Japan is riven by war.
The Emperor, previously an all-powerful godhead venerated as the Son of Heaven, has been reduced to a ceremonial irrelevance. The young Emperor, Go-Nara, lives in genteel poverty, rarely venturing beyond the high walls of the Imperial precincts. He is nominal ruler of Japan but spends his days composing poems while his ornate Kyoto palace succumbs to neglect and dereliction. It is a place of cobwebs and shadow. The gardens are overgrown. The paper screens are mottled with mildew. The ceilings drip rain. Courtiers are forced to sell palace furniture and porcelain to buy food.
Within the Imperial compound Go-Nara is treated as a deity. Servants prostrate themselves in his presence and are forbidden to meet his gaze. He issues orders to his ministers regarding the governance of the realm, unaware that these edicts go nowhere. Each decree is solemnly transcribed then filed in a vast library where countless scrolls crumble to dust.
Supreme military power should lie with the Shōgun, commander of Japan’s warrior caste. Shōgun Ashikaga Yoshiharu and his counsellors are based in a fortified compound a few streets away from the Imperial palace. Each morning Yoshiharu wakes in his spartan, unadorned chamber, kneels before a chart and contemplates the nation’s disparate provinces while a maid combs and ties his hair. To his great shame, Yoshiharu has failed to win the loyalty of regional warlords. The country has fractured and innumerable clan wars have broken out in rural provinces far from the capital as local Daimyō battle for territory. He plans to negotiate a series of strategic alliances and reassert control of the nation’s rival clans. It will be his life’s work. Until then, despite his martial training, despite his fierce ambition, the Shōgun remains as impotent as the Emperor himself.
Meanwhile, in the cities and provinces beyond Kyoto, the old aristocratic order has been overthrown. Ambitious generals depose regional nobility and seize control of their lands, a phenomenon known as Gekokujō: ‘low conquers high’. These new lords make their own treaties, set their own laws. Many soldiers have lost their master. Some become bandits. Some become monks. Some walk from town to town looking for a new sponsor willing to utilize their lethal skills. There will be no peace until an ascendant warlord subjugates his rivals and unifies the nation under his rule. Until then, anarchy reigns.
It is a time of high culture, rigid honour codes and bloody civil strife.
It is the age of the samurai.