The emperor was in flight, the palace besieged. It was Year 1 of the Genko Era, 1331 by today’s calendar. The royal panic was ignominious, if heroism is the ideal. In the palace — “the world above the clouds” — it was not. Poetry was. Poetry was divine, heroism merely human. Cowardice was no disgrace, fear no shame. Sad, yes — but sadness inspires poetry. “When, sunk in despair / I scud before the autumn wind / I see colored leaves / red and yellow on a hill / I had never thought to visit.” This was the poem of the emperor in flight.

Last month we introduced Emperor Go-Daigo (1288-1339) and his bold but doomed revolt against the bakufu, the military government ruling in remote Kamakura while he reigned powerless in Kyoto, a sort of divine poet-in-chief. We must now seek a deeper acquaintance with that tragic figure, so discontented with his imperial lot, so determined to change it, so helplessly overwhelmed by real life in the real world below the clouds, so unexpectedly victorious for a time, so abruptly undone in the end by the very unbowed arrogance that had sustained him through it all. Dying in disgrace, would he have been cheered to know what a heroic figure history would make of him, in a very distant future, an age much closer to our own than to his, of fanatic patriotism, rabid nationalism and triumphant militarism? And what a villain it would make of his ultimate undoer, whose military and political genius shaped Japan’s history for 500 years beyond his lifetime?

Go-Daigo came to the throne in 1318, a man whose immediate predecessors had all been children, a born ruler, as he thought, succeeding born puppets the bakufu could manipulate at will. He would break the mold. Just give him time. He would restore to Japan its divinity. Was he not a god himself? Were gods puppets? Were they not rather Japan’s rightful rulers? They had been once and would be again — in his person and in those of his descendants.