Who ruled Kyoto?

Kyoto lies in a basin in western Honshu, enclosed by wooded mountains on three sides and drained by the Kamo and Katsura rivers. It was laid out in 794 as a new capital for the emperors of Japan, and the emperors kept their court there for over a thousand years, until 1869. Even when real power lay with warrior governments elsewhere, Kyoto was the centre of court ritual, Buddhism, fine crafts and the arts, and it still holds a greater concentration of historic temples, shrines and gardens than any other Japanese city.

Before the city, the basin was farmed by clans such as the Hata and the Kamo, some of them descended from immigrants from Korea, whose shrines and temples predate the capital. In 784 Emperor Kanmu left Nara, where the great Buddhist monasteries had become politically powerful, and after a false start at Nagaoka he founded Heian-kyō, "capital of peace and tranquillity", in 794. Like Nara, it copied the grid plan of Chang'an, the capital of Tang China, with a broad central avenue leading north to the palace. The western half of the grid was marshy and never fully developed, and the city grew instead towards the eastern hills.

The Heian period that followed, to 1185, was the classic age of Japanese court culture. Real power passed to the Fujiwara family, who governed as regents for emperors who were often their own grandsons. Court ladies such as Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, and Sei Shōnagon wrote in the city around 1000. By the 12th century, however, warrior clans had grown strong in the provinces, and after the Genpei War of 1180 to 1185 Minamoto no Yoritomo set up the Kamakura shogunate far to the east. The emperors stayed in Kyoto with prestige but little power.

In the 1330s the Ashikaga shoguns made Kyoto their base again, ruling from the Muromachi district. They and their followers built Zen temples and villas such as the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji), and the arts of the tea ceremony, Noh theatre and ink painting flourished. Then a succession dispute set off the Ōnin War of 1467 to 1477, which was fought largely in the streets of Kyoto and left much of the city in ashes. It opened the Sengoku period, a century of civil war.

Oda Nobunaga seized Kyoto in 1568, and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi rebuilt it, regrouping temples into new districts and surrounding the city with an earthen rampart. Tokugawa Ieyasu built Nijō Castle as his residence in the city, but the Tokugawa shogunate ruled from Edo, and Kyoto became a city of the court, temples, merchants and craft workshops making silk, ceramics and lacquer. In the 1860s it returned to the centre of politics as opponents of the shogunate gathered around the emperor; fighting in 1864 started a fire that burned tens of thousands of houses.

The Meiji Restoration restored the emperor's authority in 1868, and the following year the court moved to Tokyo. Kyoto lost much of its population and purpose, and responded by modernising: it opened Japan's first elementary schools, dug a canal from Lake Biwa to power the country's first hydroelectric plant and electric tramway, and founded Kyoto Imperial University in 1897. In 1945 the city was on the shortlist of targets for the atomic bomb, but the US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had it removed, and it largely escaped wartime bombing.

Kyoto today has about 1.4 million people. Its historic monuments are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it remains a centre of universities, traditional crafts and Buddhist institutions.