Information about Kemmu Restoration

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Glossary

The Kemmu Restoration (建武の新政; Kemmu no shinsei) was a period of Japanese history that occurred from 1333 to 1336.^[1] It marks the three year period between the fall of the Kamakura shogunate and the rise of the Ashikaga shogunate, when Emperor Go-Daigo attempted to re-establish Imperial control by overthrowing the bakufu.

Background

By the early 14th century the Kamakura bakufu of the Hōjō family was in disarray: the efforts needed to repel the abortive invasions from the Mongol Empire in 1274 and 1281 had been costly, and the shogun had been unable to reward provincial leaders who had rallied to the banner.

In 1318 Go-Daigo came to the throne from the junior line of the imperial house, but was reluctant to step down later in favour of the senior line, and became determined to overthrow the bakufu. He was sent into exile in 1331, but supporters such as the provincial warrior Kusunoki Masahige continued the struggle, and in 1333 the bakufu was destroyed when Ashikaga Takauji turned against it. Go-Daigo returned to Kyoto convinced that the days of the shoguns and other usurpers were over and that the emperors could rule in fact as well as in name once more.

However, the Go-Daigo regime had neither the administrative experience nor the provincial power to deal with the realities of a warrior-dominated society. Go-Daigo refused to appoint Takauji shogun even when asked directly in 1335, and when he clashed with Takauji in 1336 the result was not in doubt. He fled south from Kyoto to Yoshino, while Takauji established a new bakufu in Kyoto, known as the Muromachi bakufu, crushed remaining loyalists in battle near Kobe, and installed a puppet emperor on the throne. This initiated a schism between two rival branches of the imperial family which lasted until 1392. Takauji's Ashikaga family ruled as shoguns for the rest of the Muromachi period.

The Kemmu Restoration was a failure, but it kept alive the ideology of imperial rule, which finally succeeded in bringing centuries of shogun rule to an end in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration five centuries later.

Kemmu Restoration in fiction

In the alternate history novel Romanitas by Sophia McDougall, the Kemmu Restoration becomes as major an event in Japanese, or 'Nionian' history, as the Meiji Restoration in reality. In that continuity, the Emperor Go-Daigo had (surreptitiously) acquired gunpowder technology from a still-extant (and ascendant) Roman Empire, and laid the groundwork for Nionia to challenge Rome for global supremacy in the centuries to come.

Notes

References

• Titsingh, Isaac, ed. (1834). [Siyun-sai Rin-siyo, 1652], Nipon o daï itsi ran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon, tr. par M. Isaac Titsingh avec l'aide de plusieurs interprètes attachés au comptoir hollandais de Nangasaki; ouvrage re., complété et cor. sur l'original japonais-chinois, accompagné de notes et précédé d'un Aperçu d'histoire mythologique du Japon, par M. J. Klaproth. Paris. [Two digitized examples of this rare book have now been made available online: (1) from the library of the University of Michigan, digitized January 30, 2007; and (2) from the library of Stanford University, digitized June 23, 2006.]