The Nun Shogun: How Hōjō Masako Ran a Country She Was Never Allowed to Officially Rule

When Hōjō Masako died in 1225, the Kamakura Bakufu — the institution her husband Minamoto no Yoritomo had founded thirty-three years earlier — was being run, in fact if not in name, by her family. The Hōjō regency that would dominate Kamakura government for the next century was a direct extension of her management, and it would take three more generations of Hōjō men to settle into the institutional pattern she had effectively invented in the years between Yoritomo's death and her own. She was the first major figure in samurai history to govern Japan without holding any formal title that legitimized her rule. The fact that she did so successfully is the founding precedent for the prominent role women would play, behind the formal scenes, throughout Japanese warrior politics.

The Marriage

Masako was born in 1157 to the Hōjō clan, a minor warrior family of Izu Province whose chief political role was as keepers of the exiled Minamoto no Yoritomo. Yoritomo had been sent to Izu after his father's failed revolt of 1160; he was supposed to spend his life there as a state prisoner. Masako met him as a young woman, conducted a clandestine relationship with him, and married him in 1177 — over the explicit opposition of her father Tokimasa, who feared the political consequences if Yoritomo ever returned to the political stage.

Yoritomo did return to the political stage in 1180, when he led the second Minamoto revolt. By 1185 he had destroyed the Taira; by 1192 he was Sei-i Taishōgun. Through all of this Masako was an active political partner. She bore him two sons (Yoriie and Sanetomo) and two daughters, ran the household at Kamakura while Yoritomo campaigned, and served as the link between her own Hōjō family and his samurai retainers. She was, in 1199, something between a chief of staff and a co-regent.

Yoritomo's Death

Yoritomo's death from a fall from a horse in 1199 was sudden and politically destabilizing. The new shogun was the eldest son Yoriie, eighteen years old, by all accounts politically inept and personally arrogant. The senior retainers immediately formed a council of thirteen to manage decisions in Yoriie's name. Within five years they had concluded that Yoriie could not be allowed to govern, deposed him, and (with Masako's tacit consent) had him assassinated in 1204. Masako had chosen, in effect, between her son and the institution her husband had built. She had chosen the institution.

She and her father Hōjō Tokimasa then installed her younger son Sanetomo as the third shogun. Sanetomo was a more successful figure — a respected poet, a competent if unmilitary leader — but he was assassinated in 1219 by his own nephew Kugyō, the son of the brother whose killing Masako had earlier sanctioned. With Sanetomo's death the Minamoto direct line was extinct. The bakufu had no shogun.

The Nun Shogun

Masako's response to the 1219 crisis was the most consequential decision of her career. Rather than allow the bakufu to be absorbed into the Imperial court, which had been waiting for exactly this opportunity, she imported a young Fujiwara noble named Yoritsune from Kyoto to be the next shogun — but kept him as a child figurehead while she and her brother Yoshitoki, then her son-in-law Yasutoki, ran the government. The title for what they were doing was Shikken (regent). The Hōjō regency had begun.

Throughout this period Masako herself held no formal office. She had taken religious vows after Yoritomo's death and was technically a Buddhist nun. The contemporary chroniclers called her Ama Shōgun — Nun Shogun — to acknowledge that she was, in fact, the de facto ruler. The phrase is an oxymoron: a nun could not be a shogun and a shogun could not be a nun. The chroniclers used it anyway because it captured what was actually happening.

The Speech Before Jōkyū

The most famous moment of Masako's rule came in 1221, when the retired Emperor Go-Toba launched a revolt against the bakufu and called on samurai to abandon Kamakura and rally to the Imperial cause. The bakufu's senior retainers were divided. Masako gathered them at the Kamakura main hall and gave the speech preserved in the Azuma Kagami chronicle.

She did not speak about loyalty to the bakufu in abstract terms. She spoke about Yoritomo. She reminded each man, by name, of the gift Yoritomo had given his family: the lands, the offices, the rises in rank. She told them to remember whose hand had built the houses they now lived in. She finished by asking whether they would now repay that debt by abandoning his widow and his memory for the cheap reward of imperial favor. The retainers stayed. The Imperial revolt collapsed within a month. The Jōkyū War is conventionally dated as the moment the bakufu became permanent.

The Pattern She Set

Masako died in 1225 at sixty-eight, having effectively governed Japan for twenty-six years. The Hōjō regency she had founded would last until 1333. The pattern of governance she had pioneered — a powerful woman behind a nominal male ruler, working through a council of senior retainers, holding no formal title that could be officially attacked — became one of the recurring shapes of Japanese politics. Subsequent Hōjō female regents continued the precedent. The Tokugawa Ōoku of the seventeenth century operated on similar principles. Modern Japanese commentary on women like the Empress Shōken or Empress Teimei, working behind their official husbands, frequently invokes Masako's name.

She is also the first major Japanese political figure to be remembered by a name that is unambiguously her own — not her husband's, not her father's, not her son's. 'Hōjō Masako' is how the chronicles call her, and how she is studied today. That, in twelfth-century Japan, was a kind of victory all by itself.

"Remember the favor your masters did for you, and do not betray them now for the easy reward of the Court."