Everything about The Kemmu Restoration totally explained
The
Kemmu Restoration (建武の新政; Kemmu no shinsei) was a period of
Japanese history that occurred from
1333 to
1336. 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 Ashikaga Takauji the shogunate title even when asked directly in 1335, and when he clashed with Ashikaga Takauji in 1336 the result wasn't 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Kemmu Restoration'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://kemmu_restoration.totallyexplained.com">Kemmu restoration Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
