On June 30, 1333 — the 18th day of the 5th lunar month of Genko 3 — the imperial loyalist commander 新田義貞 (Nitta Yoshisada), age 32, marched his army to the outskirts of Kamakura and began the assault that would extinguish the Hojo dynasty. The city had been the seat of warrior government in Japan since 1185. Its geography was its greatest defense: ringed on three sides by steep forested ridges cut only by narrow mountain passes, and bounded on the south by the cold waters of Sagami Bay. The Hojo forces had already beaten back Nitta's men at the passes of Gokurakuji and Kewaizaka. Every conventional approach was barred.

What followed became one of the most celebrated moments in Japanese medieval legend. According to the Taiheiki (太平記), the great 14th-century military chronicle, Nitta Yoshisada waded into the sea at Inamuragasaki (稲村ヶ崎) Cape on Sagami Bay, drew his sword — a gold-mounted blade — and flung it into the waves as an offering to Ryujin (龍神), the sea dragon god, and to the eight dragon gods of the inner and outer seas. He prayed for passage. The sea receded. His army advanced along a strip of exposed shoreline and entered Kamakura from the south — the one direction the Hojo had left unguarded. Modern geological surveys suggest the cape's shoreline was genuinely passable at low tide in 1333, lending the miracle an earthly frame. A stone stele at the site still marks where the sword entered the waves.

For five days Kamakura burned. Nitta's forces attacked from multiple directions as the city's defenders fell back and fires spread through the wooden streets. The man at the center of the collapse was 北条高時 (Hojo Takatoki), 29 years old, the 14th and final shikken (regent) of the Kamakura shogunate. Takatoki had formally resigned his position in 1326 at the age of 22, citing illness, taking Buddhist vows and the tonsure of a monk. He had governed informally through puppet successors while accounts in the Taiheiki painted him as a neglectful ruler consumed by dog-fighting spectacles — the inuoumono (犬追物) — allegedly keeping hundreds of fighting dogs and watching mass bouts from a pavilion while affairs of state deteriorated. Whether a fair portrait or literary invention designed to justify his fall, the image stuck: the last regent of Kamakura, tonsured and robed, watching dogs fight while an emperor plotted his ruin.

That emperor was 後醍醐天皇 (Emperor Go-Daigo), who had spent years trying to break free of shogunal control. When the shogunate crushed his first uprising in 1331 and exiled him to the remote Oki Islands, it seemed to have secured its survival. But Go-Daigo escaped in 1333 and rallied forces across western Japan. Two critical defections followed. 足利尊氏 (Ashikaga Takauji), dispatched by the shogunate to reinforce its Kyoto outpost, instead turned against it and destroyed the Rokuhara Tandai (六波羅探題) on May 7, 1333. Then Nitta Yoshisada — himself a former Kamakura retainer who had fought against Go-Daigo in 1331 — raised his banner and marched south. Within days he stood at Kamakura's gates.

With his armies broken and the city burning, Takatoki led the Hojo clan — blood relatives, retainers, wives, and children — to 東勝寺 (Toshoji), the ancestral temple of the Hojo family, founded in 1237 by Hojo Yasutoki (北条泰時), where every regent since had been interred. The temple's name means "Temple of Eastern Victory." The Hojo had chosen a name celebrating dominance. It would become their funeral pyre.

There, on July 4, 1333 — the 22nd day of the 5th lunar month — Takatoki and his followers committed mass 切腹 (seppuku). The Taiheiki describes the scene with terrible precision: the great hall was set alight; flames leapt to the roof beams; warriors in the courtyard cut their bellies and ran into the fire; others struck one another with swords and fell in heaps — "fathers, sons and brothers." The chronicle records 283 members of the Hojo clan who died, naming them family by family, branch by branch. With retainers and followers, the total at Toshoji exceeded 870. The Taiheiki adds that more than 6,000 people across Kamakura took their own lives in solidarity or despair — a figure likely magnified by the chronicle's literary ambitions, but suggestive of the catastrophe's scale.

Takatoki himself died not as a warrior in lacquered armor but as a monk: tonsured, robed, 29 years old, watching the temple his family had built to celebrate their power burn with them inside. The Kamakura shogunate — founded by Minamoto no Yoritomo (源頼朝) in 1185, governed by Hojo regents since 1203 — ceased to exist after 148 years. At the site of Toshoji today, in the Kasaigayatsu valley of Kamakura's Omachi district, the temple was never rebuilt. Excavations uncovered roof tiles bearing the Hojo family crest. Carved into the cliff face nearby is the Harakiri Yagura (腹切りやぐら) — a cave tomb where remains were later gathered. A five-tiered stone pagoda, a gorinto (五輪塔), stands inside it in silence. Access is now restricted as a sacred site.