Ashikaga Yoshiharu

Ashikaga Yoshiharu was born in 1511 in Omi Province, the eldest son of the 11th shogun of the Muromachi shogunate, Ashikaga Yoshizumi. Yoshizumi was then relying on the protection of the Rokkaku clan of Omi after being driven from the shogunate, and Yoshiharu was born in that place. Shortly after his birth he was sent to Akamatsu Yoshimura, shugo of Harima, and raised there. In 1521, following the flight of the 10th shogun Ashikaga Yoshitane, he went up to Kyoto, and in December of the first year of the Daiei era he underwent his coming-of-age ceremony and was installed as the 12th shogun of the Muromachi shogunate.

Yoshiharu's rule was unstable throughout, buffeted by the conflict between the deputy shogun Hosokawa Takakuni and Hosokawa Harumoto, Miyoshi Motonaga and others. When Takakuni was defeated at the Battle of Katsuragawa in 1527, Yoshiharu also fled to Omi. He did not return to Kyoto until 1534, when he was able to do so through the mediation of Rokkaku Sadayori. His life was marked by repeated journeys between Kyoto and Sakamoto and Kutsuki in Omi. In 1536 the Tenbun Hokke Rebellion broke out in Kyoto, a violent clash that grew out of the confrontation between Enryakuji on Mount Hiei and Nichiren sect followers, and Yoshiharu was forced to respond to this upheaval. In his later years he also struggled against the rise of Miyoshi Nagayoshi, who came forward in place of the deputy-shogun houses, and restoring shogunal authority was far from easy. In 1546 he handed the shogunal office to his heir Yoshifuji, later the 13th shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru.

The Ashikaga shogunal house collected and passed down many famous swords and celebrated treasures, beginning with the Higashiyama Gomotsu assembled in the time of the 8th shogun Yoshimasa, and Yoshiharu stood in a position to inherit this tradition. Swords held by the shogunal house were sometimes bestowed on daimyo, serving both as political gifts and as symbols of authority. In his private life, Yoshiharu took as his principal wife Keijuin, a daughter of the Konoe family's Hisamichi, and their heir became the later 13th shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru. Remembered as a 'wandering shogun' with little real power, he is evaluated as a figure who embodied both the hollowing-out and the survival of Muromachi shogunal authority during the Sengoku period.