The Ōnin War and the Sengoku Period
The Ōnin War began in 1467 over a succession dispute in the shogun's household and destroyed Kyoto over the following decade. Ashikaga Yoshimasa had no son, persuaded his brother to leave the priesthood and become his heir, and then had a son the following year. Two great families took opposite sides — the Hosokawa for the brother, the Yamana for the child — and both brought armies into the capital. The shogun himself is said to have withdrawn to his villa to pursue the tea ceremony, garden design and the aesthetics of the Higashiyama culture while the city burned, and to have built the Silver Pavilion during it. The fighting lasted eleven years, largely inside Kyoto. Both sides burned quarters to deny them to the other, employed ashigaru — light foot soldiers recruited from anyone available, who plundered as payment — and neither could win. Kyoto had been the capital for six centuries and was reduced to scattered ruins. The imperial palace burned, the temples burned, the archives and much of the accumulated art of the period were destroyed. The war ended in 1477 without a settlement, because both principals had died and the armies went home. What went home with them was the discovery that the shogunate could not enforce anything. Provincial deputies stopped remitting taxes and became independent lords; those lords were then overthrown by their own retainers in a pattern the Japanese call gekokujō, the low overcoming the high. A century of war followed, and Nobunaga began ending it in 1568.
- Year: 1467 CE
- Category: Military
