Ashikaga Takauji

Japanese shogun (1338-1358)

• Born: 1305
• Birthplace: Ashikaga, Japan
• Died: June 7, 1358
• Place of death: Kyoto, Japan

Through dogged military prowess and ruthless political decisiveness, Ashikaga Takauji prevented Japan from swinging back to an outdated Chinese-style imperial government and placed power fully in the hands of rising new military clans. The Ashikaga shogunate that he founded hastened innovations in politics, culture, and economics.

Early Life

Ashikaga Takauji (ah-shee-kah-gah tah-kah-ew-jee) was born in 1305, the son of Ashikaga Sadauji of the Seiwa Genji branch of the Minamoto clan, which had founded the first shogunate, or military government, at Kamakura in 1185. His mother was of the Hōjō family, which had dominated the latter years of the Kamakura shogunate (1185-1333). The only portrait reputed to be of Takauji shows him mounted in a heroic pose, brandishing his curved sword in full armor. He is bullnecked with a black mustache and goatee. It is typical of the battle portraits of the day. In fact, Takauji was thoroughly typical of a time in which, paradoxically, family loyalties and spartan courage were revered but betrayal and intrigue played a major part in politics.

The Kamakura shogunate under which Takauji was reared exemplified the Japanese genius for maintaining the fiction of an emperor while allowing administration by the military powers. The charade of an emperor “appointing” a shogun to oversee the details of politics served to protect the imperial court, rendering the emperor a mere figurehead. Courtiers and warriors alike drew their incomes from agricultural estates called shōen, which were overseen by stewards appointed by the shogun. Provincial military governors, like the Ashikaga, were appointed by and owed their loyalties to the Kamakura shogunate.

Although the system had been stable for more than a century, unrest was growing by the beginning of the fourteenth century. Dwindling returns from the shōen led everyone to seek a larger share. In 1318, the emperor Go-Daigo (r. 1318-1339), heir to one of the two family lines that systematically alternated in the imperial reign, legally acceded to the throne and began a movement to take back into the emperor's hands all administrative power. In 1333, the shogunate, determined to exterminate this movement, dispatched an army under the command of Takauji.

Life's Work

There was widespread resentment in Japan against the Kamakura shogunate, which, having grown stale and overly complex at the top, was unable to distribute satisfactory rewards. Sensing this, Takauji suddenly declared for the emperor and promptly seized the shogunate's offices in Kyoto, while another army attacked and captured the shogunate's main headquarters at Kamakura. Victory over the Hōjō gave Go-Daigo his chance to assert direct personal imperial rule. Known as the Kemmu Restoration, from 1333 to 1336, it was a naïve and unrealistic program to bring the institutions of military rule under long-superseded organs of pre-1185 imperial government. Takauji, who aspired to be shogun, was bypassed in favor of Go-Daigo's son, Prince Morinaga. By 1335, Takauji had turned against Go-Daigo, whom he drove out of Kyoto, and proceeded to set up the emperor Komyō (r. 1336-1348) of the rival alternate line in his place. Go-Daigo thereupon fled to the town of Yoshino, south of Kyoto, where he and his successors maintained their claim as rightful rulers. From 1336 to 1392, therefore, two emperors contested the throne. The period, known as the Northern and Southern Courts (Nanboku-cho), is one of extensive fighting during which, until his death, Takauji strove to maintain his vision of a new order.

Takauji received the title of shogun from the emperor of the northern court at Kyoto in 1338 and thus became the first in a line of Ashikaga shoguns who ruled Japan as military dictators for the next 235 years. During most of his time as shogun, Takauji had to deal simultaneously with the civil war against the supporters of the southern court and with the infighting among his own supporters. The internal strife centered on the antagonism between Takauji's brother, Ashikaga Tadayoshi, and the vassal chieftains Ko no Moronao and his brother Ko no Moroyasu. Tadayoshi had closely supported his brother in his defeat of the Kamakura shogunate and then in his turnabout against Go-Daigo. Takauji's shogunate, in fact, divided responsibilities between Takauji, who handled military affairs, and Tadayoshi, who oversaw many of the judicial and administrative matters. An able administrator, Tadayoshi at first worked harmoniously with his brother.

Moronao, a loyal vassal with high ambitions, was charged with military recruitment among the small clans in the Kyoto area. In this capacity, he sought to dispossess court nobles of their shōen in order to offer further rewards to the military. Tadayoshi, fundamentally more conservative than either Moronao or Takauji, opposed this plan and plotted to have Moronao assassinated. The plot was discovered, and Tadayoshi was ordered, as punishment, to become a monk in 1349. In 1350, he offered his services to the southern court and then attacked his own brother in 1351, killing Moronao in battle. In turn, he was defeated and taken prisoner. Takauji evidently had him poisoned in 1352. Fratricide was not uncommon in medieval Japan, but the disarray it caused among Takauji's allies kept the southern court's fortunes alive longer than might have been expected. Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1358, Takauji managed to bequeath to his son Ashikaga Yoshiakira a fairly stable regime that had at last overcome its internal strife and eliminated the offensive power of the southern court.

The atmosphere in which two imperial courts battled for legitimacy had produced more than its share of dissidents, rebels, double-crossers, and malcontents. That meant that Takauji and his successors had to be both able generals and fast-footed administrators. Takauji had to innovate for his political survival by establishing a government significantly different from that of Kamakura predecessors while still retaining whatever shreds of tradition would lend legitimacy to his rule. The basic Ashikaga code, the Kemmu Formulary of 1336, was declared to be an addendum to the Kamakura Code established in 1232. Also, Takauji appointed many Kamakura bureaucrats in a bid for legitimacy based on continuity. He also eliminated many encrusted and outdated layers of bureaucracy inhabited by imperial aristocrats and recruited new social elements, including merchants, whose talents answered the needs of a society and an economy that was changing and expanding. He and his successors, moreover, were willing to promote mercantile wealth and, eventually, to license foreign trade, which speeded diversification away from self-centered agrarianism.

Takauji chose to place his shogunate in Kyoto, the old imperial capital, partly to distance himself from the failed Kamakura shogunate but principally to take advantage of the prestige of being at the seat of the imperial government. Militarily, Kyoto was a more strategically central location. The surrounding region was the most agriculturally productive area in Japan. Because of its long association with the imperial government, it was one of the few truly urban areas of Japan at that time, with a comparatively large market. The interaction between this market and the growing production was to produce the core of a sophisticated money economy, with a large free-labor class working for wages, an advanced credit and banking system, and an active craft producing establishment.

Takauji took care not to ignore the outlying areas. The eastern provinces, which were the heartland of many in the Ashikaga camp, were particularly volatile. Takauji shifted trusted officials back and forth between Kyoto and the eastern administrative center of Kamakura. Takauji himself ruled from Kamakura during his struggle with Tadayoshi and left his son Yoshiakira there for a time. In the process, Kamakura took on the status of “deputy shogunate.” In the southern island of Kyushu, where the Ashikaga had no real vassal ties, Takauji established a permanent shogunate representative.

The finances of the Kamakura shogunate had been based on fixed shares of the incomes of supervisory estate stewards and of the provincial governors, all of which were appointed by the shogun from among those with vassal ties to the shogun's family. Thus, they relied for their revenues on loyalties that were almost familial. Takauji presided over a much more complex and potentially unstable structure, so he sought to immunize himself from dependence on vassal ties for taxation by supporting his government directly from the Ashikaga estates, some sixty shōen scattered throughout the country. He continued the practice of appointing military governors to provinces, and his main authority was exerted through these governors, but his government income was personal. Takauji died in 1358.

Significance

When his regime was first founded, Takauji asked his legal experts for advice on the shaping of his government. They responded, “Does one follow the path of an overturned wagon?” The meaning he evidently derived from this response was that, while precedent must not be utterly violated, one must be willing to carve new paths in a brutal and uncertain world. Takauji and his successors, in fact, introduced the bulk of Japan's major political innovations for the next three centuries. Yet the meaning of most of what he had set in motion by his victories and by his political arrangements was not apparent at the time he died.

It was his grandson, the third Ashikaga shogun Yoshimitsu (ruled 1368-1394), who reaped the economic benefits of foreign trade and enhanced mercantile activity. The later Ashikaga shoguns also witnessed the extraordinary cultural flowering of arts and religion that is the main contribution of feudal Japan to the modern nation. It was during the Ashikaga shogunate that Zen culture permeated art, philosophy, and drama. Takauji was exceptionally pious, a diligent Zen practitioner and talented poet, but it was his successors who saw Zen combine with aristocratic culture to transform the rude samurai into poets, artists, connoisseurs, and meditators.

Major Shoguns of the Ashikaga Shogunate, 1338-1573

Reign

• Shogun

1338-1358

• Ashikaga Takauji

1359-1368

• Ashikaga Yoshiakira

1368-1394

• Ashikaga Yoshimitsu

1395-1423

• Ashikaga Yoshimochi

1423-1425

• Ashikaga Yoshikazu

1429-1441

• Ashikaga Yoshinori

1449-1473

• Ashikaga Yoshimasa

1449-1473

• Ashikaga Yoshikatsu

1474-1489

• Ashikaga Yoshihisa

1490-1493

• Ashikaga Yoshitane

1495-1508

• Ashikaga Yoshizumi

1508-1521

• Ashikaga Yoshitane (second rule)

1522-1547

• Ashikaga Yoshiharu

1547-1565

• Ashikaga Yoshiteru

1568

• Ashikaga Yoshihide

1568-1573

• Ashikaga Yoshiaki

Major Emperors of the Muromachi Period, 1336-1573

Emperors: Southern Court

Reign

• Ruler

1318-1339

• Go-Daigo

1339-1368

• Go-Murakami

1368-1383

• Chōkei

1383-1392

• Go-Kameyama

Ashikaga Pretenders: Northern Court

Reign

• Ruler

1336-1348

• Komyō

1348-1351

• Sukō

1351-1371

• Go-Kogon

1371-1382

• Go-En’yu

Later Emperors

Reign

• Ruler

1382-141

• Go-Komatsu

1412-1428

• Shōkō

1428-1464

• Go-Hanazono

1464-1500

• Go-Tsuchimikado

1500-1526

• Go-Kashiwabara

1526-1557

• Go-Nara

1557-1586

• Ogimachi

Bibliography

Grossberg, Kenneth Alan. Japan’s Renaissance: The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. This volume is a highly literate and knowledgeable account of the economy, bureaucracy, and military of the Ashikaga shoguns. Focusing mainly on Takauji’s successors, Grossberg argues that the Ashikaga shoguns, often dismissed in general histories as presiding over a loose and uncoordinated polity, can be compared favorably to European Renaissance rulers.

Hall, John Whitney. Government and Local Power in Japan, 500-1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. This study grew out of field investigations conducted in the 1950’s in Okayama Prefecture. Despite the title, the book frequently departs from strictly local events to fill in developments in Japan as a whole. Hall’s analysis of land administration and the transformation of provincial governors into leaders of independent principalities has become the point of departure for a whole generation of American scholars.

Kitabatake, Chikafusa. A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: “Jinno shotoki” of Kitabatake Chikafusa. Translated by H. Paul Varley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. A translation of the Jinno shotoki, written in 1339 and revised in 1343 by Kitabatake, a prominent southern court loyalist and the major combatant against Takauji. Kitabatake asserts forcefully the unbroken descent of Japanese emperors from the gods who created Japan, and his chronicle is a polemic for a return to the type of imperial rule Japan had before the shoguns, whose exercise of a monopoly of power he regarded as a perversion.

Sansom, George Bailey. A History of Japan, 1334-1615. Vol. 2. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961. The second volume of a three-volume history of Japan that is arguably the most complete general history of premodern Japan available. This well-illustrated work, based entirely on Japanese sources, is indispensable for anyone writing on medieval Japan. Includes a wealth of detail on the political changes wrought by military defeats and victories, on changing alignments, and on matters of religion and art.

The Taiheiki: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan. Translated by Helen Craig McCullough. 1959. Reprint. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1979. A straightforward translation of one of the most famous of Japanese war tales, ironically titled “the great peace.” Largely favorable to the Ashikaga family, it was compiled sometime between the 1330’s and 1370’s by an unknown person and is the record of the battles and, to some extent, the intrigues of the period during which Takauji was rising to power. Contains an introduction and notes.