Page 15 - JAPAN THE SHAPING OFDAIMYO CULTURE 1185-1868

Himeji Castle. Photograph by Mike ant on provincial warriors to enforce its authority and protect the capital.
Yamashita. Copyright © 1988, National The leaders of powerful warrior bands, especially the chieftains of the
Geographic Society.
Taira and Minamoto clans, were drawn into court politics. A watershed
in the shifting balance of political power was reached in the later twelfth
century when the Taira, led by Kiyomori (1118-1181), asserted control over
the court, only to be ousted and crushed by the Minamoto, led by
Yoritomo (1147-1199) and his half-brother Yoshitsune (1159-1189).
The establishment by Yoritomo of a separate warrior govern-
ment, bakufu, in Kamakura in eastern Japan and his acceptance from the
imperial court of the title of Seiitaishogun (Great General Who Quells
the Barbarians) following the destruction of the Taira at the Battle of
Dannoura in 1185 marked a turning point in the shifting balance of
courtly and warrior power. Hitherto the title of shogun had been held by
imperial princes. The conferment of the title of shogun was a recogni-
tion by the imperial court that Yoritomo, as leader of the warrior order,
exercised a legitimate delegated authority. Thus began a political ar-
rangement that was to endure for the almost seven-hundred-year period
covered by this exhibition, in which emperors heading the imperial court
in Kyoto continued to embody a sacerdotal sovereignty while powerful
warriors (as shoguns or military hegemons) were delegated with authority
to rule. The emperors retained their legitimating function, and at times
individual emperors sought to retrieve the powers granted to warriors,
but until the mid-nineteenth century warriors controlled the movement
of Japanese history, appropriating political, economic, and even cultural
leadership. Within the warrior order those powerful feudal lords known
as the daimyo were local rulers and leading contenders for power.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Ashikaga sho-
guns gained the support of powerful provincial warrior houses by ap-
pointing them as constables, shugo, with military, administrative, and
fiscal authority over one or more provinces. Historians have named them
shugo daimyo. Strong shoguns like Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), the

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