Hino Tomiko

Born in 1440 (Eikyō 12) into the Hino, a house of court nobles. The Hino was a distinguished house that generation after generation provided consorts to the Ashikaga shogunal house.

Around 1455 she became the consort (midaidokoro) of Ashikaga Yoshimasa, eighth shōgun of the Muromachi shogunate. At first, as Yoshimasa had no natural son, he had set his younger brother Yoshimi as heir; but when Tomiko bore a natural son, Yoshihisa, in 1465, the situation changed utterly as she sought to place her own child in the shōgun's seat.

The conflict between Hosokawa Katsumoto, who backed Yoshimi, and Tomiko and Yamana Sōzen, who backed Yoshihisa, joined with the power struggles of the daimyō, and in 1467 (Ōnin 1) the Ōnin War broke out.

In this great war lasting eleven years, Kyoto was reduced to scorched earth. Tomiko amassed enormous wealth through the setting of barriers, speculation in rice, and high-interest lending to the daimyō, and was denounced in later ages as a 'wicked woman' and a 'miser.

' But recent scholarship has re-evaluated her aspect as a realistic political figure who supported the shogunal finances exhausted by the war, relieved the destitution of the court and nobles, and worked toward ending the war.

In 1489 (Chōkyō 3), Yoshihisa, who had become shōgun, died of illness at twenty-five while on campaign to Ōmi. The mother had lost, before herself, the very child she had made shōgun by her obsession.

Tomiko died in 1496 (Meiō 5). She was fifty-seven.

“To make Yoshihisa shōgun, I did not care though I was cursed as a demon. And now, outlived by that child — what is left?”

Hino Tomiko, as the woman at the center of the Ōnin War — one of the greatest upheavals in Japanese history — has long been made the byword for a 'wicked woman.

' It cannot be denied that a mother's obsession to make her son Yoshihisa shōgun was one cause of the war. But recent historiography has greatly revised that one-sided image of the wicked woman.

Supporting through her hoarding the shogunal finances that had collapsed in the war, relieving the destitution of the court, and moving realistically toward ending the war, Tomiko was a rare figure of power who, in an age when the male warriors spent their days in battle, sought to keep order through finance and negotiation.

Just as Hōjō Masako (this site's id 24) of Kamakura was a woman who supported the founding of warrior government, Tomiko was a woman who supported the age of Muromachi upheaval on the financial side.

That her appraisal is shifting from 'wicked woman' to 'figure of power' reflects the very re-examination of women's roles in history.

Kyoto, burned in the Ōnin War, gradually recovered thanks in part to the efforts of Tomiko and others, and nurtured the Higashiyama culture.

In Kyoto temples such as Shōkoku-ji, the memory of the Muromachi in which Tomiko lived remains.