An Introduction to the History of Japan

by Katsuro Hara

Regarded in this manner, the return of the governmental seat to Kyoto had a great advantage. The new Shogunate, having located its centre in the same historical place where the classical civilisation of Japan had had its cradle also, its military and political organisation could work hand in hand with the social and cultural movement. The prestige of the Shogun was bedecked with a brighter halo than when Kamakura had been the seat of his government. The change, however, was accompanied with invidious results, ruinous not only to the Shogunate, but to the political integrity of the country at large.

After having experienced the vicissitudes of a long civil war, the courtiers became convinced that they could not overthrow by any means the military régime, which had already taken deep root in the social structure of our country. So they began to think that it was wiser for them to make use of that military power than to try any abortive attempts against it. They heaped, therefore, on the successive Shoguns of the Ashikaga family titles of high-sounding honour, much higher than those with which the Shoguns of Kamakura had been invested. In the imperial palace, too, special deference was paid to the Shogun. Such a rise in the court-rank of the Shogun induced his retainers to vie with one another in obtaining some official rank of distinction in the courtiers' hierarchical scale. Those who belonged to the higher classes among them, though they were mostly the shugo or military governors of one or more provinces, used to spend a greater part of their time at Kyoto, on account of holding some civil office in the government of the Shogun, and lived in a very aristocratic way, which was easy and indolent, that is to say, not much different from that of the courtiers. There were many social meetings, in which both courtiers and warriors participated together, and the object of these meetings mostly consisted in enjoying various kinds of literary pastimes, among which the commonest was a trick in versification called renga, that is to say, the composing by turns of a line of an unfinished poem, which should form a sequence to the preceding and at the same time become the prologue to the next. Through manifold channels of this and the like kinds of amusements, a very intimate relation between the two classes was cemented. The refinement of the courtiers' circle, though somewhat vulgarised compared with that of the previous period, freely penetrated into the families of the rough soldiery. Marriages between members of the two classes also took place frequently, by which the courtiers gained materially, while the soldiers could thereby assuage the uneasiness of their parvenu-consciousness. A new social life thus sprang up.

Among the two parties, which were reconciled in this way, that which profited the more by it, was of course the courtiers. Although the income from their manors, to which they were entitled as proprietors de jure, might have become less in comparison with that of the age anterior to the establishment of the Kamakura Shogunate, yet they were now relieved of all the troubles which might have beset them had they remained holding the real power of the state. Having relinquished their political ambitions and shifted all the cares of the state and military affairs upon the shoulders of the Shogunate, they became utterly irresponsible, could breathe freely and enjoy their idle hours not in the least disturbed. On the other hand, the militarists, having found that it was no longer necessary to circumscribe the privileges of the courtiers still more narrowly than before, forgot that ultimately their interests must necessarily collide in principle with those of the latter. What were contradictory at bottom seemed to them practically reconcilable. The Shogunate thought that it was its duty to uphold the interests of the courtiers by its military power, a task which was soon found to be impossible. On account of the weakness of the central government, disorder ruled in Kyoto and in the provinces as well, and paved the way for the political disintegration of the whole empire. To explain the political phenomena I must turn for a while to the relations between the shugo, the military governors of provinces, and the djito under their protection.

In the time of the Kamakura Shogunate, as aforesaid, each province had a military governor, called the shugo, appointed by the Shogun. The shugo, himself a djito, and a very influential one of that class, served as an intermediate commander in transmitting to the djito under him the military instructions which he had received from Kamakura. He was, therefore, nothing else but a marshal of all the djito within that province. There existed no relation of vassalage between him and the djito under his military jurisdiction. The latter remained to the end the direct vassals of the Shogunate at Kamakura, and only as regards the military organisation were subordinated to the shugo. The office of the shugo was not the hereditary possession of any family, so that the Shogun could nominate any djito to be shugo of any province at his pleasure, without fear of disturbing thereby the personal relation between him and his retainers in that province. In some respects this relation resembled that of the English king and the barons, who swore, besides their oath of fealty to a higher noble as their liege lord, direct allegiance to their king. As long as the line of Yoritomo, therefore, continued as hereditary Shogun, the Shogunate could depend on the fidelity of those djito, who were but the household vassals of the Minamoto family, and by this personal tie keep the political unity of the country infrangible.

After the extinction of the Minamoto family, the Shogun who succeeded one after another had no hereditary nor personal relations with those djito, and could claim no more than the official prestige of the Shogun allowed them to do. As to the Hôjô family, though the real power of the Shogunate was in its hands, originally it was no higher in rank than the djito, and could not, in its own name, command obedience from any of the Shogun's retainers. There is some similarity between the organisation of the time of the Kamakura Shogunate in this second phase and the "Kreis" institution of the German empire in the fifteenth century, which was initiated with the object of political concentration by Maximilian I., whose real power lay in his being a duke of Austria, and not Emperor of Germany. However admirable as an organisation, such a political status was undoubtedly untenable. No wonder that the military régime of Kamakura gradually collapsed.

The relation of shugo and djito in the time of the Ashikaga was quite of a different sort from that in the former Shogunate. The office of shugo became now the hereditary possession of certain privileged families, which constituted a body of higher warriors, towering above the common djito. The shugo stood in the position of protector to all the djito of the province he governed, and those djito who stood under a shugo were designated his "hikwan" or protégés. The relation of vassalage arose thus between the shugo and the djito in the same province, a legal status which had not existed in the Kamakura period. The direct relation between the common djito and the Shogun, which was the main spring of the political régime of the Kamakura era, was now cut off. No doubt the shugo in the Ashikaga period had in their provinces, besides their suzerainty over the djito, the tenure of certain tracts of land, as in the days of Kamakura. The great difference between them, however, was that in the Kamakura era a retainer of the Shogun was first installed as a djito of a manor, and then appointed shugo, while in the Ashikaga age the land which the shugo held directly was his demesne as shugo and not the land held as a retainer of the Shogun at Kyoto, independent of his office of shugo. To sum up, the shugo of the Ashikaga period was not a mere office, as in the days of Kamakura, but a legal status of the warriors ranking next to the Shogun. As the result of such an organisation each province or group of provinces under a shugo became a political entity, while it had been but a military entity in the Kamakura era. If the Shogun at Kyoto, therefore, had been strong enough to enforce his will over all the shugo of the provinces, then the political unity of the country at large could safely continue in the hands of the Ashikaga.

The Shogunate of the Ashikaga, however, had not been originally so formulated as to enable it to impose implicit obedience on all the higher military officials of the shugo class. For this family, though a branch of the Minamoto, had nothing in its history that could attract, as Yoritomo did, a vast number of willing warriors to serve under its banner. That Takauji was promoted to the headship of the second military government was largely due to the assistance of the warriors from various parts of the empire who were not personally related to his family, but were disaffected at seeing the power of the courtiers restored, neither was it by any means to be attributed to his personal capacity, which was rather mediocre both as general and as statesman. This origin of the Ashikaga family, therefore, made it difficult from the first for the Shogun of the line to curb the arrogance of his influential generals. Insurrection against the Shogunate followed one after another, so that no year passed without some small disturbance somewhere.

This state culminated in the civil war begun in the Ohnin era, that is to say, in 1467. The war had its origin in the quarrel about the succession to the Shogunate between the son and the adopted son, in reality the younger brother, of the Shogun Yoshimasa. This family question of the Ashikaga became mixed up with other quarrels about the succession in two of the influential military families, Shiba and Hatakeyama. Other shugo of various provinces sided with this or that party, brought their liege-men to Kyoto, and turned the streets of the metropolis into a battle-field. Thus the most desultory civil war in our history was waged under the eyes of the Emperor and of the Shogun, neither of whom had any power to stop it. After the burning, plundering, and killing, carried on most ruthlessly for nine years, the street-fighting in Kyoto ceased, leaving almost no trace of the historical city of yore. The scenes of anarchy were then transferred to the provinces, and it took many years before the whole country became pacified. Nay, complete peace was not restored till the fall of the Ashikaga Shogunate itself. Such was one phase of the political disintegration of the age, and its result was that Japan was torn asunder into a number of semi-independent bodies, each with a shugo at its head.

If the process of the political decomposition of the state had been limited to what is described above, then peace might have reigned at least within each of those bodies. Unfortunately, however, for the welfare of the people, none of these shugo was strong enough to keep order even within his own sphere of military jurisdiction. Most of them had lost their military character, having become accustomed to life in the capital, as stated above, and they left the care of their respective provinces in the hands of their protégés, men who soon made themselves independent of their patrons, so that there arose a number of minor political bodies in the jurisdiction of each shugo. Again these protégés, that is to say, the heads of the minor political bodies, were put down in turn by their vassals, and so forth. Moreover, some of these minor bodies were further divided into still smaller bodies, while others became aggrandised by annexation by the stronger of neighboring weaker ones. In this way Japan fell into a state of chaos, being an agglomeration of political bodies of various sizes, with masters ever changing, and with frontiers constantly shifting without any reference to the former administrative boundaries. This second phase completed the total disintegration of the empire.

The last of the Shoguns who tried to stem this irresistible tendency to disintegration was Yoshihisa, the son of Yoshimasa. His succession to his father, as has already been described, was the cause of the civil war of the Ohnin era, for which, however, he was not responsible in the least, being only eight years old when he was invested with the Shogunate in the year 1473. He grew up, however, to be the most typical Shogun of all the Ashikaga. Though born in the highest of the military families, he had as his mother a daughter of a court-noble, and was educated in his boyhood by Kanera Ichijô, one of the most learned courtiers of the time. When Yoshihisa reached manhood, therefore, he was a courtier clad in military garments. He thought and acted as if he were a high Fujiwara noble, and even had his household managed by a courtier. Through this confidant, the proprietors de jure of manors, that is to say, courtiers, shrines, and temples, clung to the young Shogun, and pressed him to coerce, on their behalf, those arbitrary shugo and minor captains who dared impudently to appropriate the whole of the revenue from those manors to themselves, so that the share due to these proprietors de jure had been kept in arrears for many years. The Shogun was easily persuaded, and Takayori Sasaki, the shugo of the province of Ohmi, was first chosen as the object of chastisement, for his province was the nearest to Kyoto and abounded in those manors belonging to the courtiers and the like. It was in the year 1487 that Yoshihisa in person led a punitive expedition into Ohmi, crossed lake Biwa, and pitched his camp on its eastern shore. Contemporary chronicles unanimously describe in vivid colours how the gallant and refined young prince, clad in bright military costume, marched out of Kyoto surrounded by a bizarre host of warriors and courtiers. The latter group, however, did not count for aught in warfare, while the former followed the Shogun only halfheartedly. It was especially so with those shugo who were of the same caste and of the same status as the attacked, and therefore did not like to see him crushed in the interest of the de jure but fainéant proprietors. The victory of the army of the Shogun was hopeless from the first. After staying two years in camp Yoshihisa died without being able to see his enemy vanquished. One of his cousins, who succeeded to the Shogunate, renewed the expedition, and at last ousted the disobedient shugo from his province, but the proprietors de jure of the manors could not regain their lost rights, what was due to them having been usurped by other new pretenders, not less arbitrary than their predecessors.