3

Ashikaga Yoshimasa, a boy of thirteen, was proclaimed shogun in 1449. He no doubt had been informed how his father had been murdered and what struggles for power had ensued. Perhaps these circumstances inhibited him from exercising his privileges as shogun, but in his youth he apparently entertained ambitions of restoring the grandeur of the shogunate during the reigns of his grandfather and father. To this end, he revived customs that had fallen into disuse, even some that may seem to us of little intrinsic importance. In 1460, for example, he ordered that one gate to the shogunate buildings be closed to all but vehicles and riders on official business. The sole reason for this order was that such had been the practice in Yoshinori’s time. Again, Yoshimasa commanded that documents issued in Yoshinori’s name be investigated in order to ascertain exactly where on each document his signet (kaō) was affixed; he had decided to affix his own signet at the same place. In such instances, the reasons why these practices had originated were irrelevant. All that mattered was restoring these tiny fragments of a past that seemed more glorious than the present.

Yoshimasa’s efforts to restore the past were not confined to trivia. Although he is usually pictured by historians as a man incapable of action and indifferent to infringements on the shogunate’s authority, in his youth he made determined attempts to control the military governors. He failed, largely because of personal weaknesses, but also because conditions at the time did not permit the shogun to wield the authority of a Yoshimitsu or Yoshinori.¹

Today Yoshimasa is generally better known for his failings than for his modest attempts to act the part of a shogun. His faults, however, were intimately related to aesthetic preferences that were his major contribution to Japanese culture. Although his passion for building palaces led to immense debts and desperate, usually ill-conceived attempts to raise money to pay the bills, this passion also fostered the development of a distinctive new architecture. To the people of the time, the great expenditure of money was more obvious than the artistic contribution. In 1458, the same year that his costly renovation of the shogun’s palace (Karasuma-dono) was completed, Yoshimasa decided that it should be moved to the site of the old Muromachi Palace, probably out of nostalgia for the days of Yoshimitsu, who had built his palace there. His wishes were obeyed, despite the cost. The altered construction was carried out with the utmost lavishness.

One scheme for raising money to pay for these new buildings and Yoshimasa’s other extravagances was to grant tokusei, which annulled debts, on condition that the beneficiaries return one-tenth of the sum to the bakufu. The first such buichi tokusei, as it was called, was promulgated in 1454. It did not take long for clever men to find ways of circumventing the shogunate’s regulations, and the expected funds failed to materialize. In 1457, after there had been uprisings against usurers in various parts of the country, the shogunate issued another kind of tokusei, this one promising relief to the lenders, provided that they paid the shogunate one-fifth of the sums lent. It also prescribed punishment for both borrowers and lenders in the event that they colluded.

A second plan for raising money, more effective but even more unpopular, called for the establishment of new barriers on the roads leading into the capital, at which fees would be collected for those wishing to pass. The necessity of paying these fees so angered people that they staged rebellions. The shogunate responded by abolishing the barriers, only to erect new ones in 1459 at the seven entrances to Kyoto.² Although the barriers brought in income, it was not enough to rescue the shogunate from a seemingly irreversible process of decline and decay.

Yoshimasa lacked the martial disposition essential to the chief officer of a military government. For all his profound interest in no and other arts, Yoshimasa’s grandfather, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, had been a warrior by temperament, but Yoshimasa aspired to become not an invincible general but a second Genji. Handsome, sensitive, and seemingly irresistible to women, he was well qualified for the role. His tastes were those of an aristocrat rather than of a samurai. A contemporary Zen monk described him as “mild and gentle” (onkyō wajun),³ admirable qualities in themselves, but not those most needed in a military ruler.

At least while he was young, Yoshimasa felt concern for the welfare of his subjects. His mildness and gentleness may have inspired his many gifts to relieve the suffering caused by the terrible famine of 1459.⁴ Perhaps his generous impulses were abetted by an otherworldly source. In 1461, as one account informs us, Yoshimasa had a dream in which his father, Yoshinori, imposing in formal robes, informed Yoshimasa that he was suffering now for the crimes he, Yoshinori, had committed while he was alive; but because he had also performed virtuous acts, he expected to be reborn as a shogun. The apparition commanded Yoshimasa to give alms to victims of the famine, saying this would alleviate the pains he was enduring in hell. Yoshimasa at once directed a shogunate official to make suitable donations.⁵

Other anecdotes suggest that Yoshimasa recognized the great gap between the affluence of his own life and the misery in which the mass of the people lived. For example, in the autumn of 1461 when he went to view the colored maple leaves at the Saihō-ji (the temple familiarly known as the Moss Temple), he asked an attendant why it was that although the colored leaves were so glorious, the houses in the city around them looked so miserable. He wondered whether it might be because taxes were excessive.⁶

Such moments of expressed concern for the welfare of the common people grew increasingly rare. Although he was aware of the terrible suffering caused by the famine, Yoshimasa seems not to have considered reducing his expenditures in order to bring relief to those who were starving. During the worst of the famine, he did not forgo such pleasures as admiring the plum and cherry blossoms at famous sites and attending performances of nō. Nor did he hesitate to spend vast sums of money for rebuilding the Muromachi Palace, known as the Palace of Flowers (Hana no gosho) because its extensive gardens were filled with flowers.

Worse still, when he realized that he had been unsuccessful in his attempts to restore the shogunate to its former glory, he led a life of the utmost dissipation, seeking to forget his failure by indulging in women and drink. By this time, his personal efforts on behalf of the country and the people had dwindled to nothingness. He was shielded from criticism, however, by the sycophants with whom he surrounded himself and by the pervasiveness of luxury among the members of the military class, especially the high-ranking officers, who accepted Yoshimasa’s unrestrained extravagance as normal.

The famine that began in 1459 continued for three years. Prolonged drought was followed by torrential rains, and the rains in turn were followed by a plague of locusts that devoured what few crops had survived. The famine affected much of the country, from the capital in Kyoto all the way to the provinces facing the Inland Sea and the Japan Sea. Many people starved in the countryside, and more perished on the roads as they desperately struggled to reach the capital in the hopes of finding food. Death seemed to be omnipresent except in the Palace of Flowers. An entry for the sixteenth day of the third month (April 9) of 1460 from Hekizan nichiroku, the diary of the Zen priest Unsen Taikyoku, contrasts the misery of the starving poor with the arrogance of the rich:

When the sun went down I set out for home, and as I was passing Rokujō I saw an old woman with a child in her arms. She called the child’s name repeatedly, then began to wail. I looked and saw that the child was already dead. The mother, still wailing, collapsed on the ground. People standing nearby asked her where she came from. She said, “I’ve come all the way from Kawachi. We’ve had a terrible drought for three years, and the rice plants didn’t so much as sprout. The district officials are cruel and greedy. They demand a lot of money in taxes and show no mercy. If you don’t pay, they kill you. That’s why I had to run away to another province. I was hoping to earn food by begging. But I couldn’t get anything to give my baby. I’m starving and I’m worn out, heart and soul. I can’t take any more.”

When she had finished speaking, she again choked with great sobs. I took from my wallet what spare money I had and gave it to her, saying, “Take this money and hire a man to bury the child. I’m going back to my cell where, with help from the Three Treasures and the Five Commandments, I shall choose a Buddhist name for the child and offer prayers for his salvation.” The child’s mother was greatly comforted.

While I was still humbly mulling over her sad story, I encountered a group of noblemen out to admire the blossoms. They were escorted by several thousand mounted men, and servants and followers swarmed around them. These gentlemen acted as if they were so superior that nobody could compare with them. Some sneered at the people in the streets; others swore at the menials in the path of their horses; others laughingly stole blossoms; others, drunkenly singing, drew their swords; others still, having vomited food and drink and being unable to walk, lay on the roadside. There were many such sights, and whoever saw them was appalled. Anyone who happened to run into these people was terrified and ran away, intimidated by their high rank.⁷

At the time, of course, such criticism was not openly expressed, but in somewhat later writings the arrogant insensitivity of the nobles to the suffering of the poor was often cited as a cause of the Ōnin War:

Was it perhaps a portent that a great disturbance was about to break out? The nobles and military alike were greatly given to luxury, and in the towns and countryside, and even in remote regions, quite ordinary people indulged in display. The opulence of the great houses and the suffering of the masses were beyond description. This caused the masses anguish and distress, and they cried out like the people of Hsia in protest against the outrages of King Chieh: “Who will perish today? Perhaps it will be the both of us.” If there were loyal subjects at this time, why did they not come forth with remonstrances? Instead, people displayed an attitude of “if the country is going to break, let it break, if society is to perish, let it perish.” They acted as if they were indifferent to what happened to others; as long as they themselves had wealth and rank, all they thought of was shining more brilliantly than anyone else.⁸

Diaries describe how the stench from the corpses clogging the Kamo River pervaded the entire capital. When Taikyoku stood on the Shijō Bridge and looked down into the water, the river looked to him like a hilly landscape of bodies.⁹ He mentioned the case of a monk who had placed slips of wood (sotoba) on the heads of some 82,000 corpses, hoping this would bring them salvation. Many more people died in the surrounding countryside than in the city itself. Cases of cannibalism were reported.

Even though the city reeked from the bodies clogging the Kamo River, Yoshimasa went ahead with the rebuilding of the Muromachi Palace. He also planned to construct another, entirely new palace. According to traditional accounts, the only person who dared reprove this seeming callousness was Emperor Go-Hanazono, who in 1460 sent Yoshimasa a quatrain in Chinese. A chronicle composed some years later described the circumstances leading to the composition of the poem:

In the same year [1461] there was a great famine throughout the land, beginning in the spring. An epidemic of many diseases was also prevalent. Two-thirds of the people died of starvation, and skeletons filled the streets. Nobody passed but was moved to pity. But the shogun at the time, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, had built the Palace of Flowers in the second month of 1459 and doted on the place. Every day he employed people to create [gardens with] mountains, water, plants, and trees, laying out streams and stones. Showing no pity for those who suffered from hunger, he made plans to build still another new palace. At this time the emperor, learning of the plan, sent a poem of his own composition to the shogun:

Survivors scrabble for fern shoots on Mount Shou-yang¹⁰

Everywhere people have shut their doors and chained their bamboo gates.

Poetic inspiration turns sour at the height of spring;

For whom does the whole city burgeon red and green?¹¹

 

After reading the poem, the shogun is said to have felt so ashamed that he ordered a halt to the construction of the new palace. People rejoiced, thinking that the lord had acted like a lord and the vassal like a vassal.¹²

Even if Yoshimasa felt shame when he recognized the sarcasm behind the poem—the emperor implied that only the shogun had the leisure to enjoy the spring—it did not keep him from rebuilding the Muromachi Palace. Moreover, when Emperor Go-Hanazono visited this palace soon after his abdication in 1464, he expressed delight over its many elaborate and beautiful features; he was far from condemning the prodigious expense. The poem attributed to the emperor also failed to stop another construction begun at this time, the Takakura Palace, which Yoshimasa built for his mother. Indeed, the story of the poem with which the emperor rebuked the shogun was probably invented by a chronicler.¹³

Frustrated in his attempts to display the authority of earlier shoguns, Yoshimasa may have decided about this time to abdicate in order to devote himself entirely to aesthetic pleasures. He could not resign, however, until he had a successor. Even a child would have been acceptable, but Yoshimasa had no sons: Hino Tomiko had not conceived since Imamairi’s witchcraft allegedly prevented the safe delivery of her first child. Finally Yoshimasa decided on a plan of persuading his younger half brother, Ashikaga Yoshimi (1439–1491), who had become a Tendai monk as a boy of four, to return to the laity as his designated successor.

Yoshimi was extremely reluctant to leave Buddhist orders. Return to the laity, he said, was unthinkable. He also feared that if he accepted Yoshimasa’s proposal, he might be displaced as Yoshimasa’s heir if Yoshimasa had a son of his own.

In order to relieve this anxiety, Yoshimasa promised that even if he had a son, the son would be placed as an infant in Buddhist orders and there would be no change in the succession. He swore in writing by the gods of heaven and earth, both great and small, that he would abide by these words.¹⁴ Having received this assurance, Yoshimi returned to the laity in 1464 and was recognized as the adopted son of Yoshimasa and Hino Tomiko. He was given a palace, appointed to the fifth court rank, and began to frequent society, often in the company of his new father and mother.¹⁵

Although Yoshimasa now had a successor, he did not retire from office as he had planned, perhaps because he had been informed that Tomiko was with child. In the summer of 1465, the country rejoiced to learn that Tomiko had given birth to a boy.¹⁶ She now bitterly regretted her husband’s solemn promise that Yoshimi (whom she thought of with contempt) would be his successor and sought to find some way to have her son replace him. She secretly sent word to Yamana Sōzen, the most powerful of the military governors, asking him to place her son under his protection. She explained in her letter that having been granted a child at the advanced age of thirty, she could not bear to have him taken from her and put in a temple where his head would be shaved and he would be dressed in black robes.

When Sōzen read Tomiko’s letter, he reasoned that if Yoshimi succeeded to the post of shogun he would certainly favor Hosokawa Katsumoto, who had acted like a father to him, and that this would be disadvantageous to the Yamana family. Although Sōzen foresaw the likelihood of conflict between his allies and those of Katsumoto, this did not deter him, for a war would give him an opportunity to destroy his rivals. He told Tomiko that he would accept her request.¹⁷

This was the immediate cause of the Ōnin War, during which the Yamana family supported Yoshihisa, the son of Tomiko, against Yoshimi, who was supported by the Hosokawa. In the first paragraph of Ōnin ki, the author blames Yoshimasa, and especially the women around Yoshimasa, for the turmoil into which the country was plunged by the war:

The fault lay with his lordship, the Shogun Yoshimasa, who was the seventh shogun after Takauji. Instead of entrusting the affairs of the country to his worthy ministers, Yoshimasa governed solely by the wishes of such ignorant wives and nuns as Lady Tomiko, Lady Shigeko, and Kasuga-no-tsubone. Yet these women did not know the difference between right and wrong and were ignorant of public office and the ways of government. Orders were given freely from the muddle of drinking parties and lustful pleasure-seeking. Bribery was freely dispensed.¹⁸

Blaming national misfortune on the influence of women was not new. The woes of Chinese emperors were frequently attributed to women who “overturned the state” (keisei), and in Japan the dangers implicit in the emperor’s passionate love for Kiritsubo is evoked on the first page of The Tale of Genji:

His court looked with very great misgivings upon what seemed a reckless infatuation. In China such an unreasoning passion had been the undoing of an emperor and had spread turmoil throughout the land. As the resentment grew, the example of Yang Kueifei was the one most frequently cited against the lady.¹⁹

The behavior of Yoshimasa’s mother, Hino Shigeko, and his wife, Hino Tomiko, was held up by diarists of the time as an extreme example of the pernicious influence of women. It was to comfort Shigeko, who had been distressed at not being allowed to visit the beautiful garden of the Saihō-ji (because women were strictly prohibited inside this temple), that in 1462 Yoshimasa built at the new Takakura Palace a replica of the Saihō-ji garden. Even though this was an act of filial piety, diarists of the time did not praise Yoshimasa’s decision to build a luxurious palace, decorated by the finest artists, immediately after a famine.

Yoshimasa’s seeming inability to control Tomiko’s greed earned him the contempt of modern writers, who share the dismay of the author of Ōnin ki regarding women who meddle in government affairs. However, the outstanding scholar of the age, Ichijō Kaneyoshi (1402–1481), in “Sayo no nezame” (Waking at Night), a work written in about 1473, expressed quite a different opinion about the role of women in government:

In general, women follow their parents when they are young, their husbands as adults, and their sons in old age and, for this reason, do not make a name for themselves in the world. They are expected to be gentle and pliant. But this land of Japan is called wakoku [land of harmony and peace] and, for that reason, should be governed by women. The great goddess Amaterasu was a woman, and the empress Jingū, who was the mother of the bodhisattva Hachiman [the god of war], attacked and pacified the kingdoms of Shiragi and Kudara [in Korea] and founded this Land of Reed Plains…. Therefore, no one should be looked down on because she is a woman. In ancient times many female emperors augustly ruled. Even now, if there were a truly august woman, she should rule the nation.²⁰

Kaneyoshi seems to have been currying favor with Tomiko when he wrote this, but perhaps he really believed that women were particularly qualified to rule Japan, despite the many examples of disaster that were conventionally attributed to their influence.

Regardless of whether Tomiko’s influence was beneficial to the nation, it can hardly be doubted that her intense desire to have her own son become the next shogun, even if this obliged Yoshimasa to violate his solemn vow to Yoshimi, was a cause of the outbreak of war. Many other causes would be listed in a political or economic history of the age. Succession disputes in the Hatakeyama and Shiba families served to polarize the Yamana and the Hosokawa, the two main combatants during the ensuing war. There also were negative causes: if the shogunate had been led by a strong shogun like Yoshimitsu or Yoshinori, the war probably would not have taken place.

The most unusual feature of the war as it developed was the almost total lack of involvement by the shogun (and the emperor) in a war that destroyed the city of Kyoto, where both remained during the ten years of warfare. Although the chronicler of Ōnin ki was biased against Tomiko and other women of the shogun’s court, he did not neglect to blame men for the outbreak of war. Yoshimasa, of course, was rebuked for both his extravagance and his fatal lack of leadership. Ise Sadachika, Yoshimasa’s longtime mentor, who was treated even more harshly, was denounced as a corrupt official whose judgments at the Administrative Headquarters (Mandokoro), over which he presided, favored whoever paid him the largest bribe.

Sadachika’s “craving for pleasures of the flesh” and “lustful affairs” were also prominently mentioned in Ōnin ki as typifying the corruption of the times. It is ironic that this man should now be best known for the pious “maxims” he prepared to guide his “stupid son.” These teachings, with which Yoshimasa was certainly familiar, emphasized the importance of worshiping Buddha and the Japanese gods but also dealt with such worldly matters as the correct behavior for an official, the courtesy appropriate to dealing with people regardless of class, and the desirable artistic accomplishments for a gentleman. Naturally, Sadachika’s maxims say nothing about the pleasures of lust or of bribe taking, but Yoshimasa may have been influenced in this respect by what he knew of Sadachika’s private life, quite apart from the maxims. Sadachika’s influence in forming the character of the young shogun could hardly be said to have been beneficial. It certainly did not prepare Yoshimasa for the role of a leader in times of war.

The conflict that became known as the Ōnin War began with the dispute between two warring factions within the Hatakeyama family over the succession to the office of shogunal deputy. The dispute curiously paralleled the division within the shogun’s family: having failed to produce a male heir, Hatakeyama Mochikuni adopted his nephew and solemnly promised to make Masanaga his heir. Not long afterward, one of Mochikuni’s concubines gave birth to a son, Yoshinari. Mochikuni became extremely fond of Yoshinari, and when he retired in 1450 he attempted to make him his heir, despite the binding promise to Masanaga. Both men had powerful backers. In 1454 Mochikuni secured a directive from the shogun confirming Yoshinari’s succession as head of the family, but soon afterward Yoshimasa took a dislike to Yoshinari and refused to recognize his claims. His irresolute actions undoubtedly contributed to the tension between the two factions. Fighting broke out between the supporters of the rival cousins and continued sporadically for a decade until Masanaga returned in triumph to the capital in 1464 and was proclaimed as the shogunal deputy.²¹

This should have ended the dispute, but in fact it dragged on and eventually became intertwined with the dispute between Yoshimi and Yoshihisa and with a similar dispute over the headship of the Shiba family. It is extremely difficult to remember the events and names of all who were involved, but the most important fact is that the Hosokawa and Yamana families, which had been allied by marriage, had grown apart and were backing opposing factions.

At this time, the Yamana family, whose fortunes were rising, supported the defeated Hatakeyama Yoshinari and secured Yoshimasa’s permission for him to return to the capital. Yoshimasa was apparently so intimidated by Yamana Sōzen that he cancelled Masanaga’s appointment as shogunal deputy. Sōzen, confident of his control over the shogun, demanded next that Hosokawa Katsumoto cease to support Masanaga, and Yoshimasa, under Sozen’s influence, sent a warning to this effect. Katsumoto’s response was to summon troops to his mansion to prepare for war. Yoshimasa, alarmed by the likelihood of war, ordered, in an atypical show of firmness, both Yamana and Hosokawa to stay out of the Hatakeyama dispute.

Hosokawa Katsumoto obeyed the shogun’s order, but Yamana Sōzen secretly sent assistance to Yoshinari. Masanaga, who had reports that Katsumoto’s support was weakening, decided to attack, hoping that this would rouse Katsumoto into action. On learning that Masanaga had burned down his own house as a sign that the course he was about to take was irreversible, Yoshimasa feared that he might occupy the nearby imperial palace. He hastily moved the emperor and retired emperor to safety in the Palace of Flowers.

The Ōnin War²² broke out at dawn on the eighteenth day of the first month of the second year of Bunshō, or February 22, 1467.²³ The place was the Kami Goryō Shrine to the north of Kyoto, not far from the imperial palace. Fighting began in the afternoon, but as the day came to a close it was still not clear which side had won. Masanaga appealed to Katsumoto for reinforcements, but Katsumoto, obeying Yoshimasa’s order to stay out of the dispute, did not respond. Sensing defeat, Masanaga asked Katsumoto for a gift of saké, intending to drink a farewell cup, but Katsumoto sent an arrow instead, meaning that Masanaga should fight gallantly to the death. Masanaga was defeated and fled. Fifty or sixty of his men were killed. Others took refuge in the Shōkoku-ji, where they committed suicide the next morning.

The fighting at the Goryō Shrine was on a small scale. Masanaga probably had only about five hundred men and Yoshinari, about a thousand. The Yamana had helped Yoshinari, but Katsumoto studiously avoided violating Yoshimasa’s command, perhaps out of respect for the shogunate, but more likely because his forces were not yet ready. The Yamana forces exulted in the victory, and it seemed that the fighting was over. The emperor and retired emperor moved back to the imperial palace. The nobles decided that the reign-name Bunshō had been the cause of the warfare and, praying for peace, changed it to Ōnin. The illusion that peace had been restored did not last long, however. Having decided that it was useless to try to reach a political settlement with the Yamana, Katsumoto expedited his preparations for war.