anti-Kamakura intrigues, his allies and opponents, and his shortcomings as
politician and military planner. The same attitude informs The Clear Mirror
as a whole: it is a historical narrative, to be sure, but it might equally be de-
scribed as a nostalgic celebration of Heian-style court life, a treasure trove of
elegant anecdote, which seeks to re-create the romantic world of The Tale of
Genji and which consequently requires, for full understanding, an indepen-
dent acquaintance with the main outlines of Kamakura history, and especially
with the complicated system of governance characteristic of the era. ³

First, it should be noted that three main sources of governmental authority
coexisted during most of the period from 1185 to 1333: the reigning emperor's
court, where the most powerful figure was the imperial regent (sesshō or kam-
paku); the chancellery (in-no-chō), presided over by a retired emperor as head
of the imperial family; and the military government (bakufu), or shogunate, in
Kamakura, nominally headed by a court-appointed shogun but controlled by
members of the Hōjō family, who acted as shogunal regents (shikken).

The oldest of the three was the reigning emperor's court, which dated back
to remote antiquity but which had acquired its characteristic form early in
the Heian period ( 794-1185), when members of the powerful northern house
of the Fujiwara clan secured hereditary rights to the office of regent. Thence-
forth, the emperor was usually a child or young man who performed symbolic
functions while the regent, his maternal grandfather, exercised power in his
name, and who could expect to be forced off the throne to make way for
another Fujiwara grandson. ⁴

The second, the chancellery, dated from 1086, when an able retired em-
peror challenged the Fujiwara hegemony by establishing a separate power
center known as insei (cloister government), with a chancellery whose writs
carried more weight than those of the reigning emperor. Cloister governments
tended to be staffed by men whom the regental house excluded from positions
of influence, such as members of the imperial and Minamoto clans and lesser
branches of the Fujiwara. Unlike the imperial court and the shogunate, they
were not permanent features of the political landscape; however, they existed
in all but 25 of the 148 years from 1185 to 1333. ⁵ (See Table 3.)

The third power center, the shogunate, the most significant product of the
Gempei War, came about as the result of a compromise between the victor in
that conflict, Minamoto Yoritomo, and the chief figure in Kyoto, Retired Em-
peror Go-Shirakawa (insei 1158-1192).

Earlier in his lifetime, Go-Shirakawa had witnessed the rise at court of a
breed of men, aptly characterized by Jeffrey Mass as military nobles, who
functioned as liaisons between imperial and aristocratic patrons, on the one
hand, and their own warrior followers in the provinces, on the other. ⁶ In the
twelfth month of the year corresponding to 1159, one such military noble, Taira
Kiyomori, disposed of his main rival, the Minamoto chieftain Yoshitomo, in
a brief martial engagement known as the Heiji Disturbance. ⁷ He then began a
gradual rise from client of Go-Shirakawa to hegemon, a status achieved in the

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