dry-landscape garden, and the syncretic native-Chinese intellectual tradition that defined Japanese high culture through the early modern period.
The political continuity between medieval Japan and the modern Japanese state is substantial. The Tokugawa shogunate inherited the Sengoku political settlement; the Meiji Restoration of 1868 abolished the shogunate but preserved the imperial line that had continuously occupied the throne (in nominal form) since the Yamato consolidation of the 7th century. Japan is, by some measures, the longest continuously functioning monarchical state in the world.