ONE
The Muromachi Period in Japanese History
Cer~ain periods of history reveal only enough about themselves to confuse us. The Muromachi period (1336-1573) is one of these, having long defied attempts to discover in it orderly patterns of political and social life. Many traditional historians simply dis missed it as an age of political and economic instability, social anarchy, and inordinate civil violence. While these evaluations are not totally inaccurate, the era that produced the very zenith of Japan's high culture in the visual and performing arts surely offers more to the student of institutional development. This paradox inevitably led Japanese scholars to draw contradictory conclusions about what they found and about what the Muromachi contribu tion was to Japanese history. This volume will try to present a synthetic reinterpretation of Muromachi politics and society in the light of their detailed researches, which in their several ways have helped to demystify the pall of confusion surrounding the era. Our focus will be on the Muromachi Bakufu, the military regime that governed Japan during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and on the shogun who headed that government. Al though the Muromachi Bakufu existed from its founding by Ashikaga Takauji in 1336 until the last shogun Ashikaga Yoshiaki was overthrown by Oda Nobunaga in 1573, it ceased to exert real national influence from the early sixteenth century. This book will concentrate only on that part of the Muromachi age (c. 1336- 2 The Muromachi Period
1490) when the Ashikaga shoguns actually ruled and their Bakufu was a viable central government. The Ashikaga family was a samurai clan which had its roots in the Kant6 region not far from modern Tokyo. Descended from the noble Minamoto house and related by marriage to the H6j6 who ruled the previous Kamakura Bakufu, the Ashikaga were no mere upstarts but had long been a prominent warrior (bushi) family in the eastern part of Japan. Ashikaga Takauji had himself declared shogun-military dictator-and established his Bakufu in the old imperial capital of Kyoto, from which he and his descen dants exercised their power in the name of an emperor who reigned in that city but did not rule. The Ashikaga shoguns of the first half-century of the dynasty constructed a political synthesis which embraced aristocratic elements from the imperial court, feudal elements from their own samurai heritage, and bureau cratic elements which they adopted from the Kamakura Bakufu (1185-1333) and the Heian state. These various source's of legiti mate authority had always overlapped, but the Ashikaga Bakufu was the first government in Japanese history to combine them successfully in one regime deriving its support from every tradi tion of political legitimacy then current. Despite their military weakness and increasing political ineffectuality from 1500 on, the Ashikaga shoguns up to that time were feudal monarchs striving toward a postfeudal autocracy which is recognizably similar to that of the Valois in France or the York-Lancaster in England.1 Subordinated to the Ashikaga shoguns were the shugo, later to become the shugo-daimyo, great provincial military governors whose participation in the Bakufu system was necessary for its continued effectiveness, and who were in turn dependent on the Bakufu for their own legitimation. Among these shugo, three Ashikaga-related families-the Shiba, Hosokawa, and Hatake yama-came to monopolize the office of kanrei. The kanrei was the shogun's chief minister who presided over the great council of shugo in the Bakufu and transmitted the shogun's orders to them for implementation. It is concerning the issue of where final authority actually rested within the Bakufu-with the shogun