When Yoshimitsu retired in 1394 to enter Zen orders, leaving the government to his nine-year-old son, he ensconced himself in a palace in the Kyoto suburbs and proceeded to build a chapel for Zen meditation. The Golden Pavilion, or Kinkaku-ji, as it came to be known, was a wooden teahouse three stories high whose architectural beauty is now legendary.
There were few if any previous examples of this type of multistory structure, although it has been suggested that the idea may have been copied from a comparable temple in southern China. (The turn-of-the-century American critic Ernest Fenollosa suggested that it was modeled after the structure Kublai Khan constructed for a garden in Shang-tu, which Coleridge called Xanadu, after the translation of the name by Marco Polo: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree.") Whatever its origins, the building superficially resembled a low-rising pagoda—each successive story was a more or less smaller version of the one below. The two lower floors were used for evening entertainments of music, poetry, and incense, while the top floor was a tiny meditation chapel (whose ceiling was covered with gold leaf, thereby giving the building its name). Set in the midst of a beautiful landscape garden, the sweeping roofs, painstaking wooden joinery, and exquisite unpainted woods of the Golden Pavilion were a landmark of Zen taste destined to influence the course of Japanese architecture for centuries.
The Golden Pavilion was the crowning act of Yoshimitsu's career, a fitting monument to the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the rise of Zen culture. Under his rule, Japanese monks first brought back from China the finest examples of Ch'an-inspired art, from which they derived and mastered the artistic principles of the vanished Sung era and went on to re-create if not surpass the great Sung age of artistic production. The momentum for Zen culture produced by Yoshimitsu lasted through the reign of his grandson Yoshimasa (1435-1490), the last great Ashikaga patron of Zen art.
As a shogun, Yoshimasa was even more distracted by Zen than his famous grandfather. He concentrated on encouraging
the school of Sung-style ink painting, the Zen ritual of ceremonial tea, the art of flower arranging, and new styles of Zen-influenced architecture. Unfortunately, his apparently hereditary absence of interest in affairs of state ultimately brought about the disintegration of the Japanese political fabric. As the office of shogun weakened to the point of symbolism, Yoshimasa's power to tax became so frail that he was finally forced to borrow from the Zen monasteries. The real power in the land passed to the local feudal lords, or daimyo, men who governed entire domains, raised their own armies, and exercised far greater power than the samurai of earlier times.
What remained of Yoshimasa's power came to be exercised by his mistresses and his scheming wife, Tomi-ko. By his late twenties he was ready to retire entirely, the better to pursue Zen and its arts, but none of the women in the palace had yet presented him with a son who could become titular shogun. By 1464 Yoshimasa's patience was exhausted and he turned to one of his brothers who was in monastic orders and persuaded him to begin an apprenticeship for the shogunate. The brother wisely hesitated, pointing out that Tomi-ko, who was still in her twenties, might yet produce a son; but Yoshimasa won him over with solemn assurances that all sons who arrived would be made priests.
Less than a year later Tomi-ko did indeed bear a son, setting the stage for the struggle that would eventually destroy Kyoto and signal the decline of the Ashikaga age of Zen culture. As it happened, there was already an animosity between Yoshimasa's principal adviser, Hosokawa Katsumoto, and Hosokawa's father-in-law, Yamana Sozen. When the child was born, Hosokawa, a member of the historic family of Ashikaga regents, favored retaining Yoshimasa's brother as shogun, so the ambitious Tomi-ko turned to Yamana to enlist his aid in reverting the office of shogun back to Yoshimasa and thence to her son. With a natural excuse for conflict finally at hand, the two old enemies Yamana and Hosokawa gathered their armies—both numbering near eighty thousand—outside Kyoto. The impending tragedy was obvious to all, and Yoshimasa tried vainly to discourage the combatants. By that time, however, his voice counted for nothing, and in 1467 the inevitable conflict, now known as the Onin War, began.
The war raged for a decade, until virtually all the majestic temples of Kyoto were burned and pillaged. Ironically, one of the few temples to escape destruction was Yoshimitsu's Golden Pavilion, which fortunately had been situated well outside the
precincts of the main city. Although both Hosokawa and Yamana Thed in 1473, the fighting continued, as participants on both sides defected, changed leaders, and fought among themselves until no one could recall what the original war had been about. Finally, after ten full years of almost constant fighting, it became apparent that the carnage had accomplished nothing. One dark night the two armies folded their tents and stole away—and the war was no more. A remarkably senseless conflict, even by modern-day standards, the Onin War effectively obliterated all evidence in Kyoto of the marvelous Heian civilization, as well as the early Ashikaga, leaving nothing but a scorched palette for the final century of Zen art.
Yoshimasa, in the meantime, had long since removed himself from affairs of state. Since his shogun brother had switched sides during the war and become a general for Yamana, the succession question was simplified. Tomi-ko took time out from her vigorous war-profiteering to prevail upon Yoshimasa to appoint her son, then four years old, shogun. She thereby became de facto shogun herself, encouraging Yoshimasa in his desire to retire while enriching herself handsomely with imaginative new taxes. The war proved a windfall for Tomi-ko, who lent funds to both sides to keep it going, and her cupidity played no small role in the final destruction of ancient Kyoto.