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6 The Country Unified
- University of Hawai'i Press
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6 The Country Unified The last century of the Muromachi period, following the devastating Ònin War of 1467–77, has been fittingly labeled the age of provincial wars. Although its first few decades witnessed the blossoming of Higashiyama culture, the age was otherwise the darkest and most troubled in Japanese history. Fighting raged from one end of the country to the other. The Ashikaga shoguns became totally powerless, and the domains of many daimyos were torn asunder either by the internecine warfare of vassals or by great peasant uprisings. Among those most directly and adversely affected by the Ònin War were the Kyoto courtiers, so long the bearers of traditional culture in Japanese history. Many courtiers had already departed from the capital during the war for safety elsewhere, and others followed after the end of hostilities. A number of prominent courtiers with special artistic and scholarly abilities accepted invitations to visit the more stable and prosperous provincial daimyos, who wished to infuse some of the cultural brilliance of Kyoto into their domainial capitals. The cultural interests of the courtiers of the late fifteenth century were overwhelmingly antiquarian. They produced very little literature or art of note but rather devoted themselves to exegetical studies of the glorious poetry and prose works of their Heian predecessors, works such as the Kokinshû, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji. Ever more covetous of their role as custodians of the past, they even established secret or arcane interpretations of these classics which, in their increasingly straitened financial circumstances, they eagerly sought to purvey for cash. Like the courtier class in general, the imperial family also suffered grievously in the age of provincial wars. Emperors, although still theoretically sovereign over the land, had long been mere figures of ceremony at court. From about the time of the Ònin War they gradually withdrew from participation in all but the most essential courtly functions, and often they found themselves embarrassingly unable even to defray the costs of the latter. The coronation of an emperor of the early sixteenth century, for example, was postponed for more than twenty years for lack of funds. The Country Unified 141 Still another group whose influence was greatly reduced by the Ònin War was the Zen priesthood of the Gozan temples of Kyoto. Along with the courtiers, the Gozan Zen priests depended heavily on the patronage of the Ashikaga shogunate, especially the opportunity this patronage gave them to accompany the cultural and trading missions to Ming China. With the collapse of the shogunate as a central governing body in the Ònin War, initiative in the Ming trade was more and more assumed by certain daimyo houses based in Kyushu and the region of the Inland Sea. We have observed that the Zen priest and artist Sesshû, although formally associated with the Shòkokuji Temple in Kyoto, left the capital during the Ònin War to take up residence in the Òuchi domain and subsequently journeyed to China under Òuchi auspices. Sesshû was simply the most outstanding personality attracted by the Òuchi during these years in their attempt to make Yamaguchi, their domainial capital, the “Kyoto of the west.” Although the age of provincial wars was a time of great upheaval and seemingly endless disorder, we can see in retrospect that important institutional processes were under way, especially in the evolution of rule at the regional level of Japanese society, that were to make possible a rapid unification of the country at the end of the sixteenth century. Certain daimyos, such as the Òuchi, had managed to weather the Ònin War and its aftermath; but most of the other great daimyo houses of the early Muromachi period were destroyed in the final decades of the fifteenth century. Gradually, during the early sixteenth century, a new class of regional barons emerged as the masters of domains which, although generally smaller than the territorial possessions of the pre-Ònin War daimyos, were more tightly organized as autonomous units capable of survival in a time of constant civil strife. These new daimyos of the age of provincial wars were a sturdy and in many ways progressive breed of men, who devoted all their energies to strengthening and expanding their domainial rule. They gathered their vassals into more permanent fighting units, compiled legal codes to cover the altered conditions of the age, and adopted a variety of policies to encourage both agricultural and commercial development and even to exploit, through mining operations and the like, the...