This week: Go-Daigo’s regime collapses, and a second samurai government, the Muromachi bakufu, emerges. How did Ashikaga Takauji successfully establish Japan’s second shogunate–and perhaps set it up for long term failure in the bargain?
Sources
Hall, John Whitney, “The Muromachi Bakufu” and Keiji Nagahara, “The Decline of the Shoen System” in The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol III: Medieval Japan
Goble, Andrew Edmund. “Go-Daigo, Takauji, and the Muromachi Shogunate” in Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850
Images
Transcript
We left things off last week with the Emperor Go-Daigo’s Kenmu Restoration, his attempt to return political power to the imperial family in Kyoto with the help of a collection of warriors who had grown disillusioned with Hojo rule.
And initially, Go-Daigo was successful; by the middle of 1333, the Hojo had been annihilated, their chosen replacement for him deposed from Kyoto, and a new government was emerging from the ashes.
However, the Kenmu Restoration would not last, largely–it turned out–because of Go-Daigo himself. Because in terms of his actual ability to govern, Go-Daigo (it turned out) had some pretty key blind spots.
Chief among these was his complete failure to recognize the importance of rewarding his followers from the warrior class–remember, this is the main way in which fighting men are paid during this time period, so remembering to do that is, well, kind of important.
These are very well armed people who are more than happy to use those weapons; not the sort you want to try to skip out on the check with.
But apparently nobody sent Go-Daigo that memo. There was, to be clear, plenty to pay off this debt with; the treasure and lands of the defeated Hojo and their allies were his to redistribute as he saw fit, after all. But Go-Daigo did not reserve much for the warriors in his ranks, focusing instead on trying to rebuild the economic power of the Kyoto aristocracy to the greatest degree possible. As the Taiheiki notes, “the offices of shugo and governor in more than fifty provinces were received by nobles and court officials; likewise confiscated estates and great estates were given them until they became . . . rich and powerful. . . .”
By doing this, Go-Daigo essentially ran out of cash to reward his warrior followers with.
Take, for example, Akamatsu Norimura, whose name came up briefly last time–he led a rebellion in Harima province in Go-Daigo’s name, and he jumped ship fairly early to boot. He was one of the first to declare openly for Go-Daigo after Kusunoki Masashige’s initial victory at Chihaya Castle.
For his bravery, he was rewarded with the appointment of shugo of Harima province….for a time. Before long, Go-Daigo decided he needed to reward one of his followers at court with that title, and so stripped it from a bewildered and quite upset Akamatsu.
Now, this is obviously a recipe for some long-term issues, to put it mildly; it’s not the sort of thing your warrior followers are likely to forget. But, while Go-Daigo’s mistaken priorities did practically guarantee his regime would not be stable, they didn’t do much to explain where opposition to him would end up coming together. To do that, we have to return to a discussion of Ashikaga Takauji.
Now again, this is very much my personal view here, but I think it’s fairly clear Takauji felt no particular sense of loyalty to Go-Daigo and had supported the imperial cause out of pure pragmatism. His actions make that pretty obvious; while Go-Daigo did reward him substantially (we talked a bit about those rewards last week), Takauji never received the one thing he petitioned for over and over.
Takauji repeatedly asked for the title of sei’i taishogun–to be made shogun, in other words, much as Minamoto no Yoritomo had been more than a century earlier.
As an aside, when Takauji rebelled against the Hojo he declared that rebellion specifically as a defense of the Minamoto family, of which he was a distant descendant–rebelling in their name to end their exploitation at the hands of the Hojo, as he put it. Restoring Minamoto control of the position of shogun flowed pretty naturally from that.
Go-Daigo, however, was not willing to give Takauji a title so associated with the very warrior rule he was trying to end. He threw plenty of other honors Takauji’s way, but not that one. Instead, he granted that role to his son Prince Morinaga, who had continued rebelling in his father’s name after Go-Daigo’s exile to the Oki Islands.
Throughout much of 1334, a tense co-existence continued between Go-Daigo and Takauji. Takauji, who had been the one to take Kyoto from Hojo forces, busied himself with creating a military government to manage the city on the model of the old Hojo one, while Go-Daigo busied himself with securing his restoration.
Differences certainly emerged between the two over the course of the year; for example, when Go-Daigo appointed one of his sons, Prince Norinaga, to the east to take charge of the old Hojo headquarters of Kamakura, Takauji insisted that his own brother Tadayoshi accompany the prince to “ensure his safety” (more realistically, to ensure Norinaga didn’t do anything too prejudicial to Takauji’s position or warrior interests more generally).
Similarly, by the end of 1334 Takauji was convinced the new shogun, Prince Morinaga, was plotting to kill him (and to be fair, Morinaga would have been smart to do so). After Takauji’s followers captured the shogun to end the assassination attempt, Go-Daigo relented to a demand that Morinaga too be sent to Kamakura to end the tension between him and Takauji.
Still, tension continued to mount between Takauji and his erstwhile superior, and when the break finally did come, well, I can’t imagine anyone was too surprised. In August, 1335, remnants of the Hojo clan which had survived the disaster of 1333 came out of hiding to attack Kamakura. Go-Daigo’s forces, led by Takauji’s brother Ashikaga Tadayoshi, did their best to defend the city, but they were woefully outnumbered. The Hojo forces were ultimately victorious; in the confusion of the fighting, Tadayoshi’s charge Morinaga was killed as the surviving Ashikaga fled the city.
The most common narrative is that, when Tadayoshi realized he was going to lose, he had Morinaga beheaded–lest the two of them survive to lead attacks against his brother.
When word came to Kyoto of what had happened, Takauji immediately mobilized his followers and marged on Kamakura, retaking the city very quickly and avenging his brother upon the Hojo loyalists.
He then remained in Kamakura, ostensibly to “secure the city” but more practically to secure his own power base. For example, with Prince Morinaga’s death the position of shogun was now vacant; Takauji did not ask for an appointment this time, but simply claimed the title for himself. He also set about redistributing lands taken from the defeated Hojo remnants to his followers without asking Go-Daigo for permission.
The final straw came in late 1335, when Takauji sent word to Go-Daigo that he believed another of the warriors who had supported the emperor’s cause, Nitta Yoshisada, was a traitor.
Yoshisada, as a refresher, was the “final” betrayer of the Hojo; after Takauji’s defection, he’d been the leader of the final Hojo army, and the one who decided to abandon the Hojo cause, and who had turned around and seized Kamakura in Go-Daigo’s name instead.
By this time, the emperor had figured out Takauji’s game; the hope was obviously to get Go-Daigo’s permission to remove one of the few people with enough clout and reputation to seriously challenge Takauji’s own position. And so, the emperor refused permission for Yoshisada’s arrest–and what’s more, declared Takauji chouteki–an enemy of the throne, commissioning Nitta Yoshisada and another of his followers to raise armies and crush him.
Now, the war that began at this moment did not, initially, unfold to Ashikaga Takauji’s advantage. He took his forces and marched swiftly towards Kyoto, defeating a force sent by his now fairly bitter rival Nitta Yoshisada in the offing.
However, he was able to hold Kyoto for just a few days before a counterattack, led by Prince Norinaga, drove him from the city–and from Honshu altogether.
Takauji’s forces were completely routed, and Go-Daigo’s commanders were smart enough to place warriors to cut off his natural line of retreat east towards his home in the Kanto plains. Instead, Takauji was forced to run west, away from his home–and his most immediate allies and followers, and to flee all the way to Kyushu.
Basically, Takauji had lost a good chunk of his army, and was now about as far from his home base as he could realistically be. Things looked about as bad for him as they could look.
And yet, Ashikaga Takauji was not done–and here we see yet again that pragmatism that to my mind defines Takauji’s career so completely.
You see, during his retreat Takauji did not just focus on getting what was left of his forces to Kyushu intact, though naturally that was also of concern. He was also frantically writing letters to the warrior families of western Japan, cutting deals as frantically as he could.
Some were impressed by one of the most valuable prizes Takauji had taken away from his four days in Kyoto–a letter from a former emperor supporting his cause. But who would sign such a thing, going against Go-Daigo and the interests of his restoration government? Why none other than the former Emperor Kougon, the Hojo clan puppet who had been put on the throne to replace Go-Daigo after his exile for anti-Hojo agitation. Go-Daigo in turn had deposed Kogon upon his ascent, and beyond personal dislike, remember, he was also from a rival line of the imperial house–that split between the Kameyama and Go-Fukakusa lines still existed. Naturally there was little love lost between Kogon and Go-Daigo, and Kogon himself was more than happy to throw his weight behind Takauji.
Takauji also relied upon his distant ancestral ties to Minamoto no Yoritomo to claim the mantle of leadership for the entire warrior class.
But he did not rely purely on symbolic or traditional appeals, of course–Takauji was, at his core, a pragmatist. He offered his followers cold, hard benefits, too. Every warrior family along his line of retreat heard about how Takauji would champion their interests if he were to come to power–basically the same promise Minamoto no Yoritomo had made when rallying warriors against the Taira clan 150 years earlier. Given that much of Go-Daigo’s “restoration” had been a deliberate attempt to wind the clock back on the gains in political and economic power warriors had made, that message found a very receptive audience.
Takauji also made some very…direct promises, let’s call them, to the major warrior families of Western Japan in exchange for their support. Given that quite a few of these families, if they had supported Go-Daigo at all, had received pretty minimal rewards for doing so and in some cases even been stripped of said rewards as time went on, he found a very receptive audience.
For example, remember Akamatsu Norimura, the warrior who had joined Go-Daigo’s cause, been made shugo of Harima province, and then had that post taken away from him so it could be given to an aristocrat? Takauji restored him as the shugo of Harima, and granted his sons positions as shugo of two more provinces (Settsu and Mimasaka, specifically).
This wasn’t even the most egregious case of wheeling and dealing–he promised the position of shugo for all four provinces of Shikoku to the Hosokawa clan for their support, essentially bribing them with an entire island.
Takauji also had some distant relatives in the West; the Ashikaga were mostly concentrated in the east, but sprawling polygamous family trees being what they were there were a LOT of distant cousins to the Ashikaga out there and naturally a few of them had ended up out west–and were willing to hear out Takauji’s requests for aid.
By the fifth lunar month of 1336, Takauji had secured enough followers to begin his own march from Kyushu back to Kyoto.
Now, the most famous version of what came next is recorded in the Taiheiki, the gunki monogatari, or warrior epic, dealing with this conflict. Its accuracy is…dubious, to put it mildly, as it was written more to be an entertaining version of history than a true to life one. But this famous version is the most influential one for reasons we’ll get into, so it’s what we’re going to focus on.
Anyway–according to the Taiheiki, as Takauji was retreating west, Emperor Go-Daigo was getting two different sets of advice in Kyoto. Kusunoki Masashige, his longest standing follower, famously impressive general and just general man of derring-do, was suggesting a brokered peace with Takauji now that Go-Daigo was in a better position.
Takauji could be forced to give up some of his wealth and influence, and be substantially weakened as a result.
Nitta Yoshisada–longtime enemy of Takauji, and also resentful of him because both were of distant Minamoto decent (but Yoshisada’s descent was more distant)–told Go-Daigo “now is the opportunity to crush this man once and for all.”
Go-Daigo, at this critical juncture, got greedy–and decided not only to continue the war, but to march his forces out to intercept Takauji’s advance (Kusunoki Masashige wanted Go-Daigo’s army to abandon Kyoto and besiege Takauji within the city rather than risk a straight fight).
However, instead of this more cautious approach, Go-Daigo’s army met Takauji’s at Minatogawa (more or less the middle of Kobe city today) in the early summer of 1336. Go-Daigo’s army was about equal in size to Takauji’s, but crucially Takauji had won over families with substantial navies to their side (likely navies composed mostly of semi-legitimate pirates with whom these families had business dealings). That fleet enabled Takauji to land part of his forces behind Go-Daigo’s, encircle them, and crush them.
Supposedly, Kusunoki Masashige knew the plan was doomed from the get-go but was too loyal a man to refuse Go-Daigo’s orders, instead ordering his eldest son home in advance of the battle to continue the fight. The Taiheiki depicts Masashige, knowing he is beaten, deciding to commit suicide with his most loyal followers (including his younger brother Masasue) rather than risk capture. The Taiheiki depicts his final moments as follows–and here, I’ll be relying on the Hiroaki Sato translation: “Masashige, sitting at the head of the group, turned to his brother, Masasue, and asked, “They say your thought at the last moment determines whether your next life is going to be good or bad. Tell me, brother, what is your wish in the Nine Realms?” Masasue laughed cheerfully and said, ‘I’d like to be reborn in the Human Realm seven times so that I may destroy the imperial enemy.”
Masashige was pleased to hear this and said, “That’s a truly sinful, evil thought, but I think exactly as you do. Well then, let us be reborn in the same way and realize our wish.”
With this vow the two brothers stabbed each other and died side by side.”
This reputation for valor and unwavering loyalty to the imperial cause is the backbone of the Kusunoki Masashige legend. If you go to what’s now the imperial palace in Tokyo and look in the southeast corner, you’ll see a statue of a mounted samurai–the only such statue anywhere in the palace grounds. That’s Masashige, who in the modern era of
imperial rule became a symbol of loyalty to the imperial cause and a fixture of propaganda around service to the throne.
After the crushing defeat at Minatogawa (Nitta Yoshisada, if you’re wondering, ran away when the battle was lost) Takauji was able to occupy Kyoto. Go-Daigo was forced to flee, first taking refuge with the monks of Mt. Hiei and then heading south to Yoshino in the vicinity of mountainous Nara.
Takauji, meanwhile, finally got what he had likely always been after. With Go-Daigo having vacated Kyoto, he reached out to the retired emperor Kogon and arranged for Kogon’s brother to take the throne (as emperor Koumyou). Koumyou then granted Takauji his deepest desire–the title of shogun.
We call the government of Takauji and his successors the Muromachi bakufu–Muromachi being a neighborhood in Kyoto where one of Takauji’s successors would eventually build a palace for the Ashikaga shoguns.
However, for the first several decades of Takauji’s rule, the Muromachi bakufu would not govern over the entire country. Go-Daigo, remember, had fled Kyoto rather than be captured. He would remain in Yoshino to the south of Nara for the rest of his life–dying in 1339 at the age of 50 and handing off power to his son Prince Norinaga (known to history as Emperor Go-Murakami).
In addition, before his death, Go-Daigo would dispatch his sons and supporters around Japan to rally the warriors of the rpovinces to his cause as best they could.
The result was the creation of two competing governments dividing Japan. We call this period the era of the Northern and Southern Courts, with the Northern Court being the Kyoto-based one under the control of the Go-Fukakusa branch of the imperial line, and run from behind the scenes by the Ashikaga family of shoguns.
The southern court (so called because Yoshino is to the south of Kyoto) was the court of Go-Daigo’s successors and of the Kameyama branch of the imperial line, aiming to destroy the Ashikaga and take back the power they felt Takauji had usurped.
Takauji would live long enough to defeat several of his key rivals, most notably Nitta Yoshisada–who was killed in battle with Takauji’s forces in 1338. But neither this nor Go-Daigo’s own death stopped the conflict, which instead spread around the country. In central Japan Kusunoki Masashige’s son Masatsura was successful in rallying armies against the Ashikaga and keeping Takauji on the defensive. In Kyushu one of Go-Daigo’s sons, Prince Kanenaga, was able to sail to Dazaifu and seize control of the administration there, in essence taking control of the entire island.
The 1340s would see continued sporadic fighting between the two sides, and by the tail end of the decade cracks began to appear in the Ashikaga side as well.
Takauji, you see, was very reliant on his brother Ashikaga Tadayoshi for support (the same one who had probably killed Prince Morinaga for him). Tadayoshi was a long-time follower of his brother, and possessed of substantial talents of his own–he was a careful and talented administrator who took the reigns on the civilian side of government in Kyoto while his brother focused on the military end of things, and especially on trying to win the war against the Southern Court.
However, this naturally created a divide between the two of them. Takauji, aiming to win as much support as he could, gave the warrior families which came over to his side a great deal of leeway, and in particular was extremely willing to ignore violations of property laws as they related to the shoen estates in the countryside in exchange for military support. His brother, as the head of the actual administration, was not thrilled by this notion, and the two began to clash on these–and eventually other issues.
Meanwhile, the Muromachi bakufu itself began to divide into factions supporting either Takauji or Tadayoshi, and, well, I bet you can guess where this is going.
By 1349, Takauji got wind of a plot–and it’s unclear how real this plot was–that Tadayoshi was planning to assasinate one of Takauji’s most loyal followers, Ko no Moronao. Now, Ko no Moronao is another one of those people with one hell of a historical reputation; the Taiheiki depicts him as a violent, iconoclastic brute who basically fixed all Ashikaga Takauji’s problems by stabbing them as hard as he could until they stopped being problems. He’s also depicted as a villain for his iconoclastic suggestion that the imperial throne itself wasn’t really worth all that much, and that power alone was what mattered.
Which, I mean, he’s not necessarily wrong, but you can’t say that kind of thing.
Anyway, Takauji liked Moronao quite a bit, while Tadayoshi–the one who had to actually, you know, run the country–was not so fond of his brother’s Mr. Fix It running around the country stabbing anything vaguely troubling.
This whole plot convinced Takauji that Tadayoshi was going to betray him, and so the shogun ordered his brother stripped of all lands and titles, which immediately led to Tadayoshi defecting to the Southern Court, and triggering (in essence) a civil war within the Ashikaga line–the so-called Kanno Disturbance, because according to the Northern Court (but not the Southern one) 1350 was the first year of the Kanno era.
I’m not going to bother with the whole blow by blow here, but suffice it to say that it took until 1355 for Takauji to fully suppress the division within his supporters, and by then he was getting to be an old man. He would die in 1358, unable to see the conflicts he had started fully to their conclusion.
Indeed, the war between the northern and southern courts would not come to an end for almost 40 more years! It wasn’t until the time of Takauji’s grandson, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, that the Southern Court was finally beaten into submission. But in the end, Go-Daigo’s attempt to restore imperial rule would come to naught.
It would be the last such direct attempt for 500 years. In the end, Go-Daigo’s Kenmu Restoration does have some pretty important legacies for us, though. In the longer term, the attempts put forward by himself and his followers to justify his cause would become an important part of propaganda around the imperial line going forward. The most important example of this is probably the Jinnou Shoutouki (Chronicle of the Authentic Lineages of the Divine Emperors), written by one Kitabatake Chikafusa–an avid supporter of Go-Daigo’s, and of mixed aristocratic and warrior lineage himself.
Kitabatake was willing to be critical of Go-Daigo in his work, and in particular honed in on the issue of his master’s failure to reward his followers properly. However, he still maintained that the imperial line, due to its divine lineage as established in ancient histories like the Kojiki (which we dealt with in episode 502) was, “a transcendent source of virtue in government, which was above criticism.”
This notion of the imperial line as a font of virtue and a source of legitimacy in government was, of course, a major part of propaganda legitimating the Southern side of the war effort. In the future, it would be taken up by defenders of the imperial cause, and become a central part of nationalistic propaganda around the emperor and throne. You still see these ideas repeated in some sectors of the far right in Japan today.
On the Ashikaga side, meanwhile, you have works like the Kenmu Shikimoku, a code of government proclaimed by Takauji in 1336 as he was attempting to shore up support, or the 1357 Toji-in goisho (Testament at Toji-in, traditionally ascribed to Takauji but almost certainly ghostwritten by someone else).
These texts are a bit more pragmatic, outlining a Confucian-style notion that the state is not one person’s property, not even the emperor’s; instead, it is the duty of all who would rule to promote the interests of the state, and in particular peace and stability. The Kyoto court, the claim was, had failed to do this–now it was the turn of the warriors to step in and do it for them.
Of course, in Takauji’s time the idea that he represented a return to stability would have been…a challenging sell, I think. But it is certainly true that his successors had more luck in that regard.
The height of Ashikaga rule in particular is most associated with Takauji’s grandson, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who was shogun from 1368 until his death in 1408. His 40 years in office saw the end of the war between the Northern and Southern Courts, as well as a massive push to bolster the legitimacy of his regime.
For example, Yoshimitsu was the one to order the construction of the Hana no Gosho, or Palace of Flowers, that became the home of the Ashikaga shoguns in Kyoto’s Muromachi neighborhood (which is why we call this government the Muromachi bakufu). That palace was twice the size of the one his grandfather had built for the emperors in Kyoto as a gesture of patronage, a marker of the power of the Ashikaga family.
Yoshimitsu was also the one to build himself a massive retirement villa in Kitayama north of Kyoto proper; like many an elite courtier in his time, he had inherited an interest in Rinzai sect Zen which had been popularized among the elite during the Hojo years. Thus, after his death the villa was transformed into a temple to pray for his salvation; today, it’s known as Kinkakuji, one of the most famous sites of modern Kyoto.
Beyond these physical examples of a push for legitimacy, Yoshimitsu spent a great deal of time and energy laying claim to the status markers of the old aristocracy–hoping, in essence, to mark himself among them. Like many of the Kyoto aristocracy, he patronized the arts (particularly arts from China). He also worked to climb the hierarchy of courtiers, capping out in 1394 as daijou daijin–prime minister of the old civilian government, a title to go along with his position as shogun.
Yoshimitsu, broadly, seems to have understood that combining these older systems of courtly power with his role as the head of the military houses and shogun would give him a great deal of legitimacy as a ruler–and make him less reliant on pure force to see his dictates obeyed.
Which was a clever strategy, and very successful in its time–though today, Yoshimitsu is mostly remembered less as a clever politician and more as the only ruler in Japanese history to take the fateful step of accepting nominal subordination to China. In 1402 he accepted a letter of investiture from the emperor of China (Yongle, part of a new dynasty called the Ming which had overthrown Mongol rule a few decades back). That letter marked him as a tributary of China’s emperor, accepting nominal subordination in exchange for trade–the first ruler to accept that role since the founding of what became the Japanese state back in the murky past).
He almost certainly did this for the trade privileges attached to that tributary position, and because practically speaking it made little difference–though today, he is remembered with great scorn by Japanese nationalists for the choice to accept even nominal subordination.
Anyway; Yoshimitsu’s political balancing act was clever, but his successors proved unable to maintain it. And here, we get to the most important legacy of Ashikaga Takauji and his war to seize control of the government: the compromises he had to offer in order to win out.
Early on in his career, Takauji was able to rely primarily on his existing retainers and on the collateral branches of the Ashikaga–the wider clan network, in other words, of relatives flung out among the provinces. But Takauji was eventually forced to cast his net a bit wider–first because of the demands of the war itself, and second because in his attempts to set up a new bakufu in Kyoto he bumped up against existing powerful warrior families who had to be appeased and brought over to his cause.
Takauji was thus forced to create new powerful vassals by rewarding his followers, and to cut deals with existing entrenched shugo families–we’ve covered the example of the Akamatsu family already who, by jumping ship to Takauji’s cause, ended up as shugo of three provinces, and they’re a good example of the first type. The Ouchi of Suo province in Western Japan and the Shimazu of southern Kyushu are a good example of the second type–both were established and entrenched families who Takauji brought over to his cause by promising to entrench them further.
Takauji also granted his shugo substantially expanded powers, most notably the ability to collect some taxes on their own initiative–a big departure from previous practice, because remember, tax collection is supposed to be the job of the civilian kokushi governor, not the military shugo one.
Simply put, Takauji began to tip the balance of provincial government to be less…well, balanced, and more directly in favor of the warrior side of things.
And to be clear, I don’t think we can say he was wrong to do so or made a bad call here; these choices are a big part of what convinced large segments of the warrior class to follow the Ashikaga and thus enabled them to win out in the war.
But this also meant that Takauji’s successors had to deal with extremely powerful vassals out in the provinces, including shugo families with massive landholdings (the Ouchi, for example, ended up as shugo of six provinces during their height, and they were not even the greatest of the shugo families).
And this, in the end, had some pretty important consequences. The power of the Ashikaga shoguns was extremely variable as a result of both their location in Kyoto and these compromises. Their control was greatest in central Japan, in the area around Kyoto itself–but, for example, Western Japan was mostly the domain of powerful shugo families.
The Kanto, meanwhile, was a persistent issue–Takauji attempted to set up one of his sons as a sort of deputy shogun in the Kanto (Kanto Kubou was the official title). The idea was that a branch of the Ashikaga could manage the east on the shogun’s behalf–with the help of the Uesugi, Takauji’s maternal family which had a lot of landholdings in the Kanto area.
In reality, that branch of the Ashikaga would constantly clash with the main shogunal one, and the Uesugi would eventually become an independent-minded power of their own in the east.
Similarly, the northernmost part of Honshu–called the Ou area, and home to the two provinces of Mutsu and Dewa–was a constant issue to deal with. Takauji sent two of his trusted generals, Hatakeyama Kuniuji and Kira Sadaie, to keep the region under control–the hope being to avoid letting this remote area become a safe haven for his enemies.
Unfortunately, the two men hated each other, and spent more time fighting each other than enemies of the shogun–a problem Takauji and his successors could do little about.
Similarly, despite appointing a series of trusted vassals to the position of Chinzei tandai–deputy of Kyushu, in essence–Takauji and his successors were never really able to control the island, which remained home to independent-minded shugo who cooperated with the bakufu…when it was convenient for them.
The Muromachi bakufu emerged out of a series of wartime compromises…and a result was never really a stable government. The shoguns of the Ashikaga house were extremely dependent on the goodwill of the shugo to actually control anything outside of the center of the country. Clever shoguns who were adept diplomats–like Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, for example–could manage this alright, using a combination of their own intelligence and charisma to maintain a delicate balance and keep the government functional.
Future shoguns, however, would not always be so clever–and that would provide independent-minded shugo with a chance to push back against the shogunate.
The balance of power would last for a time…but in less than a century, the whole facade would crumble, resulting not in another shift in the existing balance but in the complete and total destruction of that balance.