The fourteenth to sixteenth centuries were Japan's most chaotic and, in some ways, its most creative. Central authority dissolved into hundreds of local powers, then three ruthless men pulled the country back together.

The Ashikaga shoguns

In 1333 Emperor Go-Daigo, determined to rule in fact and not just in name, rallied warriors against Kamakura. Key generals switched sides, and the Hojo regime fell. Go-Daigo's restoration lasted barely three years. One of his former allies, Ashikaga Takauji, turned on him, installed a rival emperor and became shogun in 1338. Go-Daigo fled south to the mountains of Yoshino, and for over half a century two rival imperial courts, the Northern and the Southern, competed from 1336 to 1392. The Ashikaga based their shogunate in the Muromachi district of Kyoto. The third shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, reunited the courts and accepted the title "King of Japan" from the Ming emperor of China in order to trade, which later nationalists found humiliating. Under Ashikaga patronage, Kyoto saw the Golden Pavilion, ink painting, dry rock gardens and the tea gathering, arts shaped by Zen taste for restraint.

The Onin War and the warring states

The Ashikaga never had much land or many troops of their own, and their authority depended on powerful provincial lords. In 1467 a quarrel over who would succeed the shogun drew those lords into a war fought in the streets of the capital. The Onin War, from 1467 to 1477, wrecked Kyoto, burning palaces and temples, and ended with no winner. Afterward the shogun's writ barely ran beyond the city. The next century is called the Sengoku, or warring states, period. Local lords, now called daimyo, built castles, wrote their own house laws and fought constantly. Many were upstarts who had overthrown their masters, a pattern summed up in the word gekokujo, "the low overthrowing the high". Villages formed self-governing leagues for defense, and some religious communities armed themselves. In Kaga province on the Sea of Japan, a league of Pure Land believers governed for nearly a century, from 1488 until 1580, after driving out the provincial lord.

Guns and missionaries

In 1543 a Chinese junk carrying Portuguese traders drifted onto the island of Tanegashima, south of Kyushu. The local lord bought two of their matchlock guns, and Japanese smiths quickly began copying them. Within decades Japan produced firearms in large numbers. In 1549 the Jesuit Francis Xavier arrived, and Christianity spread rapidly in Kyushu; by 1600 there may have been around 300,000 converts, including several daimyo, some of whom valued the Portuguese trade that came with the priests.

The three unifiers

Oda Nobunaga, a minor lord from central Japan, used ruthless strategy and new weapons to seize Kyoto in 1568. He drove out the last Ashikaga shogun in 1573. Armed Buddhist institutions opposed him, and in 1571 Nobunaga destroyed the temple complex of Enryakuji on Mount Hiei, killing thousands of monks and lay people. At Nagashino in 1575 his massed musketeers, shielded by wooden palisades, broke a famous cavalry army. In 1582, close to dominating central Japan, he was betrayed by one of his generals and died at the Honnoji temple in Kyoto.

His general Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the son of a foot soldier, avenged him and finished the conquest by 1590. Hideyoshi set out to freeze the social order. His sword hunt of 1588 took weapons from farmers and villagers, and later edicts barred warriors from becoming farmers or merchants and farmers from leaving their fields. A national land survey measured fields and fixed tax obligations. Then he looked abroad. In 1592 and 1597 he sent huge armies into Korea, aiming at Ming China. Korean resistance, the Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin's victories at sea and Ming armies stalled the advance. The invasions ended in failure, after Hideyoshi's death in 1598, leaving Korea devastated. In Kyoto, a mound still holds the ears and noses cut from Korean and Chinese dead as proof of kills.

Hideyoshi left a five-year-old heir and a council of regents. The strongest regent, Tokugawa Ieyasu, defeated his rivals at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, which opened the way to Tokugawa rule. He became shogun in 1603 and destroyed the Toyotomi at Osaka in 1615.

Worked example: the sword hunt edict

Hideyoshi's edict of 1588 told farmers across the country to hand over swords, bows, spears and guns. The official reason was pious: the metal would be melted into nails and bolts for a giant Buddha that Hideyoshi was building in Kyoto, so the farmers would gain merit in this life and the next. The edict also argued that weapons tempted villagers to refuse taxes and rise against their lords, and that farmers who held only tools would prosper for generations. Which reason mattered more? Consider the timing. For a century, armed villages and leagues had defied lords, and many soldiers were part-time farmers. By disarming the countryside and separating warriors from peasants, Hideyoshi made it far harder for anyone to raise an army from below, the very path he himself had climbed. The edict shows how a ruler can present a measure of control as a gift. Studies of village records suggest that many households kept some weapons, so enforcement was uneven; what changed lastingly was the line between those allowed to carry arms and those who were not.