his title, shikken, came to mean "shogunal regent." In 1225, Yo*censored*oki's son Yasutoki created a Council of State to broaden participation in the government and made and uncle a "co-signer" of government decrees to share responsibility with him. Thereafter until the fall of the Kamakura in 1333, the Hojo family demonstrated great success at collective leadership. Two senior Hojo occupied the paired posts of "shogunal regent" and "co-signer," while two junior members of the family occupied the paired posts of deputies in Heian-kyo. The year after the Council of State came into existence, the Hojo installed the Fujiwara infant Yoritsune, descended through his mother from Minamoto Yoritomo, as the titular shogun. In 1252, Yoritsune was replaced with the imperial prince Yoritsugu. The Hojo regency provides a remarkable tribute to the cohesiveness of Minamoto Yoritomo's shogunate. The entire system depended, in theory, on the personal loyalty of the vassals to him and his heirs, yet despite the extinction of his lineage, the Kamakura bakufu operated successfully with a purely symbolic object of loyalty at its head. By the early thirteenth century, the Japanese emperor was merely a puppet in the hands of a retired emperor and a great court family, the Fujiwara, who together controlled a skeleton government completely dominated by the private military government of the shogun, who in turn was a puppet in the hands of a Hojo regent. The man behind the throne had become a series of men, each one in turn controlled by the man behind him. The Hojo maintained tight control of the government and immediately destroyed any sign of rebellion. The relatively powerless shogun stayed in Kamakura while the Hojo placed his deputies in Heian-kyo and throughout western Japan. In 1232, the shogunate introduced a new legal code that stressed such Confucian values as the importance of loyalty to the master, and generally attempted to suppress a growing de...
