In the fifth month of 1333 (Genkou 3), Nitta Yoshisada (1301-1338) raised his banner against the Kamakura shogunate at Ikushina Shrine in Kozuke Province (present-day Gunma Prefecture). Within barely ten days, his forces had reached the outskirts of Kamakura.
The shogunate’s defense relied on the narrow mountain passes called kiridoshi, with the three main approaches — Kobukurozaka to the north, Gokurakujizaka to the west, and Kesagozaka to the northwest — forming the primary defensive perimeter. Yoshisada’s strategy of simultaneous assault on all three passes forced the defenders to disperse their forces.
The most famous episode of the campaign is the crossing at Inamuragasaki. The Taiheiki records that Yoshisada threw a golden sword into the sea and the waves parted, creating a path for his army. Modern scholarship interprets this as a literary embellishment typical of military chronicles, while the underlying tactical fact — that forces used the tidal flats at low tide to bypass the Gokurakujizaka defenses — is considered historically probable based on tidal calculations.
Hojo Takatoki (1303-1333), the last regent, had been a figurehead since 1326, with real power held by his deputy Nagasaki Takasuke. As Yoshisada’s forces entered the city, Takatoki led his clan and retainers to Toshoji temple, the Hojo family’s ancestral temple, where he committed ritual suicide on the 22nd day of the fifth month. He was thirty-one years old. Hundreds of Hojo clansmen and retainers perished with him, and the temple burned. The shogunate that Minamoto no Yoritomo had established in 1185 was finished.
The sites of these events survive in present-day Kamakura. Inamuragasaki remains a coastal landmark. The ruins of Toshoji temple and the adjacent Harakiri Yagura cave tomb, where the Hojo dead were interred, can still be visited. Kuzuharaoka Shrine commemorates Hino Toshimoto, a loyalist executed by the shogunate in 1332. Together these sites form a circuit tracing the final days of Japan’s first warrior government.