of the individual knights themselves, free to manage their individual estates as each saw best, but organized for mutual defense under a constable in each province.
The whole “family” government of the Minamoto may have been designed simply to control the private affairs of the clique and not to administer the nation as a whole, but by controlling the members of this group, who had now been spread throughout the whole land as the key class of estate managers and local knights, the government at Kamakura effectively controlled all classes of society throughout Japan. Its member knights ruled the peasants, who were serfs on their estates, and they also controlled the purse strings of the court aristocracy, which derived its income from these same estates. Although it maintained the fiction of being a private organization, the Kamakura regime had become the most effective central government Japan had yet known; and the people of all classes, realizing that Kamakura alone had the power to enforce its decisions, went there rather than to Kyoto for justice and looked to the Shogun’s administration rather than to the emperor’s court for leadership.
An ambitious retired emperor in 1221 dared challenge this indirect and unannounced control of national life by Kamakura, but found himself overwhelmed by the Minamoto cohorts. The incident revealed conclusively that imperial rule was at an end. The imperial family and the noble families around it continued to receive their income from the estates they nominally owned, but as far as political realities were concerned, the emperor and his court had become anachronistic survivals of an earlier age, with no valid place in the