Ashikaga Yoshimasa
Ashikaga Yoshimasa was the eighth Muromachi shogun, presided over a devastating civil war he made no attempt to stop, and shaped Japanese aesthetics more than any ruler before or since. Born in 1436, he became shogun at fourteen in 1449 and found the office already stripped of real authority by the provincial military governors. He gave up on governing early and devoted himself to building, gardens, tea, poetry and the acquisition of Chinese art, funding it by levies on the capital while famine killed tens of thousands in the 1460s. His succession decision caused the war. Having no son, in 1464 he persuaded his brother Yoshimi to leave the priesthood and become his heir. His wife Hino Tomiko then bore a son in 1465, and backed the child. The two rival claims attracted the two great military houses, Hosokawa and Yamana, and in 1467 fighting broke out in Kyoto. The Onin War lasted eleven years, burned most of the capital to the ground, and destroyed what remained of shogunal authority, opening the Sengoku period of a century of provincial warfare. Yoshimasa continued his aesthetic pursuits throughout, and retired in 1473 in favour of his son. He then built the Higashiyama villa on the eastern hills, with the Silver Pavilion, Ginkaku-ji, at its centre — never actually silvered — and a garden with a raked sand cone. The culture he assembled there is the source of much of what is now considered characteristically Japanese: the tea ceremony as codified by Murata Juko, noh drama, ink painting, flower arrangement, shoin architecture with tatami and tokonoma, and the aesthetic of wabi. He died in 1490.
- Lived: 1436 CE – 1490 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: ruler
