Two hundred archers walked down the mountain and started shooting. That was the entire plan.

赤松則村 (Akamatsu Norimura) was not a great lord. He was a jito (地頭) — a local land steward — from Harima Province (播磨国, Harima no Kuni), the western stretch of Honshu that is now Hyogo Prefecture, west of modern Kobe. In the summer of 1332 he had raised his banner in support of 後醍醐天皇 (Go-Daigo Tennō) against the Hojo-controlled 鎌倉幕府 (Kamakura Bakufu). This was, on paper, an act of spectacular foolishness. The shogunate had governed Japan for 148 years. Its military apparatus had turned back the Mongol armadas of 1274 and 1281. It commanded armies that dwarfed anything a provincial steward could field.

But by early 1333, something had changed. At 千早城 (Chihaya-jō), the warrior monk 楠木正成 (Kusunoki Masashige) had been holding out for weeks against a vastly larger shogunate siege force using guerrilla tactics — booby traps, falling boulders, feigned retreats, night raids. The Bakufu's army sat beneath Chihaya's walls unable to take it, hemorrhaging men and prestige with every failed assault. The myth of Kamakura's invincibility had developed a hairline crack.

Norimura moved east with roughly 3,000 men. He built a fort at 摩耶 (Maya), a mountain overlooking the approach to Kyoto near what is now Kobe. When the shogunate dispatched an army of approximately 5,000 men to destroy him, he was ready.

His trap was topographic. The approach to his position passed through a section called the Seven Bends (七曲り, Nanamawari) — a tight switchback path flanked by bramble thickets on one side and flooded rice paddies on the other. An army moving through the Seven Bends could not spread out. It could not easily retreat. It moved in a column, bunched together, exposed from above.

Norimura sent 200 archers down the mountain. They exchanged fire with the shogunate vanguard — just enough to draw them forward — and then broke, running uphill as if in panic. The shogunate force pursued. All of them. The entire column of 5,000 men flooded into the Seven Bends, pressing upward, the men in the rear pushing against the men ahead.

The archers on the slopes above opened fire into the packed formation below. When the column stalled and compressed, 500 of Norimura's infantry charged downhill. Into 5,000 men who could not maneuver, could not spread, could not do anything but absorb the impact. The shogunate force broke and routed.

It was the first significant battlefield defeat the Kamakura shogunate had suffered in the entire suppression campaign. Norimura, with fewer men and no strategic resources except terrain and patience, had beaten the Bakufu's professional army through a textbook 伏兵 (fukuhei) — ambush — operation.

The ripple was immediate and enormous. Word spread that the shogunate could be beaten. Loyalist commanders across Japan grew bolder. 足利尊氏 (Ashikaga Takauji), one of the shogunate's own generals, had been sent west to suppress the revolt. After Maya, he switched sides. In June 1333, imperial loyalists destroyed the shogunate's western power base at the 六波羅の戦い (Rokuhara no Tatakai). Simultaneously, 新田義貞 (Nitta Yoshisada) marched an army into Kamakura itself. The Hojo regent and hundreds of clan members retreated to their family temple and committed mass suicide. One hundred and forty-eight years of Kamakura rule ended in a single month.

Norimura himself advanced on Kyoto after Maya and reportedly constructed a fort at the site that would later become 姫路城 (Himeji-jō) — the great white fortress now famous worldwide as Japan's finest surviving feudal stronghold. The castle built on ground first fortified by the man who brought down a shogunate with two hundred archers.

The irony of the Kamakura shogunate's fall is worth pausing on. It was not brought down by foreign invasion — the Mongols had tried twice and failed. It was not brought down by institutional collapse or famine. It was brought down by the warrior class it had created and empowered: samurai lords who had grown too strong, too independent, and too confident to keep tolerating Hojo domination. Norimura's ambush at Maya was the proof they needed that the Bakufu could bleed. Once they had that proof, the end came in weeks.