The Ashikaga Shogunate

A title inherited rather than fought for

formationDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Ashikaga Takauji, descended from the same Minamoto line Yoritomo's own shogunate had come from, founded a new military house on the ruins of the one he had just destroyed - installing a compliant emperor in Kyoto and receiving from him the same office, Sei-i Tai Shogun, that had governed Japan on the throne's behalf since 1192. He died in 1356, still fighting a war whose real resolution belonged to his grandson.

Jōdo-ji, Onomichi · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

An office that no longer needed a fight for each holder

Under the Hōjō, the shogunal title had been filled by imperial appointment, however hollow the appointment had become in practice. Under the Ashikaga, the office simply became hereditary in the family itself, passing from father to son without the outside confirmation or internal power struggle that had marked its transfer under Kamakura. This was, in its own way, a genuine consolidation - and it did nothing to guarantee that the man who inherited the title would actually wield the power attached to it. In nearly every generation that followed Takauji, the shogun himself remained a figurehead, no more capable of independent rule than the mikado he nominally served.

A boy shogun who ended his family's war

That pattern of hereditary transfer without guaranteed personal authority did not stop one holder of the office from becoming, in substance as well as name, the most powerful ruler Japan had. Takauji's grandson Yoshimitsu became shogun at the age of ten and grew into a celebrated warrior across southern and western Japan. It was under his rule that the fifty-six-year schism between northern and southern imperial courts - the war his own grandfather's rebellion had opened - was finally settled, in 1392, giving the Ashikaga house a single throne in Kyoto to answer to rather than a divided one.

Rokuon-ji, Kyoto · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

A king of Japan by a foreign emperor's grant

peakDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Yoshimitsu, having reunited the imperial courts and built himself a luxurious palace in Kyoto, reached a height of personal power no Ashikaga shogun before or after him would match. He styled himself in the manner of the mikado, dressed his court to match, and, for a man already the most powerful figure in the country, wanted only one thing his own countrymen could not give him: the outward form of a crown.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Martin Falbisoner · CC BY-SA 4.0

An embassy that bought a title at a real cost

In 1401 Yoshimitsu sent a mission to the Ming court bearing gifts that amounted, in substance, to an acknowledgment of Chinese overlordship, and accepted in return the style Nippon Ō - King of Japan. To later generations of Japanese readers, this was not diplomacy but a humiliation without justification: a ruler who already held every real form of power available to a subject, seeking foreign validation for a rank his own country's own institutions had no mechanism to grant him, and doing so at the price of Japan's own dignity before a neighbour already regarded as arrogant.

A precedent nobody else would repeat until the reckoning came

No mikado, one nineteenth-century chronicler insists, ever accepted tribute status from China in the whole of Japanese history; only this one shogun did, and the insult attached to his name for it rather than to the office he held. A much later shogun who styled himself "Tycoon" before American treaty negotiators, in similarly self-aggrandizing terms, would pay for the same impulse far faster - in war, exile and the final abolition of the shogunate itself, rather than in a slow accumulation of posthumous blame. Yoshimitsu's own reign, by contrast, closed a year after his greatest honours with a retirement to a Buddhist monastery, the humiliation of 1401 left for history rather than his own contemporaries to punish.

Two of Akamatsu's retainers

contractionDrafted from Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910)

Yoshimitsu's son and grandson governed without his commanding authority, and the shogunate's decline shows most plainly in what happened to the sixth shogun, Yoshinori - a former priest who governed with real vigour for thirteen years and was murdered at his own host's dinner table for trying to use it.

A banquet with the doors shut

In 1441 Yoshinori moved to break the power of the Akamatsu family by partitioning its provinces among rival vassals. The Akamatsu chieftain said nothing, and instead invited the shogun to a banquet at his own Kyoto mansion. When the feast was at its height, two of his retainers loosed every horse in the stables into the courtyard, where the uproar covered the sound of the doors being shut. One retainer seized the shogun by the hands; another came up behind him and took his head off with a single stroke. Akamatsu fled to his own castle with the head as a trophy, was besieged there by three rival houses eager for a share of his confiscated domains, and took his own life along with his leading vassals when the castle fell.

Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Unknown · Public domain

It was the second time in two and a half centuries that a sitting Japanese ruler had been murdered by his own subject at a banquet held in his honour, and it left the shogunate to a nine-year-old heir who drank himself to death within two years, and then to his younger brother Yoshimasa - a child of eight, patented as shogun at fourteen, whose long personal rule would do more damage to the house than any assassination had.

An aesthete with an empty treasury

Yoshimasa inherited his grandfather Yoshimitsu's taste for magnificence without any of his capacity for governing, and kept building as though the state's finances were still what they had been in Yoshimitsu's day, when in fact they were not. He is recorded pawning his own armour to cover the costs of his consort's childbirth in one breath and lavishing fortunes on incense-parties, poem-competitions and tea ceremonies in the next - refined pastimes, in the record's own judgment, considerably less innocent once they were the main occupation of the man responsible for governing an empire sliding toward ruin. He is recorded holding a banquet in his own palace in the middle of one of the fiercest battles of 1467, enjoying, by one chronicler's comparison, the spectacle of the world burning around him much as Nero was said to have done.

Tokyo National Museum · Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Tosa Mitsunobu (attributed) · Public domain

Real administration passed by default to his consort, the Lady Tomi, and to her brother Hino, whose appetite for bribes was constant and unappeasable at a court so impoverished that other nobles could no longer afford robes to attend what functions still occurred. When Tomi had the old toll barriers at Kyoto's gates rebuilt, ostensibly to fund repairs to the imperial palace, and diverted every coin of the revenue into her own purse instead, the city mob rose, tore the barriers down again, and had to be pacified with a debt-cancellation edict rather than a reckoning.

An heir undecided

What turned this ordinary misrule into a war was Yoshimasa's own failure to settle who would succeed him. Having no son for years, he adopted his own brother Yoshimi as heir; when a son, Yoshihisa, was finally born to him, he could not bring himself to choose cleanly between the two, and each claimant found patrons among the great military houses already competing for influence at a weakening court. Two of the shogunate's own senior deputies, Hosokawa Katsumoto and his father-in-law Yamana Sōzen - the "Red Monk," nicknamed for his flushed complexion - had already spent years managing rival successions inside the Shiba and Hatakeyama military houses from opposite sides of every quarrel. By 1467 each commanded tens of thousands of his own retainers and had built, in effect, two competing shadow governments inside the one the Ashikaga name was still nominally attached to. The dispute over who would succeed Yoshimasa was not the cause of what followed. It was simply the occasion the two men, already primed for open war with each other, had been waiting for.

The War of Ōnin

contractionDrafted from Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910)

The war that broke Kyoto ran for ten years, 1467 to 1477, and settled almost nothing except that the country was no longer governable from the city where it was fought.

A capital of half a million, fighting itself

Kyoto in 1467 held something like a hundred and eighty thousand households - perhaps nine hundred thousand people, a population few contemporary European cities came within a tenth of matching. Hosokawa Katsumoto could put sixty thousand of his own retainers into the field at a word, with twenty-one thousand more from collateral branches of his house; Yamana Sōzen commanded comparable numbers. One of the war's first great battles was fought for possession of the Zen monastery of Sōkokuji, founded by Yoshimitsu himself as the Ashikaga house's own mortuary temple, and was followed by a still fiercer battle for control of its ruins. Neither side ever achieved a decisive victory over the other. What they achieved instead was ten years of fighting inside and around a city that had never been built to withstand a war.

Shinnyo-dō, Kyoto · Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Kamonnosuke Hisakuni · Public domain

What the fighting cost

By the time it ended, the samurai who had fought it abandoned the capital outright and went home to their own provinces, and the imperial court that Yoshimitsu and Yoshimasa had spent fortunes patronising was left destitute in every sense a court can be. Sōkokuji, temples, palaces and mansions across the city went up in flames; the emperor himself spent thirteen years confined within the narrow grounds of the shogun's own Muromachi compound because there was nowhere else safe to hold court, and when ceremonies finally resumed they were abridged versions, stripped down because there was no money left to hold them properly. When one emperor died in 1500 it took forty-four days to raise the funds for his funeral; his successor could not afford a coronation until 1521, two decades into his reign. Between 1465 and 1585 no emperor abdicated at all - not from any new respect for the office, but because the ceremony an abdication required cost money nobody had.

What replaced the government that failed

The war's deeper damage was administrative rather than architectural. Imperial decrees and shogunal instructions alike came to be ignored everywhere outside Kyoto and the single province of Yamashiro, and it was soon recognised as pointless to issue them at all. Ordinary taxation on peasants, craftsmen and traders continued to be collected

• it simply stopped reaching the shogun's own treasury, because the great military houses that collected it had made themselves independent in substance while the Ashikaga name remained nominally above them. European missionaries arriving a century later described local warlords as "Kings" - the King of Bungo, the King of Satsuma, the King of Hirado - and Murdoch's own judgment is that the term was, if not technically correct, practically accurate: within his own domain, even the smallest of these lords held army, law and taxation entirely in his own hands, owing nothing upward to anyone. This is the condition later Japanese historians call the Sengoku Jidai, the Age of the Country at War, and its opening decades ran directly out of the fighting in Kyoto's own streets rather than starting from nothing once the Ōnin War happened to end.

What the war did not destroy

Oddly, it did not destroy the shogunate's own cultural patronage. Yoshimasa, driven from the political stage as thoroughly as any Ashikaga ruler before him, retreated after the war into exactly the kind of building projects that had helped provoke it in the first place - the Silver Pavilion chief among them - and the Zen-affiliated school of painters his and his grandfather's patronage had sustained went on producing what is still counted among the high points of Japanese pictorial art, largely because the great monasteries that housed the artists were among the few institutions the general anarchy left more or less alone. A country whose central government had stopped functioning in every practical sense kept producing, in its capital's own ashes, some of the finest art it would ever make.

Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Laitr Keiows · CC BY-SA 3.0

Tokyo National Museum · Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Sesshū Tōyō · CC BY 4.0

A shipwreck that armed a civil war

contractionDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

By the sixteenth century the Ashikaga shoguns had become figureheads in the fullest sense, presiding nominally over a country whose real power had scattered among competing regional lords. It was into this fractured landscape, in 1542, that a storm-driven Chinese pirate junk carrying three shipwrecked Portuguese travellers made landfall on the small island of Tanegashima, off the southern coast of Kyushu.

A weapon more interesting than the visitors themselves

The islanders were more impressed by the arquebuses the shipwrecked Portuguese carried than by the foreigners themselves. The local daimyo invited one of the survivors, Fernão Mendes Pinto, to visit him, and within a short time the secret of making gunpowder and firearms had been taught to Japanese craftsmen directly. Within a few years, according to native chronicles, firearms had spread into general use across the country - weapons still called by the name of the island where they first arrived, centuries afterward.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Samuraiantiqueworld · CC BY-SA 3.0

A market that drew its own flood of newcomers

The trader who had brought Pinto to Japan cleared a fortune on his own cargo, and word of the profit available drew hundreds of Portuguese merchants to Japanese shores in the years that followed. Regional lords, already locked in contests for territory and advantage that the distant Ashikaga court could do nothing to arbitrate, competed with each other to attract these foreign traders - each daimyo hoping the weapons and wealth they brought would tip his own local balance of power decisively in his favour.

Kobe City Museum · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Kanō Naizen · Public domain

Faith arrived where trade had already opened the door

The missionary followed the merchant, and the Jesuit Francis Xavier landed in Kagoshima within a decade of the first Portuguese shipwreck, finding his own success in Japan remarkably rapid. Firearms, foreign traders and a new faith arrived together, inseparably linked in native memory ever afterward - and none of it did anything to restore the authority the Ashikaga shoguns had already lost to the country's own warring regional lords.

Kobe City Museum · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

The vassal who no longer needed the title

endDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Oda Nobunaga first appears in the record in 1542, inheriting from his father a modest stock of arms, land and feuds typical of any regional warrior family scrambling for territory in a fractured country. Over the following decades he absorbed one province after another - Suruga, Mino, Ōmi, Mikawa, Ise, Echizen - through a combination of battle and alliance, until he held Kyoto itself and could make or unmake the occupant of its shogunal office.

Chōkō-ji, Toyota · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Kanō Sōshū · Public domain

A kingmaker who became his own king's enemy

Nobunaga used exactly that power in 1568 to put Ashikaga Yoshiaki on the shogunal throne, backing his claim with the same military weight that had already won him half a dozen provinces. The partnership did not last. Within six years the two men had quarrelled, and Nobunaga answered the quarrel the way he answered every obstacle in his path: he arrested Yoshiaki and deposed him outright.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

An office ended, not merely vacated

The deposition in 1573 closed a shogunal line that had held power, nominally or in fact, for two hundred and thirty-eight years. No new Sei-i Tai Shogun would be appointed for three decades afterward. Nobunaga himself, despite commanding more territory and more soldiers than any Ashikaga shogun had wielded in generations, never claimed the title for his own house - by one account because the office had long been the customary preserve of Minamoto descendants, and Nobunaga traced his own line to the rival Taira instead. He took the rank of Naidaijin, inner great minister, and governed in the mikado's name without ever becoming, in title, anything more than the emperor's own subject.

A power built on war that could not survive peace

Nobunaga proved, like Yoritomo four centuries before him, a skillful and determined soldier - but unlike Yoritomo, he never subdued Japan's great regional clans completely, and lacked the administrative patience to consolidate in peace what he had won by force. He met his own death in Kyoto in 1582, betrayed by one of his own captains and burned alive in a temple he had chosen, by chance, as his lodging that night. What his conquests had already accomplished, though, could not be undone: the office the Ashikaga had held for nearly two and a half centuries was gone, and the country's next unifier would build on foundations Nobunaga's own campaigns had laid rather than start again from the fractured landscape he had first inherited.