Page 33 - JAPAN THE SHAPING OFDAIMYO CULTURE 1185-1868

The medieval Hosokawa reached their peak of political power
under Hosokawa Masamoto (1466-1507) who as Kanrei treated the elev-
enth Ashikaga shogun as a nonentity and virtually ruled the country on
his own. Like their rivals the Ouchi, the Hosokawa were active in trade
with China and Korea and sponsored merchants from the port of Sakai.
Like many other shugo daimyo the Hosokawa were also patrons and
practitioners of the arts. Yoriharu and Yoriyuki were both regarded as
fine poets and had their verses included in a number of court antholo-
gies. Yoriyuki studied Zen with one of the most influential Rinzai monks
of the fourteenth century, Muso _Soseki. Hosokawa Katsumoto, who led
one of the warrior leagues in the Onin War, frequently held renga and tea
gatherings. He too was an enthusiastic patron of Zen and established the
Ryôanji, a Zen temple in Kyoto, with its magnificent dry landscape
garden. Hosokawa Shigeyuki, shugo of Awa, had multifaceted cultural
interests. In addition to renga and waka he was proficient in painting and
kickball (kemari), and a patron of No. Divided by a bitter succession
dispute after Katsumoto's death, the main branch of the medieval Hoso-
kawa daimyo family declined after the Onin War. The family fortunes
were revived in the sixteenth century by Hosokawa Yüsai (Fujitaka, 1534-
1610) and Sansai (Tadaoki, 1563-1646), members of a branch family. Yüsai
and Sansai were among the survivors in the cut and thrust of the military
campaigns of the sixteenth century. They were also among the most
cultured of the daimyo who showed an interest in the way of bun. We
will look at them in a little more detail when we come to consider some
of their peers as daimyo in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. Other daimyo who practiced the twofold path of literary and
martial arts in this period were the Hatakeyama, Asakura, Takeda,
Uesugi, and Hôjô. Hôjô Ujiyasu, for instance, was a vigorous patron of
scholarship who supported the Ashikaga school for samurai, the nearest
medieval Japan came to having a university. According to Francisco
Xavier it was the largest school in Japan in the sixteenth century, with
more than three thousand students.

The daimyo Sporadic provincial warfare in the late fifteenth and
in an age of early sixteenth centuries gave way after 1560 to large-
war and scale campaigns by Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hide-
unification yoshi, and Tokugawa leyasu. All aimed at reunifying
the country. The escalating pace and scale of warfare
brought greater unpredictability and change to dai-
myo. The process of unification demanded the reduction of daimyo
autonomy. A weakening of the domain or a mistake in choosing an ally
could lead to destruction in a single battle. A few families, including the
Shimazu of Satsuma, survived all the warfare and continued as daimyo
until the nineteenth century. Most of the medieval shugo daimyo, how-
ever, were overthrown. In some cases the smaller daimyo houses with
more closely controlled domains who replaced them in the late fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries were able to consolidate their positions and ally
themselves with one of the unifiers to survive and flourish in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In many cases, however, those
daimyo who toppled shugo were crushed in their turn when they stood in
the way of unification. In many parts of the country three or four daimyo
families achieved local hegemony and lost it again in the course of the
sixteenth century. This period of intense social upheaval is known as the
age ofgekokujô, "inferiors toppling superiors/'
Underlying these almost bewildering surface phenomena ofgeko-
kujô were significant changes in the institutional character of daimyo. In
the crucible of warfare and unification new types of daimyo were being

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