Mototsune had served as regent before Uda's accession and controlled a powerful court network. Uda was not his maternal grandson, making the terms of continued service especially important. The transition required a formula that preserved ministerial authority without emptying the new reign of meaning.
Emperor Uda came to the throne in 887 after a succession in which Fujiwara no Mototsune had been indispensable. An accession document invited Mototsune to continue managing government but used the term akō, a title associated with a revered Chinese minister. Scholar Fujiwara no Sukeyo argued that the office carried honor without defined duties.
In 887 Sadami returned to princely status and became emperor within the same succession crisis. For the preceding three years he had held the status of an imperial subject under the name Minamoto no Sadami. His father, Kōkō, was nearing death, and the court needed an heir. Fujiwara no Mototsune supported Sadami’s selection. The man known afterward as Uda reached the throne through a reversal of his recent position, with the highest minister’s backing.
Sadami had been born in 867, before his father became emperor. His mother, Princess Hanshi, also belonged to the imperial family. In 884, when Kōkō took the throne following Yōzei’s removal, Sadami received the Minamoto surname along with other children of the new sovereign. Imperial ancestry remained, but princely status did not. In studying preparations for Daigo’s later reign, Arai Hiroki emphasizes how late and hurriedly Uda’s succession was settled in 887. The outcome should not be projected back into the surname change of 884 as a known plan.
Mototsune’s support connected the restored prince to the court’s existing leadership. Uda did not begin by seeking a government without that minister. Kotō Shinpei’s study of the Akō controversy identifies the essential duty involved: receiving consultation on matters submitted to the sovereign and on instructions issued in his name. Uda wanted Mototsune’s assistance in this arrangement. Selection of a sovereign had solved one problem; agreeing on the minister’s participation in the sovereign’s decisions created another.
The opening of Uda’s reign thus turned on two connected acts. The court restored a subject as a prince and ruler, then had to specify the senior minister’s governing function. Both depended on documents and on cooperation between men who already held very different positions. The wording of the next imperial reply would test how far their understanding extended.
Seiwa abdicated in 876 in favor of the young Yōzei. The decree entrusting Mototsune with regency invoked Yoshifusa’s service as precedent. There was also a difference: Seiwa remained alive as retired sovereign. Kamiya interprets the arrangement as one in which Mototsune exercised delegated imperial powers while a guardian above the child ruler still existed. In 880, on Seiwa’s death, Mototsune became daijō daijin, the highest minister. Kamiya reads the timing as a further adjustment to the disappearance of that guardian. This is a historical interpretation of the relationship between two appointments, rather than proof that the highest ministry had a single, unchanging statutory function.
The word akō became the focus because scholars interpreted its classical precedent differently. Mototsune's refusal to conduct business converted the interpretive disagreement into an administrative crisis. Drafting, commentary and withdrawal were political acts.
Mototsune withdrew from business, and normal government stalled while officials debated wording, precedent and authority. Uda eventually issued a revised document and censured Tachibana no Hiromi, who had drafted the disputed language. The settlement preserved Mototsune's position as kanpaku.
The dispute was not merely a philological puzzle. It showed that the relationship between sovereign and chief minister had to be created through appointments whose language both sides could recognize. The kanpaku office gained a stronger precedent, while the young emperor learned the constraints surrounding personal rule.
The first document entrusted government to Mototsune using the expression kanpaku, the chief adviser to an adult emperor. An imperial reply to his resignation then called the position Akō, drawing on an ancient Chinese office. This was intended to describe his role, yet critics interpreted it as depriving him of active governing duties. Mototsune’s refusal to proceed made the disputed expression consequential. Uda’s need for advice was now joined to a minister’s demand that the documentary basis of his authority be settled.
Uda replaced the disputed wording and punished the drafter. Mototsune resumed his position and retained recognized authority until his death in 891. The emperor later governed with greater freedom, but only after conceding the immediate dispute.
Tachibana no Hiromi had drafted the reply. He was also the maternal grandfather of two of Uda’s princes. The controversy therefore affected a learned official with a place in the imperial family’s network, as well as the ruler and highest minister. Demands to punish Hiromi gave the dispute a second object: the author of the document might bear the cost of its rejected wording. Kinship and scholarship met inside the same administrative act.
Kotō reconstructs the sequence from eight extracts of Uda’s diary preserved in the Akō section of Seiji Yōryaku, a later compilation of government precedents. His published abstract describes an inconclusive scholarly discussion before Uda in the sixth month of 888. Uda then asked Mototsune to act under the original document of 887. Mototsune insisted that the Akō issue must first be resolved, leading to a revised imperial reply. An earlier document’s existence did not suffice while the later reply remained disputed.
Historical disagreement · Did one letter settle the Akō dispute?
The dispute extended into the question of Hiromi’s punishment and a concession concerning Mototsune’s daughter, Onshi, entering Uda’s household. Kotō distinguishes these later stages and reconsiders a diary entry traditionally misdated to the sixth month rather than the eleventh. That changes how the diary entry relates to a letter from Sugawara no Michizane, a scholar and court official, to Mototsune.
The familiar story of a scholar’s intervention belongs within a sequence of revisions and negotiations; the evidence does not make one letter an independently proven, instant settlement.
Onshi subsequently became Uda’s consort.
During these years Uda also completed a project inherited from Kōkō. His father had initiated a temple at the foot of Ōuchiyama in 886. Uda dedicated it in 888, together with rites for Kōkō’s first death anniversary. Ninna-ji’s chronology records two annual ordination places obtained in 890 through a petition by its administrator. A building project had gained both commemorative purpose and provision for admitting monks. The temple’s development continued while Uda’s governing relationship with Mototsune remained in place, until the minister’s death in 891.
Uda’s initial 887 commission used kanpaku. Mototsune submitted a formal resignation; the emperor’s reply compared him to an ancient Chinese Akō. The objection concerned the duties attached to that designation. If the comparison conferred distinction without active governing business, it could diminish precisely the function Uda wanted Mototsune to perform. A dispute about an apparently honorific word therefore reached the practical question of who would handle affairs on behalf of an adult emperor.
Later accounts used the crisis to explain the kanpaku's institutional standing and the vulnerability of scholar-officials caught between ruler and minister. Because the surviving evidence includes later compilations and cited diary material, the action chain is clearer than every reported private intention.
The Akō dispute made documentary language a battlefield for institutional power. A title mattered because it determined whether a minister had duties, standing and access to decisions.
The episode strengthened the political precedent for a chief minister acting for an adult emperor, while also showing that Fujiwara dominance was negotiated rather than automatic.
Mototsune’s death in 891 allowed Uda to govern without installing a replacement regent or kanpaku. The absence of that senior intermediary increased the importance of officials whom the emperor could consult and promote. Michizane became especially prominent. Scholarly biographies also identify Fujiwara no Yasunori among the capable officials he employed and associate this phase with attempts to improve provincial government and reaffirm the principles of the legal administration. Later writers called it the “government of Kanpyō,” after the era name. The name summarizes an assessment; it does not establish that every provincial problem was solved.
