A history of the Japanese people

by F. Brinkley; Dairoku Kikuchi

Now the maternal grandfather of Ichiman was Hiki Yoshikazu, a captain who had won high renown in the days of Yoritomo. Learning of the projected partition and appreciating the grave effect it must produce on the fortunes of his grandson, Hiki commissioned his daughter to relate the whole story to Yoriiye, and applied himself to organize a plot for the destruction of the Hojo. But the facts came to the lady Masa's ears, and she lost no time in communicating them to Tokimasa, who, with characteristic promptitude, invited Hiki to a conference and had him assassinated. Thereupon, Hiki's son, Munetomo, assembled all his retainers and entrenched himself in Ichiman's mansion, where, being presently besieged by an overwhelming force of Tokimasa's partisans, he set fire to the house and perished with the child, Ichiman, and with many brave soldiers. The death of his son, of his father-in-law, and of his brother-in-law profoundly affected Yoriiye. He attempted to take vengeance upon his grandfather, Tokimasa, but his emissaries suffered a signal defeat, and he himself, being now completely discredited, was constrained to follow his mother, Masa's, advice, namely, to take the tonsure and retire to the monastery Shuzen-ji in Izu. There he was followed and murdered by Tokimasa's agents. It is apparent that throughout these intrigues the lady Masa made no resolute attempt to support her first-born. She recognized in him a source of weakness rather than of strength to the Minamoto.

SANETOMO

After Yoriiye's retirement, in 1204, to the monastery in Izu, Masa, with the concurrence of her father, Tokimasa, decided on the accession of her second son, Sanetomo, then in his twelfth year, and application for his appointment to the office of shogun having been duly made, a favourable and speedy reply was received from Kyoto. The most important feature of the arrangement was that Hojo Tokimasa became shikken, or military regent, and thus wielded greater powers than ever—powers which he quickly proceeded to abuse for revolutionary purposes. His policy was to remove from his path, by any and every measure, all potential obstacles to the consummation of his ambition.

Among these obstacles were the lady Masa and the new shogun, Sanetomo. So long as these two lived, the Yoritomo family could count on the allegiance of the Kwanto, and so long as that allegiance remained intact, the elevation of the Hojo to the seats of supreme authority could not be compassed. Further, the substitution of Hojo for Minamoto must be gradual. Nothing abrupt would be tolerable. 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. 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. 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. It has been inferred that her pleading was in Tokimasa's ears when he sent a band of assassins to murder Yoriiye in the Shuzen-ji monastery. However that may be, there can be little doubt that the Hojo chief, in the closing episodes of his career, favoured the progeny of his second wife, Maki, in preference to that of his daughter, Masa.

Having "removed" Yoriiye, he extended the same fate to Hatakeyama Shigetada, one of the most loyal and trusted servants of Yoritomo. Shigetada would never have connived at any measure inimical to the interests of his deceased master. Therefore, he was put out of the way. Then the conspirators fixed their eyes upon Sanetomo. The twelve-year-old boy was to be invited to Minamoto Tomomasa's mansion and there destroyed. This was the lady Maki's plan. The lady Masa discovered it, and hastened to secure Sanetomo's safety by carrying him to the house of her brother, Yoshitoki. The political career of Hojo Tokimasa ended here. He had to take the tonsure, surrender his post of regent and go into exile in Izu, where he died, in 1215, after a decade of obscurity. As for Minamoto Tomomasa, he was killed in Kyoto by troops despatched for the purpose. This conflict in 1205, though Hojo Tokimasa and Minamoto Tomomasa figured so largely in it, is by some historians regarded as simply a conflict between the ladies Maki and Masa. These two women certainly occupied a prominent place on the stage of events, but the figure behind the scenes was the white-haired intriguer, Tokimasa. Had the lady Maki's son-in-law succeeded Sanetomo, the former would have been the next victim of Tokimasa's ambition, whereafter the field would have been open for the grand climacteric, the supremacy of the Hojo.

HOJO YOSHITOKI

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. Yet in thus espousing the cause of his sister, Masa, and his nephew, Sanetomo, against his father, Tokimasa, and his brother-in-law, Tomomasa, it is not to be supposed that Yoshitoki's motive was loyalty to the house of Yoritomo. On the contrary, everything goes to show that he would have associated himself with his father's conspiracy had he not deemed the time premature and the method clumsy. He waited patiently, and when the occasion arrived, he "covered his tracks" with infinite skill while marching always towards the goal of Tokimasa's ambition.

The first to be "removed" was Wada Yoshimori, whom Yoritomo had gratefully appointed betto of the Samurai-dokoro. Yoritomo's eldest son, Yoriiye, had left two sons, Kugyo and Senju-maru. The former had taken the tonsure after his father's and elder brother's deaths, in 1204, but the cause of the latter was espoused with arms by a Shinano magnate, Izumi Chikahira, in 1213. On Wada Yoshimori, as betto of the Samurai-dokoro, devolved the duty of quelling this revolt. He did so effectually, but in the disposition of the insurgents' property, the shikken, Yoshitoki, contrived to drive Wada to open rebellion. He attacked the mansion of the shogun and the shikken, captured and burned the former, chiefly through the prowess of his giant son, Asahina Saburo; but was defeated and ultimately killed, Senju-maru, though only thirteen years old, being condemned to death on the pretext that his name had been used to foment the insurrection! After this convenient episode, Yoshitoki supplemented his office of shikken with that of betto of the Samurai-dokoro, thus becoming supreme in military and civil affairs alike.

DEATH OF SANETOMO

How far Sanetomo appreciated the situation thus created there is much difficulty in determining. The sentiment of pity evoked by his tragic fate has been projected too strongly upon the pages of his annals to leave them quite legible. He had seen his elder brother and two of the latter's three sons done to death. He had seen the "removal" of several of his father's most trusted lieutenants. He had seen the gradual upbuilding of the Hojo power on this hecatomb of victims. That he perceived something of his own danger would seem to be a natural inference. Yet if he entertained such apprehensions, he never communicated them to his mother, Masa, who, from her place of high prestige and commanding intellect, could have reshaped the issue.