trolled by members of the Taira faction. Although personally commanding the only strong military force in all Japan, Yoritomo was content to permit the continuation of the fiction that an emperor and his civil government ruled the land and that he himself was merely the commander of the emperor’s army. Yoritomo and his band, however, constituted the only effective central government Japan possessed, and Kamakura became the true political capital of the land. Thus Japan’s first military dictatorship was established.
The administration which Yoritomo and his successors set up at Kamakura was not in theory or in outward form a national government. It was merely a simple but efficient organization designed to control the relatively small band of knights that owed personal allegiance to the Minamoto. It was, in fact, nothing more than a “family” government, not of a single clan as had been customary in ancient times, but of a loose association of knights held together by bonds of family relationship or by long-standing ties of friendship and traditions of mutual support.
Under the Shogun, three small offices were created as the chief organs of this “family” government—an office to watch over and control the affairs of the individual knight members of the clique, an administrative board, and a final court of appeal, making legal decisions based upon the customary law which had gradually developed among the provincial warrior aristocrats during the preceding two centuries and which the Kamakura administration issued in codified form. The provincial organization of this government was even simpler than its central administration. It consisted only