Siege of Kamakura

What Happened

On 15 December 1526, forces loyal to the Uesugi clan attacked the city of Kamakura. The assault was led by Satomi Sanetaka. The city's defenders were retainers of Hōjō Ujitsuna, among them members of the Itō and Ogasawara families. The fighting is associated with the person of Hōjō Ujitoki on the defending side and Satomi Yoshitoyo among the attackers.

The Uesugi forces burned much of Kamakura to the ground. The fire consumed Tsurugaoka Hachimangū, the great shrine that stood at the ceremonial heart of the city. The siege took its Japanese name from that shrine.

The date places the event in the sixth year of the Daiei era (大永, だいえい), during the Muromachi period, which ran from 1336 to 1573. The wider setting is the Sengoku period, the century and a half of near-continuous regional warfare that reshaped Japan's political map.

Background

Kamakura lies on the coast of Sagami Province, south of Edo. For most of the thirteenth century it was the seat of the Kamakura shogunate, the military government that gave the city its lasting prestige. The shrine of Tsurugaoka Hachimangū was the shogunate's ceremonial centre, and the Hōjō family that dominated the shogunate as regents took its name from the place.

That first Hōjō line met its final defeat at Kamakura in 1333, when the shogunate fell. The memory of that collapse attached itself to the city. A later family, the Hōjō of Odawara, claimed descent from the earlier line and adopted the same name; Hōjō Ujitsuna was its head in the 1520s.

Two years before the siege, the Hōjō had taken Edo from the Uesugi. Edo, on the site of modern Tokyo, was a Uesugi stronghold, and its loss pushed the Uesugi out of the Kantō plain's eastern approaches. The 1526 campaign was an attempt to strike back at the Hōjō at one of the most symbolically charged points in the region.

Why It Mattered

The burning of Kamakura was a severe psychological blow to the Hōjō. The city was not merely a piece of territory. It was the place where the earlier Hōjō clan, from which Ujitsuna's family took its name and its claim to legitimacy, had been destroyed in 1333. To have Kamakura's shrine put to the torch by a rival in 1526 repeated the shape of that earlier catastrophe.

For the Uesugi and the Satomi, the attack demonstrated that the Hōjō could be reached in their own heartland. The destruction of Tsurugaoka Hachimangū was the kind of act that carried meaning beyond the battlefield, striking at the ritual foundation on which Hōjō authority in the Kantō rested.

The siege belongs to the long contest for the Kantō region that occupied the Hōjō, the Uesugi and their neighbours through the Sengoku period. The Hōjō of Odawara survived the 1526 attack and continued to hold Kamakura and Edo, but the war for the region was far from settled.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name of the event is 鶴岡八幡宮の戦い. It is read つるがおかはちまんぐうのたたかい in kana, and rendered in romaji as Tsurugaoka Hachimangū no Tatakai.

The name is a compound: the shrine, followed by a possessive particle, followed by the word for battle. Breaking it down character by character:

• 鶴 (つる, tsuru) — crane, the long-legged bird. In place names it often carries an auspicious sense.
• 岡 (おか, oka) — hill, ridge, rising ground. Together, 鶴岡 (つるがおか, Tsurugaoka) is "Crane Hill", the name of the district and of the shrine.
• 八 (はち, hachi) — eight. Here it is the first element of 八幡, a shrine deity's name.
• 幡 (まん, man) — banner, flag. The two characters together, 八幡 (はちまん, Hachiman), name Hachiman, the deity of war and archery and the traditional patron of the warrior class. The reading shifts from hachi to hachi and man to man when the two are joined, and the whole becomes Hachiman.
• 宮 (ぐう, gū) — shrine, palace. Added to 八幡 it gives 八幡宮 (はちまんぐう, Hachimangū), "Hachiman Shrine". The reading of 宮 shifts to gū in this compound.
• の (の, no) — the possessive and linking particle, joining the shrine's name to the word that follows.
• 戦 (たたか, tataka) — battle, fight. It supplies the stem of the verb 戦う, "to fight".
• い (い, i) — the closing kana of 戦い (たたかい, tatakai), the noun "battle". Written in kana rather than kanji, it turns the verb stem into a noun.

Read as a whole, 鶴岡八幡宮の戦い means "the Battle of Tsurugaoka Hachimangū" — the fight at Crane Hill Hachiman Shrine. The name records the target rather than the outcome: the event is remembered for the shrine that burned.

Key Figures

Hōjō Ujitsuna (北条氏綱, ほうじょう うじつな) headed the Hōjō family of Odawara and held Kamakura in 1526. His retainers defended the city, and the loss of Tsurugaoka Hachimangū struck at the prestige his family drew from the older Hōjō line.

Hōjō Ujitoki (北条氏時, ほうじょう うじとき) is named among the defenders of Kamakura during the siege.

Satomi Sanetaka (里見実堯, さとみ さねたか) led the attacking Uesugi forces that burned the city and its shrine.

Satomi Yoshitoyo (里見義豊, さとみ よしとよ) is named among the participants in the assault.

The Itō and Ogasawara families supplied retainers who fought on the Hōjō side in the defence of the city.