Silver Pavilion, Kyoto 1482
Golden Pavilion, Kyoto
The flowering of Zen culture might be described as the Periclean age of Japan. As with fifth-century Greece, this was the era that produced Japan's finest classical art at the same time that rampant plagues and internecine warfare bled the land as never before. Government, such as it was, rested in the hands of the Ashikaga clan, men ever ready to sacrifice the general good in furtherance of personal interests. That these interests happened to include Zen and the Zen arts probably brought scant solace to their subjects, but today we can weigh their selfishness against the culture they sponsored. In any case, all who admire the classic Zen cultural forms should be aware that their price included the heartless taxation of and disregard for the entire peasant population of Japan.
The historical backdrop for the Ashikaga era reads like a Jacobean tragedy peopled by cutthroat courtiers ever alert to advantage in chambers or in battle. The political shape of the Ashikaga era began to emerge in the early years of the fourteenth century as the once invincible Kamakura rule of the Hojo family dissolved, plunging Japan into a half-century of war and feuding over the identity of the rightful emperor. Throughout much of the century the provincial daimyo warlords and their samurai warred up and down the length of the land, supporting first one emperor, then another. It was during this time and the two centuries following that Zen became the official state religion and Zen monks served as foreign diplomats, domestic advisers, and arbiters of taste.
The political troubles that ended the Kamakura warrior government and unseated the Hojo seem to be traceable to the war against the Mongols. It was a long and costly operation which left most of the samurai impoverished and angered at a government that could give them only cheerful thanks rather than the lands of the vanquished as was traditional practice. The general discontent found a focus in the third decade of the fourteenth century when a Kyoto emperor named Godaigo attempted to unseat the Hojo and re-establish genuine imperial rule. After some minor skirmishes, the Hojo commissioned an able general nanied Ashikaga Takauji (1305-1358) from an old Minamoto family to march on Godaigo and settle the difficulty. Along the way Takauji must have thought things over, for when he reached Kyoto instead of attacking the emperor's forces he put the Hojo garrison to the sword. Shortly thereafter, another general supporting the imperial cause marched out to Kamakura and laid waste the Hojo capital. The last few hundred Hojo supporters committed suicide en masse, and the Kamakura age was ended.
Godaigo gleefully set up the new Japanese government in Kyoto, and soon it was like old times, with aristocrats running everything. In a serious miscalculation, he assumed that the