The Kamakura shogunate, which had been economically and politically weakened by the Mongol invasions of the late thirteenth century, was toppled in 1333 by a coalition of warriors fighting at the behest of Emperor Godaigo. Flushed with victory and determined to rule in the manner of a classical, Chinese-style sovereign, Godaigo sought to become the sole arbiter of formal rewards and commendations.1 Provincial warriors seeking recognition and recompense for services rendered in the recent conflict were compelled to make the journey to Kyoto personally. Large-scale migration forced the greater capital basin to accommodate a sudden and dramatic influx of fighting men, and by no means were the newcomers kept outside the capital’s traditional boundaries. On land adjacent to his own palace, Godaigo granted prime real estate to prominent generals such as Kusunoki Ma-sashige (d. 1336) and Nawa Nagatoshi (d. 1336).2 Former proscriptions on warriors in the capital appear to have had no meaning in the new order. Indeed, had Godaigo’s regime prevailed, such circumstances might not have constituted a threat to imperial authority. In fact, it should have signified the advent of an even stronger centralized state, one able to accommodate and dominate political interests irrespective of their locations, inside or outside the capital. But alas, within three years of its proclamation, the restoration came crashing down. By the summer of 1335, Godaigo had been hounded out of Kyoto by the Ashikaga and their supporters, who quickly moved to replace him through the enthronement of Komyo (1321-1380), a prince from a rival branch of the imperial family. Meanwhile, the exiled Godaigo established
Io3
A “Southern court” in the mountains of Yoshino from which he and his successors challenged the primacy of Kyoto’s “Northern Court” for more than half a century.3 The war of attrition that ensued helped justify the establishment of a robust warrior regime in Kyoto. The general state of unrest that characterized the 1330s in fact transformed Kyoto into a cityscape infused with warriors and other “outsiders,” a circumstance that substantially eroded notions of capital exclusivity. Surprisingly, it was the Ashikaga who attempted to restore them.
This chapter begins by exploring the ways warriors interacted with Kyoto’s urban landscape following the establishment of the Ashikaga shogunate in 1336.4 Some of the regime’s earliest policies reveal a remarkable level of deference toward traditional spatial paradigms. Whereas the trend toward a greater level of inclusion had become inexorable by this period, warrior residence remained largely limited to the city’s margins. This tendency remained true even during the transformative reign of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the third and most powerful Ashikaga shogun. Yoshimitsu’s several large-scale building projects had a dramatic impact on Kyoto’s medieval urban landscape. Notably, however, not one was located within the classical city’s original boundaries. The shogun, it seems, remained reticent about violating the foundational taboo barring warriors and temples from the city. He even went so far as to defer to the court on questions of capital land distribution. The findings of this first section force a re-evaluation of the extent of Ashikaga assertiveness in medieval Kyoto, even at the zenith of the regime’s power. The standard narrative depicts the shogunate as a growing and eventually ineluctable force of political, economic, and physical change, one that ruled by fiat and according to supposedly unique “warrior” sensibilities. We discover here, however, evidence of a marked reluctance to violate age-old customs and a powerfully conservative impulse vis-a-vis capital spatial norms. This stance, it is argued, helped the Ashikaga gain legitimacy by enabling them to play the part of dutiful servants of the state.
The impulse to become fully endowed members of the state bureaucracy helps explain the findings of the second section, which show that successive Ashikaga leaders consistently built residential headquarters in the shinden style. Doing so endowed them with the architectural infrastructure necessary to conduct rituals of state that helped authenticate their membership in the imperial hierarchy. The findings reinforce the suggestion that the Ashikaga sought to
Influence traditional spheres of influence through infiltration rather than coercion. This section also calls into question a widely accepted impression that the Ashikaga shoguns were pioneers of shoin-style architecture, the precursor oftraditional Japanese residential architecture. As we shall see, to the extent that the Ashikaga shoguns built structures in that emerging style at all, they were more likely responding to preexisting trends instead of forging new ones.
The same section concludes with a brief reflection on yet another way warriors used architecture to “build” legitimacy in medieval Kyoto. Following the establishment of the shogunate, the Ashikaga sought to transform the Tsuchimikado Palace in Kamigyo from a luxurious yet temporary imperial abode—a sato-dairi—into the official and permanent Imperial Palace, the kokyo. The campaign was significant because it signaled the Ashikaga’s public acceptance of responsibility for the reigning emperor’s material well-being, a duty indicative of political primacy carried out with equal relish by the Fujiwara, Taira, and Minamoto before them. Just as important, any plan that contributed to a sense of imperial stability underscored the legitimacy of the Kyoto court (and its military protectors) vis-a-vis its “Southern” rivals.
The third section of this chapter looks more closely at the urban legacy of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, this time to consider the possibility that the shogun had a master plan for medieval Kyoto that entailed a fundamental reorganization of capital space. A synthesis of textual and archeological evidence reveals that all the major building projects commissioned by Yoshimitsu—including several major temples, the Imperial Palace, and his own shogunal headquarters—lined up along a series of axes that together constituted a complex and highly contrived urban matrix. The evidence suggests the shogun was constructing a cityscape in which each of the powerful bodies of interest had a clearly defined place within the greater order, an order that he himself was defining and constructing in the process. While the calculated incorporation of kenmon into the capital’s urban landscape was novel, there was something deeply conservative about Yoshimitsu’s vision. By reorganizing Kyoto into a more unified political and material entity, he was restoring the classical ideal of monocentrism and turning back the clock on the nodal development that had for centuries made the city a fractured and pluralistic medieval landscape.
In the conclusion, we consider how the success of Ashikaga rule affected the discourse of capital exclusion. As the shogunate expanded its
Power to eventually control all key matters of policy and the economy, the differentiation between Rakuchu and Rakugai became less emphatic, and from about the fourteenth century, those two words began appearing with the greatest frequency as part of a single, compound term signifying the entire capital basin: “Rakuchu-Rakugai" No longer, it appears, was it necessary to sharply define spheres of autonomy and jurisdiction in an environment where there existed a strong centralized governing authority.
World History
