Muromachi Period

The Muromachi period (1333–1573) in Japanese history was named after the location in northeastern Kyoto of the offices of the military government, or shogunate, of the Ashikaga line of the warrior rulers (shoguns). The shogunate was founded in 1336 by Ashikaga Takauji (1303–1358) after the overthrow of the Kamakura shogunate in 1333 and the failure of a brief attempt by Emperor Godaigo (1228–1339) to revive direct imperial rule between the years 1333 and 1336.

The Muromachi period (also known as the Ashikaga period) was one of the most tumultuous ages in the history of Japan. The Ashikaga shoguns, at their peak in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, controlled only a part of Japan. During the last hundred years of Muromachi, also known as the Sengokuage, Japan had no effective central government. Emperors had long been figureheads, and the Ashikaga shogunate controlled little more than Kyoto and its environs. Toward the end of the Muromachi period, however, independent territorial domains ruled by warrior chieftains called daimyo appeared throughout the country, and from about 1560 on, these domains were unified by a series of warlords whose triumphs led finally to two and a half centuries of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate (1600/1603–1868).

Although much of the Muromachi period was unquestionably a dark age, it was also a time of cultural achievement. Pure Land ( Jodo) and Zen Buddhism flourished, and arts such as Noh drama, tea ceremony, monochrome ink painting, landscape dry gardening, and flower arrangement were primarily the products of Muromachi culture. While the Ashikaga shoguns were generally ineffective rulers, collectively they were superb patrons of the arts. The patronage derived in part from sending missions to China that returned to Japan with vital ideas in philosophy and religion, new styles of art, and countless objects of art and craft. Through the patronage of the Ashikaga shoguns, China exerted great influence over the shaping of Muromachi culture.

The Muromachi period is also remembered as the time when Europeans first visited Japan. Portuguese traders arrived in 1543 and were followed in the ensuing half-century by the Spanish, Dutch, and English. The Catholic countries Portugal and Spain also brought Christian missionaries, who launched vigorous campaigns to convert the Japanese. Eventually, Japan rejected Christianity and in the early seventeenth century commenced a persecution against the foreign religion that was a major factor in shaping the policy of national seclusion by the Tokugawa shogunate from the 1630s.

Paul Varley

Hall, John W., and Takeshi Toyoda, eds. (1977) Japan in the Muromachi Age. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Sansom, George. (1961) A History of Japan, 1334–1615. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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