The Ashikaga Shogunate

A title inherited rather than fought for

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

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.

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.

A king of Japan by a foreign emperor's grant

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

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.

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.

A shipwreck that armed a civil war

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

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.

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.

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.

The vassal who no longer needed the title

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

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.

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.

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.