User:Soranin/Sandbox4

Timeline

Ōnin War [1467-1477]

Ōnin War, running from 1467 to 1477. Huge damage done to Kyoto in the process of this war. It begins as a kind of succession dispute within the shogunate, but an enormous proportion of Kyoto is destroyed in fire. Lots of these different warrior constables from around the country end up coming to the Kyoto region to get involved. When that war ends, some of them go back to their provinces to find that someone else has usurped them. And that's someone else who has usurped them, manages to solidify their own power until they become what we would call daimyo, this real independent warlord. And in other cases, the warrior constables, when they go back to their provinces, they're the ones who managed to do that. Because this war, this Onin War, this 10 year conflict, pretty much destroys the idea of a functional shogunate. And so there really is no one in Kyoto anymore that you have to answer to.

So it's a period when central authority in Japan has completely gone. So you've still got the emperor in Kyoto, but as we were saying a moment ago, they're kind of impoverished and not really able to do very much politically or militarily. You've also still got a shogun in Kyoto. So if we go to the end of the Onin War, 1477, which is also pretty much the beginning of this Sengoku era, you've got a shogun there, but they're also extremely poor.

This is the exact period after the Onin War when the Ashikaga shogunate is descending really into complete impotence. Their writ doesn't run far outside Kyoto and they haven't got much income. So they simply couldn't afford to put the silver on there.

So you mentioned the Onin War there, 1467 to 77, a bit of a succession crisis. Should we view that as the catalyst for the Sengoku period? I think that's right, yes.

These two lords, I think it was the Hashimoto's and the Yamunas, have been itching to fight for a long time, and they fought for 10 years. It's said that they destroyed the whole of Kyoto. That's not quite true. They destroyed the upper class part of Kyoto. So 10 years of fighting included looting, arson, and all these other things. But this mainly happened. This was the temples. This was the palaces. That lot got destroyed. Meanwhile, the shogun who lived at that point was a guy called Yoshimasa, who was living during the end of the 15th century. And he retired. He was very interested in the arts, and he was not remotely interested in fighting. And he kept well out of this fighting. And he went off to the east of the city, and there he built a fabulous pavilion, the silver pavilion. And there he carried on having a life of leisure and art with his friends. While all this was going on in Kyoto, his pavilion was facing away from the city, so it didn't have to see it was burning. And it was facing towards the lovely mountains on the east. And he was, again, an amazing patron of the arts. And under him, ink painting flourished, pottery flourished, every possible art form. Oh, linked verse became very important. So the war came to an end.

The part of the city that had not burnt down was the part where the merchants and the artisans were, because they were poor chaps. And so nobody bothered with looting them, but they weren't that poor. So they were actually supplying and selling stuff to both sides in this war and getting richer. And the end of the Onin war, this is the Onin war, everything had sort of fallen apart, because Kyoto was in such a state of devastation.

The result of that was the whole society kind of fell apart. And a lot of the lords headed out to the provinces, partly because they were broke, because they'd had their houses burnt down. I mean, there are quite a lot of peasants and serfs could come out of the countryside into the city and recreate themselves as merchants or as artisans, because they could make things, they could sell things. And so a whole new culture grew from that period of incredible disaster.

Siege of Mount Hiei [1571]

So there were quite remarkable sieges along the way, a company that has to be said, certainly in the case of someone like Nobunaga, with extraordinary slaughter. I think he particularly hated the idea that Buddhist sects would interfere in the running of the country. So there's another Buddhist sect, the Tendai sect, which he attacked on their mountain base called Mount Hiei, sent thousands of troops up there, killed everybody, burned everything, just destroyed the entire sect, including people unrelated to the sect who were living on the mountain. So this gives you an idea of how bloody and uncompromising some of this warfare could be.

But in 1571, he realizes that the only way to solve his problem of encirclement is to break kind of the circle. So he starts with Mount Hiei, the Enuryakuchi temple complex that had given refuge to his enemies. And in the fall, he brings them out and has his troops advance up deliberately. And according to eyewitness accounts from the time that are written down, his troops are killing anything that's alive, whether it be monks, laymen, women, children, reportedly even every animal that's on the mountain. And they burn almost every building of this massive temple complex.

And of course, in addition to the human toll, which is horrific, this is a massive loss of life, but it's also a loss of culture, of history. This was a major religious complex. So it had important documents, texts, artwork that all went up in flames with the exception of one small building that got overlooked.

when Emperor Kamu had the capital built there, one of the things he knew was that there was already in the northwest a mountain called Mount Hiei on which was a huge Buddhist temple. So that therefore counteracted the unluckiness. That was very important. And then more Buddhist temples and more Buddhist temples were built on that same mountain. And in the end, there was something like 3000 Buddhist temples up there, which was all an excellent thing for countering the unluckiness, except it became rather unlucky itself, because those Buddhist priests then came down and started rampaging around the city. And then, unluckily, Nobunaga had to go up and destroy the entire temple compound, which he did. He burnt down the whole lot. But there are temples there again.

Groups

Iga ikki

Iga at this time is ruled by an independent league or ikki that did not recognize any daimyo's hegemony and even gone so far as to expel the military governor of the province that had been appointed by the Ashkaga.

we have the names of a couple of the senior leaders, if you will, but it really was more of a collective than any hierarchical organization that we would associate with like there being a daimyo and samurai underneath him and so forth. That's not to say that there wasn't a hierarchy there was, but it's really hard to just name one person as an acting figure on the Iga side of things. And part of this is because of the way that they constructed it. This is born out of sort of the chaos resulting in the wake of the Onin War of 1467 to 1477.

In response to this as a way to limit internal conflict in their own ranks, in 1494 we see two documents. They're not quite constitutions in the way that we would think of it, but they kind of form the rules for local life within Iga as a community. The first one is a document signed by 350 commoners, peasants, villagers, and so forth. And it's an agreement to abide by specific rules that limit conflict over rice paddy land, access to forests, mountains, and fields, and it kind of gives a general code of conduct. So in the absence of authority coming from the center, they decide to create their own sort of rules for them to live by. And then later on that same year, we see another document signed by 46 people representing families of note from Iga Province.

So these 46 families sign an oath, vowing not to fight over taxes or the collection thereof to work together to prevent insubordination of the peasants underneath them. And these two groups form a united front in coordination to maintain local order and peace and limit the amount of violence, whether it's internal or whether it's coming from external sources like bandits or even larger warrior organizations like Daimyo from a neighboring province who wants to move in. [...] There is a hierarchy. There are the upper class. Those 46 samurai families are in charge and so forth. But it is much more of a collective, we driven organization than certainly the Daimyo houses that we are normally associated with this period. Other leagues like this have risen up in other places at this time, fairly common in the absence of central authority for locals to take measures to protect themselves. But most other places, they didn't last very long [...] So it was much easier for the Iga Iki to keep outsiders out than it would have been for other similar organizations, which is why they lasted as long as they did.

Some advantages that the Iga ikki had. One is this long experience with unconventional warfare, we'll say. Another is that because of their makeup, it's not quite egalitarian or democratic in the way that we would think of it, but they're led by lower level warriors, localized power base holding warriors, but they integrate the commoner population, if you will, into their organization. Often you'll hear people talk about the Iga Shinobi clan or ninja clan or something like that. And that's misleading because this wasn't a family based organization in the way that we think of like the Oda being a military and political entity organized around the Oda family. That's not what this was, but they were able to conscript almost the members of the community from all levels, give them military training and utilize them in ways that we don't necessarily see to the same extent in other locations. So it wasn't just these 46 families that signed the oath document saying that they would work together and their household warriors. It was a mobilization of the entire community in essence to resist external aggression.

Ikkō-ikki

Another group that around this time rises up to challenge his authority and one that will probably his longest running enemy is what's known as the Ikkō-ikki or the Ikko League. This was a confederation of followers of the true Pure Land Sept of Buddhism. And its headquarters was the Ishiyama Hongan-ji, which was located in what is now present day Osaka. But it had groups of adherents called these Ikki or leagues scattered throughout the provinces of central Japan. And in 1570, Nobunaga starts a war with them because the self-defense groups, these Ikki and the Ishiyama Hongan-ji itself resisted political and military control by local warrior rule. In fact, in 1486, the Ikko Ikki of Kaga Province overthrew the local dainyo and ruled the province without any samurai rule for almost 100 years.

For 10 years until 1580, he's in this constant on and off war with the Ishiyama Hongan-ji and their ikko followers in various locations throughout the provinces. And they're really the linchpin of the various coalitions that are opposing Nobunaga. You know, at this point, these are kind of like the main enemies that he's looking at.

But in 1571, he realizes that the only way to solve his problem of encirclement is to break kind of the circle. So he starts with Mount Hiei, the Enuryakuchi temple complex that had given refuge to his enemies. And in the fall, he brings them out and has his troops advance up deliberately. And according to eyewitness accounts from the time that are written down, his troops are killing anything that's alive, whether it be monks, laymen, women, children, reportedly even every animal that's on the mountain. And they burn almost every building of this massive temple complex.

The Ikko-ikki finally surrenders through the agency of the Court, the court noble is sent by the emperor to broker a settlement and a surrender by the Ishiyama Hongan-ji, which ends that.