Background
Yoshiaki Ashikaga was born on 5 December 1537 in Japan. He was a son of the twelfth shogun of the Muromachi shogunate, Ashikaga Yoshiharu, he became a monk with the religious name Kakkei and headed the Ichijo-in of the Kofuku-ji in Nara.
足利 義昭
Yoshiaki Ashikaga was born on 5 December 1537 in Japan. He was a son of the twelfth shogun of the Muromachi shogunate, Ashikaga Yoshiharu, he became a monk with the religious name Kakkei and headed the Ichijo-in of the Kofuku-ji in Nara.
In the second month of the 1568 Ashikaga Yoshihide became the fourteenth shogun, but Yoshiaki, with the help of Oda Nobunaga, entered Kyoto in the ninth month, removed Yoshihide from the position of shogun, and in the tenth month himself became the fifteenth shogun. He did not get along well with Oda Nobunaga, however, and after unsuccessfully attempting to oppose Oda, he was driven out of Kyoto in 1573. With this, the Muromachi shogunate came to an end both in name and fact. He continued in his efforts to overthrow Oda Nobunaga but without success, and in 1587 he placed himself under the protection of Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
1588 – Yoshiaki officially resigns from his post as shōgun.
In 1565 Matsunaga Hisahide killed Yoshiaki’s elder brother, the thirteenth shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru, and tried to set up the brothers’ cousin Ashi- kaga Yoshihide as shogun. Kakkei, fearing for his own safety, fled from the temple and returned to lay life, taking the name Yoshiaki and working to revive the fortunes of the Muromachi shogunate. In 1568, having been told that the character aki (“autumn”) in his name was inauspicious, he replaced it with another character read aki meaning “bright.”