Season 9, Episode 13: A Shogunate, If You Can Keep It

For our non-American listeners, as well as our American listeners who don’t obsess over minor facets of history, an explanation of today’s title is in order. After the establishment of the United States of America, founding father Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman whether the new government was to be a republic or a monarchy. Ben Franklin was said to reply, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

While the Muromachi Shogunate was far less idealistic than latter-day republics of the enlightenment, that did not mean that it had no ideals at all. The leading Shoguns of the Ashikaga Bakufu combined clever administration with savvy political strategy to achieve new milestones in samurai governance. While later generations of pro-emperor partisans would decry every shogunate as nothing more than a pack of upstart ruffians who oppressed the imperial court through violence, intimidation, and usurpation, ample evidence suggests that many shoguns truly believed themselves to be but humble servants of the Tenno who enforced the nation’s secular harmony so that he could maintain its spiritual harmony. Some of them were cynical power-grabbers who felt no particular appreciation for the emperor and his lackeys, but the same could be said of certain Fujiwara regents before them and indeed this description could also apply to many emperors of the early Heian Period.

While the shogun had been relegated to a powerless figurehead long before the 1520s, the government was more than just the great general who subdues eastern barbarians. I’ve taken great pains to differentiate between the acts of shoguns and the shogunate as a whole throughout these last few seasons because the administration of the Bakufu had a life of its own apart from its leader. Even in the midst of the chaos that defined the shogunate of the early 1500s, dutiful administrators were attempting to collect taxes, resolve complaints, and address retainers’ grievances. These were thankless tasks and not above a certain level of corruption, but many officials continued to attend these duties regardless of the chaos that enveloped the higher echelons of their government.

Some episodes back, we followed the career of Miyoshi Yukinaga until his death in 1520. Shortly after his death, the Kyoto Kanrei whom he had championed, Hosokawa Sumimoto, died after fleeing to Awa Province. Normally, I would expect the Miyoshi Clan to offer an apology to the shogunate and hope that the Bakufu’s wrath had been mostly expended on their late chieftain. However, Hosokawa Harumoto, the son of the late Sumimoto, was now six years old and Miyoshi Motonaga, the son of Yukinaga, was determined to see the boy installed as the rightful Kyoto Kanrei. However, the resources of the Miyoshi Clan were, by now, all but depleted so for the moment he would wait until the opportune time to attempt his revenge.

It was Hosokawa Takakuni himself who opened the door for such an attempt. Things were looking very good for the Kyoto Kanrei in the mid 1520s. Shogun Ashikaga Yoshitane, whom he had driven away and replaced, died in Awa Province on Shikoku in 1523 and in 1525 he felt so secure in his position that he stepped down as Kyoto Kanrei and chieftain of the Hosokawa Clan. His son took both jobs, and for a while performed well at them. Six months later, however, his son died of an illness at the age of eighteen, so Takakuni had little choice but to return to his duties.

In 1526, a retainer named Hosokawa Tadakata spread a slanderous rumor about Takakuni’s chief retainer Kozai Motomori. I was unable to discover the nature of this slander, but it was serious enough for Takakuni to order Kozai Motomori to commit seppuku. This event triggered an uprising by Motomori’s brothers, who raised a rebellious call to arms in Tanba Province in northwestern Kansai. Takakuni sent Tadakata with an army to put this uprising down, but after a series of fumbles, betrayals, and unexpected disasters which largely involved bungled castle sieges, Tadakata fled back to the capital and desperately wrote ahead for reinforcements.

The rebel leaders in Tanba Province were in correspondence with Miyoshi Motonaga, who was now requested to join in their glorious uprising in the spring of 1527.  His moment at last at hand, Motonaga departed Awa Province and arrived in Kansai by way of Sakai city once more and joined with the armies of Kozai Motomori’s brothers. At Katsura River, to the southwest of Kyoto, the shogunate forces met with the rebel armies, thinking to use the river as a natural strong point for defense. However, Miyoshi Motonaga engaged in a tactic known as Nakairi, wherein a section of an army breaks away and attempts to ambush their opponents where they are not suspecting. This was a favorite tactic during Sengoku Jidai, but it was risky -- if the enemy discovered the detached army, they could turn the ambush against itself and inflict significant losses.

In this particular case, fortune was with the Miyoshi army. They surprised the reserve forces deployed behind the shogunate army’s main line and as chaos ensued, the rebel army took advantage of the confusion and charged. The result was an overwhelming victory for the Miyoshi-allied forces, and Takakuni’s partisans were pressed hard until finally they were forced to flee to Omi Province. This should have been a moment of glorious victory and vengeance for Miyoshi Motonaga, but cracks were already beginning to emerge in the coalition which he had helped build.

Motonaga appears to have favored negotiating some kind of peace deal with Hosokawa Takakuni, something which Hosokawa Harumoto found entirely unacceptable. Harumoto’s plan was to establish a new kind of shadow government called the Sakai Kubo which would have Ashikaga Yoshitsuna as its shogun and Harumoto himself as the Kanrei. This government would be based in Sakai city, which was more practically defensible than Kyoto, and Motonaga grudgingly accepted this plan and gave his support.

Hosokawa Takakuni, meanwhile, was far from idle in Omi Province. He made overtures to the Rokkaku Clan as well as the Asakura Clan, who contributed soldiers to his cause. However, when that army came to do battle against the forces led by Miyoshi Motonaga at yet another branch of the Katsura River, Takakuni’s partisans were repulsed and soon quit the field. However, the Sakai Kubo was not a unified polity but a loose confederation of competing daimyo who frequently attempted to edge one another out of important decisions. Miyoshi Motonaga and Hosokawa Harumoto increasingly found themselves at odds with one another and their recent victories did little to mend what was becoming an acrimonious relationship. In fact, Motonaga’s victories only served to increase Harumoto’s jealousy and determination to rid himself of the troublesome Miyoshi clan.

Hosokawa Takakuni was determined to recapture the capital, and his allied forces swept into Settsu, capturing several castles and even building at least one new fortification to support their advance. There followed an uneasy stalemate between Takakuni’s forces and the partisans of Harumoto as they held castles and defended against occasional raids for a few months.

In 1530, forces loyal to Takakuni managed to capture Kyoto when Harumoto’s partisans abandoned the city. This was largely a symbolic victory, as the capital had little overall strategic value and the opposition was headquartered in the city of Sakai. At this point, Urakami Muramune was the primary commander of Takakuni’s partisan force, and the Kyoto Kanrei himself sent out a call to arms for loyal clans to come to his aid. Happily, the Akamatsu clan responded, assembling a large army to serve as a rearguard to the Kanrei’s forces.

There was more going on, however, than meets the eye in this case. The previous Akamatsu clan leader had been assassinated, allegedly on the orders of Urakami Muramune himself. The Akamatsu leadership had kept correspondence with the Sakai Kubo shadow government, and agreed to aid their cause, sending several hostage children to Sakai as a display of good faith. Meanwhile, the Sakai Kubo insisted to Harumoto that Miyoshi Motonaga lead the charge against the impending incursion by Takakuni’s partisans. They got their way, and Motonaga brought thousands of troops to Sakai from Awa Province where they prepared to take the fight to their mutual enemy.

In the ensuing battle, Motonaga’s troops held their own against Takakuni’s in a relatively equal exchange until the Akamatsu clan showed up for battle. Takakuni’s forces believed they would fall into line as a rearguard, but instead they attacked. The battle then proceeded fairly predictably, with Takakuni’s army being crushed in a well-coordinated pincer movement. Hosokawa Takakuni himself, after fleeing the disastrous collapse at Daimotsu, allegedly took shelter in a storage building which held jugs of sake. When he was discovered, he committed seppuku.

Thus in 1531, the upstart Kanrei Hosokawa Harumoto utterly crushed his rival Takakuni and his future prospects no doubt appeared quite luminous. However, he was rightly fearful of becoming a powerless puppet like his father and extremely anxious about the rising power of Miyoshi Motonaga. Motonaga had received the lion’s share of credit for the final defeat of Takakuni, and influential samurai were beginning to flock to his banner and pledge their allegiance.

One area in which Motonaga was vulnerable, however, was religion. He patronized the Tendai School, which you may recall was one of the oldest and most established Buddhist denominations in all of Japan. Many of the newer schools and movements considered the conservative Tendai to be their natural enemy, a calculation which was not entirely incorrect. Last season we discussed how Rennyo, the man who became the inspiration behind the Ikko-Ikki, was persecuted partly because of the efforts of the Tendai sect at Enryaku-ji Temple.

Motonaga also had personal beefs with other ranking members of the Sakai Kubo government. At one point while Takakuni was still in the field, he had even withdrawn his support and returned to Awa Province in an attempt to force Hosokawa Harumoto’s hand against a fellow daimyo whom he felt was being given undue influence. Harumoto eventually relented in that case, at which point Motonaga returned and punished his fellow retainer on the battlefield. Harumoto wanted to avoid being subjected to such tantrums in the future, and so he conspired with Motonaga’s uncle, Miyoshi Masanaga, to put an end to the troublesome son of Yukinaga.

Throughout 1532 and 1533, Miyoshi Motonaga supported Hatakeyama Yoshitaka in his effort to chastise his retainer Kizawa Nagamasa, who was beginning to engage in some gekokujo by cozying up to Hosokawa Harumoto. The layers involved in such a conflict reveal just how complicated questions of loyalty, vassalage, authority, and obedience could become in such an age. The spat between Yoshitaka and his vassal resulted in a series of sieges, withdrawals, and feints in Kawachi Province, but eventually the allied force of Motonaga and Yoshitaka laid siege to Iimori castle where Nagamasa had sought shelter.

Seeing that an opportunity to rid himself of a dangerous rival had presented itself, Hosokawa Harumoto reached out to a group of unlikely allies: the Ikko-Ikki. The militant peasant Jodo-shu disliked Miyoshi Motonaga because of his support for the Tendai sect, and they quickly mobilized when Hosokawa Harumoto invited their help. With his army occupied with the siege of Iimori Castle, the Ikko-Ikki gathered a massive army and caught the Miyoshi warriors by surprise. The ensuing melee was terrible, and Hatakeyama Yoshitaka was killed in the initial skirmishing. Miyoshi Motonaga fled but was later surrounded by Ikko-Ikki and committed seppuku.

Things fell apart for the so-called Sakai Kubo government shortly thereafter. Ashikaga Yoshitsuna was the nominal head of the Sakai Kubo but trusted Motonaga far more than Harumoto. Shortly after learning his patrons’s fate, he fled Sakai for the protection of Hosokawa Mochitaka in Awa Province. Although he was, himself, the Sakai Kubo, Yoshitsuna had never been installed as shogun. Rather than try to rebuild his coalition, Hosokawa Harumoto opted to make peace with sitting shogun Ashikaga Yoshiharu and was welcomed to the capital as the rightful Kyoto Kanrei. Thus in 1532, the status quo returned at last. And by status quo, I mean the continuation of independent regional wars like those we discussed in the Sengoku “States” episode series.

Although their chieftain had been killed, the Miyoshi Clan still maintained a level of influence which the Bakufu had no intention of ignoring. Motonaga’s son, Nagayoshi, was pardoned of any involvement in his father’s designs against the Kanrei and welcomed into the fold as a retainer of the Hosokawa Clan. Although he was only ten years old at the time, he had just inherited one of the most capable armies in the greater Kansai-Shikoku area and the Kanrei obviously wanted to make good use of it.

In 1539, however, Miyoshi Nagayoshi began showing troubling signs of independence. Some of his father’s lands had been confiscated by the Bakufu after his death and Nagayoshi always believed that eventually those lands would come back under his domain. When the shogunate repeatedly ignored his requests for the lands to be restored, he marched on the capital with over two thousand warriors as an escort.

His intentions, at the time, were unclear. Shogun Ashikaga Yoshiharu fled to Omi Province, fearing that this was the beginning of open hostilities. However, Nagayoshi was not attempting a coup here, just making a show of force. The shogunate soon restored his father’s lands to him and made him the governor of Settsu Province. Kizawa Nagamasa, who had played a direct role in the death of Nagayoshi’s father, fell out of Hosokawa Harumoto’s favor and after a series of related misfortunes, Nagayoshi found an opportunity for revenge. In 1542, Harumoto and Nagayoshi led an army against him as he attempted to retake a castle he had lost, and Nagamasa was killed in the ensuing battle.

Miyoshi Nagayoshi’s power and influence continued to grow through the 1540s and Hosokawa Harumoto rightfully worried that the young Miyoshi chieftain might eventually supplant him through gekokujo. In 1546, possibly worried that Shogun Ashikaga Yoshiharu was becoming entirely too chummy with the Miyoshi leader, Harumoto forced Yoshiharu’s resignation and arranged to install his eleven-year-old son Yoshiteru as the new shogun. Fearing for his own life, Yoshiharu fled to Omi Province but soon returned to the capital upon Harumoto’s reassurance that his life would be safe.

It seems that Kanrei Harumoto had good reason to fear potential upheaval from his ambitious retainer. In 1548, Nagayoshi would conspire with a rival of Harumoto’s to seize control of the office of Kanrei. Although Harumoto remained nominally powerful as the official Kanrei, the Hosokawa Clan was still splintered and full of rival claimants waiting for the support of ambitious daimyo to back them. One such rival was Hosokawa Ujitsuna, an adopted son of Takakuni, who had been ousted as the shugo of Settsu Province back in 1543 and was determined to have redress for his unceremonious removal.

Miyoshi Nagayoshi met with Ujitsuna and agreed to support him against his cousin. After some initial successes, Nagayoshi’s forces managed to intimidate the Kanrei and his shogun, causing both to flee to Omi Province and attempt to gather reinforcements. The Rokkaku Clan offered support, raising an army to drive Nagayoshi out of the capital. They conspired with Miyoshi Masanaga, a cousin of Nagayoshi who was attempting to raise an army in northwestern Kansai to support the exiled shogun. Not wanting to be trapped between two hostile forces, Miyoshi Nagayoshi attacked his cousin and after a two-week siege at Eguchi Castle in 1549, Masanaga’s forces were defeated and he committed seppuku.

Without the support of a coordinated attack, the partisans of Harumoto and Yoshiteru could only wait in Omi Province for their fortunes to change. In 1552, peace talks were arranged and Miyoshi Nagayoshi agreed to allow the ousted shogun to return to Kyoto and gave Harumoto assurance of safe conduct if he agreed to retire to a monastery. This peace was just a ruse, however, possibly from both sides of the conflict.

The Rokkaku marched on the capital now that the shogun was safely reinstalled. Miyoshi Nagayoshi seems to have expected this, however, and quickly withdrew his forces to regroup and plan a new campaign. The intermittent fighting for the next six years generally favored Yoshiteru’s faction, but the tide eventually turned in Nagayoshi’s favor. In 1558, Yoshiteru once more was forced to abandon Kyoto for the environs of Omi Province as Nagayoshi triumphantly returned.

This time, however, there would be no comeback story for the young shogun. He corresponded with Nagayoshi, who offered him clemency if he would return to the capital and follow his wise guidance. Yoshiteru agreed and as a result, the Miyoshi Clan was now the power behind the throne. Where so many of his predecessors had failed, Miyoshi Nagayoshi had managed to become the Tenkabito - the person who actually manages the national government.

That being said, there wasn’t much national government left to manage. The shogunate had been greatly reduced in its influence by this point, and Nagayoshi’s constant campaigning certainly didn’t contribute to regional harmony. Even claiming that their authority was still absolute over at least the Kansai region was laughably false. Nagayoshi had control of the Bakufu, but what did the Bakufu still control? A few provinces in the immediate vicinity of Kyoto and… little else. It was bad enough that the nearby daimyo were starting to wonder whether they might find a way to try their luck and supplant the Miyoshi, but news of the shogunate’s troubles were, by the late 1550s, inspiring the outlying clans from distant Chubu and even Kanto to lead great armies to the capital and bring an end to the constant disorder.

In the midst of the turmoil of the 1540s, Emperor Go-Nara attempted to relocate the daijo-daikan to Yamaguchi City in western Chugoku. In 1551, however, the retainers of the Ouchi Clan turned on their master and killed most of the capital aristocrats who had relocated to their regional capital. We discussed these events in Episode 8, Sengoku “States” Part II, but I thought it would be helpful to understand why the Tenno felt like relocation would be a better option. He especially feared Miyoshi Nagayoshi.

While the shogun himself had, by this point, long since been reduced to a powerless figurehead and puppet ruler, the reduction of the office of Kanrei to puppet status was certainly a new development that brought new possibilities for future would-be rulers of the nation. Get the right people under your thumb and dependent upon your protection, and you too could have been the ruler of feudal Japan. At least, on paper.

While Miyoshi Nagayoshi may not have managed to reassert the Bakufu’s practical authority, he suffered from many of the same problems his political predecessors had faced. The constant threat of gekokujo meant that it became extremely important to understand the motivations, capabilities, and ambitions of vassals, retainers, and enemies.

Shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru, for his part, never gave up the dream of being the real Tenkabito. He kept up near-constant correspondence with clan chieftains across the nation, attempting to engage in diplomacy and sometimes trying to broker peace agreements between feuding clans. While his efforts are admirable, there is little evidence that his many letters had any noticeable effect on national peace, nor did this help him to throw off the yoke of the Miyoshi Clan.

In 1564, however, he thought his moment had arrived at last. Miyoshi Nagayoshi died from illness at 42 and his only surviving son was an adoptee who was only fifteen years old. The Miyoshi Clan quickly agreed to split the regency between three trusted high-ranking retainers, though another retainer named Matsunaga Hisahide served as an unofficial fourth member of this triumvirate regency. Nevertheless, the shogun sent out many letters begging powerful daimyo to help him reinstate his power and overthrow the upstart Miyoshi pretenders.

Fully aware of the shogun’s correspondence, the Miyoshi decided it was time for Yoshiteru to retire. In 1565, Matsunaga Hisahide led troops that surrounded the buildings where Yoshiteru resided, likely with the intention of forcing retirement. It’s worth noting that when the late Nagayoshi defeated Yoshiteru’s loyalists in 1558, he prevented his troops from giving chase for fear that the shogun himself would be killed. It’s possible that Hisahide intended harm against Yoshiteru, but I think forced retirement and exile was the most likely intended outcome.

Whatever they intended, the shogun despaired that his letters failed to bring even a single daimyo to the capital to defend him. He committed seppuku rather than allow himself to fall into the Miyoshi Clan’s hands, and possibly hoping his sacrifice might inspire the lackadaisical daimyo to support the future claim of his younger brother, Yoshiaki, who had managed to escape the capital before Matsunaga’s siege.

Shogunal succession officially fell to Ashikaga Yoshihide, though he wouldn’t actually be installed into the office for a few years. The potential for greater conflict in the wake of Yoshiteru’s death and the possibility that the Miyoshi might still coopt Yoshiaki to keep the peace meant that actual succession was not a priority.

The shogunate under the Miyoshi Clan was far from what could rightfully be described as a national government. By the time a daimyo would manage to gain control over the Bakufu and start rebuilding its national authority, he would find that the whole thing would be easier to manage without a shogun at all. The Ashikaga Shogunate would not last forever, and the stage was set for the ultimate act of gekokujo.

Next time, we will explore one of the great daimyo rivalries of the Sengoku Period, whose battles and betrayals would become famous far beyond the boundaries of their native Kanto.