The Hojo family transformed the Japanese government and power structure in profound ways that lasted for a very long time. They did this by achieving the right balance of transactional and transformational leadership strategies.
Back when I was a graduate student, I used Kuhnert and Lewis’s transformational / transactional leadership model together with French and Raven’s five bases of social power (rewards, coercion, expertise, legitimacy and referent – the power of “like”) in my research exploring how the Hojo family wrested political power from the courtiers in Kyoto to establish themselves as the de facto heads of the Japanese government in the 13th century – in the process launching centuries of warrior dominance.
Though they (obviously) didn’t consciously use a 20th century leadership model to guide their actions, the Hojo learned to use different leadership strategies in different situations in relation to different stakeholder groups to gain and maintain a grip on the state. They used the material rewards and punishments that characterize lower order transactional leadership; it was a brutal era and coercion often meant eliminating (i.e. killing) rivals. They also asserted their power over the imperial court when it raised an army to put the Hojo back in their place in the political hierarchy. Like other leaders of the period, the Hojo rewarded their followers with fiefdoms and titles.
They also built the kinds of strong inter-personal ties within the family (cemented through inter-marriage of children and distribution of titles) as well as with key warrior and courtier families that characterize higher order transactional leadership. Their initial rise and ongoing dominance were built on strong mutual relationships with their warrior peers and the courtier officials who educated them in the forms and rituals of state.
What was most interesting to me, though, was how they managed to transform themselves into an early version of warrior statesmen. They bolstered their legitimacy by creating consultative bodies that (at least appeared to) keep other members of the warrior class involved in decision-making. They issued legal proclamations (such as 御成敗式目 / Gosiebai shikimoku) to guide the resolution of conflict over land rights and other issues, and they established courts that the common people, merchants and warriors could use to settle grievances without resorting to violence.
They began building a vision of warrior leadership ethics based on a combination of the arts of the pen（文）and the arts of the sword（武）which later came to be known as bunbu ryodo (文武両道), and they integrated Buddhist and Confucian ethics into their thinking on political leadership, creating a sense that they had expertise on how to promulgate 善政 (good/moral government). These actions all bolstered their legitimate, expert and referent power bases as heads of state.
Over the course of about 50 years, they used these strategies to arrogate a great deal of power and wealth from families and institutions that had formerly had higher status than themselves. At least in the early years of their rule, they redistributed their gains in ways that enhanced both their transactional (rewards and punishments) and transformational (expertise, legitimacy and referent/attractiveness) power bases.
As time went on and their status rose, they came to seem much more legitimate, and they cemented this legitimacy by leaving behind documents that were referred to for centuries by warrior and merchant leaders as templates for legitimate, stable rule. Their followers wrote the histories that explained how they had come to power and why the Kamakura shogunate was legitimate in comparison to what had come before it.
Much of their legitimacy came from the perception that they had put in place institutions that restored stability, order and civility after an extended period of conflict and competition among warrior families and their courtier sponsors. The subject of my research Hojo Shigetoki himself demonstrated his commitment to the virtue of charity by requesting that his home be converted into a hospital for the poor after he passed away. The two behavioral guides ( kakun / 家訓) he left to his descendents – “The Letter to Nagatoki” （六波羅殿御家訓) and The Gokuraji Letter（極楽寺殿御消息）were held up as early guides on the manners and ethics of a warrior statesman.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the dominance of the Hojo began to wane for various reasons – some within their control and some not. The main line of the family had concentrated most decision-making power in the hands of the Tokuso (徳宗 / head of the family council). Those who took the Emperor, Shogun, and Shikken roles had all come to be recognized to be puppets in a play orchestrated behind the scenes by an increasingly cloistered group of Hojo leaders.
As these official roles came to be seen as functioning primarily to provide a facade of legitimacy for decisions made by a small group of Hojo insiders, the Hojo lost the trust of their important stakeholders in both the courtier and warrior communities (世間 / seken). As their monopoly on the organs of the state became more brazen, this unsurprisingly engendered resentment and plotting on the part of those who aspired to take more power for themselves.
Toward the end of the thirteenth century, while Hojo Tokumune managed to pull together a group of warriors that successfully repelled the Mongol invasion, this war was different from previous conflicts. Since it was a war of defense rather than conquest, there were no new estates or riches to be distributed to loyal followers. Tokimune was not able to reward his followers with much except praise and titles. This inability to recognize and reward their followers for their contributions eroded both his (and the Hojo family’s) reward, legitimate and referent power bases.
Seeing an opening, members of the Court and a number of powerful warrior families formed new alliances. Their efforts to bring the center of power back to Kyoto ushered in a new period of open conflict during what is known as the Nanbokucho (南北朝時代 / the period of the Northern and Southern Courts) in which rival claimants supported by powerful families asserted that they had legitimate claims to imperial authority.
As their legitimate, reward and coercive power bases declined, the Hojo also lost their reputation for good government. They faded into the history books about 130 years after their sudden emergence, but the political and social transformation they had initiated continued. The warriors continued their long transition from belligerent killers to poet bureaucrats. As new warrior legal institutions emerged, their framers looked to the Hojo institutions for precedents. The letters written by Hojo Shigetoki (the subject of my research) were used to educate warriors and merchants in what it looked like to be a leader.
The Hojo themselves, however, did not survive. As their power bases weakened they disappeared from the corridors of power so completely that it eventually became difficult to figure out who were their legitimate descendants or if they even had any.
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing out in my mind how the current administration in the USA has been getting people inside and outside the USA to fall in line. They’ve used a fascinating mix of the three levels of leadership. While this is a different era with a different set of features, problems, and opportunities, the same models are still useful in categorizing the leadership strategies of the current administration.
The two tiers of transactional leadership loom large in this administration’s leadership strategies.
We’ve seen plenty of threats of punishment for resistance. And the administration has taken rapid action to show that they can indeed deliver on their messages of coercion. We have also seen proactive re-distribution of rewards to those who show loyalty. Moreover, we have seen evidence of selective relationship building.
Moreover, as frustrating as it may be for those who do not support this administration, it is based on a transformational vision statement that appeals quite strongly to part of the population. That vision statement may repel or even draws jeers from many of their peers (myself included), but it resonates for a significant subset of Americans who are not convinced that they have benefitted from the “progress” of the last few decades. This vision statement resonates for those who feel that the USA has lost its mojo and perhaps even lost its sense of purpose.
While they have managed to communicate a vision of how they want to transform the USA and its relationship with the rest of the world, I am not confident that this administration will succeed in driving anything like a lasting transformation. Like the emperor GoDaigo who followed the Hojo, the legitimacy of this administration’s vision is based on a tenuous foundation of fantasies that remind us of a Golden Age that never actually existed. It will be difficult to re-create something than never really existed to begin with.
As the administration pursues its transformational agenda, problems seem likely to arise in the maintenance of their expert, legitimate and referent power bases. Much of what has been done so far looks pretty ham-fisted, and it could end up being more show than substance. Moreover, I’m not at all sure that this is the kind of transformation that the majority of Americans really want. Initial reactions indicate that an increasing number of American citizens already feel they have fallen for some sort of bait and switch.
I suspect that the expert and legitimate power bases will decide the fate of this administration. It’s quite possible that at some point a large percentage of Americans will wonder if the expertise that the current administration brings is the right expertise for the problems we currently face.
In the legitimate power category, the overreach has been quite remarkable, and that may end up hurting the legitimacy of the administration. How many official and unspoken rules can you break before most people start to think you’ve broken one too many and decide they don’t want to follow you anymore?
As the administration’s expert and legitimate power bases erode, this will tend to also reduce their referent power. As the real results of their policies become more obvious, many people will find them and the vision they are promoting less aspirational. Some may even come to find it worthy of scorn and opprobrium.
I’ll be curious to see how the transactional and transformational strategies of this administration shake out. Viewed from afar from the perspective of a former aspiring scholar of social power, the next four years have the makings of quite a SHOW of transformation, but not necessarily of a REAL transformation.
Sometimes overreach is successful long enough to create a new set of rules for what is legitimate. Still, I wonder how long the show can go on before a majority of Americans and their international peers start to see nearly everything about this administration as an affront to the laws and ideals we’ve built up over the past two and half centuries.
Will all these transactions and the show of transformation eventually add up to a durable transformation in how the USA is governed? Or will the current administration come to be seen as an anomalous disturbance in the ongoing evolution of the American polity along the arc of history that bends toward justice?
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Postscript:
When I was in Nepal in two stints between 1986 and 1990, I witnessed another political transformation that serves as cautionary tale. At the time, there was a popular movement to transform Nepal from a monarchy with semi-democratic supporting institutions to a more pure form of democracy. The transition did not go smoothly. The King relinquished absolute power in 1990 after a series of demonstrations challenging the legitimacy of the monarchy and its supporters. I was an observer/participant in some of these demonstrations, including one that was violently suppressed, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The government’s violent suppression of the protests was followed by several days of martial law and the eventual abdication of the King.
It would have been wonderful if there had been a “They lived happily ever after” end to this story, but the reality was much grimmer. In the aftermath of the King’s abdication, Nepal entered a decade of civil war that claimed thousands of lives. I understand things are much calmer now, but the current peace came at a great cost.
Once legitimate power has been compromised, it can be very difficult to re-establish legitimacy in the minds of the followers whose beliefs are the foundation of the state. If enough followers come to see their leaders as illegitimate, things can fall apart very quickly.
Unfortunately, after legitimacy has been undermined, the path back to legitimacy is often strewn with the bodies and lives of followers obeying the will of leaders with competing agendas. It can take a long time to re-establish the belief in the legitimacy of institutions required for a sustainable political order and thriving economy.
Our leaders exert a great deal of leverage over the forces that shape and transform our lives. When too many of us fall into the trap of believing the promises of the wrong leaders, all of us are likely to end up suffering the consequences of our fellow citizen’s beliefs for many years to come.
© Dana Cogan, 2025, all rights reserved.