He persuaded his younger brother, Ashikaga Yoshimi, to abandon the life of a monk, and named him heir.

[5]: 220 [6] Tomiko sought political and military support to rule as regent until the maturity of her son, the future shogun Ashikaga Yoshihisa.

Surely, too, they perceived links between their immediate purposes and the deeper strains in every relationship of power and personal attachment.

In July, according to Sansom, Yoshimasa appointed Hosokawa commanding general in an attempt to "chastise the rebel" Yamana.

Sansom states "The chronicles of the time paint a dreadful picture of the carnage", and "the two adversaries faced one another without action for the rest of the year".

[5]: 226–227 Both Yamana Sōzen and Hosokawa Katsumoto died in 1473, and even then the war continued on, with neither side able to figure out how to end it.

Ōuchi Masahiro, one of the Yamana generals, eventually burnt down his section of Kyoto and left the area on 17 December 1477.

[5]: 227–228 By 1477, ten years after the fighting had begun, Kyoto was nothing more than a place for mobs to loot and move in to take what was left.

The Ikkō, who had a complex relationship with the Jōdo Shinshō leader Rennyo, appealed to the common peasants in their region, and inevitably formed the Ikkō-ikki.

[citation needed] The uprising of the Ikkō-ikki and the Yamashiro-ikki formed part of the general outbreak of civil war.

Sansom states some refer to this as gekokujō (roughly "the low oppress the high"), or a "disturbed social order".

Sansom further states, "The frequent risings of the fifteenth century were expressions of popular discontent in which peasants took part".

[citation needed] In 1507, the Kanrei Hosokawa Masamoto was assassinated and in 1508, Yoshizumi left Kyoto and the Ōuchi restored the shogunate to Yoshitane.

[5]: 234  Others such as Mark Ravina,[14] Mary Elizabeth Berry, and Conrad Totman argue that the kuni (provinces) were not unlike quasi-independent states, and that the term is thus more or less appropriate.

The cost for the individual daimyō was tremendous, and a century of conflict so weakened the bulk of Japanese warlords that the three great figures of Japanese unification, beginning with Oda Nobunaga, found it easier to militarily assert a single, unified military government.

It illustrates in detail the strategies involved in the fighting, and its chief instigators, Yamana Sōzen and Hosokawa Katsumoto, along with accounts of how the Onin War affected the city and its citizens: "The flowery capitol which we thought would last forever to our surprise is to become a lair of wolves and foxes.

[5]: 225–226  Even the North Field of Toji has fallen to ash ... Lamenting the plight of the many fallen acolytes, Ii-o Hikorokusaemon-No-Jou read a passage: Nare ya shiru Miyako wa nobe no Yū-hibari Agaru wo mite mo Ochiru na-mida wa Now the city that you knew Has become an empty moor, From which the evening skylark rises While your tears fall.

Without fully anticipating the consequences, the Muromachi government had loosened the restraints of tradition in Japanese society, which meant that "new energies were released, new classes were formed, and new wealth was created".

As the shogunate's powerful figures competed for influence in Kyoto, the leading families in the provinces were amassing resources and growing more independent of centralized controls.