estern Japan. At his castle in Sakai, near Osaka, he amassed wealth
by foreign trade, and there he received and harboured representatives
of the Kusunoki and Kikuchi families, while at the same time he
carried on friendly communications with the Doki, the Ikeda, and the
Yamana. In short, he grew too powerful to receive mandates from
Muromachi, especially when they came through a kwanryo of the
Hatakeyama family who had just risen to that distinction.

Suddenly, in November, 1399, the Ouchi chief appeared in Izumi at the
head of a force of twenty-three thousand men, a force which received
rapid and numerous accessions. His grounds of disaffection were that
he suspected the shogun of a design to deprive him of the two
provinces of Kii and Izumi, which were far remote from the other five
provinces in his jurisdiction and which placed him within arm's
length of Kyoto, and, further, that no sufficient reward had been
given to the family of his younger brother, who fell in battle. There
were minor grievances, but evidently all were pretexts: the real
object was to overthrow Muromachi. The shogun, Yoshimitsu, acted with
great promptitude. He placed Hatakeyama Mitsuiye at the head of a
powerful army, and on January 18, 1400, Sakai fell and Yoshihiro
committed suicide. Thereafter the province of Kii was placed under
the jurisdiction of the Hatakeyama family, and Izumi under that of
Hosokawa, while the Shiba ruled in Echizen, Owari, and Totomi. In
short, these three families became the bulwarks of the Ashikaga.

KAMAKURA AND MUROMACHI

An important episode of the Ouchi struggle was that Mitsukane, the
third Kamakura kwanryo of the Ashikaga line, moved an army into
Musashi to render indirect assistance to the Ouchi cause. In truth,
from an early period of Kamakura's tenure by an Ashikaga
governor-general of the Kwanto, there had been an ambition to
transfer the office of shogun from the Kyoto to the Kamakura branch
of the family. The matter was not mooted during Takauji's lifetime,
but when, on his demise, the comparatively incompetent Yoshiakira
came into power at Muromachi, certain military magnates of the
eastern provinces urged the Kamakura kwanryo, Motouji, to usurp his
brother's position. Motouji, essentially as loyal as he was astute,
spurned the proposition. But it was not so with his son and
successor, Ujimitsu. To him the ambition of winning the shogunate
presented itself strongly, and was only abandoned when Uesugi