The documentary record of destruction and depopulation during the decade following 1467 paints a dire picture of urban devastation. Here are several representative examples:
Holding aged parents in their arms, pulling along wives and children behind them, the townspeople fled the city in a roar of cries. And none was left to fight the blaze. The fires burned over one hundred blocks, from Nijo in the south to Goryo in the north, from Odoneri in the west to Muromachi in the east. About 30,000 residences—of aristocrats, military men, great and small alike—went up in flames. Everything is now ruined.5
Across our charred land, all human traces have been extinguished. For blocks on end, birds are the sole sign of life.6
Like hornets’ nests, the sanctuaries of the eastern and western hills have all been burned and crushed.7
The Capital of Flowers of myriad ages is now a lair of foxes and wolves.8
Figure 6.1 shows the extent of fire damage sustained during the Onin years. Over the course of the conflict, the elite district of Kamigyo was razed several times. Data for Shimogyo is conjectural due to a lack of documentation, although it is possible that that part of the city was purposefully spared. Not only was it bereft of the homes of key political figures, its commoners played a critical role in the war effort as the providers of food and fighting implements to armies operating in the area.9
6.1. Mapoffire damage during the OninWar(1467-1477), indicated with shaded areas and dots for major temples, shrines, or palaces destroyed.
Following the negotiation of a cease-fire in 1477, the Ashikaga shogunate spearheaded a large-scale effort to rebuild the city’s most important venues of statecraft, including the Imperial Palace, the Muromachi Palace, and many of the homes of the civil aristocracy. They even attempted to reconstruct the urban grid, which had been compromised through the creation of an elaborate network of walls and moats.10 Despite initial progress, long-term reconstruction efforts were hampered by the general state of political disorder and lawlessness. Financial woes were also a large problem. The emperor and aristocracy, as well as the shogunate itself, were finding it difficult to draw income from provincial estates, which fell increasingly under the control of renegade warlords. The Imperial Palace was partially restored around 1479, but we have no records of substantial repairs taking place after a succession of fires, floods, fighting, arson, and burglary visited the site over the next several decades.11 So badly maintained was the Imperial
Palace that one contemporary diarist deemed it “indistinguishable from commoner dwellings.”'2 Joao Rodrigues, a Christian missionary who arrived in Japan in 1577, had this to say about Kyoto’s venues of traditional authority:
The palaces of the king and the kuge were wretched and made of old pine wood, while the walls were constructed of pine planks. The outward life of the kuge was extremely wretched and poor. The walls surrounding the king’s palace were made of wood covered with reeds and clay, and were very old and dilapidated. Everything was left open and abandoned without any guards, and anyone who so desired could enter the courtyards right up to the royal palace without anybody stopping him, as we ourselves did to look around.'3
The Muromachi Palace was partially rebuilt in 1479, yet the frequency of subsequent reconstructions suggests the site was either subjected to virtually continuous assault or that it was never rebuilt very well in the first place, or both. In 1527, Muromachi was abandoned as the shogun Yoshiharu (1511-1550) took refuge in Shokokuji, the first of many examples of a wartime shogun either sheltering in fortified temples or remaining outside the city altogether. Several subsequent attempts were made to re-establish a sustained shogunal presence within Kyoto, but each was short-lived. In 1542, Yoshiharu moved into a restored palace, although he and his son, the future shogun Yoshiteru (1536-1565), had moved back into fortified temples by 1547 before moving yet again into outlying castles. A new shogunal headquarters was built in 1560, only to be destroyed in an attack five years later.'4 After that, a dedicated shogunal headquarters was not created in Kyoto until 1569.'5 Such locational instability demonstrates political and financial weakness, as well as the sustained threat of extreme violence. As we shall see, the inability to maintain a formal residence in the capital was not merely symptomatic. It hindered the shogun’s ability to foster and regularly renew a connection with the statutory state.
Members of the court fared no better than the emperor and shogun. Their homes were likewise destroyed while many took refuge outside the city. When they finally returned, reconstruction was complicated by continued unrest, a lack of funds, and in some cases the presence of squatters who stubbornly occupied the ruins of their former
Palaces.16 The shogunate’s initial postwar reconstruction plan led to mass evictions of commoners and the successful construction of several Kamigyo palaces belonging to the Saionji, Kajuji, Takakura, and other aristocratic families. The documentary record from successive decades, however, suggests that progress was generally short-lived and, even where successful, limited in scope. Nobleman Kanroji Chikanaga (1425-1500), for example, was able to construct a palace substantial enough to be sought after by peers who wanted to borrow it to conduct certain rituals. Such was the case in 1488, when Ichijo Fuyuyoshi (1464-1514) held a haiga there to formally mark his promotion to the post of interior minister.17 Indicative, however, of just how poor conditions were and how desperate the aristocracy had become, Chikanaga himself described his new abode with marked disparagement:
The new structure has the appearance of a palace, yet it [certainly] is not. It’s merely halfway completed. There’s no gate and it’s located at the end of a back alley. [The entry is so far back and the alley so narrow that] it’s not even possible for me to board a carriage. That’s why I lease a house on Ogimachi [author’s emphasis].18
Ichijo Fuyuyoshi was not alone in his need to borrow the homes of his peers. Yamashina Tokitsugu (1507-1579) insisted upon conducting formal meetings at the Kamigyo residence of a Lord Nakamikado. Otherwise, he refused meetings altogether while attempting to keep up appearances (and, presumably, defensive capacity) by spending what little money he had on maintaining the walls surrounding his house rather than patch a leaky roof.19 Despite his best efforts, we know that Tokitsugu and at least several of his aristocratic colleagues ended up living in shacks built within the grounds of the Imperial Palace.20 The architectural footprint of the traditional elite, as well as that of their commoner counterparts, was so profoundly eroded during the Age of Warring States that the poet Socho was moved to write the following in 1526:
As I looked out over the city, I saw not one in ten of the houses that had been there formerly, either rich or poor. The sight of tilled fields around farmhouses, with the Imperial Palace in the midst of summer barley, was too much for words.21
When discussing the erosion of the courtly presence in wartime Kyoto, Mary Elizabeth Berry explained that the “destruction of the city signified. . . the destruction of civility and, one suspects, of identity itself.” To the traditional elite, she argued, buildings represented order, secure social places, and coherent lives. The despair so clearly evident in their accounts “surely derived most acutely from fears of their own physical and social effacement.”22 Although accurate, Berry’s wording can be easily misunderstood to mean that the sorry plight of the elite boiled down to a profound sense of humiliation borne of poverty and material privation. While humiliation was undoubtedly relevant, the old guard was haunted by a far more concrete and politically consequential affliction. Their inability to maintain shinden-style palaces, those built and decorated to meet certain status-specific prescriptions, meant the aristocracy were left incapable of properly engaging in official rites, rituals, and formalized activities. The efforts by some aristocrats to borrow the homes of their colleagues appear in hindsight to be feeble attempts to maintain a semblance of official conduct. Even Kanroji Chikanaga, who was apparently better off than most, was reticent about calling his own residence a “palace” at all. As Rodrigues wrote with perhaps more insight than he realized, war had indeed devastated the “outward life” of the aristocracy, a life that relied more than anything upon formalized ceremony and the scripted rituals of public pageantry.
The documentary record is replete with accounts of aristocrats lamenting their inability to conduct key public rituals.23 The imperial house itself was apparently so bereft of funds it was unable to hold even the most essential ceremonies, including imperial enthronements and interments. The burial of Emperor Gotsuchimikado (1442-1500) was delayed forty-three days, while the enthronements of emperors Go-kashiwabara (r. 1500-1526) and Gonara (r. 1526-1557) were postponed a staggering twenty-two and ten years respectively. When in 1502 the court requested help from warrior families to pay for Gokashiwabara’s enthronement, not only did Hosokawa Masamoto (1466-1507) dismiss the appeal, the warlord’s response called into question the very necessities of imperial government and ritual themselves:
The prime minister is good for nothing. . . . For that matter, things like imperial posts and ranks are worthless. So what if someone gets a promotion? Even if you tell everyone about it, it has no effect. I shall make this statement to the throne:
“The great enthronement ceremony at the Imperial Palace is worthless. Even if it is held, the common people will not know the king is king; and even if it is not held, I will know the king is king. All of the big ceremonies are, until the end of days, inappropriate” [author’s emphasis].24
The failure to hold a formal enthronement ceremony kept Gokashi-wabara from engaging in public events. Writing about royal banquets in 1506, nobleman Nakamikado Nobutane (1442-1525) decried the “abjection of imperial rituals” before, a few years later, explaining the cloistering effect of their abeyance:
The emperor has not gone out [to participate in new year events] at all because his enthronement ceremony has not yet been held. The blinds are down. Even though he has been on the throne for seventeen years, [the ceremony has] not been held because there are not the funds. Why, oh why? This is leading to the end of days.25
Equating the abeyance of imperial rituals with the “end of days” is a common, though nebulous, refrain in noble diaries from the period. Yamashina Tokitsugu is more explicit about the relationship between ritual and the survival of his kind. After attending a fire festival (sagicho) in the first month of 1530, he was “heartbroken” by the palace’s preparation of a meager twenty-six ritual pyres, far fewer than precedent dictated. To Tokitsugu, the lackluster showing was much more than mere anticlimax. Indeed, it signaled the “ruin of the aristocracy.”26
With almost universal consistency, contemporary diarists blame a lack of funds for the problem. What they leave unexplained, however, is precisely what the funds were needed for. Following strict rules of status-based comportment and precedent was expensive. It required the procurement of numerous objects as well as the employment of many people. On the occasion of a promotion celebration, for example, an aristocrat of the fifth rank or above would be obliged to replace his formal wardrobes and procure for his guests sumptuous food, drink, and take-home gifts. To make the day’s activities go smoothly, he would conscript a small army of minor officials, gardeners, attendants, craftsmen, cooks, menials, musicians, and chanters. Similar things would be required of an emperor preparing to be enthroned, in addition to a
New oxcart with richly embroidered blinds. But for all this, by far the most expensive aspect of public events held by members of the imperial hierarchy would have been the manufacture, refurbishment, and decoration of the architectural environment.
Court rituals required specific structural and decorative elements that were more than merely fine. Many had to accord with prescriptions that governed comportment as a function of status. Recall, for example, that the styles of roofing tiles and walls, tatami edgings and entry gates (as well as where those gates were located), were all dictated by an aristocrat’s formal status. Promotion to a higher court rank could easily necessitate a substantial refurbishment or replacement of many of these fixtures. For an enthronement, the Imperial Palace would gain a new raised dais (the Japanese equivalent of a “throne”) and sleeping chamber. Paper doors, folding screens, and curtains would be meticulously mended, while the cypress bark tiles of the central palace structure, the shi-shinden, would also likely be replaced.
Needless to say, during wartime it became impossible for the traditional elite to maintain their palaces in conditions suitable to the continuation of rituals according to previous standards. Plagued by violence, lawlessness, and financial ruin, most were probably not even able to ensure that their respective residences had a central shinden, the most basic structural element of a shinden-style palace. When we read in the documentary record, therefore, of the dilapidation of the Imperial Palace, aristocrats living in shacks, or the disappearance of the shogun’s headquarters, we are reading not merely of an effacement borne of disgrace. We are witnessing the disappearance of the infrastructure of classical pageantry. While the real-world efficacy of the emperor and statutory state had long been in decline, the destruction of Kyoto in the fifteenth century meant the loss of their means of asserting symbolic efficacy as well. War had rendered the traditional elite incapable of engaging in those acts of public pageantry that for centuries had served to validate and renew their status as members of the imperial hierarchy.
World History
