ABSTRACT
The 700 years from the establishment of a new capital city of Heian in 794 to the outbreak of the Onin War in 1467, which destroyed much of the city, was an epoch of profound change in both authority and architecture. It covers the three historical periods of Heian (794-1185), Kamakura (1185-1333) and Muromachi (1333-1467). The general historical framework of these periods is well known and need be mentioned only briefly here. The Heian period saw the flourishing of indigenous forms of government and culture under the civil aristocracy in the Heian capital, now generally referred to by its modern name of Kyoto. The centralised authority of aristocratic government based in Kyoto was eroded by the growth of private land holdings in the provinces, and by the creation of warrior bands to protect and promote these landed interests. Political and military turbulence reached its culmination with the defeat of the Taira forces by those of the Minamoto in 1185 and the establishment of a warrior government at Kamakura. Minamoto Yoritomo assumed the court title of shogun, setting the precedent of using this imperially conferred office to sanction de facto warrior power as de jure government. The succeeding period witnessed an uneasy balance between the civil power of the court in Kyoto and the military power of the warrior class at Kamakura.1
By the end of the fourteenth century the balance had shifted decisively towards the military. The overthrow of the Kamakura shogunate by a coalition of disaffected warrior and aristocratic interests under the leadership of the Ashikaga family saw the destruction of the city of Kamakura, and the establishment of warrior government in Kyoto itself. The warrior class was gradually absorbed into the cultural milieu of the old capital. The confluence of warrior and aristocratic culture transformed the high culture to create many of the characteristic features for which Japanese civilization was henceforth known in architecture, theatre, religion, literature and painting. The authority of the Ashikaga shogunate, however, was still vested in the formal authority of the imperial institution. The Ashikaga presided over a loosely controlled system of national and regional government in which the regional was once again to triumph over the central. The eventual breakdown of Ashikaga control over regional lords at the time of the outbreak of the Onin War in 1467 precipitated nearly a century and a half of civil wars which devastated the cities, ruined the economy but, paradoxically, stimulated
