In 1953 when I was first living in Kyoto, I often went to a nearby temple, Tōji-in, in order to escape the din of the children in the school next door. The temple was virtually deserted in those days. I never saw a priest, though I was told that one came every week from the Tenryū-ji, a temple of the same branch of Zen. The only persons I ever encountered in the temple were a few young men studying for their university entrance examinations. The temple was neglected. Tall weeds sprouted from the roofs of the gates and temple buildings, and the fusuma-e, the paintings on the sliding doors between the rooms, said to be the work of the celebrated Kano Sanraku, were smudged and torn, especially around the metal fittings. I don’t recall ever seeing a visitor, though even in those days the celebrated stone and sand garden of the nearby Ryōan-ji attracted a constant stream of tourists, both Japanese and foreign. The Tōji-in was an ideal place to study without noise or other interruption.
Apart from the main buildings, the temple includes a small, curving pond in the shape of the character kokoro. Similar ponds are found in the precincts of other Zen temples, perhaps because the use of the mind—one of the meanings of kokoro—is especially important in Zen Buddhism.
Tōji-in was originally founded in the fourteenth century at the foot of Mount Kinugasa, in fulfillment of a vow made by Ashikaga Takauji (1305–1358), the first of the Ashikaga shoguns. His inconspicuous stone gravestone in the temple’s garden is hardly of the magnificence one might expect of the tomb of the man who founded the dynasty of shoguns who ruled Japan from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Indeed, there could be no greater contrast to the elaborate mausoleum erected in memory of the founder of the next dynasty of shoguns, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616).
In recent years, an effort has been made to increase Tōji-in’s appeal as a tourist attraction. The pond, and indeed the whole temple—buildings, gardens, and walls—look far better today than they did when I first knew them, though I remember nostalgically the poetic neglect. The interior of the main building has been refurbished; the fusuma-e are now protected by glass; and a much larger area of garden than I had seen before has been opened to the public. Picture postcards on sale in the temple attest to the beauty of its seasonal flowers and leaves, but I have no recollection of any flowers or colored leaves fifty years ago. For that matter, I even have difficulty in associating picture postcards with the gloomy presence of the Ashikaga shoguns. One small building, however, remains exactly as I remember it from the past: the Reikō-den, the hall where the Ashikaga shoguns are enshrined.
In one of the first articles I wrote in Japanese, I described this building, which had made a powerful impression on me, and said that it was cold even during the torrid Kyoto summer. Probably I was consciously exaggerating, but on a recent visit I definitely felt an uncomfortable chill emanating from the life-size wooden statues ranged on both sides of the hall. The glass eyes of these statues are their most disquieting feature, each face staring past the visitors with unblinking eyes that glow in the dim light inside. Their gaze seems to traverse the centuries, unwavering and unforgetting.
Before coming to Japan, I knew the names of three Ashikaga shoguns: Takauji, Yoshimitsu, and Yoshimasa. I disliked Takauji for what I interpreted as his betrayal of the cause of Go-Daigo, an emperor whose ill-fated struggle to retain his throne gave him a tragic appeal, at least to a romanticist like myself.
I was much more favorably disposed toward Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), the third shogun, because he was the great patron of Zeami and the nō theater. I knew Yoshimitsu’s name also because of the letters he sent to the Chinese court. His readiness to accept the title of King of Japan, bestowed on him by the Chinese and signifying that they considered him to be a loyal vassal, earned Yoshimitsu the hatred of those who, believing in the divine ancestry of the Japanese emperors, could not tolerate servility toward a foreign country.
Hatred of Yoshimitsu was especially strong during the years immediately before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which had as one of its professed goals the return of secular authority to the emperor. In the second month of the third year of Bunkyū (1863), nine men, followers of the Shinto zealot Hirata Atsutane, broke into the Tōji-in and removed the heads of the statues of the first three Ashikaga shoguns: Takauji, Yoshiakira, and Yoshimitsu. They then exposed the heads on the bank of the Kamo River, following the common practice at this time of “patriots” exposing for all to see the heads of men accused of being traitors. Beside the heads of the three shoguns, placards were set up enumerating the crimes of each. Yoshimitsu’s acceptance of the title of King of Japan made him the worst traitor of all.
The heads had been restored to the statues long before I saw them. Of the three, Yoshimitsu’s produced the most powerful impression on me. His mouth is turned down in a disdainful frown and his eyes glare, making him look more like an arrogant despot than a sensitive and generous patron of nō. This is not surprising. Although he was genuinely devoted to the arts, Yoshimitsu was one of the most powerful men of Japanese history: the de facto ruler of the whole country after he reunited in 1392 the two courts into which it had been divided for sixty years, each presided over by an emperor. Some scholars believe that Yoshimitsu’s ambitions went beyond the office of shogun and that he planned to assume the title of emperor himself.1 After Yoshimitsu entered Buddhist orders, he was accorded the title of cloistered sovereign (hōō), and in 1400, after his death, he received the title of dajō tennō (retired emperor).
Yoshimitsu’s reign marked the high point in the political fortunes of the Ashikaga shoguns. He ruled without interference from other military lords or from the emperor, the sacredness of whose person was barely acknowledged. The nobles of the court aristocracy fawned on Yoshimitsu despite the repugnance many felt for someone not of their class; they were aware that they had no choice but to obey.
The shoguns’ dominance over the country ended in 1441 with the assassination of Ashikaga Yoshinori, the sixth shogun, and during the reigns of his successors, the shoguns’ power steadily eroded. When visiting the Reikō-den, I often stopped before the statue of Yoshinori’s son, the seventh shogun, Ashikaga Yoshikatsu (1434–1443). The face and size of the statue make it clear that Yoshikatsu was still a child when he joined the company of deceased shoguns, but like the other shoguns he stares straight ahead, a baton of office (shaku) grasped in his right hand, youthful but by no means childish. I guessed (without bothering to confirm it) that he had been poisoned by someone who desired his office, perhaps a wicked uncle, but as I later learned, Yoshikatsu died of illness.
The statue of Yoshikatsu’s younger brother Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436–1490), the eighth shogun, did not attract my attention, though his face—eyes close together and a small, weak mouth—distinguishes him somewhat from other members of the Ashikaga family. His skimpy beard contrasts especially with Yoshimitsu’s flowing whiskers, as if to indicate that he belonged to a lesser generation. Not for many years did I learn that despite Yoshimasa’s unprepossessing appearance and his many faults as a shogun, husband, and father, he contributed more to Japanese culture than did any other Ashikaga shogun or, it might be argued, anyone else who ever ruled over Japan.
Yoshimasa is remembered by most people as the builder of the Ginkaku-ji, the Temple of the Silver Pavilion, and (unfavorably) as the shogun at the time of the Ōnin War (1467–1477). Following that war, the authority of the shogun all but disappeared, replaced by the rule of provincial military governors (shugo daimyō).2 In a letter to his son written in 1482, the hapless Yoshimasa complained, “The daimyo do as they please and do not follow orders. That means there can be no government.”3 Unable to assert his authority over the daimyos, he turned his back on politics and devoted himself instead to his quest for beauty.
The portrait statues of the Ashikaga shoguns4 in the Tōji-in are not outstanding as sculpture, but they form an imposing, even fearsome, ensemble. The sculptor (or probably many sculptors) is unknown, but the statues seem to date from the early seventeenth century. The oppressively gloomy atmosphere engendered by their dusty ranks seems to confirm the impression that most Japanese have of the medieval period of their history. There are no cheerful anecdotes about the Ashikaga shoguns.
During my stay in Kyoto, I visited almost all the famous temples. At many of them, I was informed that the original buildings, of the greatest splendor, had gone up in flames during the Ōnin War. Hardly a building in the capital escaped destruction. Reading accounts of the desolation left in the wake of the warfare might make one suppose that the capital—for long the only major site of culture in the whole country—had been turned into a wasteland, barren as Carthage is today, but in fact the city rose phoenix-like from its ashes. A new culture, which had originated at Yoshimasa’s mountain retreat in the Higashiyama (Eastern Mountains) area of Kyoto, gave its name to the Higashiyama period (1483–1490) and greatly influenced all subsequent Japanese culture.
During the Ōnin War, Yoshimasa continued to reside in his palace, even though it was situated no more than a few hundred yards from the worst of the fighting. He seems to have spent most of his time admiring his garden and his collection of Chinese paintings. His indifference to the fighting and the suffering it caused may have been exaggerated by chroniclers of the time, but there is no reason to doubt that Yoshimasa, having decided not to participate in the warfare (though as shogun, the supreme military commander, he should have led his troops), devoted himself almost exclusively to aesthetic pleasures.
The Ōnin War led not only to the birth of a new culture but also to the immediate diffusion of culture to the provinces. Poets, painters, and others fled the capital, where almost all the fighting occurred, to take refuge with local potentates. The poets introduced to their often barely literate hosts the literary masterpieces of the past, including the tenth-century anthology of poetry Kokinshū and the eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji, and they taught their hosts how to compose poetry. Even the most barbarous warlord desired the trappings of culture that would enable him to feel like a civilized man.
Above all, the refugee poets taught their hosts how to compose renga (linked verse), the most popular variety of poetry at the time. Renga appealed to the provincial lords not only because it was largely free of the tedious conventions of the waka, the classic verse form, but also because it was flattering to compose poetry with a master from the capital, adding one’s contributions to the “chain” of linked verse.
A renga sequence was normally composed by three or more participants who took turns supplying alternating verses in seventeen and fourteen syllables. Each poet was free to change the direction of the sequence as he saw fit. It was not considered desirable to create the impression that one poet had composed the entire sequence of a hundred or a thousand “links,” but ultimately each participant was sharing in the experience of creating one long poem.
The rules of renga, at least when composed by professionals, were no less demanding than those of waka. However arbitrary they may seem today, these rules had a literary grounding, but the provincial lords who participated in renga sessions probably thought of them as no more than part of an elaborate game. If they could not memorize the rules, their teachers were ready to call attention to infractions. The daimyos enjoyed renga sessions so much that they offered visiting poets months or even years of hospitality.
Renga were composed through the worst of the Onin War. In fact, this was the golden age of renga, perhaps because at a time of destruction and death, composing the linked verses provided occasions for bringing people together to share with friends the pleasure of creating poems. Today the composition of renga is no longer of much interest except to a handful of scholars, but the idea of several people composing an extended poem—whether or not in keeping with rules—has in recent years found exponents even outside Japan, and haiku, which originally was the first link in a chain of renga, rank today as the most popular of all Japanese verse forms.
Poems in Chinese (kanshi), mainly composed by Zen monks, were of major literary importance during the Higashiyama period. For a long time, such poems were dismissed by historians of Japanese literature as mere imitations of Chinese examples, but their importance has been rediscovered in recent years. Of particular interest are the Chinese poems of Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481), a memorably eccentric Zen monk. In contrast, those Buddhist priests who were concerned more with proselytization than with poetry found fertile ground at this time of warfare and death for sowing the seeds of faith. Rennyo (1415–1499) was known especially for his epistles (ofumi) in which he used simple language to explain the essence of salvation through faith in Amida Buddha. The sect of Buddhism he founded, True Pure Land (Jōdo shinshū), became the religion of the Japanese masses.
The nō theater also flourished. Although Zeami, the supreme master of the art, died before the Higashiyama period, his successors frequently performed for Yoshimasa. The austere expression of the no plays was congenial to the Higashiyama taste. Masks made during this period rank as the finest and are used to this day, and the robes bestowed on actors by Yoshimasa after outstanding performances are treasured and still serve as models for new robes.
The bare nō stage itself was a perfect example of the evocative simplicity that had become an aesthetic ideal. An even more typical form of architecture invented during the Higashiyama period, the shoin-zukuri, developed into the most common variety of traditional Japanese houses. Likewise, the gardens surrounding the buildings provided models for the gardens of later centuries.
Many painters, headed by the great Sesshu (1420–1506), were active in both the capital and the provinces. Their most characteristic works were ink paintings (suibokuga), then enjoying a vogue in China, rather than the brightly colored scrolls of earlier times, a further expression of the preference for simplicity and suggestion.
The tea ceremony (chanoyu), another important development in Higashiyama culture, originated in a small room at the Ginkaku-ji where Yoshimasa offered tea to his friends. Today, a tiny wooden ladle (chashaku), even if it is hardly more than a bent piece of bamboo, may be worth a fortune if a connection with Yoshimasa can be established. Most of the tea bowls used in the ceremony today are simpler and sturdier than the Chinese ceramics that Yoshimasa himself preferred, but they harmonize even better with the bare interiors of the rooms where he first drank tea with his friends. Flower arrangement developed along with the tea ceremony, enhancing the rooms with the beauty and spiritual qualities of blossoms artistically arranged in ceramic vases.
The soul (kokoro) of Japan, the aesthetic preferences of the Japanese, was shaped in this period probably more than in any other. But even though Yoshimasa played a leading part in the formation of Japanese taste, his achievements have not brought him a favorable reputation. Rather, he is most often depicted by historians as a spiritual weakling, completely under the dominance of his wife, Hino Tomiko. His extravagance, his incompetence in dealing with state business, and his inability to succor the people in times of famine or to end the meaningless Onin War are deplored, quite properly. And in the eyes of most historians, his virtues, particularly his encouragement of the arts, have not compensated for his faults.
Unfortunately, the surviving documents do not enable us to create a rounded portrait of Yoshimasa. We know many facts about his life, and they do help us visualize what it was like for him and others to live in the Japan of the fifteenth century, but neither his poems nor the facts of his private life enable us to come close to him. We can, however, imagine the salient features of his personality from his aesthetic preferences, especially after he had freed himself from shogunal duties and lived as he pleased at the Higashiyama retreat. We can tell, for example, that although he profoundly respected Yoshimitsu, he had no desire to emulate his grandfather’s grandeur.
Perhaps Yoshimasa’s preferences toward the end of his life were influenced to some extent by economic necessity: simple structures like those at the Higashiyama retreat cost less than an elaborately decorated palace. But surely that was not the main reason why the architecture at Higashiyama so little resembles that of the Kinkaku-ji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, built by Yoshimitsu. The simplicity and reliance on suggestion of the buildings and gardens at Higashiyama may indicate that a man who had earlier exhausted the pleasures of extravagance had at last achieved a kind of enlightenment. Yoshimasa’s seeming incapability to act, even when warfare reached his doorstep, may also be interpreted not as the callous indifference of a tyrant but as the result of the despair felt by a civilized human being who could find no solution to endless warfare. It was less admirable, no doubt, to withdraw from the world than it would have been to face courageously the terrible problems facing Japan, but Yoshimasa’s withdrawal from society enriched Japanese culture far more than any display of courage of which he might have been capable.
The retreat that Yoshimasa built in Higashiyama is popularly known as the Ginkaku-ji, or Temple of the Silver Pavilion, a name that appropriately suggests a humbler version of Yoshimitsu’s Kinkaku-ji, or Temple of the Golden Pavilion, built some eighty years earlier. Unlike the gilded Kinkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion was never decorated with silver leaf. The name instead suggests an age less brilliant than Yoshimitsu’s Age of Gold. The arts that Yoshimasa favored—the tea ceremony, ink painting, the nō, and the rest—had the unobtrusive elegance of oxidized silver.
In 1449, the year when Yoshimasa assumed the duties of shogun, the reigning emperor was Go-Hanazono (1419–1470). Although he was shown respect, the emperor exercised little or no influence over the country’s administration, and he hardly figures in histories of the period except as an accomplished waka poet. During the Ōnin War, when the palace where the emperor and former emperor lived was threatened by the fighting, both men moved without protest to Yoshimasa’s palace at a word of command.
The emperor during the war, Go-Tsuchimikado (1442–1500; reigned from 1464), was not asked his preference between the two sides. He had no soldiers at his disposal and was protected only by the aura surrounding the throne. Unlike China, where dynasties were overthrown when they could no longer withstand their enemies, Japan had been ruled by a single dynasty from its earliest history, a fact that seems to have inhibited those (like Yoshimitsu) who could easily have seized the throne whenever they desired. The shogun ranked next in prestige after the emperor, though the old court ranks of chancellor (kanpaku) and the like still ranked higher in principle if not in fact.
In 1449 Japan was still largely controlled by the bakufu, the “tent government,” or shogunate. The first shogun, Yoritomo (1147–1199), led soldiers of the Minamoto clan during its successful battles for power at the end of the twelfth century. Although the Minamoto were of noble lineage, Yoritomo had lived for most of his life away from the capital, and in 1192 when he established his bakufu, the first warrior government, he chose as the site Kamakura in the east, not far from modern Tokyo.
The bakufu was much better organized than earlier governments. It had well-organized administrative organs in Kamakura and maintained control over the rest of the country through estate stewards (jitō), whose loyalty in the wars had been rewarded with grants of the land they managed, and by constables (shugo), who were chosen from among vassals to maintain the peace in different parts of the country. Historians discuss the lord–vassal relationship prevailing under the Kamakura bakufu in terms of feudalism, even though the appropriateness of this European term has been questioned. The Kamakura bakufu ruled the country successfully for about 150 years. But the cost of the defeat of the two Mongol invasions in 1274 and 1281 put the Kamakura bakufu in serious economic difficulties, as victory over the Mongols had not brought the usual spoils of war (such as the lands of the defeated) that could be apportioned among meritorious vassals.
Civil war between the senior and junior lines descended from Emperor Go-Saga (1220–1272) also helped weaken the Kamakura bakufu at the end of the thirteenth century, and it finally was overthrown in 1333. Emperor Go-Daigo (1288–1339), who had been banished by the bakufu to the Oki Islands in the previous year for having planned a revolt against its authority, escaped and led the movement to restore executive power to the throne. His followers, at first few in number, won victories against bakufu troops, inducing other forces that had become discontent with the bakufu to join them. Chief of these allies was Ashikaga Takauji, a member of a branch of the Minamoto family that owned extensive estates. Takauji had been sent with a powerful army to defeat the supporters of Go-Daigo but then changed sides, ensuring victory for the imperial cause and the end of the Kamakura bakufu.
Go-Daigo, restored to the throne and possessing greater powers than any emperor had for many years, did not govern wisely. His decision to build a lavish new palace at a time when the treasury was exhausted resulted in unreasonable demands for funds from landowners and led to general discontent. The revival of direct imperial rule under Go-Daigo lasted for only three years.
Although he had been amply rewarded for his part in the revival of imperial power, Ashikaga Takauji became increasingly restive under the new regime. He was particularly angered by the haughty manners of the nobles surrounding Go-Daigo, who treated him as a boorish soldier. So he finally decided to change sides once again, this time with an eye to establishing a new bakufu with himself at the head.
A series of battles between Takauji and the forces loyal to Go-Daigo ended in 1336 with the emperor fleeing the capital, eventually taking refuge in the mountains of Yoshino. Takauji set up a prince of the northern line as the new emperor. Go-Daigo, refusing to abdicate, established a court in Yoshino, initiating a period of sixty years when there were two rival courts, one in Kyoto and the other in Yoshino. Takauji was appointed as shogun by the northern (Kyoto) emperor, and two years later, in 1338, he established his bakufu in Kyoto rather than in Kamakura. The Ashikaga bakufu lasted until 1588 when Yoshiaki, the fifteenth and last shogun, abdicated. Of the last seven shoguns, only Yoshimasa’s son Yoshihisa (1465–1489) is more than a name in the Ashikaga family genealogy.
In retrospect, the Ashikaga period (also known as the Muromachi period after the section of Kyoto where Ashikaga Yoshimitsu built his “Palace of Flowers”) might seem almost unrelievedly dark because of the wars and the way the wars affected the lives of members of the court and other educated people. If we turn, however, from those at the court to the humbler classes, as described in the popular fiction of the time,5 we find stories showing that despite the warfare, the period for many commoners was far from being a time of unvarying gloom. The hero of these stories is often a commoner who, by dint of hard work and mother wit, becomes fabulously rich and may even marry a princess. Granted that these stories are fiction and not fact, they could exert their appeal only if in some way they reflected the society. The Ashikaga period is frequently characterized as age of gekokujō, or those underneath conquering those above. The constant warfare, especially during the first half of the sixteenth century, caused meaningless slaughter and destroyed much of the heritage from the past, but it gave those of exceptional strength or intelligence a chance to rise above their station.
If gekokujō was welcome to those below, it was a nightmare to those above. Ichijō Kaneyoshi (1402–1481), the kanpaku at the time of the outbreak of the Ōnin War, was one of the most fortunate members of society. He enjoyed universal respect for his scholarship, had a large and distinguished family, and owned perhaps the finest library of the time. His house was destroyed in the fighting, but the library, because it was roofed with tiles and had earthen walls, withstood the fires that swept the city. “But,” he recalled,
bandits of the neighborhood, supposing that there must be money inside, soon broke their way in. They scattered the hundreds of boxes that had been the haunt of bookworms, and not one volume was left of all the Japanese and Chinese works that had been passed down in my family for over ten generations. I felt exactly like an old crane forced to leave its nest, or a blind man who has lost his stick.6
Even though he was the highest-ranking noble in the country, Kaneyoshi was forced to take refuge in Nara, where his son was the abbot of the great monastery Kōfuku-ji. He remained in exile from the capital for ten years.
While in Nara, Kaneyoshi devoted himself to a study of The Tale of Genji and other classics. The old culture, brutally mauled by the swords and flaming brands of ignorant soldiers, could still provide comfort and support to those like Kaneyoshi who looked back with longing to the Heian past. Others, not content with merely studying the classics, wrote pastiches in the language and manner of three hundred years earlier, only inadvertently betraying the fact that they lived in a totally dissimilar age.
Unlike the writers of the prose pastiches, the most important poets of the Higashiyama era wrote a new kind of poetry, renga, that had antecedents in traditional poetry but was distinctly of its own time. The other arts, whether visual or performing, were also essentially new and strongly influenced Japanese culture in the future. Under the guidance of the former shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the Higashiyama era represented a kind of cultural renaissance in the wake of the worst destruction Japan had ever experienced.7