Japanese History： The Muromachi Period (1336-1573), Pt. 1 (The Northern and Southern Courts)

The Kamakura Bakufu has fallen, and for the first time in more than a hundred years, Japan's emperor stands alone as the sole leader of his country. Confident, vigorous, and full of ideas, Emperor Godaigo surely has nothing to look forward to but a long and successful reign of progress and peace. Or does he? Stay tuned to see if Japan's inspired new sovereign can carry out his ambitious vision for the country, or if his plans will all disintegrate into a disordered mess of rampant chaos and warfare. Hint, it's the second one. It's definitely going to be the second one. All that and more on this 15th episode of Japanese History The Textbook, right here on the Buyuuden Japanese History Channel. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Japanese History The Textbook, the series where we trace the course of Japanese history through the ages, using Japanese language educational materials as our guide. As always, if you'd like to find out what exact sources I'm using, you can find them down in the video description, or just check out some of my older videos where I introduce them in a bit more depth. On today's episode, we at last enter the Muromachi period, Japan's final age of medieval history, which spanned over 200 years and witnessed a whirlwind of political chaos and social evolution. While the Muromachi period itself is fairly long, running from about 1336 to 1573, it contains a couple of sub-eras that make it easy to break down into smaller chunks, namely the Northern and Southern Courts period that constitutes its first half-century or so, and the Warring States or Sengoku period, which takes up roughly its final hundred years. On today's episode, we will take a look at that first phase, the Northern and Southern Courts period, as well as several decades of what I suppose you could call the Vanilla Muromachi period that immediately follow it. I do want to warn you that this episode is going to get rather complex in comparison to prior episodes, with a lot of new names and terminology flying around. Without spoiling too much, this period of Japanese history was a bit of a clusterf**k, for lack of a better word, but I have done my best to streamline my explanations as much as possible without losing any of the key info that a Japanese high school student, for example, would be expected to remember. Prepare yourself to potentially get a little confused, and if you do, don't sweat it too much, just try to hang on and absorb as much of the big picture as you can. With that said, I have no other announcements of note for this video, and I'm sure anyone coming off of part three of my Kamakura period series is eager to hear how our story progresses, so without further ado, let's jump right in. Japanese History The Textbook Episode 15 The Muromachi Period Part 1 On our last episode, we watched as Japan's Emperor Godaigo overthrew the country's warrior government, the Kamakura Bakufu, with the help of a great number of the Bakufu's own warrior constituents who were fed up with the way the organization had come to be managed in its last few decades of existence. To briefly review, Godaigo came to the throne as the representative of one of two branches of the imperial family who had spent much of the Kamakura period taking turns filling the position of emperor. Godaigo was a man who was both ambitious and nostalgic for past eras when Japan's emperors still held real political power, and one of his primary goals became finding a way to make himself the country's undisputed sovereign not just on paper, but in practice as well. To do this, he resolved to overthrow the Kamakura Bakufu, which supported the two-branch succession system, and after failed attempts in 1324 and 1331, he at last succeeded in 1333. A huge factor in Godaigo's ultimate triumph was his success in winning over a number of the country's powerful bushi warriors to his cause, the foremost of these being Ashikaga Takauji, an extremely high-ranking member of the Kamakura Bakufu with Minamoto blood and marriage ties to the Hojo. Takauji's defection to the Godaigo side dealt the Bakufu a mortal blow, leading numerous other warriors to join the imperialist cause in a short civil war which ended with the capture of Kamakura and the mass suicide of most of the important members of the Hojo clan. Takauji will play a hugely important role in today's episode too, but for the moment, let's set him aside for a bit and take a look at the victorious Emperor Godaigo's actions in the immediate aftermath of the Bakufu's fall. In 1333, Emperor Godaigo began a new regime philosophically modeled after the mid-Heian period emperors Daigo and Murakami, whose reigns he saw as the ideal of emperor-centric rule. We refer to Godaigo's regime today as the Kemu no Shinsei, meaning the new government of the Kemu era, or sometimes as the Kemu no Chuukou, meaning the Kemu Restoration, a term referring to the Japanese aristocracy's return to power. Kemu, of course, was the new era name which Godaigo had instituted following the fall of the Kamakura Bakufu, as we discussed at the end of our last episode. Godaigo's regnal name, by the way, is a direct reference to the aforementioned Emperor Daigo, and the emperor is in fact said to have chosen it himself. Given that an emperor's regnal name was traditionally assigned to them by others after their death, this was quite an abnormal occurrence, and it clearly illustrates how much of a willful idealist Godaigo was. The go within the name means after, and implies Godaigo's perception of himself as Daigo's spiritual successor. One of Godaigo's first orders of business was to begin working toward reviving the imperial court's ritsuryo-style central bureaucracy, which by this point in history had largely ceased to function. Godaigo began appointing top-level aristocrats to head the court's eight ministries, which he reorganized to operate directly under his own personal direction, and he also breathed life back into the old kokushi governor positions, which had mostly lost their relevance thanks to the chigyokoku proprietary province system that had taken hold in the late Heian period. More than anything, Godaigo also placed a major emphasis on strengthening the authority of the office of emperor itself, declaring that from here on the only means of guaranteeing land rights was through an imperial decree called a rinji, issued personally by his own hand. As a result of these various reforms, Japan's aristocratic elite suffered a great economic blow, and they suddenly found themselves in a position where their income would, going forward, largely depend on how well they could curry favor with the emperor himself. Godaigo's new regime was focused around several key institutions which he set up to handle the major aspects of government. The foremost of these was the kirokujo, literally the place of records, an office which handled most of the new government's major administrative decisions by serving as a sort of advisory think tank for the emperor. Another important new institution was the zassoketsudansho, whose name can be awkwardly translated as the place for deciding miscellaneous court cases, and whose function was pretty much exactly what that name would lead you to expect, as it was an office for handling legal disputes, specifically legal disputes involving land. A third key institution which Godaigo established was the onshokata, the rewards commission, which handled the duty of rewarding the various parties who had contributed to Godaigo's victory against the forces of the kamakura bakufu. Interestingly, all these institutions were staffed by a combination of both aristocrats and warriors, reflecting both the diverse cast of characters who had helped return Godaigo to the throne, and indicating Godaigo's own perception of himself as having absorbed the duties of the fallen bakufu to become a supreme sovereign who governed the whole of society. This concept was further illustrated by Godaigo's policies in regard to the provinces, where in addition to the aforementioned kokushi governors, he also continued the kamakura bakufu's tradition of placing shugo constables to take charge of provincial military and policing affairs. Furthermore, he set up regional government headquarters in the eastern and northern parts of the country, the kamakura shougunfu and the mutsu shougunfu, respectively, and he sent his own sons, the imperial princes, to serve as figurehead leaders with the support and guidance of trusted and experienced advisors. Godaigo is famously recorded to have once remarked that, yesterday's innovations are today's traditions, and my innovations today shall become the traditions of the future, a quote which clearly illustrates just how confident he was that he would go down in history as an inventive visionary. As is so apt to happen in life, however, reality did not conform to Godaigo's plans for it, and his new government would ultimately last just three short years before collapsing under the weight of its own shortcomings. One of the new government's biggest weaknesses was its idealistic insistence that the emperor be centrally involved in every single affair of government, unintentionally placing a workload on Godaigo so mammoth that no mortal human, no matter how smart or talented, could ever hope to handle. This was particularly evident with the aforementioned policy requiring all land rights to be guaranteed by a personal decree from the emperor himself. Upon hearing of this, people began flocking to the capital by the thousands in hopes of having their land ownership recognized by the government, and the new Zasso Ketsudansho judicial office quickly found itself so backed up with cases that it had practically ceased to function. The situation was further complicated by the fact that many people apparently tried to capitalize on the chaos to obtain decrees guaranteeing land which they did not rightfully own. Godaigo's shiny new government institutions slowed to a crawl and quickly began to lose the trust of the people they had been established to govern. It also didn't help that a lot of the actual concrete policies which Godaigo embarked upon, such as imposing heavy taxes to rebuild the imperial palace or declaring his intent to replace popularly circulating foreign currencies with a natively minted one, did not go over well with his subjects. The Kemmu government's dysfunction and the mayhem which that brought about is perhaps transmitted to us best by a piece of satirical graffiti which is said to have been anonymously left on display not far from Godaigo's government headquarters in Kyoto in the eighth month of 1334. The start of the composition, likely written by a fairly high-class native denizen of the city, reads as follows. Let me tell you what is popular in the capital as of late. Night burglaries, muggings, counterfeit imperial decrees, prisoners, urgent courier horses, senseless commotion, freshly cut heads rolling in the streets, monks becoming laypeople, laypeople suddenly fancying themselves monks, average men who've been made great and great men who've been made destitute in the span of a day, men inventing wars for the sake of land and rewards, plaintiffs far from home with their boxes of land deeds, flatterers, slanderers, monks playing politician, men who've risen far beyond their rightful rank, and the emperor's Ketsudansho which will hire damn near anyone no matter how untalented. The graffiti's message goes on substantially longer, but I think you get the gist. From the point of view of Kyoto's traditional high society, the capital, and by extension the country, was going to hell in a handbasket. Beyond the simple failure of his government on a policy level, perhaps one of the other largest factors which spelled doom for Godaigo's ambitions was his rejection of the very concept of a bakufu, and his attempt to return to a world where Japan's warriors were governed by the same institutions as everyone else. The bushi had spent well over a century now being accustomed to having their own institutions to look after their needs as a powerful and unique stratum of society, but now thrown back into the same barrel as the aristocracy and the clergy and submitted to the whims of a government that was as inefficient as it was incompetent, they quickly began to grow nostalgic for the good old days when there was a lord of Kamakura to look out for their interests. Around this time, most of the warriors in the country fell into two camps in regard to whom they looked to as a beacon of leadership. The traditional old guard samurai who made up the backbone of the Kamakura bakufu's constituency naturally looked to Ashikaga Takauji thanks to his deep ties to the Minamoto and the Hojo, but the new school of warriors who had emerged outside of the traditional bakufu framework during the latter decades of the Kamakura period instead preferred to give their allegiance to the imperial prince Moriyoshi. Moriyoshi, as we discussed at the end of the last episode, was a key player in helping his father Godaigo retake control of Japan, defying the typical stereotype of the weak and defeat aristocrat by dashing around the country raising troops and fighting on the front lines of the war. However, partially because of this un-aristocratic temperament, and partially just because Moriyoshi was not the child of his father's favorite wife, Moriyoshi and Godaigo's relationship became strained once peace was established, and the emperor seems to have eyed his son with an air of suspicion and disdain. In contrast, the emperor was lavish in displaying his gratitude toward Takauji, whom he gifted with a letter from his own personal name, an extremely high honor in pre-modern Japan. Coming from a western naming system, this might be slightly hard to grasp, but Emperor Godaigo's personal given name was Takaharu, and he bestowed Takauji with the same Taka character to use in his own name. By coincidence, the actual pronunciation of Takauji's name did not change, having already included another kanji character pronounced as Taka, but the new character used to convey the Taka sound was suddenly a lot more prestigious. Anyway, Takauji and Moriyoshi seem to have been quite wary of one another, with Moriyoshi even managing to get himself appointed Seitai Shogun as a means of preventing Takauji from obtaining the position. However, according to legend, Takauji convinced the emperor that Moriyoshi was plotting treason against the new regime, and Moriyoshi quickly fell from grace, being sent to Kamakura to be confined to house arrest under the supervision of Takauji's younger brother, Ashikaga Tadayoshi, who was there to help manage Godaigo's regional Kanto government office. It was under these uneasy circumstances, with Moriyoshi confined out in Kamakura and Takauji on the verge of becoming the undisputed, if unofficial, leader of Japan's warrior class, that an incident would occur to provide the final straw in triggering the downfall of Emperor Godaigo's Kenmu government. In the seventh month of 1335, less than a year after Prince Moriyoshi's exile, a rebellion broke out in the Kanto region whose figurehead leader was the ten-year-old Hojo Tokiyuki, the orphaned son of the final leader of the Kamakura Hojo, our old friend Hojo Takatoki. During the first few months of this conflict, dubbed the Nakasendai Rebellion, the army of this rejuvenated Hojo remnant defeated the forces of Ashikaga Tadayoshi at various battles around the Kanto region, before at last recapturing the city of Kamakura. During this chaos, just before giving up the city, Tadayoshi quietly had the confined Prince Moriyoshi murdered in his quarters, possibly out of fear that he would be captured and used by the Hojo rebels, but possibly just out of personal malice toward his older brother's political enemy. Whatever the reason, with the prince's death, the Ashikaga were now free of their greatest rival to the control of the country's warriors. Hearing of his younger brother's plight in Kanto, Ashikaga Takauji petitioned Emperor Godaigo to make him Seitai Shogun so that he could march out east and put down the rebellion, but the Emperor, unwilling to abandon his royal-centric ideology, refused the request and instead bestowed the Shogun position on another of his own sons. Unable to accept the Emperor's judgment, Takauji would ultimately choose to march out to his brother's aid without official permission, and together the two men made short work of the Hojo rebels and recaptured Kamakura, whereupon Takauji took up residence in the city and began unilaterally doling out land rewards and generally behaving as though he were the Shogun. The following weeks would see a tense situation in which Emperor Godaigo attempted to placate Takauji and bring him back into the fold, and Takauji himself displayed a great deal of trepidation, clearly unhappy at the prospect of disobeying his sovereign. If anything, within the Ashikaga family, little brother Tadayoshi seems to have been the one who was most firm in his desire to see the birth of a new warrior government, and in a sense he seems to have sort of dragged his much more reluctant older sibling in that direction. Ultimately, with the Emperor's entreaties having fallen on deaf ears, the Imperial Court organized a large army under the de facto command of the war hero Nitta Yoshisada, the man responsible for capturing Kamakura from the Hojo in our last episode, and they sent it out east to deal with the disobedient Ashikaga brothers. Amusingly, upon hearing the news of this army's departure, Takauji is said to have made no effort to organize his own troops, instead locking himself in his house in a deep depression. Takauji really, really did not want to fight the Emperor. Still, the war became a reality, and Takauji would eventually find himself having defeated the Imperial Army and captured the city of Kyoto, although he was quickly driven out again by troops from northern Japan under the command of another of the Emperor's close advisors, one Kitabatake Akiie. The Ashikaga brothers fled west, all the way down to Kyushu, where they attempted to regroup and prepare to make a counterattack, and along the way Takauji cleverly managed to obtain an Imperial decree for the destruction of Nitta Yoshisada from none other than the retired Emperor Kougon, the Emperor who had been briefly placed on the throne back when Godaigo was still trying to overthrow the Kamakura Bakufu. With this decree in hand, Takauji could now claim that he was not a traitor against the throne. He was the exact opposite, in fact, and with the momentum that this supplied him, he united the warriors of Kyushu under his banner and began to fight his way back east. The events which transpired from this point on could easily be the subject of their own long-form video, as the battles carried out over the next few years were both dramatic and numerous, but we have an entire era to cover, so I'm afraid we will have to save those details for another occasion. At the end of the day, Takauji managed to once again capture the capital, whereupon he removed Emperor Godaigo from the throne and set up a new sovereign, Emperor Komyo, who was descended from Godaigo's family's rival line. Godaigo himself feigned surrender, handing over the three Imperial treasures to the new Emperor, before suddenly absconding from the capital and declaring that said Imperial treasures were all fakes and that he still possessed the real ones. Godaigo and his supporters rejected the validity of the new Emperor Komyo and set up a new Imperial court in Yamato Province's Yoshino, roughly a hundred kilometers south of Kyoto, and for the next sixty years or so, the two courts would turbulently coexist in a phase of Japanese history known as the Nanbokuchō Jidai, or the Northern and Southern Courts Period, the Northern Court being Kyoto and the Southern Court being Yoshino. Godaigo himself passed away just a few years after this tumultuous sequence of events in 1339, with many of his best generals and most loyal supporters, such as the aforementioned Nitta Yoshisada, dead and his dreams of a triumphant return to the capital ultimately unrealized. After the Imperial court split, Takauji was officially appointed Seitai Shogun by his new puppet Emperor, and he released a document called the Kemushikimoku, which is sometimes described as a legal code but was really more of a policy manifesto declaring the thoughts and intentions of Takauji's new Bakufu regime regarding a wide range of issues. The very first point covered in the document laid out one of the most significant differences between the new Bakufu and its predecessor, the Kamakura Bakufu, namely that it would base itself not in the old warrior capital out east, but rather in the city of Kyoto itself. From the era of Takauji's grandson, whom we will cover in a bit, the Ashikaga shoguns would specifically begin living in a residence in Kyoto along a street called Muromachi, and it is for this reason that the new regime, whose birth we mark from the promulgation of the Kemushikimoku, is remembered to history as the Muromachi Bakufu. While Takauji was the official first shogun of the Muromachi Bakufu, during the government's early years he ran it together as a Takauji served as the Bakufu's leader and figurehead and was responsible for military affairs and the distribution of rewards, while Tadayoshi worked as the Bakufu's top administrator and legal arbiter, who dealt with the more mundane affairs of day-to-day governance. Initially the arrangement worked very smoothly, with the opinionated Tadayoshi getting the opportunity to turn his plethora of ideas into real policy, while the moody and contemplative Takauji could maintain his status as boss without getting bogged down in the irritating details of actually running a government. While the Muromachi Bakufu did not have a shikken or shogunal regent, Tadayoshi's role in the Bakufu during this time has sometimes been compared to that of shikken, and I personally find this to be an apt metaphor. Takauji and Tadayoshi's two-man show, however, was not destined to last forever, as Tadayoshi gradually came to find himself at odds with another powerful figure in the Muromachi Bakufu's government, Takauji's chief steward Kono Moronao. As Takauji's steward, Moronao often served as the de facto field commander of the Ashikaga army, and he and his brother Morogasu, who was the leader of the new Bakufu's samurai dokuro, had racked up numerous military achievements in the war against the southern court. While Tadayoshi is often characterized as a traditionalist and an idealist who drew on his rosy-tinted perception of the early Kamakura Bakufu for guidance, the Kou brothers seem to have been unapologetic realists, classic military tough guys who believed that rules only mattered so long as they were convenient to the people making them. One famous anecdote about Kono Moronao from the Taiheiki records him expressing his annoyance at the need to have an emperor as the government's figurehead, and bluntly remarking that, If we absolutely must have an emperor or a retired emperor, why don't we just build one out of wood or metal and send the real one packing? With Tadayoshi and Moronao both holding extremely powerful positions within the governmental and social hierarchy of the fledgling Muromachi Bakufu, their stark difference in political outlook eventually led to significant friction between the two. While folklore describes their conflict as having been sparked by a personal dislike for Moronao and his brother by some of Tadayoshi's close associates, many history books characterize their disagreement as far more political in nature. Moronao, as a military leader and the Ashikaga family's steward, essentially represented the needs and desires of the rank-and-file warriors who served the Bakufu, while Tadayoshi, as the Bakufu's administrative leader, was far more concerned with attending to the needs of the aristocracy and the clergy, the powerful segments of society that the Bakufu needed on their side to smoothly run the country. Both concerns were obviously valid and each man's agenda made sense from his own standpoint, but in the chaotic environment of the mid-1300s, peaceful coexistence was simply not in the cards. Moronao and Tadayoshi's animosity eventually devolved into violent confrontation in the year 1350, with many of Japan's great warrior families choosing to side with one man or the other, and the conflict snowballing into the start of a war remembered as the Kanno no Jōran, or the Kanno Disturbance. Shogun Takauchi would ultimately take the side of his steward and march out to battle against his younger brother, but said little brother ended up coming out with the victory, and during the peace talks which followed, Takauchi agreed to have the co-brothers enter the priesthood and retire from public life. Adding insult to injury, or more accurately, adding mortal injury to insult, the brothers were then ambushed and killed by supporters of Tadayoshi on their way back to the capital, removing them permanently as a threat. During the course of the conflict, Tadayoshi had been officially removed from his position as administrative leader of the bakufu, this position having instead been taken over by Takauchi's son and heir, Ashikaga Yoshiakira, but with peace having ostensibly been restored, Tadayoshi returned to government to continue on as Yoshiakira's advisor. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, bad blood remained within the Ashikaga family, and it wasn't long before the bakufu government had once again split in two, and Tadayoshi was once again embroiled in open war with his brother and nephew, with their respective supporters still being essentially the same as they had been during the first phase of the conflict. This time, Tadayoshi was not so successful in his campaign, and after losing several crucial battles out in the Kanto region, he was at last captured and imprisoned in Kamakura, where he died under mysterious circumstances in the early months of 1352. While we have no hard proof to verify this, it is widely suspected that Tadayoshi was poisoned at the orders of Takauchi, but either way, Tadayoshi's death marks the end of the Kanno disturbance. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the disturbance is that, throughout the conflict, both sides at different points actually allied themselves with the Southern Court to gain political advantage or strategic stability, with the Northern Court actually being temporarily abolished at one point and the country being momentarily reunited under a single emperor, although this state of affairs only lasted for a very brief span of time. Part of the reason that the Northern and Southern Court's period lasted as long as it did is that, despite the Southern Court losing most of its military within the first decade or so of existence, the top figures in the early Muromachi Bakufu found it a useful tool for them to take advantage of during their never-ending internal power struggles. To put it simply, if Samurai Leader A secured an imperial decree from the Northern Court for the elimination of Samurai Leader B, Samurai Leader B could then run off to the Southern Court and get a new decree calling for the destruction of Samurai Leader A. No one outside of the royalty themselves was really concerned with which emperor was more quote-unquote legitimate, they were merely concerned with ensuring that they had one or the other of them on their side at any given time. As an interesting little detour, in modern Japan, the Southern Court is actually officially considered to have been the legitimate dynasty of the era, with the emperors of the Northern Court not being included within Japan's main list of sovereigns, despite the fact that the current modern imperial family is descended from the Northern Court's genealogical line. This concept of the Northern Court's illegitimacy did not begin to take root until the Edo period, with the increased influence of Confucianism driving scholars to re-examine history through the lens of justice and higher principles, as those concepts are defined by the hierarchical Confucian ideal. Particularly, scholars of the Mito school, which was also the group which espoused the concept of expelling foreigners and exalting the emperor during the final years of the Edo period, were major proponents of the Southern Court's superior legitimacy, leading the idea to begin gaining steam. Fast forward to 1910, and an anarchist socialist thinker named Kotoku Shusui was arrested for plotting the assassination of the Meiji emperor, and at his court hearing he attempted to justify himself by bringing up the idea of the Northern Court's illegitimacy. This forced the Meiji government to take an official position on the issue, and the conclusion that their scholars came up with was, put simply, that the Southern Court was legitimate while it existed, but that after it, spoiler alert, surrendered to the Northern Court in 1392, the Northern Court retook the official imperial treasures, and its descendants thus became the This explanation actually doesn't really check out historically, as a number of sets of imperial treasures were circulating around during the Northern and Southern Court's period, and it's unclear which one was really the real deal, but the Meiji government was looking for something that sounded good, and this is what they eventually settled on, and it's lasted to the present day. Anyway, let's get back to the 14th century. The Kanno disturbance may have ended in 1352, but peace was by no means restored to the country, or to the fledgling Muromachi bakufu. Ashikaga Tadayoshi's fight was carried on by his adopted son, Ashikaga Tadafuyu, who confusingly was actually the scorned biological son of Shogun Takauji. The forces of the Southern Court, of course, also continued to wrap themselves up in all this fighting, and the possession of the city of Kyoto itself changed hands multiple times throughout the next ten years or so. Takauji himself would never live to see the end of all this fighting, dying in 1358 at the age of 54, supposedly as the result of an infected arrow wound which he had sustained in battle with his aforementioned son-slash-legal-nephew-slash-battlefield-enemy Tadafuyu. The prolonged warfare of this period happened to be corresponding with a specific societal change in the realm of inheritance, which likely played a not insignificant role in keeping the fighting going for as long as it did. As you will recall from our last video, warrior families during the Kamakura period typically practiced divided inheritance, in which the head of any given household's land and possession were divided up among their children after their death. By the Northern and Southern Court's period, however, this was beginning to shift to a single inheritance system, wherein one designated heir would inherit everything, and any other children would be left out in the cold. While this change probably helped solve some samurai families' poverty issues, at least for whoever was lucky enough to inherit the family headship, it also had the effect of eroding clan bonds and creating a warrior society that was less concerned with ties of blood and instead beginning to become more concerned with ties of land. In other words, it wasn't so much who you were related to, it was who you lived near that began to matter more. Anyway, this naturally led to the emergence of new bushidan throughout the country struggling with each other for supremacy, as well as squabbles within individual families over inheritance, and these smaller regional conflicts were exacerbated by the fighting going on at the political world's top level. Much like how warrior society's elites casually hopped back and forth between the Northern and Southern Courts for the sake of political and military convenience, lower-level warrior families also bounced around between serving different masters, based on whatever lord-vassal arrangement was most convenient to their own personal circumstances. As previously mentioned, the chaos of the Northern and Southern Courts period would finally draw to a close in 1392, when the Southern Emperor Gokameyama made his way to Kyoto and ceremonially abdicated the throne to the sitting Northern monarch, Emperor Gokomatsu. This reunification was carried out under the leadership of the Muromachi Bakufu's third and arguably greatest shogun, a man named Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. Yoshimitsu was the grandson of Takauji, whom we briefly touched on earlier for giving the Muromachi Bakufu its name, as he lived in a grand residence along the Muromachi street of Kyoto called the Hananogosho, or the Flower Palace, thus named because its lavish garden was home to various flowering trees gifted to the shogun from around the country. In addition to leading the Bakufu with an iron fist, Yoshimitsu also rose to the pinnacle of Kyoto's aristocratic society, assuming the post of daijo-daijin, chancellor of the realm, and by all accounts being treated with the pomp and circumstance normally reserved for a retired emperor. Whether they realize it or not, I am guessing that most people are at least peripherally familiar with Yoshimitsu thanks to a certain temple which he ordered the construction of, the Radiant Kinkaku-ji, or Golden Pavilion, of Kyoto, which is easily one of Japan's most globally well-known landmarks. In addition to overseeing the reunification of the imperial court, Yoshimitsu also made great strides in reasserting the Bakufu's control over its most powerful vassals, many of whom had turned themselves into formidable regional warlords over the course of the chaos of the mid-1300s. In 1390, Yoshimitsu took advantage of a family dispute within the Toki clan to send in Bakufu troops and forcibly redistribute the three major shugo offices which the clan held, greatly undermining their power. The following year, Yoshimitsu repeated this process on an even greater scale by defeating another overly-powerful clan, the Yamana, in an incident remembered as the Meitoku Rebellion. Throughout the mid-1300s, the Yamana had acquired the shugo offices for an astounding 11 provinces, about a sixth of the country, and so Yoshimitsu provoked two of their most powerful members into marching out against the Bakufu, whereupon he promptly defeated them and reduced the clan's holdings down to a much more modest three provinces. Finally, in 1399, Yoshimitsu would defeat and downsize the Ouchi clan, who had actually gained much of their power thanks to loyal service to Yoshimitsu, but had ultimately turned to rebellion out of fear that they were next on his hit list, an action which ironically guaranteed them a spot on said hit list. Anyway, with the imperial court reunited and Japan's powerful samurai lords reminded of their subservience to the shogun, the Muromachi Bakufu at last began to resemble a truly united national government. The Bakufu's overall structure was heavily based on the model of the Kamakura Bakufu, with its central organs of operation comprising a Mandokuro, Samurai Dokoro, Monchūjō, Hyōjōshū, and Hikitsuke-shū. See part 1 and 2 of my series on the history of the Kamakura period if you need a refresher on those. While these component parts remained the same, their roles and their respective significance within the Bakufu did naturally change somewhat in response to the differences in circumstance between the two organizations. Under the Muromachi Bakufu, the Mandokuro primarily handled both the Bakufu and the Ashikaga family's finances, no longer really being involved in general political administration, although this was actually a change that had begun to take place during the mid to late Kamakura period. The Samurai Dokoro changed quite markedly as a result of the Bakufu being based in Kyoto rather than in Kamakura, still being responsible for managing the Bakufu's vassals but also taking over the the capital in place of the old Kebishi police force which had handled that responsibility since the early Heian period. By the time of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the leadership of the Samurai Dokoro had come to be fundamentally shared by four powerful samurai families, the Akamatsu, the Ishiki, the Kyōgoku, and the Yamana, whose patriarchs took turns serving as the agency's leader during the Muromachi Bakufu's golden age. The Monchūjō, which had begun as Kamakura Bakufu's main judicial agency, had had its duties gradually absorbed by various new entities such as the Hikitsukeshū, and by the time of the Muromachi Bakufu, it had transformed into an agency whose primary duty was the creation and storage of important records. The Hyōjōshū, which had functioned a bit like the Shogun or Shikken's cabinet or advisory council under the Kamakura Bakufu, continued to exist in much the same manner under the Muromachi Shoguns, although over the decades it would gradually go on to lose its political power and become something which conferred little more than social prestige on its members. A new feature of the Muromachi Bakufu was that all these groups and agencies were organized under the leadership of a new Bakufu position known as Kanrei, often translated into English as Deputy Shogun. As that name suggests, the Kanrei was the Bakufu's second-in-command, advising the Shogun on matters of state and even taking over de facto leadership of the Bakufu when the situation called for it, such as in the case of an adolescent Shogun, for example. The office of Kanrei was actually the evolution of the Ashikaga family's household steward position, the post which Kō no Moronao had held back in the days of Takauji, but its name change from steward or shitsuji to Kanrei reflected a shift in its duties away from personal service to the Bakufu government. From the time of Yoshimitsu, the position came to be passed around between three powerful families at the top of the Bakufu food chain, the Shiba, the Hosokawa, and the Hatakeyama, all of whom were lesser branches of the Ashikaga clan. Two more new features of the Muromachi Bakufu were the Bugyōnin-shū, or the Corps of Administrators, and the Hōkōshū, or the Shogunal Military Guard. The former, the Bugyōnin-shū, was a hereditary group of administrative staff specializing in clerical work and legal affairs who were dispersed throughout the Bakufu's various agencies and handled much of their day-to-day operations. The latter, the Hōkōshū, was essentially the Shogun's private army, responsible for guarding his person and residence in times of peace and fighting for him on the battlefield during times of war. Members of the Hōkōshū were also dispatched out to manage the Shogun's personal land holdings spread throughout the country, which also conveniently gave the Shogun a way to keep an eye on his shugo constables, who were becoming much more akin to regional governors and even warlords by this point in history. More on that in a bit, though. A final major difference in the structure of the Muromachi Bakufu in comparison to its predecessor was in the effect that its shift in primary location had on the way it managed the more For the Kamakura Bakufu, which was obviously based in Kamakura, its most important regional headquarters had been the Rokuhara Tandai, which exercised its will in Kyoto. However, with the Muromachi Bakufu being actually based in the capital, it instead implemented the mirror image of this structure and placed its main regional headquarters in Kamakura, this being an institution known as the Kamakura-fu. The leadership of the Kamakura-fu was known as the Kamakura-kubo, and this post became the hereditary property of the descendants of Ashikaga Takauji's fourth son. The first Kamakura-kubo and the second Muromachi Shogun were, in other words, brothers, and their respective lines would manage the major eastern and western wings of the Bakufu, with the Kamakura-kubo, of course, being the subordinate party in the relationship. The Kamakura-fu was structured basically like a mini-Bakufu, with its own iterations of all the Bakufu's major component agencies and even its own kanrei, a post specifically referred to as the Kanto Kanrei, and hereditarily staffed by the family of Takauji's mother, the Uesugi clan. While the Kanto Kanrei served as the Kamakura-kubo's primary advisor and second-in-command, the post also functioned as the Bakufu's supervisor and spokesperson out east, who would, ideally, make sure that the Kamakura-kubo never forgot his allegiance to the Shogun in Kyoto. And yes, if you're wondering, this absolutely falls under the category of ominous foreshadowing, so feel free to keep it in the back of your mind for the next episode. The Kamakura-fu administered the eight provinces of the Kanto region, as well as the provinces of Izu and Kai, giving it in total ten provinces over which it held jurisdiction. Like the Kamakura Bakufu, the Muromachi Bakufu also set up regional headquarters in Tohoku and in Kyushu, although their distance from the capital meant that neither was held particularly strongly, and their management was mostly left up to the discretion of powerful local families. Speaking of powerful local families, we of course must discuss the transformation which the Shugo underwent during the early years of the Muromachi period. As you have probably surmised by now via my numerous peripheral references to the fact, the Muromachi Bakufu, like the Kamakura Bakufu and Emperor Godaigo before it, carried on the policy of appointing the leaders of powerful warrior clans to serve as the Shugo of Japan's various provinces. A great number of these Shugo were selected from clans which held some degree of blood relation to the Ashikaga, much like what the Hojo had done in the late Kamakura period, although many others were simply drawn from the local clans which had long held power in their respective regions. In the Kemushikimoku, the Bakufu's law and policy manifesto which we discussed earlier, the Shugo are described as being akin to the quote, government officials of old, in other words the Kokushi governors, indicating that the Bakufu leaders saw the Shugo office as something beyond just a provincial police chief. Over the course of the northern and southern courts period, the Shugo saw their duties expanded beyond just handling the three great crimes which we discussed back in episode 12, being now also entrusted with cracking down on local land disputes as well as with practically enforcing the legal judgments of the Bakufu. These new responsibilities allowed the Shugo to actively involve themselves in the affairs of the local warrior clans in their provinces, thereby paving the way for them to slowly exert control over said warriors and turn them into their own personal vassals. Further amplifying the powers of the Shugo were the issuing throughout the mid-1300s by the Bakufu of orders known as Hanzeirei, literally half-payment orders, which permitted the Shugo to receive half of their province's tax income. These orders were originally issued on a temporary basis in specific provinces only as a means of helping the Shugo pay for their regional wars on behalf of the Bakufu, but eventually they spread throughout the entire country and became a permanent fixture. Tired of fighting against the growing power of the warrior class, many Shōen estate owners threw in the towel and permitted the Shugo to collect all the tax on their lands as long as they agreed to pay them what they were legally owed. By the time of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, with the country finally having achieved a semblance of peace, many Shugo were required to reside in Kyoto and serve the Shogun, sending representatives called Shugodai out to govern their provinces in their place. These super-powered Muromachi period Shugo, who presided over their provinces as de facto governors rather than just military peacekeepers, are referred to as Shugodai Myō, a term which we use to differentiate them from their less powerful Kamakura period predecessors. Having followed the tumultuous birth and rise of the Muromachi Bakufu, as well as examined the structure that it eventually settled into when all the chaos of the 1300s had at last simmered down, it's about time that we begin drawing this video to a close. But before we go, I would like to take a brief moment to touch on the Bakufu's various income streams, which were significantly more diverse than its predecessors had been. The Bakufu's only regular stream of income was the tax rice brought in from the Ashikaga family's land holdings throughout the country, but it also raised funds from a myriad of other sources whenever it was in need of cash. The foremost of these was the city of Kyoto's commercial community, specifically its sake brewers and storehouse owners, who in this era often served as high-interest money lenders. In a somewhat mafia-esque manner, the Bakufu muscled in on this lucrative industry and made sure that they received an ample cut of the interest money that these business people were accruing, and this actually ended up providing a very large share of the Bakufu's income. They also set up toll barriers at both roads and waterways around central Japan, and collected a fee from the multitude of merchants and other travelers making their way to and from the capital. On the occasion of important state projects and events, such as the Imperial Succession Ceremony, for example, the Bakufu mobilized the shugo to levy temporary taxes called tansen and munabetsu-sen across the country's provinces, the former being a tax on rice fields and the latter being a tax on households. Finally, the Bakufu brought in a massive amount of income from trade with China, with Yoshimitsu having established an official trade relationship with the Ming dynasty, which had overthrown the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty in 1368. In the pre-modern era, a country could only open diplomatic relations with China by means of that country's sovereign presenting themselves to the Chinese emperor as a loyal subject, and creating a sort of international lord-vassal relationship, and since Yoshimitsu was not technically the sovereign of Japan, he initially struggled to open talks with the Chinese. However, he eventually made use of an extremely high court rank which he had obtained to get the Chinese to recognize him as quote, king of Japan, and he thereafter continued to use that title to facilitate numerous diplomatic embassies, embassies which returned to Japan filled to the brim with Ming coinage and exquisite cultural products. There has long been debate among scholars as to whether Yoshimitsu's gleeful use of his king of Japan title was simply born out of convenience, or if it represented a greater ambition to perhaps one day actually usurp the imperial throne. Fortunately for Japan's imperial family, this question would never receive a clear answer, as Yoshimitsu died suddenly of disease in 1408 at the age of just 49, bringing a premature end to the age of the Muromachi Bakufu's greatest shogun. And with that my friends, we have reached the end of our first look at the Muromachi period. On our next episode, we will watch as the Muromachi Bakufu begins to lose its hard-won stability, and Japan takes its first baby steps into that era of history that everyone loves to read about, but no one would ever actually want to live through. The Sengoku Jidai, also known as Japan's warring states period. I'm sure some of you are probably wondering how any era could possibly be more war-torn than the one we just spent the past 40 minutes talking about, but I assure you, it only gets more chaotic from here, so look forward to that. Stay tuned to the end for a mnemonic to remember the year of the reunification of the northern and southern courts, and as always, thanks for watching, have a great day, and FUGUN WO INORUZO!