page_title: Nanboku-chō period
section_title: Rise of the shugo lords
hierarchical_section_title: Nanboku-chō period / Rise of the shugo lords
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Ashikaga Takauji or Kō no Moronao, cleaned up and color-corrected with PS
context_page_description: The Nanboku-chō period, spanning from 1336 to 1392, was a period that occurred during the formative years of the Muromachi bakufu of Japanese history.
  During this period, there existed a Northern Imperial Court, established by Ashikaga Takauji in Kyoto, and a Southern Imperial Court, established by Emperor Go-Daigo in Yoshino.
  Ideologically, the two courts fought for fifty years, with the South giving up to the North in 1392. However, in reality the Northern line was under the power of the Ashikaga shogunate and had little real independence.
  Since the 19th century the Emperors of the Southern Imperial Court have been considered the legitimate Emperors of Japan. Other contributing factors were the Southern Court's control of the Japanese imperial regalia, and Kitabatake Chikafusa's work Jinnō Shōtōki, which legitimized the South's imperial court despite their defeat.
  The consequences of events in this period continue to be influential in modern Japan's conventional view of the Tennō Seika. Under the influence of State Shinto, an Imperial decree dated March 3, 1911, established that the legitimate reigning monarchs of this period were the Southern Court.
context_section_description: The competing loyalties that characterized the Nanboku-chō era were played out on many levels.  There was the defection of local samurai families like the Mori, which were not uncommon during the terribly divisive Kannō Incident; and at a higher level, shugo lords continued to act in a dangerously independent manner until the latter half of the fourteenth century.
  The shōgun Ashikaga Takauji appointed branch family members as shugo lords in the different provinces of western and central Japan.  The shugo acted as governors, and served the function of mediating between the regime center and periphery.  As local governors, and lords in their own right, they represented the authority of the regime in the provinces. The shugo of this period had greater power than of the Kamakura, including sending envoys where land disputes occurred, law enforcement, issuing hanzei (a half-tax), and to levy taxes. They came to hold much greater authority than the samurai houseman by virtue of having a province-wide appointment, not limited to single estates.
  The success of shugo appointments did not lie in kinship ties, but with how well they were tied to the regime through other factors.  Warrior families since the Kamakura period were characterized by the use of headship rights (soryo) where leadership over branch families was accorded to the leader of the main family.  However, headship rights were extremely unstable because branch families often asserted their own independence, particularly as new generations emerged to dilute the ties of kinship.
  The exigencies of the day called for the successful use of military skills by those who were appointed to shugo posts.  As in vassalage ties between the Ashikaga shōguns and the local samurai, the tie between the shōguns and the shugo lords was intermediary in a similar sense: in the world of competing loyalties, the Ashikaga shōguns by appointing warriors to shugo posts endeavored to tie these men closer to themselves.  The successful generals, who were at the same time branch family heads who had cast in their lot with Takauji's rebellion, were the ones often rewarded with the post. The cost of not tying them to the regime was to lose their support, and to encourage their independence from the regime.
  Ashikaga branch families appointed to shugo posts included the Hosokawa, Yamana, Imagawa, Hatakeyama, Niki, Kira, Shiba, Ishido, and the Isshiki families.  In particular provinces, the Ashikaga failed to displace the original shugo families: the Sasaki, Togashi, Takeda and the Ogasawara in the central provinces, and the Shimazu, Otomo and Shoni in Kyūshū.  In the central and western provinces roughly half were new appointees.  During the Kannō Incident, Ashikaga headship (soryo) ties to the new appointees did not prevent these shugo from outright rebellion towards the regime at all.  In fact, the coercive institutions of the regime were woefully lacking in this time period vis-a-vis the shugo lords.
  What prevented the shugo lords from simply doing whatever they pleased was the tenuous link of appointment, particularly  new appointees who had emerged with Takauji—they had a vested interest in maintaining their links to the regime, insofar as they had not yet built up their power in the provinces.  Those provincial families who had accumulated power throughout the Kamakura period, like the Ouchi of Suo and Nagato provinces and the Shimazu of Satsuma province, were lords in their own right, and were, thus, less dependent on the regime and on their shugo titles.
  After 1372, shugo lords were given the responsibility to collect taxes (tansen) for the Muromachi regime.  These taxes hit every category of landowner from the nobles to the samurai.  As middlemen, the shugo profited by inflating the amount of taxes required from each individual landowner.  By this date, they had become unassailable as governors and hence were given the added responsibility of overseeing a new regime centered tax.
caption: Ashikaga Takauji
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