Sakura blossoms envelope the mountain-top village of Yoshino.
This is the season when Japanese and Japanophiles wax rhapsodic about the frail beauty of sakura, the cherry blossom that heralds the arrival of spring with its translucent pale petals. You might be surprised to learn that this delicate flower is the symbol of the samurai, for reasons that are satisfyingly twisted. The sakura has a fleeting moment of glory before it falls to the ground, a life cut short at the height of its beauty.
Many are the places that claim to offer the best sakura viewing in Japan, but at the top of the heap is Yoshino, a remote mountain village whose slopes are covered with cherry trees. While the sight is glorious, Yoshino-zakura owe their fame as much to the melancholy legends associated with the place. Read on…
Yoshino History: Loyalty to the Emperor—But Which One?
There are certain events in a nation's history that penetrate to the core of its contradictions, that are still the subject of political debate centuries later. The French argue to this day about the Revolution of 1789; for Japan, the attempt of a fourteenth-century emperor to reestablish direct imperial rule was a topic of heated dispute until recent times.
In the late thirteenth century, a quarrel over the imperial succession resulted in a compromise whereby the descendants of two brothers agreed to reign alternately (see Daikaku-ji, Western Kyoto: Arashiyama and Sagano). In 1318, Go-Daigo, of the junior line, became the seventh emperor to ascend the throne under this system—which, however, he came to repudiate. His wish to have his own descendants monopolize the throne was part of a larger plan to get rid of the hated Kamakura shogunate, which had arranged this compromise. By toppling Kamakura, Go-Daigo believed he could take power out of the hands of the warriors and restore it to the court. At the beginning of his reign, he took the name Go-Daigo, meaning Daigo II, after the Heian emperor Daigo (885–930) who had also been a strong proponent of direct imperial rule. Instead of achieving his objectives, however, Go-Daigo needlessly subjected Japan to sixty years of sporadic conflict.
Go-Daigo, although intelligent and strong-willed, seems to have been neither wise nor gallant. His opponent, ASHIKAGA TAKAUJI, a brilliant general and able administrator, seems quite the superior personality. Nevertheless, in the Taiheiki, an epic of this period, and in the writings of nationalist scholars of subsequent centuries, Go-Daigo came to be portrayed as a noble sovereign unjustly robbed of his imperial prerogatives. (Go-Daigo's 1334 Kemmu Restoration was seen by Meiji loyalists as the precedent for their own movement in 1868.) His followers, especially Kusunoki Masashige, were idealized as selfless heroes dedicating their lives to the imperial institution against impossible odds. Ivan Morris, in The Nobility of Failure, suggests that what made Kusunoki Masashige the ultimate Japanese hero was his sincere and utter devotion to a cause that was doomed from the start. During World War II, Go-Daigo and Kusunoki Masashige were held up as chief exemplars by Japan's militarists, who marched millions off to die for the sake of the emperor.
Go-Daigo began plotting against Kamakura soon after his accession, but it was not until 1331, when one of his trusted advisors betrayed his plans, that the shogunate felt the need to take direct action against the emperor's sacred person. Go-Daigo fled to a monastery south of Kyoto, on Mt. Kasagi. It was here, according to the Taiheiki, that he had the famous dream in which he was invited to sit under a tree, on a throne facing south. Go-Daigo interpreted this to mean that he would be able to restore imperial rule, and that his mainstay in this enterprise would be someone named Kusunoki (camphor tree), written with a Chinese character combining "south" and "tree." A well-known warrior—something of a bandit—named Kusunoki Masashige was summoned to Mt. Kasagi, where he immediately swore fealty to Go-Daigo.
Not long after, the renegade emperor, with his hair ignominiously unkempt and his clothes in shambles, was brought back to Kyoto, a captive of Kamakura forces. Before his capture, however, Go-Daigo had commissioned Masashige to save his cause. While the emperor was escorted into exile on the remote Oki Islands in 1332, Masashige and Go-Daigo's son, Prince Morinaga, continued to resist. The bandit-warrior and the prince showed such resourcefulness that the two Kamakura generals sent to subdue them, Ashikaga Takauji and Nitta Yoshisada, decided to defect to the imperial cause. In 1333, Nitta Yoshisada sacked Kamakura, forcing the Hōjō regent to retreat to a cave and commit suicide with hundreds of followers. Go-Daigo, in the meantime, had escaped from Oki. Joined by loyalist warriors on the Japan Sea coast, he triumphantly entered Kyoto, where he set about turning his dream into reality.
Go-Daigo's reign was a disaster. In his enthusiasm for an imperial revival and his blindness to political realities, he and his aristocratic coterie failed to give his warrior supporters their due. The fatal error was in the treatment of Takauji, who, as the emperor's most powerful general, wished to be invested with the title of Shogun. Go-Daigo, however, intended to reserve this office for a member of the aristocracy. In 1335, Takauji left the capital against Go-Daigo's orders, ostensibly to quell a small rebellion of Hōjō supporters in Kamakura. Nitta Yoshisada was sent to chastise him, but was beaten instead. Seeing his chance, Takauji returned to Kyoto with a large army. Go-Daigo was forced to flee once more, this time to Mt. Hiei, where his son, Prince Morinaga, was abbot of Enryaku-ji. Morinaga and Masashige mounted a counterattack three days later. Takauji withdrew to Kyūshū, where he raised more support. The following year, in 1336, Takauji and his army landed near Kōbe; at the Minato River crossing he engaged in a decisive battle with Kusunoki Masashige.
Masashige, knowing that his own small band could not win this battle, had proposed a strategic withdrawal into the hills, evacuating the capital, to give him time to regroup his forces and retake Kyoto later. Go-Daigo, however, was loath to quit his palace once again and refused to permit this. Unable to defy his lord, Masashige loyally marched into battle, knowing it would be his last. After fighting long and hard, he was forced to commit suicide at a nearby farmhouse. A song, "Aoba shigereru Sakurai no," popular with the Japanese army in World War II and subsequently banned by the Allied Occupation, recounts the parting of Masashige and his ten-year-old-son Masatsura:
Here is the precious sword
That his Majesty bestowed upon me many years ago. Now I am giving it to you.
In Memory of this, our last farewell.
Go Masatsura, back to our village.
Where your aging mother waits.
(trans. Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure)
The victorious Takauji set up a member of the senior line as emperor and from him received the long-coveted title of Shogun. Go-Daigo, after a brief period in captivity, escaped with the imperial regalia and what was left of his supporters and set up a rival "southern court" in the mountain fastness of Yoshino. He died in 1339, pining for Kyoto and clutching the sword of the regalia. The Namboku-chō (Northern and Southern Courts) period continued for another fifty years, through three successions. Kusunoki Masatsura, obedient to his father's last instructions, tried to retake Kyoto in 1347; but after some initial successes, he too was slain. At various times, the southern court controlled Kamakura, Kyūshū, and other parts of Japan, but the cause was doomed to failure. The last southern emperor was tricked into returning the imperial regalia to the northern line and spent the remainder of his life at a villa south of Kyoto.
The Kemmu Restoration was a fiasco, but as a symbolic event it had lasting repercussions. It shattered the polite myth of a divine, infallible emperor presiding over his family, the Japanese people. First, there was the distressing fact of two emperors, each with an incontrovertible claim. Worse, Go-Daigo was clearly not only fallible, but at times reprehensible—as when in 1335, at the height of his power, he allowed his loyal son, Prince Morinaga, to be executed by Takauji. But the greatest violence to the myth was in Go-Daigo's shabby treatment by Takauji, who not only went unpunished, but achieved the ultimate worldly success.
In the Meiji period, the southern party became national heroes. Shrines were dedicated to Go-Daigo and Masashige. In 1911, there was a national controversy over a school textbook that treated the Northern and Southern lines as equal. At the request of the government, the EMPEROR MEIJI, himself a descendant of the Northern line, issued a decree recognizing the Southern line as the truly legitimate one.
In the 1950s, a shopkeeper claiming descent from Go-Daigo asked the Japanese public if he shouldn't replace Hirohito, but on the whole, the debate quieted down with the end of World War II. Yoshino itself is one of the few lingering legacies. Yoshino Jingū, a State Shinto shrine at the foot of Mt. Yoshino, enshrines Go-Daigo. The southern court's palace is said to have stood behind the great temple hall, Zaō-dō. Go-Daigo's mausoleum is near Nyoirin-ji, where he prayed in his final, bitter years. Its wooden door bears a famous farewell poem by Kusunoki Masatsura, who scratched it there with the butt of his arrow on his way to battle. His topknot, recovered later, is entombed in a nearby mound. Masashige and Masatsura are considered exemplars of the ideal samurai, who unflinchingly accepts—if only to please his lord—a painful, even futile, death. Like the cherry blossom which, just as it attains its fullness of beauty, is scattered by the wind, the most glorious death was to fall in the prime of life. Every spring, Yoshino is enveloped in a cloud of blossoms from tens of thousands of mountain cherry trees, the most celebrated in Japan.
Read Gateway To Japan's section on Yoshino to learn about the region’s ancient links to the mysterious yamabushi warrior-monks, hallowed temples, where to stay, and when to visit to enjoy the famed blossoms.
