The Oshihito Rebellion was one of the most well-known wars in Japanese history, lasting eleven years from the first year of Oin (1467) to the ninth year of civilization (1477), leading to the decline of the Muromachi shogunate and the beginning of the Sengoku period in Japan.
At the same time, China across the sea was in the third year of Ming Chenghua (1467), and the eighth emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Emperor Mingxianzong Zhu Jianshen, was still full of ambition and earned the title of "Trance Like Ming Jun". If he hadn't fallen in love with wan shi, a nursing mother who was seventeen years older than him, I think history would have given Ming Xianzong a higher evaluation.
In Europe at the same time, the Byzantine Empire (also known as the Eastern Roman Empire) was destroyed by the Ottoman Empire in 1453, marking the end of the thousand-year-long European Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance era.
Across the Pacific, in the Americas, the Mayan civilization is coming to an end, and Columbus will soon discover the American continent in 1492, officially arriving at the Age of Discovery.
The long Ying Ren Rebellion in Japan, and the next hundred years, was described by the Japanese historian Yu Sansheng As "the era of the collapse of the old system and the budding of modern times."
"The emptiness of the world, the chaos of Ying Ren."
This is an evaluation of the Ren Rebellion that is widely circulated in Japan.
In the Yingren Rebellion, because of drought and war, there was a serious shortage of food, and there were epidemics such as smallpox and dysentery, resulting in countless deaths. For the sake of their own interests, the prevention and control of the epidemic is limited to prayer, and the people do not have a good life.
In his book "The Rebellion of Ying Ren", the author Wu Zayongyi described it as a war with unknown causes and unknown results. "The course of war is neither dramatic nor flashy, only futile and illogical", in fact, it is not unreasonable.
The reason for the Yingren rebellion is so complicated that it is difficult to fathom. If it is summed up simply, it is caused by the power struggle between the shogun and the emperor, and the confluence between the princes is continuous.
Here, there are no eternal friends, only eternal interests. The one who violates the interests is called the enemy; the enemy of the enemy is the friend; if it is not a friend, a friend of the friend, it must be the enemy.
The Rebellion of YingRen is based on the diaries of the two Xingfu Temple,D., Jingjue and Xunzun,Viejo (the title of the supreme leader of Kofuku-ji Temple), and explains in detail this complex war in combination with the research of other historians. Of course, there are many unclear places in the diary, and Wu Zayongyi also pointed it out and provided his own judgment.
The author, Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1980, ph.D. at the University of Tokyo, majored in Japanese Medieval History, has published a number of works, and his book "History of the Japanese Medieval War" won the 12th Kadokawa Foundation Scholarship Award.
The story begins a long time ago.
In the 4th century AD, under the influence of Chinese culture, Japan established the emperor system.
In 710, the capital was moved to Heijo-kyo (present-day western suburb of Nara City), and Japan entered the Nara period. Buddhist culture began to flourish, and buddhist temples and statues were built throughout the country.
In 794, the capital was moved to Heian Kyo (present-day Honji Kyoto), known in history as the Heian Period. Regency politics began to emerge, that is, due to the emperor's young age, the courtiers were subordinate to the status of foreign relatives and the rule of the oligarchic nobility.
As early as the fall of the monastic regime at the end of Nara, the power of the nobility swelled, and the nakato, Kamakura, was given the surname Fujiwara clan by the emperor for his outstanding merits. The authors of the main reference materials of the "Rebellion of Yingren" are both monks of Kofuku-ji Temple. The predecessor of this Kofuku-ji Temple was the family temple founded by Fujiwara Kamakura in 669, and was later converted into an official temple because of its prosperity, under the influence of both the Fujiwara clan and the imperial court.
In 1086, in order to resist his cousin Fujiwara clan, Emperor Shirakawa gave way to Emperor Horikawa, who was only 8 years old, and became Emperor Taishang, and established a court hall in his residence, appointing officials and samurai such as bedan and judges. The power of the state was returned to the Imperial Household Office, supported by the nobles who were suppressed by the Fujiwara clan, and the history is called the Imperial Government Era.
In 1185, the Genrai Dynasty, officially enthroned by the Emperor as the "Shogi Shogun", established a samurai regime with Kamakura as the political center of the country after eliminating the once-prominent Hira clan regime, and the Kamakura shogunate was established, known as the Kamakura Period. Japan thus began more than 600 years of shogunate rule.
However, the stability of the Kamakura shogunate did not last long, and it suffered two invasions by Kublai Khan, the ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty, and suffered heavy losses. Relations between the shogunate and the samurai became increasingly lax, and the strength to resist shogunate rule gradually developed, but many plans to overthrow the shogunate ended in failure.
In 1333, the shogunate sent the Ashikaga Takashi clan to quell the rebellion, and the Ashikaga Takashi clan was already dissatisfied with the absolutist regime of the shogunate ruler Hojo clan, and on the way, he defected, and the last generation of the Kamakura shogunate, Hojo Takashi, committed suicide, and the Kamakura shogunate was destroyed.
The Ashikaga Clan attacked Kyoto by attacking the remnants of the shogunate, and established Emperor Hikari, who was fifteen years old, and Emperor Go-Daigo. Soon, Emperor Go-Daigo fled from Kyoto to Yoshino (Yoshino-cho, Nara Prefecture) and proclaimed his orthodoxy. As a result, two emperors appeared in Japan, and the situation of the Southern and Northern Dynasties of Japan emerged.
In 1338, ashikaga was appointed by the Northern Dynasty as a shogun of the Seiyi Dynasty and opened a shogunate in Kyoto, beginning with the Muromachi period.
The Fujiwara clan of the Heian period, also known as the Regency family because of their hereditary status as "regent" and "sekibai", split into the Konoe family, the Eagle Family, the Kujo family, the Ichijo family, and the Nijo family in the Muromachi period. The relationship between these several is obviously not harmonious, and they often even fight each other.
After the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate, the Yamato Kingdom did not have a guardian, that is, there was no position to rule over the samurai, and Kofuku-ji Temple, as the de facto guardian, carried out the shogunate's orders and ruled Yamato.
Kofuku-ji Temple has more than a hundred subordinate monasteries, of which the Regent's mastery of the Ichijō-in temple and the Mahayana Temple are the most special existence, and almost all the monasteries in Kofuku-ji Temple are subordinate to the Ichijo-in temple and the Mahayana Temple, known as the "two-door system".
For a long time, monks from the Regency family were called "nobles", and other monks from slightly lower status families were called "good families". Under the good family are mortal monks. The concept of hierarchy is very strict, the status of monks is almost determined by blood and family, and the good family is absolutely unable to override the noble race.
The emergence of the Ying Ren Rebellion broke the relatively strict bloodline hierarchy in Japan.
But in fact, in the fierce and repeated confrontations earlier, the Ichisen-in temple and the Mahayana temple gave them very generous treatment in order to win the support of the lower-level warrior monks and clergy, so that the control of the Ichijo and the Mahayana over the territory gradually became nominal.
The trigger of the Ying Ren Rebellion was the dispute between the Shan clan and the shan family governors. Although in the third year of Matilda (1392), due to the Matilda Treaty, the unification of the north and south dynasties was realized, it still affected the subsequent period for a long time. The Hatoyama clan was originally one of the most important forces in the Southern Dynasty, and as a shogun of the Northern Dynasty, he always tried to disintegrate, and the two forces eventually formed a confrontation between the Eastern and Western armies.
The Onin Rebellion lasted for eleven years, and the de facto supreme ruler of Japan at the time, shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, was not immune to the blame.
On the one hand, it was the indecisiveness of Yoshimasa himself, and on the other hand, he tried to use checks and balances to disintegrate the more powerful daimyo (equivalent to the princes of China), but did not have the corresponding strength to avoid possible chaos, thus inevitably allowing Japan to move from the "Spring and Autumn" to the "Warring States".
Ashikaga Yoshimasa's goal was to strengthen the power of the shoguns, so he spared no effort to reduce the strength of other daimyōs. Either incite the internal strife of his family, or support the daimyo's family enemies, or treat the daimyo's subjects differently and make them turn against the lord, and so on.
Another reason for this war was the dispute over the heirs of shoguns. Ashikaga Yoshimasa was originally childless, and was preparing to make his younger brother Ashikaga Yoshinori the next shogun, but he did not expect to have a son in middle age, so he wanted to give the seat to his son, which naturally caused disputes.
Fearing sanctions, Ashikaga Yoshishi ran to the Western Army, so the Eastern Army supported Ashikaga Yoshinaga, the son of Ashikaga Yoshimasa, and the Western Army supported Ashikaga Yoshinori.
In addition, under the rule of the shogunate, there had always been heavy taxes, and the unbridled pleasures of the nobility, which made the people at that time greatly dissatisfied, and the frequent peasant uprisings were called "Tuyiyi" at that time. And these popular forces will be used by the princes and play a big role in the Yingren Rebellion.
In the end, the commanders of the Eastern and Western Armies, Hosokawa Katsumoto and Yamana Munemasa, both died, the Hosokawa clan and the Yamana clan negotiated peace in the sixth year of civilization (1474), and in the ninth year of civilization (1477), the other main force of the Western Army, the Ōuchi Masahiro Army, surrendered to the Eastern Army, and Hatoyama Yoshinori withdrew his army from Kyoto and attacked Hanoi and Yamato instead, and the Western Army collapsed in fact. At this point, the end of the Ying Ren Rebellion is considered to be an ending that is not the end.
After the Onin Rebellion, Japan experienced nearly a century and a half of the Sengoku period, when the old aristocratic hierarchical order collapsed, and well-known heroes at home and abroad such as Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Miyamoto Musashi emerged. The first Europeans also came to Japan.
In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu began the Edo period with the leadership of the "Shogun Seiyi Shogunate" in Edo, but it was still the shogunate who held real power and implemented a policy of closing the country to the country for more than two hundred years.
In 1853, U.S. Admiral Matthew Perry led four steamships into Edo Bay, Japan, forcing Japan to open its doors and trade with the outside world, known as the Black Ship Incident.
In 1868, under various pressures, the Edo shogunate was forced to return power to Emperor Meiji. After that, The Meiji Emperor rectified the internal affairs and enriched the country and strengthened the army, which is the famous "Meiji Restoration" in Japan.
In general, the book "The Rebellion of YingRen" explains this period of Japan's history in detail and analyzes it thoroughly, and summarizes the significance of this war to Japan, and many of its views are worth pondering.