These eminent services were recognized by Ouchi Yoshihiro's appointment to administer no less than six provinces—Nagato, Suwo, Aki, Buzen, Kii, and Izumi. In fact he guarded the western and eastern entrances of the Inland Sea, and held the overlordship of western Japan. At his castle in Sakai, near Osaka, he amassed wealth by foreign trade, and there he received and harboured representatives of the Kusunoki and Kikuchi families, while at the same time he carried on friendly communications with the Doki, the Ikeda, and the Yamana. In short, he grew too powerful to receive mandates from Muromachi, especially when they came through a kwanryo of the Hatakeyama family who had just risen to that distinction.
Suddenly, in November, 1399, the Ouchi chief appeared in Izumi at the head of a force of twenty-three thousand men, a force which received rapid and numerous accessions. His grounds of disaffection were that he suspected the shogun of a design to deprive him of the two provinces of Kii and Izumi, which were far remote from the other five provinces in his jurisdiction and which placed him within arm's length of Kyoto, and, further, that no sufficient reward had been given to the family of his younger brother, who fell in battle. There were minor grievances, but evidently all were pretexts: the real object was to overthrow Muromachi. The shogun, Yoshimitsu, acted with great promptitude. He placed Hatakeyama Mitsuiye at the head of a powerful army, and on January 18, 1400, Sakai fell and Yoshihiro committed suicide. Thereafter the province of Kii was placed under the jurisdiction of the Hatakeyama family, and Izumi under that of Hosokawa, while the Shiba ruled in Echizen, Owari, and Totomi. In short, these three families became the bulwarks of the Ashikaga.
KAMAKURA AND MUROMACHI
An important episode of the Ouchi struggle was that Mitsukane, the third Kamakura kwanryo of the Ashikaga line, moved an army into Musashi to render indirect assistance to the Ouchi cause. In truth, from an early period of Kamakura's tenure by an Ashikaga governor-general of the Kwanto, there had been an ambition to transfer the office of shogun from the Kyoto to the Kamakura branch of the family. The matter was not mooted during Takauji's lifetime, but when, on his demise, the comparatively incompetent Yoshiakira came into power at Muromachi, certain military magnates of the eastern provinces urged the Kamakura kwanryo, Motouji, to usurp his brother's position. Motouji, essentially as loyal as he was astute, spurned the proposition. But it was not so with his son and successor, Ujimitsu. To him the ambition of winning the shogunate presented itself strongly, and was only abandoned when Uesugi Noriharu committed suicide to add weight to a protest against such an essay. Japanese annals contain many records of lives thus sacrificed on the altar of devotion and loyalty. From the outset the Uesugi family were the pillars of the Ashikaga kwanryo in Kamakura. Uesugi Noriaki served as shitsuji in the time of the first kwanryo, and the same service was rendered by Noriaki's son, Yoshinori, and by the latter's nephew, Tomomune, in the time of the second kwanryo, Ujimitsu. Confusing as are the multitude of names that confront the foreign student of Japanese history, it is necessary to note that from the time of their appointment as shitsuji at Kamakura, Yoshinori took the family name of Yamanouchi, and Tomomune that of Ogigayatsu. Balked in his design against Kyoto, Ujimitsu turned his hand against the Nitta, old enemies of his family, and crushing them, placed the Ashikaga power on a very firm basis in the Kwanto. His son, Mitsukane, had the gift of handling troops with great skill, and in his time the prestige of the Kamakura kwanryo reached its highest point.
In the eyes of the military men of the eastern provinces, the shogun in distant Kyoto counted for little compared with the governor-general in adjacent Kamakura. The latter's mansion was called gosho (palace); its occupant was termed kubo, an epithet hitherto applied to the shogun only, and the elder and younger branches of the Uesugi family, in which the office of kwanryo of Muromachi was hereditary, were designated Ryo Uesugi (the Two Uesugi). Mitsukane, when he abetted the Ouchi's attempt to overthrow the Kyoto shogun, persuaded himself that he was only carrying out his father's unachieved purpose, and the shogun, Yoshimitsu, took no step to punish him, preferring to accept his overtures—made through Uesugi Tomomune.
THE EXTRAVAGANCE OF YOSHIMITSU
There is little question that whatever applause history can extend to the administration of the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu, was won for him by his profoundly sagacious guardian and chief minister, Hosokawa Yoriyuki. After the latter's death, in 1392, many abuses and few meritorious acts appear in the shogun's record. Alike, the wise self-effacement and the admirable frugality which distinguished the Hojo rule were wholly foreign to the mood of Yoshimitsu. He insisted on being raised to the post of chancellor of the empire, and he openly spoke of himself as "king," designating as Go-sekke (Five Regent Houses) the families of Shiba, Hosokawa, Hatakeyama, Rokkaku, and Yumana. At the ceremony of his investiture as chancellor (dajo daijiri) he presented to the Throne a sword forged by Kunimitsu; one hundred pieces of white silk; one thousand silver coins; ten tigers' skins, and fifty pounds of dyed silk. To the ex-Emperor he gave a thousand silver coins; fifty pieces of white silk, and a sword, and among the Imperial princes and Court nobles he distributed ten thousand pieces of silver. Such was his parade of opulence.
ENGRAVING: ASHIKAGA YOSHIMITSU
The chief obstacle to conferring on him the title of chancellor had been that the records contained only one instance of a military man's appointment to that exalted post. That instance was Taira no Kiyomori, whose example should have been deterrent to a Minamoto. Yoshimitsu overcame the difficulty by nominally transferring his military functions to his son Yoshimochi (1423), and constituting himself the patron of literature. It was now that his love of luxury and splendour assumed its full dimensions. He had already beautified his Muromachi mansion by constructing there a park so spacious and so brilliant at all seasons that it went by the name of Hana no Gosho (Palace of Flowers). This he now assigned as a residence for his son and successor, Yoshimochi, transferring his own place of abode to the site occupied by the Saionji family, to whom was given in exchange an extensive manor in Kawachi. Here the Ashikaga chancellor built a palace of such dimensions that sixteen superintendents and twenty assistant superintendents were required to oversee the work. Most conspicuous was the Kinkaku-ji, or golden pavilion shrine, so called because its interior was gilt, the gold foil being thickly superposed on lacquer varnish. On this edifice, on the adjacent palace, and on a park where deer roamed and noble pine trees hung over their own shadows in a picturesque lake, immense sums were expended. Works of art were collected from all quarters to enhance the charm of a palace concerning which the bonze Sekkei declared that it could not be exchanged for paradise.
Yoshimitsu prayed the Emperor to visit this unprecedentedly beautiful retreat and Go-Komatsu complied. During twenty days a perpetual round of pastimes was devised for the entertainment of the sovereign and the Court nobles—couplet composing, music, football, boating, dancing, and feasting. All this was typical of the life Yoshimitsu led after his resignation of the shogun's office. Pleasure trips engrossed his attention—trips to Ise, to Yamato, to Hyogo, to Wakasa, and so forth. He set the example of luxury, and it found followers on the part of all who aimed at being counted fashionable, with the inevitable result that the producing classes were taxed beyond endurance. It has to be noted, too, that although Yoshimitsu lived in nominal retirement at his Kita-yama palace, he really continued to administer the affairs of the empire.