Onin War
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The Onin War (応仁の乱 Ōnin no ran) was a civil war from 1467 to 1477 during the Muromachi period in Japan. A dispute between Hosokawa Katsumoto and Yamana Souzen escalated into a nationwide war involving the Ashikaga shogunate and various daimyo.
The war initiated the Sengoku jidai, "the Warring States period". This period was a long, drawn-out struggle for domination by individual daimyo, resulting in a mass power-struggle between the various houses to dominate the whole of Japan. It was during this time though, that there would emerge three individuals who would later be considered the three great daimyo of the Sengoku Period, and who would eventually unite Japan under one clan; they were Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.
The Onin War began when Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa proclaimed his brother, Yoshimi, heir to the shogunate. Yoshimasa even dragged his brother out of a monastery to fulfill his proclamation. A year later, upon the birth of his son Yoshihisa, Yoshimasa changed his mind and decided his son was a better candidate. At the same time though, the Yamana and Hosokawa clans had spent years as rivals, interfering in the affairs of other families and clans with varying degrees of success. With two potential candidates to be the next shogun, it was a given that each family would choose either Yoshihisa or Yoshimasa as who should be the next shogun. Yamana Souzen, referred to as the "Red Monk" for his horrendous temper and his membership of the priesthood, decided to support the infant heir, Yoshihisa. Hosokawa Katsumoto on the other hand, threw his clan behind Yoshimi, the current shogun’s brother. To make things worse, Yamana Souzen and Hosokawa Katsumoto were related - Souzen was Katsumoto's father-in-law.
After mustering their armies, Yamana - with 80,000 samurai and mercenaries, and Hosokawa - with 85,000 men, met in Kyoto. At this time in history, these numbers were unbelievable, seeing how most European forces numbered only in the low tens of thousands. Neither side though, would risk starting the battle, for fear they would be considered a rebel in the eyes of the Shogun, thus inevitably losing support for them throughout Japan. The war did start though, after Yamana pulled in another 20,000 men, and when 'mysteriously', the Hosokawa mansion burnt to the ground. This act placed the unwanted title of "rebel" upon the Yamana Clan.
By July, 1467 the fighting had become serious, and this was when the Onin War officially started. By September, Kyoto's northern parts were in ruin, and everyone who could flee from Kyoto did.
Both Yamana Souzen and Hosokawa Katsumoto died in 1473, and even then, the war continued on, neither side figuring out how to end the war. However, eventually the Yamana clan lost heart as the label of "rebel" was at last having some effect. Ouchi Masahiro, one of the Yamana generals, eventually burnt down his section of Kyoto and left the area. It was by 1477, some ten years after the fighting had begun, that Kyoto was now nothing more than a place for mobs to loot and move in to take what was left. Neither the Yamana clan, nor the Hosokawa clan had achieved its aims, other than to kill some of the other clan.
During this whole ordeal, the shogun did absolutely nothing. Ashikaga Yoshimasa was only slightly in-tune with reality; and he obviously didn't have a care what was going on in his country. While Kyoto was burning, he spent his time on poetry readings and other cultural activities and in planning the Ginkaku-ji, a Silver Pavilion to rival the Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, that his grandfather, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, had built.
The violence in Kyoto between Yamana and Hosokawa left a bad taste in the mouths of everyone in Japan. The Onin War, and the shogun’s complacent attitude torwards the war, "sanctioned" private wars and skirmishes between the other daimyo. It got to a point where no part of Japan was untouched by violence. The best way to settle any dispute, during this time, appeared to be by the sword. Although the battles in Kyoto had been abandoned, the war had spread over to the rest of Japan. In Yamashiro Province, the Hatakeyama clan had split into two parts that fought each other to a standstill. This stalemate, as well, was to have serious consequences. In 1485, the peasantry and ji-samurai (lesser samurai) just had enough and revolted. Setting up their own army (the 'ikki'), they forced the clan armies to leave the province. The ikki were becoming a powerful force, and not just armed mobs. By 1486 they had even set up a provisional government for Yamashiro province.
The ikki would form and appear throughout the other parts of Japan, such as Kaga Province, where a sect of the Amida Buddhists, the Ikko, started their own revolt during the Onin War after being enlisted by one of Kaga's most prominent warlords, Togashi Masachika. The Ikko were a sect who tried their hardest to appeal to the common peasants in their region, and it was only inevitable that they would form a sort of Ikko-ikki. By 1488 the Ikko-ikki of Kaga Province expelled Masachika and the other warlords, and took control of the province. After this they began building a fortified castle-cathedral along the Yodo River and used it as their Headquarters. The Ikko-ikki and the Yamashiro-ikki were revolutionary, in a process called Gekokujo ("the low oppress the high").
After the Onin War, the Ashikaga bakufu completely fell apart; for all practical purposes, the Hosokawa family was in charge and the Ashikaga shoguns becamse their puppets. When Yoshimi's son Yoshitane was made shogun in 1490, the Hosokawa Kanrei soon put him to flight in 1493 and declared another Ashikaga, Yoshizumi, to be shogun. In 1499, Yoshitane arrived at Yamaguchi, the capital of the Ouchi, and this powerful family threw its military support behind Yoshitane. In 1507, the Kanrei Hosokawa Matsumoto was assassinated and in 1508, Yoshizumi left Kyoto and the Ouchi restored the shogunate to Yoshitane. Thence began a series of strange conflicts over control of the puppet government of the shogunate. After the death of Hosokawa Matsumoto, his adopted sons Takakuni and Sumimoto began to fight over the succession to the Kanrei, but Sumimoto himself was a puppet of one of his vassals. This would characterize the wars following the Onin War; these wars were more about control over puppet governments than they were about high ideals or simply greed for territory. The Hosokawa family would control the shogunate until 1558 when they were betrayed by a vassal family. The powerful Ouchi were also destroyed by a vassal in 1551; by the end of the Warring States period only a dozen or so warlord families still remained standing. But the most important development to come out of the Onin War was the ceaseless civil war that ignited outside the capital city. Hosokawa tried to foment civil strife in the Ouchi domains, for instance, and this civil strife would eventually force Ouchi to submit and leave. From the close of the Onin War, this type of civil strife, either vassals striving to conquer their daimyo or succession disputes drawing in outside daimyo , was endemic all throughout Japan. So the Warring States period (which is the Chinese term borrowed by the Japanese in calling this period "sengoku jidai"), really wasn't a "warring states" period at all, but a "warring warlords" period. The cost for the individual daimyo was tremendous, and a century of conflict would so weaken the bulk of Japanese warlords, that the three great figures of Japanese unification, beginning with Oda Nobunaga, would find it easier to militarily assert a single, unified military government.