ABSTRACT
This book began with a discussion about one building, but it was not any building. The castle built first by Yoshiteru and then by Yoshiaki and Oda Nobunaga on the main road linking the two parts of Kyoto can be considered a harbinger of the early modern period, the first hesitant essay in central control. Not long after its two-fold demise came the short-lived triumph of Nobunaga's castle of Azuchi, on the banks of Lake Biwa, followed by the more sustained attempt by Hideyoshi Toyotomi, not only to build a castle in Kyoto but also to convert the city into a new and different form of urban settlement. Even this was to prove inconclusive. However much Kyoto had recovered from the ravages of earlier periods, it had lost its position as centre of political power. The affirmation of Tokugawa control, which came with the victory at Sekigahara in 1600, led inevitably to the final ascendancy of Edo and to an eastward move in the axis of power.
