Hosokawa Masamoto

Hosokawa Masamoto (1466–1507) was the dominant political figure of late Muromachi Japan — so powerful that contemporaries called him the "half-shogun" — who twice deposed shoguns and appointed their replacements, effectively transforming the Ashikaga shogunate into a puppet instrument of the Hosokawa clan. His Meiō no Seihen of 1493, in which he deposed Ashikaga Yoshiki and installed Yoshizumi, was the defining event of the gekokujō ("the low overcoming the high") era, when the fiction of shogunal authority could no longer be maintained against the reality of military power. Masamoto was also one of the strangest figures in Japanese history: he refused to marry, drove women from his household, devoted himself to Shugendo mountain asceticism, and reportedly believed he was learning to fly. He was called tengu — the supernatural mountain spirits of Japanese folklore — and his reputation for magical practices was so strong that legends accumulated around him for centuries after his death. He was assassinated in 1507 by retainers of one of his adopted sons, triggering the internal warfare that ended Hosokawa supremacy and opened the way for the rise of the Miyoshi and Matsunaga clans. The swords in the Hosokawa collection reflected the family's position at the apex of Muromachi culture: finest Yamashiro and Yamato blades, chosen with the discriminating taste of the greatest art patrons of the age.