In 1336, two emperors ruled Japan at the same time.

One sat in Kyoto, installed by Ashikaga Takauji Emperor Kōmyō of the Northern Court. The other sat in Yoshino, deep in the mountains south of Osaka, with the imperial regalia in his baggage and a claim to legitimacy that he did not give up: Emperor Go-Daigo of the Southern Court.

Both had followers. Both had armies. Both had priests who certified that they were the true emperor.

What followed was the Nanboku-chō — literally “south-north courts”— a civil war lasting 56 years that ground Japan down like a millstone. Battles without decisions. Alliances that broke overnight. Families that split into enemy camps. Cities that changed hands several times. And in the end a settlement so weary that it set almost no conditions.

Portrayal of Ashikaga Takauji — Portrait said to be Ashikaga Takauji © CC-PD-Mark

The Prelude: How Japan Broke in Two

The split had a history that reached back long before 1336.

In the 13th century, the imperial house had split into two rival lines — the Jimyōin line and the Daikakuji line. Both claimed the throne. The Kamakura bakufu, which exercised political control, had resolved this conflict pragmatically: alternating succession to the throne. Your line today, mine next time. A formula that satisfied no one, but kept the peace.

Emperor Go-Daigo, of the Daikakuji line, ascended the throne in 1318 — and immediately decided to break this formula. He wanted his son as successor, not the candidate of the other line. He wanted direct imperial rule, not bakufu control. And he was prepared to fight for it.

In 1331 his uprising began. In 1333 — with the help of warriors such as Nitta Yoshisada and Ashikaga Takauji, who abandoned the bakufu — he overthrew the Kamakura shogunate.

Then he made the mistake of believing he had won.

The Kemmu Restoration (1333–1336) was Go-Daigo’s finest hour and his defeat at the same time. He handed out offices, ignored the warriors who had fought for him, and ruled with a mixture of Confucian idealism and tactical blindness. Ashikaga Takauji, the most powerful of the warriors who had overthrown the bakufu, did not receive the reward he expected. Go-Daigo underestimated him.

In 1335 Takauji broke openly with Go-Daigo. He defeated every army the emperor sent against him. In the spring of 1336 he entered Kyoto. Go-Daigo fled — with the three imperial regalia, without which no accession to the throne in Japan could be considered legitimate.

He made the mountain fortresses south of Kyoto his court in exile. And he refused to give up the throne.

Go-Daigo: Visionary and Catastrophe

Go-Daigo was a scholar, deeply familiar with Confucian theories of the state, a Buddhist with genuine spiritual depth, a political tactician who actually overthrew the Kamakura bakufu — something that had been considered impossible for decades. His rise from 1331 to 1333 is one of the most improbable seizures of power in Japanese history.

And then the Kemmu Restoration: three years in which he showed that he wanted to rule Japan without knowing how.

The specific mistakes are documented in the sources. He favoured court nobles over warriors in awarding lucrative posts. He made his son Morinaga commander of the warrior armies — a position for which Morinaga had no experience whatsoever and which deeply offended the warriors. He failed to compensate Nitta Yoshisada and Ashikaga Takauji, the two men without whom he would never have won, with sufficient land and rank.

When Takauji rebelled in 1335, Go-Daigo initially responded by appointing Nitta Yoshisada as his opponent — a man who hated Takauji but was also not strong enough to defeat him. Yoshisada lost battles he should have won. Takauji won battles that should have stopped him.

The pain of the lesson came when Go-Daigo arrived in Yoshino: he possessed legitimacy and nothing else. No money, no army, no administration. Only the regalia and the will not to give up.

That was enough for 56 years of civil war.

In his analysis of the Muromachi bakufu, Hall shows that Go-Daigo’s real problem was not Takauji — but the structure he was fighting against: “neither shogun nor shugo acquired the capacity for enforcement needed to fully exercise their legal authority.” (Cambridge Vol. 3, p. 176)[4] This also applied to imperial authority. Legitimacy without the power to enforce it is principle without practice.

Portrayal of Emperor Go-Daigo from the nanboku-cho period — Portrait of Emperor Go-Daigo, completed in 1339 © CC-PD-Mark

Ashikaga Takauji: The Victor Who Never Won

Ashikaga Takauji (1305–1358) is one of the most dazzling and enigmatic figures in Japanese history.

He overthrew the Kamakura bakufu and helped Go-Daigo to the throne. Then he drove out Go-Daigo and installed another emperor. He founded the Muromachi shogunate — and spent the first twenty years of his life as shogun fighting his own brother, putting down uprisings and ruling in a capital in which no one was yet sure who had really won.

Contemporary sources describe periods of exhaustion and withdrawal. He was a Buddhist who had warriors killed en masse, and he founded temples as memorials for the fallen of both sides. The Taiheiki treats him ambivalently: powerful but illegitimate, victorious but without moral authority.

What he established — the Muromachi bakufu — was structurally weaker than Kamakura. He ruled through shugo governors whom he did not really control. That was the price of victory: he needed the support of too many warrior families to be able to truly command all of them afterwards.

This shaped the Nanboku-chō period from the outset: Takauji won militarily and lost institutionally.

The Taiheiki: How the War Was Told

The Taiheiki (literally: “Chronicle of Great Peace”) is the epic of this era. It was written by monks who sympathised with the Southern Court. It contains historical facts, literary inventions, moral lessons and political propaganda in a mixture that is impossible to separate.

Conlan, who has evaluated the wound reports of the 14th century, shows the fundamental problem: the Taiheiki names armies of hundreds of thousands. The logistics documents attest to thousands. Troop strengths were systematically inflated by a factor of 10 to 100, and single combat was glorified where group formation was the reality.[1]

Nevertheless, the Taiheiki is indispensable. Not as a historical document — but as a cultural one. As Varley shows, it constructs the moral landscape of the Nanboku-chō period: who is the hero? Who is the traitor? What kind of loyalty is virtuous? “The war tales can perhaps best be described as literary histories, mixtures of truth and fancy… They are the most important sources of information we have about the customs and ethos of the warriors.” (p. xi)[2]

The Taiheiki answers these questions as follows: Masashige is virtuous. Takauji is morally problematic, even though he wins. Nitta Yoshisada is loyal but unfortunate. The Southern Court is in the right; the Northern Court has power.

This assessment was adopted by Japanese historiography of the Meiji period — for the Meiji emperor was a descendant of the Southern Court, that is, of the “rightful” emperor. The Nanboku-chō question was thus no longer a historical debate, but a question of legitimacy for the modern state.

56 Years of War: What Really Happened

The fundamental problem was structural: neither side had the resources to destroy the other completely. The Southern Court had legitimacy (the imperial regalia) and the mountain region around Yoshino as a natural fortress, but hardly any fighting strength or economic base. The Northern Court had the capital, the shogunate and most of the great families — but could not end the mountain fighting.

Kusunoki Masashige represented the best the Southern Court had: a tactician who achieved much with little. After his death in 1336, Go-Daigo’s cause no longer had a figure of his military quality.

Go-Daigo himself died in Yoshino in 1339 — ill, in exile, the regalia in his hands, never truly giving up the throne. His last wish: his body was to face north, towards the capital he had never recaptured.

The wars went on. Sons and grandsons, on both sides, fought for claims that their grandfathers had begun. Alliances shifted — Conlan shows how contract-based and conditional loyalty was in this period: if the reward is not right, you change sides.[1]

In this atmosphere arose the phenomenon that the Taiheiki describes as basara: a deliberate rejection of old norms, an eccentric, almost provocative display of wealth and individuality by the new warrior rulers. The old codes of courtesy no longer applied. Whoever had power showed it — and in such a way that people had to see it.

“Basara implies excess, ostensibly in bad taste… It was the style of the new overlords who rejected the restrained aesthetic of the past for flamboyant display.” (Varley, p. 206)[2]

Aesthetics in Chaos: Nō, Tea and Wabi

Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443) codified Nō theatre in this era — his treatises were written under the protection of Shogun Yoshimitsu, who brought the Nō troupe to Kyoto and made it his own cultural project. Zeami’s concept of yūgen — mystical depth that makes the unspoken audible — is unthinkable without the background of loss, exile and dissolution that the Nanboku-chō period produced.

Hannya mask used in Noh theater from the Samurai Museum Berlin — Hannya mask used in Noh theater, Edo period (1615-1868) © Samurai Museum Berlin

The tea ceremony developed its philosophical foundation in this period. The tea master Murata Jukō (1422–1502) — technically already in the early Muromachi period — built on an understanding of aesthetics that stemmed from the Nanboku-chō decades: wabi, the beauty of imperfection and simplicity.

As Varley shows in his analysis of medieval culture, these aesthetics were not a reaction to the war in spite of the war — they were a reaction to the war through the war. “If there is a single point that stands out… it is that aesthetics of the age evolved directly from earlier times. The criteria of Zen… coincided with feelings that were also indigenously Japanese.” (Cambridge Vol. 3, p. 467)[4]

Mujō — Buddhist impermanence — was the leitmotif of the Heike Monogatari. In the Nanboku-chō period, mujō was no longer literature, it was everyday life: dynasties fell, lords changed, vows were broken. Anyone who made art in this period made it in the awareness that it reflected the impermanence of all things.

The Unification of 1392: A Peace Without Winners

In the end, unification came — not through military victory, but through exhaustion.

The third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), was the most powerful shogun of the Muromachi age. He had enough resources and political skill to end what his predecessors had not ended. In 1392 he negotiated a unification with the Southern Court: the Southern emperor Go-Kameyama would hand over the regalia, and in return the succession to the throne would alternate again in future — this time to the Northern line.

Go-Kameyama handed over the regalia.

The alternation never took place. The Northern line kept the throne. The descendants of the Southern Court withdrew into a private life, occasionally interrupted by small uprisings — but never again seriously shook the politics of the capital.

Japanese historical scholarship of the Meiji period long struggled with this episode. If Go-Kameyama’s court was the legitimate one — and the emperor of the Meiji Restoration was its descendant — then the unification of 1392 was a fraud. And the emperors of the Northern line who reigned from 1392 until the Meiji Restoration would have been illegitimate. That was an explosive conclusion that no one liked to draw.

In 1911 the Japanese parliament solved the problem by parliamentary resolution: the Southern Court was officially recognised as the legitimate one. History had been corrected. The complications were not discussed further.

The episode is a reminder of how history is not only remembered but administered. Every era writes its prehistory according to the needs of the present. The Nanboku-chō period is a prime example: 56 years of civil war with two simultaneous emperors who were both right and both wrong — and who, in the hindsight of the Meiji state, became a problem of legitimacy that had to be resolved by parliament.

Armour in Transition: The Nanboku-chō Period as a Technological Turning Point

The shift from mounted cavalry to mass infantry, which had begun in the Kamakura period, accelerated dramatically in the Nanboku-chō period. The mountain fighting, sieges and long marches of the 56-year wars required warriors who could manoeuvre on foot — not on horses, which were useless on narrow mountain paths.

As Absolon shows in his technical analysis of armour, Japanese smithing schools responded directly to tactical requirements — not as decorative craftsmanship, but as functional adaptation.[3] The Nanboku-chō period is a period in which these adaptations followed one another particularly closely: many wars, many needs, many innovations.

Conclusion: What 56 Years of Civil War Left Behind

The Nanboku-chō war ended in 1392 with a fraud. And it ended because no one had enough energy left to carry on.

What remained?

Institutionally: the Muromachi shogunate — weakened, decentralised, dependent on provincial governors who increasingly formed their own dynasties. The structural weakness that led to the Ōnin War (1467-1477) and ultimately to the Sengoku period was laid in the Nanboku-chō era.

Culturally: an aesthetic of decay. Mujō — Buddhist impermanence — pervades the literature of the era. The Taiheiki is not a triumphant epic, but a requiem for norms that did not survive. The aesthetic of failure that the Heike Monogatari began became the keynote in the Nanboku-chō period.

And then basara — eccentric display as a countermovement: if the old codes are dead, one may as well put oneself on show. This impulse, described critically in the Taiheiki, is also an energy that flowed into the kawari kabuto aesthetic of the Sengoku period: spectacular helmet forms as individual marks of recognition on a battlefield that no longer knew any rules.

The Nanboku-chō period is not a minor era. It is the hinge at which the classical Japan of the Heian and Kamakura narratives ended and the chaotic, productive, brutal Middle Ages of the 15th and 16th centuries began.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Nanboku-chō Period

What does Nanboku-chō mean?

Nanboku-chō literally means “south-north courts” — referring to the Southern Court in Yoshino (Nanboku = south) and the Northern Court in Kyoto (Kitachō = north). The period lasted from 1336 to 1392 and was marked by simultaneous, rival imperial claims.

Why were there two emperors in Japan?

After the fall of the Kamakura shogunate (1333) and the failed Kemmu Restoration (1336), Ashikaga Takauji drove Emperor Go-Daigo out of Kyoto. Go-Daigo fled with the imperial regalia to Yoshino and refused to give up the throne. Takauji installed an emperor from a rival line. As a result, two simultaneous courts existed — both claiming legitimacy.

Who was right — the Northern or the Southern Court?

In 1911 the Japanese parliament declared that the Southern Court had been the legitimate one — because the Meiji emperor was a descendant of this line. Historically, the question is more complicated: legitimacy depended on the imperial regalia (which Go-Daigo had), but also on political power (which Takauji had). Both sides had strong arguments.

What is the Taiheiki?

The Taiheiki (14th c.) is the main chronicle of the Nanboku-chō wars — an epic written by monks for the Southern Court and recited by lute players. It contains historical facts, literary inventions and political propaganda. For historical facts on troop strengths it is unreliable (systematic exaggeration); for the cultural self-image of the era it is indispensable.

What was basara?

Basara refers to a culture of eccentric, provocative self-presentation that the Taiheiki attributes to the new warrior rulers of the 14th century. Sumptuous clothing, ostentatious gestures, rejection of courtly restraint — a statement: the old rules no longer apply. The concept flows into the kawari kabuto aesthetic of the Sengoku period.

How did the Nanboku-chō period end?

In 1392 Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu negotiated a settlement with the Southern emperor Go-Kameyama: Go-Kameyama handed over the imperial regalia in return for the promise of alternating succession to the throne. The promise was not kept. The Northern Court kept the throne. The civil war ended through exhaustion and political fraud.

Which weapons were mainly used in the Nanboku-chō period?

Thomas Conlan analysed 1,302 wound reports from the 14th century: 72% of the wounds were caused by arrows, approx. 20% by swords. Surprisingly frequent: stones (tsubute), especially in mountain sieges. The image of the sword duel is a literary fiction; the reality was hails of arrows, ambush and group combat.

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Sources and Further Reading

This article is based on academic research and the expert catalogues of the Samurai Museum Berlin. All cited works are documented in the complete bibliography of the knowledge hub.

Primary Sources

[1] Conlan, Thomas D. (2003). State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan. University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. Used: introduction (inflation of troop strengths), ch. 2 (wound analysis, weapons), ch. 5 (loyalty as a transaction).
[2] Varley, H. Paul (1994). Warriors of Japan as Portrayed in the War Tales. University of Hawaii Press. Used: ch. 5 (Taiheiki, Kusunoki Masashige, basara, Nanbokuchō chronicling).
[3] Absolon, Trevor (2017). Samurai Armour, Volume I: The Japanese Cuirass. Osprey Publishing. Used: chs. 4–5 (evolution of armour, development of helmet rivets, adaptation to fighting on foot).

Secondary Literature

[4] Yamamura, Kōzō (ed.) (1990). The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 3: Medieval Japan. Cambridge University Press. Used: ch. 3 (decline of Kamakura), ch. 4 (Muromachi bakufu, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu), ch. 10 (aesthetics).
[5] Turnbull, Stephen (1977/1996). The Samurai: A Military History. Routledge. Used: ch. 4 (Kemmu Restoration, Ashikaga Takauji, Minatogawa); with corrections by Conlan.
[6] Benesch, Oleg (2014). Inventing the Way of the Samurai. Oxford University Press. Used: instrumentalisation of Nanboku-chō history in Meiji nationalism.

Museum Catalogues and Expert Reports

[7] Samurai Museum Berlin (2021). Armours of the Samurai. Display case E04V (hoshi-kabuto-bachi, Nanboku-chō period); display case C04V (haramaki armour, Muromachi period); display case C02V (ō-yoroi, Kamakura period).

Nanboku-chō: The War of the Two Imperial Courts (1336–1392)