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 Post subject: The Lion Clan
PostPosted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 10:46 am 
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The Lion were the big winners of Yugozohime's Restoration. They were given full legitimacy to dismantle the Gozoku regime by any means necessary, which meant freedom to intervene militarily in other Clans' territories and displace the members of the Triumvirate in Imperial institutions. Technically the Dragon were their partners in this, but their role was sidelined soon after with minor dissent, and it were the Lion who filled the ranks of the Emerald Office, the Imperial Legions, the Imperial Guard... Especially after Doji Usan stepped down as the Emerald Champion to be married to the Empress and Matsu Mochihime took his place the Lion power was unchecked and unchallenged. And that led many Lion to be bloated with self-entitlement, arrogance and a sense of impunity for whatever actions they would take. That engendered wanton onslaught, liberal land and resource grab and other forms of military adventurism. After the first post-Gozoku Imperial Winter Court, in Kyuden Ikoma, the Lion leadership concluded that they also had largely free reign in shaping Imperial politics and Imperial memory, the very account of truth, moral and factual. For many other Clans, the dark age of Lion hegemony began.

While the Crane under Doji Kakumei mounted costly resistance and bloodied themselves all across the Osari Plains trying to curb Lion expansionism, the Phoenix and the Scorpion gave up on military opposition, for a time becoming occupied territories. To the point of Lion problems becoming everyone's problems. When they sneezed, many other caught a cold, though there were those like Mirumoto Turan who had their way in instrumentalising Lion overabundance of disposable power. Rikugunshokan Akodo Godaigo's rampage across the Phoenix lands, the unpunished destruction of the City of Remembrance and the wilful erection of the Castle of the Faithful Bride in the middle of Isawa Woodlands demonstrated the extent of discretionality many a Lion thought they ought to enjoy wherever they go. The most atrocious part of those events was of course Kitsu Uragiri's prolific use of dark magicks that angered Yugozohime and made her rethink the leeway she had been giving the Clan that had raised and supported her against her sibling. But much was in flux because of the arrival of the gaijin, and before the Kitsu would be punished for their fugitive daimyo's blasphemies the White Stag happened. It let Akodo Kurojin, Matsu Mochihime and Ikoma Genmuro become the great heroes of the Empire, going down into Imperial Histories as saviors of the Empress. Between that reality and difficulty in assembling a successful punitive action against the Lion, Yugozohime reconsidered and allowed the new champion Matsu Zaruko to sort it out as an internal issue, though the risk of overreliance on the Right Hand had already been impressed upon her. In the aftermath of the White Stag she allowed Otomo Hokusai to embark on a great act of rebalancing in Imperial politics that would reduce the preponderance of the Lion Clan. The Left Hand under pragmatic Kakumei, a hero of the war with foreign invaders in his own right, was ready to deliver, setting the track for renewed Lion-Crane antagonism for decades to come.

When Kurojin died on the shores of the Golden Sun Bay his son Toru was but an infant, so Matsu Zaruko claimed power over the Lion without much opposition. There is a reason why the White Lioness is sometimes better remembered as a Champion than Matsu Itagi who had preceded her as the first Lion Champion from among the Matsu. She had a rare quality, she matched fierce charisma with cool forethought and strategic mind. Living in two worlds at once took a toll on her health, her hair turned white ahead of their time and she died prematurely on some terminal disease, but her rule was a predominantly good one for the Lion. Amid mounting opposition, she reasserted core Lion interests while introducing domestic reforms, cutting on military overstretch and refining the language of Lion presence in court. But the very first issue she had to deal with was the shame of the Lion related to the corruption within the Kitsu. There was a quiet purge the extent of which was not reported to the outside, but the end of it was that most of the Kitsu shugenja and sodan-senzo were confined to their key premises where they could be monitored, the Ise were empowered as guardians of the purity of the family while the spiritual guidance for the Lion in no small part shifted toward the shinpu of Bishamon Seido and the respective order as he enjoyed special rapport with Lion leadership reaching back to their common fight against the Gozoku. The next Kitsu daimyo appointed by Zaruko, Shingen, was not a shugenja and was specifically charged to sustain the intricate system of 'house arrest' for the Kitsu. Shingen lived up to the task. Ironically, when decades later the Veiled Emperor's edicts threw most other shugenja families into disarray, the Kitsu were well-prepared to adjust to the new laws.

The other big issue Zaruko dealt with was Lion warlordism. While the war with the Crab at the turn of 430s and 440s was relatively short, decisive, conducted on a foreign territory (Scorpion lands) and its outcome put to rest any notion to argue that the Crab are mightier than the Lion that had lingered since Itagi's unfortunate trip into the Shadowlands, there was no way around it that it had been provoked by witless politics of a provincial lord and rapidly escalated to involve several top Lion military commanders who then spilled it over half of Rokugan without even waiting to hear what their Champion had to say about this. And however sweet that victory was, it put the Lion at a strategic disadvantage with the following rapid consolidation of the Crab-Scorpion alliance, later joined by the Mantis and the Sparrow, effectively converting almost all the land south of Seikitsu into a territory hostile to any kind of Lion presence. But a lot more glaring consequence of adventurism of generals was Akodo Tsetsu's escapade into the Osari Plains in the final weeks before the White Stag which ended in a military disaster as the Crane likely used poluvora to devastate the invading force. So when Matsu Koritome chose to violently involve his troops in a planned meeting between Lord Muhaki of the Tortoise and a group of Thranish stranded in Rokugan it could be read with two scripts.

In official Ikoma histories the heroic narrative won: Koritome saved the Empress' uncle dying bravely, and Zaruko rewarded his remaining family and followers in the art of kyujutsu with a vassal family status. In this version Koritome was not just another power-hungry, self-righteous aspirant warlord. However, there are other versions in circulation, or at least lingering questions. It occurred near Shiro no Yojin, weren't the Crane involved? Why Lord Muhaki was rather tacit about what had transpired? Were all the gaijin involved dispatched? And, probably most important, was it really an ambush, and were it really the Thranish who shot first? Regardless of what had really occurred, Zaruko made it the last case during her rule of her vassals provoking wars on their own account. There was a sweeping reorganisation and centralisation of the Lion armies, most remote garrisons in the Scorpion lands and a few in the Phoenix lands were vacated, Zaruko 'had talks' with many key commanders and rotated quite a few of them. When the Lion again went to war with the Crane in 445 over the Osari Plains even the 'unorthodox' Daidoji tactics could not stop their advance until they lay siege to Kosaten Shiro, relieved before winter on the request of the Empress, with the qualified victory going to the Lion to erase Akodo Tsetsu's defeat. The Koritome marksmen proved crucial in that campaign in countering Daidoji tactics as they also would in wars to come. However, the motion launched by the Ikoma in relation to the victory at the following winter court to ban poluvora by Imperial law met with stiff resistance from many sides and failed.

This was a minor setback compared to the larger gains in political sphere the Lion secured when the Crane and the Scorpion were still weakened. The Ikoma claimed control over the Imperial Census in the Ministry of Service, therefore controlling both the process of heimin headcount, often attaching themselves to Miya Heralds and saibankans with Emerald Office, and determining the size of the taxed population within a given domain, and by consequence the size of Imperial Taxes. While the Imperial Families, with the support of the Crane and practically everybody else, have usually managed to soften the blow, the Lion have learnt to leverage various concessions with the accuracy and meticulousness of the count. The accounts differed sharply year to year because the easiest way to punish anyone was to count women, children or elderly as workforce or not. This reflected a wider doctrine of the special Lion responsibility in protecting Imperial interests in the whole Empire, along with the right to intervene militarily in any mismanaged territories and to occupy them. The established precedence of that was of course the custody of Ki-Rin lands extended to the Lion by the Shining Prince, but it was in the late 430s when Ikoma diplomats drove their point home over a more universalistic approach to the issue to be derived from Genji's Edicts. That the Lion presence, like in the Phoenix lands, was the very cause of many woes and burdens for the local governance was beyond question. In this sense the Scorpion may have lucked out when Zaruko ultimately found some agreement with Bayushi Junzen, deeming occupation of the southern neighbour too costly. The Phoenix had no such luck, the Lion were about to stay. In 460, under the new rule of Akodo Toru, the fortress built by Akodo Godaigo to honor the memory of Matsu Hitomi, the Castle of Faithful Bride, was finished, solidifying Lion control of the northeast. Every winter the Lion diplomats haven't been losing occasion to remind every other Clan that their autonomy is conditional; if they do poorly in their stewardship of the Emperor's lands, they will likely see the Right Hand coming to lift that responsibility from their incapable hands.

When in 458 Akodo Toru ascended to the Lion Championship, the Clan had no friends or allies, just those who resigned themselves to live in the shadow of the mighty Lion, those who hedged against them, or challenged their position to various extents and with varied transparency. In the last category, the Crane often stood alone, paying the price in blood and koku, honing their ways of asymmetric warfare through political wrangling, legal challenges and duels, acting through Imperial institutions and imposing economic strangleholds. The Lion would add obnoxious underhanded guerilla warfare to the list, something the Crane would vehemently deny despite many happenstances of gaijin pepper being used on the battlefields along their common border. The Dragon were protective of their autonomy and used the advantage of terrain to secure it, but usually sought no redress if the Lion rampaged in their lowlands. The Phoenix largely capitulated though the Isawa didn't cease in their magical pursuits to find a way to turn the table on the occupant. The Scorpion were often conceding before an invasion would happen, only to restore whatever they've given up a few years later, by other means. The Minor Clans who couldn't hide behind the backs of the great ones, like the Badger or the Boar or even the Tortoise, usually sought some constructive accommodation of Lion interests to get away from their scrutinising glare. The Crab were happy to keep their distance, though they sometimes rotated a part of its military to reinforce their Scorpion allies. Ultimately, the only power to significantly constrain the Lion was the Imperial Authority. And it just did.

Retsuhime was a whimsical, decisive and hands-on Empress, and she quickly grew to abhor all the presumptions the Lion were making in how HER Empire should be governed. Her sentiment for the Lion's role in dismantling the Gozoku was tenuous at best when compared to her mother's, and lasted just a few years since her ascension onto the Emerald Throne. When marrying her sisters out she forewent the eligible Lion kuge in favour of Gusai Mori. Her own Lion consort soon fell into disfavour and was cut off from both her bedchamber and her council, ultimately siring no heir, and she was more often seen with men like Shiba Murayasu. Many of her early edicts were indirectly adversely affecting the Lion position in Imperial politics. Her encouragement of progress, support for expansion of trade and manufacturing allowed many Clans to restructure their income in ways that did not fit into traditional Lion patterns of counting productivity with crop yields they were basing their censuses on. Otomo Hokusai was tasked with driving the recruitment into Imperial offices away from Lion hopefuls. The bulk of the Lion samurai were kept unaware of the scale of estrangement that occurred between Retsuhime and Toru, but within the politically formative years for both the Empress and the Lion Champion, in late 450s and early 460s, he did not attend the Imperial Winter Court, and none of them happened in Lion lands.

But then, the two decades of wars with the Yobanjin came, and the Empress was eventually forced to rely on the sole true military force at her disposal. While the first, lighter invasions in 462 were largely repelled by the northern Clans, most notably the Badger and the Dragon, the massive one in 472 left the Throne with no options but to begrudgingly call upon the Right Hand. Toru had his moment of schadenfreude-doused satisfaction when he wrested the title of Shogun for himself as he unleashed a successful campaign in the northeast, having the Faithful Bride as the centre of operations. While the intervention could be called successful within a year or so, he held onto the title as long as he could as it legitimised his ways over those of the rest of the Empire. For other Clans those were the years of relative reprieve as in his capacity of Shogun Toru did not wage wars on his neighbours, trying to hold high moral ground. The decade of struggle between the years 473-483 was not primarily a military one thus, but a battle between the Lion and the Crane over the control of the core of the Imperial system. Toru found a worthy opponent in Doji Shioden, the younger brother of the Crane Champion Doji Kogyoku who had claimed the Emerald Championship in 471. The loyalty of the Imperial Legions was split during that time, and ultimately the Lion paid the price of having few political allies. Determined to succeed in depriving Toru of any title to commandeer the troops of the Emerald Office, Shioden fell back onto the old patterns, primarily trading favours with the Phoenix and the Scorpion. One by one, the Legion commanders either acknowledged that since the war was effectively over they should revert their loyalty to the Emerald Champion or were replaced by any means necessary, shi duels included, to the point of a stalemate. In the end the tide was turned in 481 when the Legions controlled by Dragon commanders returned to the Emerald fold on the decision of the young daimyo Mirumoto Chorude. The Matsu daimyo Dainoku, who doubled as top rikugunshokan under the Shogun, declared a feud against the Mirumoto for what he claimed to be a vile betrayal. Isolated and defeated in the game he didn't know how to play well, Toru surrendered the position that was indeed supposed to be temporary and retrenched, returning many of the Lion troops home. He bided his time, though he allowed Dainoku to seek redress in several brief summer campaigns in Dragon lowlands and the Ikoma were crying foul about the impending rebirth of Gozoku.

When the Veiled Emperor ascended to the Emerald Throne, the hopes among the Lion were not high. The resentment against the current state of the Empire took root, and many a Lion bemoaned the creeping degradation of Bushido and other traditional values. During the Yobanjin campaigns opium became a problem among the troops, and the leadership enacted severe measures to crack down on the spreading addictions, the campaigns against the Scorpion south of Beiden included. Lion politics of dissent were mostly frantic, however, and even their military actions were slowly losing impact. The empire was indeed changing, its economic axis had been shifting toward the sea, and destroying farmlands didn't have as much of an effect on the economies of neighbours as it had used to. After half a century of Lion military hegemony most other Clans learned how to live with it, and how to circumvent it. Increasingly alienated from the rest of the Empire, Toru, who had his best days behind him, chose to turn inward to preserve the Lion way of life and to way out the ludicrity of so-called Progress. At the same time, he turned more spiritual in his later years Somewhat oddly for a Lion Champion started to invite more Fortunist monks as his advisers, bringing his son Ikuo up in respect for them, the Brotherhood being the only other bulwark against what he saw as creeping influence of the new Gozoku. He found the abbot of the Order of Osano-Wo as his ally in his campaign against the spread of opium, and the ikko-ikki activity the abbot masterminded in 488 provided a significant distortion for the Scorpion cartel and Scorpion trade along the River of Gold in general. Both Toru and Ikuo became enamoured with the sohei ways within the Brotherhood, and developed techniques that moulded the way of the sword and the way of the open hand into one fighting system.

The Lion external effort focused on holding its outposts in the Phoenix lands to keep the struggling Clan hostage, especially with the rise of a strong Elemental Council under Isawa Takao who was giving many Phoenix hope for the long-awaited rejuvenation. They realised that Takao kept mastering the Elemental Fire to unleash it against the Lion. So when he spectacularly failed and the Hantei IX moved against shugenja in the wake of Takao's debacle, it breathed new life in Lion aspirations to move themselves back into the forefront of Imperial politics. The Lion found it very easy to adjust to the Imperial Edict on Education as this was basically how they had been treating the Kitsu, and they looked with delight as the Phoenix Clan was falling apart because of it. The Emperor's close ties with the monastic clergy was perceived as a good platform, even if choosing deeply Shinseist Sozan rather than one of the venerable Fortunist abbots as the Imperial Advisor was not to everyone's tastes among the Lion.

But it got even better from the Lion perspective when the Throne moved against the Scorpion and the Crane to cripple any lingering dreams of a next triumvirate. The Veiled Emperor may have been a mixed blessing with his endorsement of progress, but the Lion saw hope in his sons. When Matsu Dainoku learned that Togashi Moho was accepted as a friend and tutor for young Hohiro, he immediately sent his own son Arashige to the capital to counter the Dragon influence over the heir. The Lion were soon pleased to learn that Hohiro was sceptical about unbridled adoption of gaijin ways and together with Arashige he often spoke about Bushido and tradition, the narrative his sensei in the Kakita Academy didn't counter. Jama remained ignored because of his progressive leanings up until the Foxpox outbreak in 498 that rendered the heir apparent bedridden for a time troubling enough for Arashige to try to get closer to the second son. When Arashige died in mysterious circumstances Dainoku had no doubts about Dragon complicity in murdering his beloved son and swore personal vengeance against their conspiracy.

Arashige's death deeply complicated the Lion position on the heirs. While Toru still bet on Hohiro as the traditional choice and a one that promised moral restoration, a vocal minority, headed by the Ikoma daimyo Meiran was paying more attention to his deep, unbalanced ties with the Crane and the Dragon; a charge, in all honesty, that could be raised against Jama as well. Kitsu Fusenko, the new daimyo appointed by Toru in 498, an orphan brought up in Bishamon Seido and yet first in half a century to actually be a shugenja, wasn't a strong voice among the Lion daimyo due to young age and lingering distrust, but her quiet sympathies were closer to Jama, perhaps because of his greater tolerance of priests by his side. She was the only one to actually clear the attendance of her buke for the Summer Retreat in Dragon's Guard of 499 though she was rebuked by Toru for it afterwards, with Meiran cushioning the Champion's displeasure. As there seemed to be no clear way forward, introverted stance was slowly winning over again, and as Jama embarked on a bold agenda that restored the Imperial Explorers, their kneejerk reaction of the Lion mainstream was to see a Crane-inspired ploy in it, an ill-conceived progressive pipe dream, and wait for the initiative to fail. The signs of a growing spat between Jama and Doji Tanaka weren't easily coming through.



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