Nitta Yoshisada

Born around 1301 (Shōan 3) into the Nitta, gokenin of the Nitta estate in Kōzuke Province (present-day Ōta City, Gunma Prefecture).

Though a distinguished Minamoto house descended from the same Minamoto no Yoshikuni as the Ashikaga, the Nitta line had long been kept in a disadvantaged position.

In 1333 (Genkō 3), receiving Emperor Go-Daigo's edict to overthrow the shogunate, he raised troops. He lifted his banner at the Ikushina shrine, and as he marched on Kamakura with only a small force, anti-Hōjō soldiers joined one after another until his army swelled into a great host.

He broke the Hōjō army at Bubaigawara, and at Inamuragasaki, the Taiheiki relates, he cast a golden sword into the sea and made the tide withdraw.

In the fifth month he took Kamakura and drove Hōjō Takatoki and his clan to suicide at Tōshō-ji. The Kamakura shogunate, which had lasted 140 years, perished here.

He received rewards under the Kenmu Restoration, but came into conflict with Ashikaga Takauji (this site's id 25). After his defeat at Hakone-Takenoshita in 1335 he turned to the losing side, and at Minatogawa in 1336 he retreated without being able to save his sworn friend Kusunoki Masashige (this site's id 16).

Driven from Kyoto, Yoshisada went down to Echizen bearing the imperial princes, but Kanegasaki Castle fell and he lost both a prince and his own son.

On the second day of the intercalary seventh month of 1338 (Engen 3), he was struck by a stray arrow in the muddy fields of Fujishima and died in battle.

He was thirty-eight. The Southern Court lost its greatest military pillar.

“Let the name of Nitta, long kept in the shade, be shown to the realm in the name of the Minamoto.”

Nitta Yoshisada, though the leading figure who destroyed the Kamakura shogunate by force, was long evaluated poorly in later ages as 'a mediocre general who kept losing to Ashikaga Takauji.

' Contrasted with the wise and valiant Kusunoki Masashige (this site's id 16), he also bore the disgrace of being 'the man who let Masashige die at Minatogawa.

' But recent scholarship has justly re-evaluated the desperate struggle of Yoshisada, who supported almost single-handedly the military of the Southern Court against Takauji's great armies.

Edo-period Mito learning and the Meiji state honored Yoshisada as a loyal subject who died for Emperor Go-Daigo, enshrining him at Fujishima Shrine in Echizen (Fukui City) and at the Nitta estate in Kōzuke.

But apart from the image of the honored hero, what the historical Yoshisada saw at his end was not the radiance of a great cause, but the mud of Echizen that trapped his legs and a single arrow bearing down on his brow.

It was the all-too-human end of the hero who had taken Kamakura. His sons Yoshioki and Yoshimune and the rest of the Nitta clan continued to resist as the Southern Court thereafter.