Nishijin and Kamigoryō: A City Behind Earthworks

In 1471, people sheltering within the Eastern Army's fortified district in Kyoto faced an epidemic. Their response included singing, dancing, and ceremonies intended to pacify the spirits believed to bring disease. Kyoto's historical account records crowds gathering for these observances inside an enclosure made to protect people from an army.^[1]

The incident introduces a city that a map of battles can easily omit. Behind the defenses, people still needed somewhere to live and ways to address dangers that an earthwork could not exclude. Outside them, bridges, temples, and residential compounds had acquired new military uses. The war reorganized the conditions of urban life while that life was continuing.

The connected places from Kamigoryō and Shōkoku-ji westward to Nishijin, and north to Funaokayama, preserve parts of that reorganization. They also reveal an uneven aftermath: renewed defenses, surviving religious buildings, returning craftspeople, and a military place name eventually associated with weaving. The question is how a divided battlefield became usable city ground again—and what the divisions left behind.

The first encounter at Kamigoryō in 1467 arose from a dispute within the Hatakeyama house. Hatakeyama Masanaga established a position around the shrine's wooded grounds; his rival Yoshinari attacked him. Their confrontation preceded the wider mobilization of forces under Hosokawa Katsumoto and Yamana Sōzen. The archaeological institute's account separates this opening clash from the larger fighting that developed several months later.^[2]

That interval matters to the geography. Kamigoryō identifies an encounter between rival claimants to a powerful house, not a purpose-built battlefield selected for a countrywide war. As other forces gathered, the conflict spread into the establishments through which military government already operated. Houses became headquarters; the shogun's residence became the center of a defended zone.

The shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, headed the military government based in Kyoto. The competing coalitions included men whose authority extended into the provinces, but their confrontation concentrated around establishments in the capital. Their positions consequently made use of an already crowded political neighborhood rather than facing one another across an empty plain.^[2][3]

The two best-known labels preserve their relative positions. The Eastern Army's core lay around the Muromachi palace, also called the Hana-no-Gosho, the Palace of Flowers. Yamana's residence anchored the opposing position farther west. Nishijin means the western encampment. It began as a description of where a force stood in relation to another force, rather than a name for a particular weaving technique.^[3]

A residence in this setting did more than accommodate its owner. Once it became a headquarters, the neighboring approaches and properties acquired consequences for everyone around it. A street leading toward an influential household could become an avenue of attack. The household's importance attracted military protection, but also helped determine where military danger would gather.

The surviving shrines and streets therefore need to be read in relation to one another. Kamigoryō supplies the opening encounter. The palace area and Yamana's neighborhood explain the subsequent concentration of forces. No single one of these places contains the whole transition from a house dispute to a divided city.

Around the Muromachi palace, the Eastern Army developed the Onkamae, a large defensive enclosure of ditches and earthen banks. Its approximate extent can be related to Ichijō on the south, Teranouchi on the north, and from the Ogawa area in the west to Karasuma in the east. The emperor, a retired emperor, courtiers, warriors, and prosperous townspeople took refuge within it.^[1]

A palace district was becoming a temporary city of refuge. People who ordinarily belonged to different establishments now shared a dependence on the same defended perimeter. The presence of the emperor did not turn every resident into a soldier, and the presence of soldiers did not eliminate the requirements of a household. Shelter brought different populations into one constrained space.

The enclosure also changed the value of routes. Kyoto's history describes communications with the commercial districts to the south being cut, while the northern connection toward the allied establishment of Enryaku-ji became crucial.^[1] A destination could remain close on a city map and become difficult to reach. Distance alone no longer described access.

This is one reason the earthworks belong to urban history as well as military history. A defense had to obstruct an enemy while allowing the people behind it to remain supplied and connected. Closing every route would frustrate the purpose of holding the district. The same boundary that offered protection made the routes still available beyond it more consequential.

Crowding introduced another problem. Fire and disease occurred inside the protected area. The observances of 1471 addressed illness through the religious practices available to its inhabitants.^[1] The resulting gatherings show people acting together within the wartime enclosure for a purpose other than fighting. Their ceremonies were part of living through the conflict, not an interruption in a city otherwise occupied exclusively by armies.

Protection was thus a condition that required continuing work. It depended on defended ground, outside connections, and the survival of people sharing limited space. The Onkamae makes those requirements unusually clear because the court's presence and the military position occupied the same urban district.

Shōkoku-ji stood close to this concentration of court and military establishments. Founded in the fourteenth century under shogunal patronage, the Zen monastery had repeatedly repaired damage before the Ōnin War. Its own history dates completion of a major gate to 1463. Four years later, warfare destroyed its buildings again.^[4]

That short interval gives the loss a particular scale. The buildings attacked in 1467 were part of an institution that had recently invested in reconstruction. Their destruction interrupted religious use and renewed construction at the same time. The temple was neither an expendable empty lot nor an establishment whose earlier work had already ended.

The military relationship was nevertheless inescapable. Fighting at Shōkoku-ji brought opposing forces into the precinct beside the Eastern Army's core. A monastery's buildings and enclosed ground could become useful positions because of where they stood in the city. Its religious identity did not remove those spatial advantages from the calculations of combatants.^[2]

Excavations west of the temple recover a longer sequence than the single famous battle. A 2011 investigation found a pebbled medieval road renewed several times before abandonment, and later defensive ditches that overlapped or replaced one another. The excavators dated the latter group broadly to the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They also identified a narrower ditch containing burnt roof tiles and pottery, possibly associated with a Buddhist building destroyed during the period's conflicts.^[5]

The evidence brings rebuilding and renewed defense into view together. Cutting another ditch involved making a fresh decision about the boundary to be protected. A repaired road represented repeated investment in an established line of movement. Neither activity describes a district simply emptied of people and left untouched after the first fire.

The sequence also extends beyond the conventional end of the Ōnin War in 1477. The excavation account cites a record of defensive work near the temple's east gate in 1536.^[5] Some earthworks belong to the insecurity of later generations, not to the opening positions of 1467. The capacity to fortify the neighborhood continued to matter after the original coalitions had dispersed.

Shōkoku-ji consequently supplies more than a destroyed landmark on a campaign map. It reveals an institution repeatedly trying to make its ground usable while that ground remained exposed to conflict. Archaeology records some of the practical adjustments involved: renewing a surface, filling a cut, and establishing another defensive line.

At Dodo Bridge, an ordinary piece of urban infrastructure became part of the front. The bridge crossed the Kokawa watercourse between opposing positions. The municipal bamboo park's account of the bridge associates it with fighting between Hosokawa and Yamana contingents during the war's first year.^[6]

The smallness of the crossing is instructive. Armies assembled from different provinces still had to negotiate local obstacles. Men on opposite sides of a watercourse could be physically close while their ability to cross remained contested. A bridge concentrated movement that might otherwise spread across a wider frontage. Its usefulness in everyday circulation helped make it consequential in war.

The material encountered under its name has a later history. A successor bridge was dismantled in 1963; stored components subsequently went to Rakusai Bamboo Park. The archaeological institute identifies surviving foundation stones near the former crossing with a later, Edo-period bridge.^[6][7] The documented medieval crossing, rather than one unchanged set of bridge stones, connects this point to the fighting.

Farther north, Funaokayama brought another route into the conflict. The hill stood near the approach from Tanba through Nagasaka into Kyoto. Western forces established a fortified position there, which Eastern forces took in 1468. It became a battlefield again in 1511, during another struggle over entry into the capital.^[8]

The two locations explain different scales of access. Dodo Bridge concentrated movement inside the urban confrontation. Funaokayama was associated with an approach linking the city to the country beyond it. Holding the palace neighborhood could not make that outer connection irrelevant; armies and supplies still had to arrive from somewhere.

Together, crossing and hill prevent the opposing camps from becoming two colored blocks detached from the working city. Their positions depended on passages through and beyond those blocks. That dependence also explains why defensive traces survived as a recurring feature of Kyoto's landscape rather than as the equipment of one brief battle.

The subsequent identity of Nishijin can make the war sound like the founding event of Kyoto's weaving industry. The industry's own historical account instead places private textile production before the conflict. Craftspeople had long supplied fabrics through arrangements that developed from, and alongside, the court's earlier workshops. Wartime displacement interrupted an existing occupation.^[9]

Kyoto City's textile history gives the recovery a more divided geography than a single return to the western camp. It places the Nerinuki guild in Hakūn village, in the former Eastern headquarters area, and the Ōtoneri guild around Ōmiya, in the former Western headquarters area. These groups competed while contributing to the revival of Kyoto's weaving.^[10]

A guild was an organized body of craftspeople, not simply the name of the street where they worked. Re-establishing production meant recovering a place within relationships of supply and patronage as well as finding premises. The two locations show that this process crossed the old military division. Economic recovery did not require returning craftspeople to preserve the camps as permanent, mutually exclusive communities.

Nor did the end of fighting distribute opportunities equally among all weavers. The city's account describes the Ōtoneri organization acquiring a direct relationship with the shogunal household in the sixteenth century. In 1571, six of its thirty-one houses were appointed to make fabrics for the imperial court.^[10] These appointments identify a specific route to recognized work, rather than an undifferentiated renaissance enjoyed on identical terms by everyone returning to Kyoto.

The implications are quite different from a story in which destruction itself generated a new industry. Skills and relationships had histories before the war. Displacement broke their local arrangements. Return required those arrangements to be made usable again, through competing organizations and connections to purchasers capable of commissioning their products.

The geography is especially revealing because institutions associated with the court and military government recur on both sides of the story. Their establishments had helped concentrate armed conflict in upper Kyoto; their requirements also offered work to specialist producers afterward. The continued existence of customers and offices could matter even when the surrounding distribution of houses and workshops had changed.

Nishijin's commercial identity thus grew through a longer process than the withdrawal of armies. The western-camp name endured, but the history of the work associated with it cannot be confined to one wartime headquarters or one moment of return.

The rebuilding of working neighborhoods did not guarantee lasting safety. In 1536, conflict involving Enryaku-ji and Kyoto's Hokke, or Lotus-school, Buddhists again brought destruction to upper Kyoto. The ward's historical account describes residents preparing ditches and fences in response to attack.^[11] Such preparations belong to a later conflict, but they continued to make the neighborhood itself part of its defense.

Read beside the excavated ditches west of Shōkoku-ji, the episode clarifies why an archaeological “wartime” feature needs a date. The city repeatedly rebuilt and defended itself. The traces of those activities can overlap beneath streets whose surface now offers little indication of either one. Recovery and insecurity were not successive conditions with a clean boundary between them.

Standing architecture supplies another correction to the image of total disappearance. Daihōon-ji, better known as Senbon Shakadō, lost its surrounding halls during the Ōnin War, but its principal hall survived. The building's 1227 date is established by an ink inscription on its ridge timber.^[12]

Its survival also involved repairs. The cultural-property description records work in several medieval periods, followed by substantial alterations in 1669 using material from another temple building. Modern restoration recovered earlier structural arrangements.^[12] A hall could survive the war without remaining materially motionless for the centuries afterward.

Here, retaining a building meant retaining a place where religious life could continue. The hall was not preserved originally as a demonstration of how much else had burned. It still had work to do. Its later value as evidence of survival emerged from that continuing institutional life and the repairs it required.

The contrast with the vanished palace defenses is useful. The earthworks addressed an immediate need to control movement. The hall served purposes that could continue after the fighting shifted elsewhere. Different uses gave different elements of the neighborhood different prospects of survival. Neither complete erasure nor an untouched medieval city describes the result.

The name Nishijin was already being used as a place name by 1487, according to the dated entry identified in Kyoto City's textile history.^[10] Its later public commemoration, however, joined the army's address to a much longer account of manufacture.

The Nishijin stele erected in 1928 carries a text composed by historian Miura Hiroyuki. Its narrative moves from court weaving to private producers, wartime flight to Sakai, return, new techniques, and the spread of Nishijin's reputation. The military encampment explains the name, but the inscription's destination is the flourishing textile district.^[13]

This is a particular choice about what to do with a battlefield's memory. The stele does not ask its readers to celebrate Yamana's campaigns. It makes the old military name part of an account of skilled work and commercial continuity. The war appears as a disruption through which the history of the industry passes, not as the achievement for which the neighborhood is commemorated.

That reading required renewal in its own right. In 1976, a replica was erected beside the new Nishijin textile center. Its additional inscription explains that the earlier stone had weathered and that members of the Nishijin Club had contributed to recreating it when the new center was completed.^[14] The repeated name now marked another investment in the industry's public presentation.

The historical area holds these different uses of place together. Kamigoryō fixes an opening clash to shrine ground. The palace district explains refuge and dependence on protected routes. Shōkoku-ji's excavations show recurring adjustments to a threatened neighborhood. Funaokayama connects the city to approaches from outside. The weaving histories trace work re-established across a line that armies had once defended.

Nishijin's inheritance from the war could change its purpose. A word that distinguished one encampment from its opponent became an address under which producers presented their work. The city did not need to keep the battlefield intact to keep using—and reshaping—the geography the fighting had left behind.