Nanboku-chō period

Emperor Daigo (AD 901–923), who lived at a time when the court had no strong rivals and effective rule was exercised directly from the throne, became Go-Daigo's adopted name and model.

The Nanboku-chō War was an ideological struggle between loyalists who wanted the Emperor back in power, and those who believed in creating another military regime modeled after Kamakura.

The shugo of this period had greater power than that of the Kamakura, including sending envoys where land disputes occurred, law enforcement, issuing hanzei (a half-tax), and to levy taxes.

However, headship rights were extremely unstable as branch families often asserted their own independence, particularly as new generations emerged to dilute the ties of kinship.

[24] Those provincial families who had accumulated power throughout the Kamakura period, like the Ouchi of Nagato and the Shimazu of Satsuma, were lords in their own right and thus less dependent on the regime and on their shugo titles.

[28] A largely missing picture until recently, was the fate of public lands (kokugaryo) during the Muromachi period, and the role of the shugo lords in their encroachment on them.

Furthermore, in 1346, ten years after the emergence of the Muromachi regime, the shōgun decentralized authority by giving the shugo the right to judge cases of crop stealing on the estates, and to make temporary assignments of land to deserving vassals taken from the imperialist forces.

His power was not built upon personal ownership of land like the territorial lords (daimyō) of the sixteenth century, but upon the loyalties of the local samurai through ties of vassalage.

There were two reasons why it survived in the attenuated form described above: one, was the existence of the Muromachi regime that consistently upheld the estate system in the face of warrior incursions.

[28] As described earlier, Ashikaga Takauji tried to make sure that the limits set on the warriors by the half-tax measure was not exceeded, but he failed to circumvent arrangements like the shugo contract that really denuded the noble of his estate and its income.

To prevent outright disobedience and rebellion among the populace was one reason why both shugo lords and kokujin came to respect the outward form of the estate structure.

[38] The kanrei also had the responsibility of looking over the bureaucratic elements of the regime on a daily basis, consulting and transmitting shogunal orders to the council and to the bureaucracy.

[13] The office holder automatically became the shugo over Yamashiro province, the wealthiest and most densely populated in Japan, and had the responsibility of protecting the regime headquarters and Kyoto.

Shugo participation in the Senior Vassal Council and in the Board of Retainers were important because it was through the use of these intermediary instruments whereby the Ashikaga shōguns were able to centralize the state under their direction.

Kinship in the form of headship ties (soryo), looms large as a recruiting mechanism, here too, the shugo lords were mostly branch families of the Ashikaga.

In 1362, the two most powerful shugo houses in the country, the Ouchi and the Yamana, submitted themselves to the Ashikaga regime on condition that the shōgun would not interfere with the internal affairs of their respective provinces (Grossberg 1981:25).

In 1362, the last Southern Court offensive against Kyoto forced the Ashikaga to withdraw from the capital, but like many previous attempts, the imperialists had to eventually retreat in the face of a large counterattack without having accomplished anything.

[43] In 1370, Imagawa Sadayo (Ryoshun) was appointed by the kanrei Yoriyuki and the Senior Vassal Council to bring down the last bastion of Southern Court resistance in Kyūshū.

After a grueling twelve-year campaign, imperialist resistance collapsed with the defeat of the Kikuchi clan in 1381; and with the death of Shimazu Ujihisa in 1385, the last Kyūshū provincial domain declared its allegiance to the regime.

Outside shugo lords (tozama) unrelated to the Ashikaga like the Takeda, Chiba, Yuki, Satake, Oyama, Utsunomiya, Shoni, Otomo, Aso, and the Shimazu families, all of whom were concentrated in or near the Kantō and Kyūshū regions, did not participate in the kanrei council system, and were semi-independent of the regime.

However, geographically, the Muromachi regime was limited in scope, delegating its jurisdiction of the Kantō and Kyūshū areas to regional representatives, holding more or less direct control only over the central and western provinces of Honshū.

Before the Meitoku Rising of 1391, the Yamana clan possessed 11 provinces in western and central Japan which made them the most powerful shugo family in the country.

[66] The Yamana shugo lords Mitsuyuki and Ujikiyo attacked Kyoto, but were severely defeated by the shogunal army in concert with the forces of Ouchi Yoshihiro.

At the battle of Sakai, Yoshimitsu along with the forces of five shugo lords, the Hosokawa, Akamatsu, Kyogoku, Shiba, and the Hatakeyama, overwhelmed Yoshihiro's defensive works by setting fire to the city.

With the compulsory residential policy that emerged under the shōgun Yoshimitsu, shugo lords with their vassals and servants added to the distinguished population of the city that included nobles, the imperial court and the Muromachi government.

It came in novel form as commercial revenue extracted from the moneylenders, a tax was assessed once the power structure of the Muromachi bureaucracy had effectively taken the city of Kyoto.

He relied on three main policies to accomplish the task of assembling power: Both the vassalage ties with the samurai and control over shugo lords were established after the regime had solidified in the 1350s.

The half-tax policy led the shugo to have more power as lords of the provinces and it divided estate lands which multiplied the number of fiefs owned by samurai warriors.

The half-tax policy began as an emergency tax designated for military rations (hyororyosho) collected during wartime: half the income from a particular temple, shrine and estate lands in the provinces of Mino, Ōmi and Owari would be taken to support armies of the Muromachi regime.

[82] Ties had to be strengthened or there was a risk of losing a potential warrior to the emerging shugo lords loyal to the Ashikaga clan or worst, by rival imperialist generals.