Ashikaga Takauji

Born in 1305 to the Ashikaga branch of the Minamoto, Takauji was a senior Hōjō retainer until 1333, when Emperor Go-Daigo's revolt against the Kamakura Bakufu drew his support.

He turned against his own clients and led the army that captured Kyoto for Go-Daigo in May of that year, ending 148 years of Hōjō rule.

Within three years his alliance with Go-Daigo had collapsed: the new Imperial government had refused to grant Takauji the institutional samurai role he expected, and in 1336 he marched against the court.

He defeated the loyalist Kusunoki Masashige at Minatogawa, drove Go-Daigo from Kyoto, and installed a rival emperor — beginning the period known as Nanboku-chō, the Northern and Southern Courts, when Japan had two competing emperors and two imperial lines for sixty years.

Takauji established himself as the founding shogun of the new Muromachi Bakufu in 1338 and ruled until his death in 1358.

The instability his decisions created — both between courts and within the bakufu's own provincial structure — set up the chronic conflicts that would erupt into the Ōnin War a century later and produce the Sengoku.

“I have made one war and another after it; I have ended none of them in time.”

Takauji is one of the most morally compromised major figures in Japanese history. He betrayed his Hōjō patrons; he then betrayed Go-Daigo; he split the imperial line; he founded a shogunate weak enough that its provincial deputies eventually became the warring states of the late Muromachi.

Modern Japanese opinion is divided. Pre-war historiography treated him as a traitor for opposing Go-Daigo. Post-war scholars have rehabilitated him as a pragmatic statesman who recognized that warrior government had outgrown the imperial framework.