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Japan Past and Present
member of a collateral line of the imperial family on the throne. Daigo II and his followers withdrew to the mountain fastnesses south of the Nara Plain and there set up a rival imperial court. From this vantage point they and their successors continued the hopeless struggle against the Ashikaga family for almost sixty years. In the year 1392, they were induced to give up and were lured back to Kyoto by the promise that the line of Daigo II would alternate on the throne with the line set up by Takauji. No one who had observed the Ashikaga family’s past record of treachery could have been surprised that they did not live up to their agreement. No member of the line of Daigo II ever sat on the throne again.
Daigo II had failed completely in his fantastic attempt to restore imperial rule in feudal Japan, but Ashikaga Takauji, who had had himself appointed Shogun in 1338, was little more successful in his attempt to recreate the unity of Kamakura. He set up a line of Ashikaga Shogun at Kyoto who managed to retain the title until 1573, but no Ashikaga Shogun ever exercised effective control over all the military leaders and powerful Buddhist monasteries of the land. During a large part of these two and a half centuries, the government of the Shogun was almost as much of a political sham as the imperial court itself. The third Ashikaga Shogun came as close as any member of his family to ruling the whole country for a brief period after the surrender of the imperial faction of Daigo II in 1392, but Ashikaga power declined rapidly thereafter. From 1467 on, civil wars were chronic throughout Japan. Strong feudal lords drove Ashikaga Shogun