It is strange to think that the flowering of Japan’s exquisite artistic and cultural life in the 15^th century, happened largely because the 8^th shogun of the Muromachi shogunate, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, was an indulgent and pleasure- seeking aristocrat who left the governing of Japan to his wife and advisors.

Having given the shogunate to his nine-year-old son and relinquished his official responsibilities, Yoshimasa set about creating a retreat in the mountains east of Kyoto. He commissioned a landscape designer, the renowned Soami, to create its gardens and had the most beautiful complex of villas and pavilions built, designed for banquets, tea ceremonies, incense gatherings and moon viewing. Preferring the simplicity of the abstract Zen garden to an earlier ostentatious style, he had a waterless river of raked sand foam over the rocks, and a cone of sand sculpted to resemble a miniature Mount Fuji. These gardens were designed not just for strolling in but as carefully framed views from the villa’s rooms, integrating interior spaces and landscape as a continuous visual experience. Beside a large pond he built a modest but beautifully refined pavilion, crowned with a phoenix. The Silver Pavilion was unobtrusively elegant, designed in a restrained aesthetic of asymmetric unadorned wood, with an emphasis on weathering and imperfection. It came to embody the spirit of what was subsequently known as Higashiyama culture, one of the primary influences of Japanese cultural life.

Yoshimasa invested heavily in art and ritual that refined and choreographed sensory experience as a mark of status and cultivation. His life revolved around highly curated aesthetic pursuits in the company of his circle of court ladies, actors, poets and practitioners of flower arranging and the tea ceremony. Together they debated the merits of porcelain and Chinese Sung paintings. They discussed Noh plays and calligraphy. They wrote poems about the moonlit garden. They collected and displayed Chinese and Japanese art objects. As a patron and arbiter of taste, Yoshimasa was exceptional. Under his influence a new culture took shape, cultivated in his mountain retreat, that was deeply informed by Zen Buddhism. During this period, flower arranging, ink painting, the creation and appreciation of porcelain and lacquerware, landscape gardening and the art of linked verse either first emerged or reached their highest refinement. He also played a central role in shaping the tea ceremony, an art form that became grounded in simplicity, restraint and refined austerity. Everything about the ceremony was controlled by the most highly developed aesthetic sensibilities, every utensil – whisk, ladle, bowl – was a work of art, wrapped in silk when not in use. Yoshimasa’s tea advisor, Murata Shuko, is traditionally credited as the first to articulate a distinctly Japanese “sabi” style tea practice which represented the Japanese fondness for simplicity. It was in no sense an affectation. Sabi was accepted because it accorded with deep seated aesthetic beliefs. Yoshimasa experimented with small tea rooms, reduced decorative display and cultivated an ideal of equality among participants. Yoshimasa was not a great shogun, but as a patron and aesthete he was extraordinary, and he left Japan’s cultural and artistic life enriched.