Ashikaga Tadayoshi (足利 直義; 1306 – March 13, 1352, Kamakura, Japan) was a Japanese samurai general of the Northern and Southern Courts period (1337–92) of Japanese history and a close associate of his elder brother Takauji, the first Muromachi shōgun. Son of Ashikaga Sadauji and Uesugi Kiyoko, daughter of Uesugi Yorishige, the same mother as Takauji, he was a pivotal figure of the chaotic transition period between the Kamakura and Muromachi shogunates. Tadayoshi is today considered a military and administrative genius and the true architect of many of his elder brother's successes. In contemporary chronicles he is rarely called with his name, but is instead called either gosho (御所) or Daikyū-ji-dono (大休寺殿) from the name of his family temple. His posthumous name was Kozan Egen (古山慧源).
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Biography
The Ashikaga were a samurai family from Kamakura having blood ties with the Seiwa Genji, Minamoto no Yoritomo's clan. Unlike his brother Takauji, Tadayoshi took no part in the Kamakura shogunate's political activities until the Genkō War (1331–1333), a civil war whose conclusion (the Siege of Kamakura (1333)) marks the end of the Kamakura period and the beginning of the most turbulent period in Japan's history, the Muromachi era.
Like his brother, Tadayoshi resolutely abandoned the Kamakura shogunate (de facto ruled by Hōjō clan) to ally himself with formerly expelled Emperor Go-Daigo during the Kenmu Restoration of 1333. When Go-Daigo had ascended to the throne in 1318, he had immediately manifested his intention to rule without interference from the military in Kamakura. The samurai class as a whole however was not ready to give away power, so the alliance between him and the Ashikaga was bound to be only temporary.