Hōjō Masako the Nun Shogun

Before there was the Warrior Nun on Netflix, there was Hōjō Masako, “Shogun Nun”, who was the wife of the very first shogun of Japan and a formidable political activist. After her hubby died, she shaved her head, and became a nun, but she continued to hold political sway until her death at 69 years of age, outliving her husband and 4 children.

The reason I selected Masako as a topic, was because I was teaching a unit on Shogunate Japan and found a resource online where the students were to do an assignment about a significant person of the time, and they provided a list to choose from. But then I realised, that none of the options on the list were women, surely there was at least one woman in this almost 700-year period who rated a mention. I checked the textbooks available and nothing. Just like a Japanese Cormorant bird diving in to catch a fish, I dove into Google and came up with Hōjō Masako and today I will regurgitate my findings to you.

If you are wondering why I am using such an odd metaphor. Cormorant fishing is a traditional Japanese practice where fishermen train birds to dive into the river to catch fish, they have a necklace on so they can’t swallow the fish and when the bird comes to the surface, the fisherman collects the fish from the bird’s throat.  When I was living in Gifu, Japan, I went on a cormorant fishing dinner cruise where we watched the traditional fishermen and then a chef on board our boat cooked up a feast from their catch. I was a bit perturbed and felt sad for the birds, but my local friends were very proud to show me this tradition that had been around for 1300 years.

Back to our shogun nun. Hōjō Masako, the wife of the first Japanese shogun, was an incredibly significant woman, who helped fight against the imperial family to keep the shogun government in a position of power.

Before we get into Masako’s story, we need to understand the system of government. I know that politics doesn’t light everyone’s world on fire, but these politicians had samurai swords, so it makes it a little bit cooler.

Just before the period we are looking at, Japan was divided into clans, and every good clan leader needed some samurai to make sure they could keep control of their lands. Samurai means “one who serves” and over time they developed a code of ethics, the bushido code, and became warriors highly skilled in martial arts and their everyday carry was quite a lethal cache of high-quality swords.

There were emperors in power, and they were believed to be descended from the gods, the Sun goddess in fact. The royals would hang out in their luxurious court and leave the day to day running of the country to advisors and minsters. While the emperor was writing poetry and doing calligraphy in his fancy palace in Kyoto, outside there were civil wars breaking out between clans.

And this is where our heroine’s hubby comes in. It was the year 1185 and there was a new made up job that popped up, Shogun, and that just means military leader or general. Masako’s husband, or Minamoto no Yoritomo became the first shogun and introduced a new system of government. This system was meant to be temporary, but it hung around for about 700 years. Yoritomo set his government up in a place called Kamakura, which is why the first shogunate is called the Kamakura shogunate. He then set up military leaders in the different provinces all over Japan and implemented a feudal system of government. But enough about Yoritomo, he gets enough press, let’s meet Hōjō Masako the shadow shogunate leader.

As a young girl Masako was a tomboy, enjoying horse riding, hunting and fishing. I know I am getting off track early, but I just learned the etymology of the word tomboy which originally meant a rude and boisterous boy. The word later made the shift to meaning a wild girl who acts like a boy. See how my brain works, sometimes I can barely write a sentence without following a word down a rabbit hole.

Masako’s mother died when she was in her late teens and she had to take on the household duties. Her dad went to Kyoto for 3 years to work on guard duty for the emperor and while he was there, he remarried a woman who was the same age as his daughter Masako. Awkward.

Also, while he was away, this was when Masako started canoodling with her future husband. Yoritomo was living in exile in the province since his family had been killed by a rival clan leader. When her dad came back and found out about this relationship, he was livid- he wanted her to marry another guy who would strengthen the family’s position. But Masako knew what she wanted on the evening of her arranged wedding to this other guy, she crept away in the middle of the night and hid in a mountain temple with her boyfriend Yoritomo and was guarded by warrior monks until her dad begrudgingly gave his consent for their union. That’s the stuff rom coms are made of.

There were a bunch of civil clan wars going on at the time, and eventually Masako, her dad and husband banded together to become victorious by wiping out a rival clan. This was about the time that the new shogun feudal system that I mentioned earlier was being set up.

In 1199, her husband died, it was traditional at the time for widowed women to shave their head and become a nun. She did shave her head and wear a habit. However, she did not live in the nunnery, instead she kept her finger in the political pie.

When the first shogun Yoritomo died, as this job was set up to be an inherited position, her eldest son Yoriie was in line to be the next shogun. The thing is, he was not quite old enough- he was only 17. Masako formed a council of elders to rule on his behalf this included her father, Yoriie’s grandfather. Her son a now powerless hormonal teenage shogun, was peeved and started running his mouth off about killing his grandfather. Alarm bells rang about Yoriie’s competence as a shogun and after only a year, she kicked him out of the job, put him into exile and placed her 11year old second son, Sanetomo in the position of the shogun. Being only 11, of course Masako, our nun shogun was again ruling as regent.

After 2 years of this, her dad, remember how he married a woman the same age as Masako, well they had a son and, her dad had hatched a plan to replace the shogun with his own son. Masako was not having a bar of this and sent her dad into exile to live in a monastery. Phew, so much political and family intrigue.

It doesn’t stop there, remember how Masako had exiled her first son, before he died, he bore 4 children and one of those boys grew up to become a Buddhist monk with a grudge. One day, after Shogun Sanetomo was on his way back from a ceremony, Yoriie’s angry monk son, assassinated his shogun uncle. One source says that he sprung out from behind a ginko tree to do the deed. That means that Masako’s grandson from her first son, murdered her second son. And that marked the end of the Minamoto line, but not the end of Masako’s political influence.

After her son’s death, Masako travelled to Kyoto and appointed the 4^th shogun, a one year old relative of her husband. The Emperor thought this might be a good time to try and get back control of the country, but Masako and the Hōjō clan managed to rally warriors and she continued to rule in the capacity of a regent until her death.

This is Kelly Chase, on the case.