thumb|The home of a gokenin
A was initially a vassal of the shogunate of the Kamakura and the Muromachi periods. In exchange for protection and the right to become jitō (manor's lord), a gokenin had in times of peace the duty to protect the imperial court and Kamakura, the administrative capital of Japan at the time. In times of war, he had to fight with his forces under the shōgun’s flag. Under the ritsuryō legal system in use in Japan from the seventh to the tenth century, a kenin ("house person") was a human being who, while legally property of a family, could be inherited but not sold and, unlike a slave, had some rights.
From the beginning of the Japanese Middle Ages, the relationship between lords and vassals tended, even in the absence of real blood ties, to be seen as an ancestral bond where each side inherited the rights and duties of the previous generation. Both sides thought of and spoke of their relationship in terms suggesting kinship, hence the use of the term gokenin, the prefix "go-" denoting prestige having been added after the Heian period. Until recently it was assumed Kamakura shōgun Minamoto no Yoritomo coined the word and the role when he started his campaign to gain power in 1180. The Azuma Kagami, diary of the shogunate, uses the term from its very first entries. The first reliable documentary evidence of a formal gokenin status and of actual vassal registers however dates to the early 1190s, and it seems therefore that the vassalage concept remained vague for at least the first decade of the shogunate's life.
History
Fall of Kamakura
Gokenin vassals were descendants of former shōen owners, former peasants or former samurai who had made a name for themselves in Minamoto no Yoritomo's army during his military campaigns against the Taira clan and were rewarded after victory. The Kamakura government retained the power to appoint and dismiss, but otherwise left gokenin shugo and jitō alone and free to use tax income as they saw fit. Unlike a hatamoto, a gokenin was not of status – in other words, he had no right to an audience with the shōgun. Some of their descendants were promoted to hatamoto and held important positions in the shogunate.
References
- Iwanami Japanese dictionary, 5th Edition (2000), CD version