FATHERS AND SONS AT WAR
THE TWO BATTLES OF KŌNODAI
The 1538 victor was Hōjō Ujitsuna, the second daimyo of the great Hōjō dynasty who were gradually extending their territories across the Kantō Plain, the area around modern Tokyo. At the First Battle of Kōnodai, Ujitsuna defeated an allied army commanded by Ashikaga Yoshiaki, a man who bore the title of Oyumi Kubō and was the younger brother of the Koga Kubō, two strange titles that require some explanation.
‘Kubō’ denoted a court rank equivalent to that of a prince and had its origins with the first Ashikaga shogun Takauji, who decided in 1351 to move the (shogunate) from Kamakura to the imperial capital of Kyoto. Fearful of leaving a power vacuum behind in eastern Japan, he created the post of shogun’s deputy for the area with the title of Kantō Kubō. The position became hereditary within the junior branch of the Ashikaga family, until its fourth occupant Mochiuji rebelled against the shogun and was forced to commit suicide, at which the post fell into disuse. The then discovered that Mochiuji’s revolt had so diminished the shogun’s influence in the east that the Uesugi family were beginning to dominate the Kantō virtually unchecked, so in 1449 the ruling shogun re-established the ‘Prince of the Kantō’ in the person of Ashi kaga Shigeuji, Mochiuji only surviving son. The restoration was not a
