Event

In the Jōkyū War of 1221, retired emperor Go-Toba declared war on the Hōjō warrior family in attempt to destroy Japan’s first warrior government, the Kamakura bakufu, which had shared power with the imperial court in Kyoto since the late twelfth century. Unlike most events in pre-modern Japan, this conflict suffers from a notable absence of documentation. Court diaries and land documents, the bread and butter of historians since Jeffrey Mass reinvigorated pre-modern Japanology in the 1970s, contain large gaps for 1221. Thus we are left in a difficult position when it comes to analyzing the events of the war and how it unfolded. With no such “reliable” documentation, scholars have either relied on narratives and chronicles of the period—such as the Tale of Jōkyū (Jōkyūki) and Mirror of the East (Azuma kagami), which embellish and exaggerate events—or, as Mass himself advocated, ignored the events of the war completely.

In this talk, based on a chapter of my upcoming book on the Jōkyū War, I try a different approach: to bring all material we have to bear on the conflict, while remaining conscious of the biases and agendas of the more problematic texts. By triangulating what we know from limited documentary evidence with the exaggerated claims of the narrative texts, I offer new insights into the outbreak of the war, including why Go-Toba struck when he did; how the Hōjō responded to the attack; and how bakufu soldiers utilized geography and infrastructure to advance on Go-Toba’s troops. Instead of ignoring the war as historical event, this more rigorous methodology allows us to glean many new insights into pre-modern Japanese political and military history, while noting the ways our written sources may have shaped or manipulated the timeline and rationale of the war for later generations.