Kyōgoku

The Kyōgoku were a branch of the Sasaki clan and traced their line to the Uda Genji; their name came from the Kyōgoku quarter of Kyoto where the family lived in the Heian period. Sasaki Ujinobu founded the line in the thirteenth century.

Its most famous head, Sasaki Takauji (1306–1373), known by his monastic name Dōyō, abandoned the Hōjō regency to support Ashikaga Takauji against the Kenmu Restoration of 1333, became shugo governor of six provinces, and was also a noted renga poet whose verses entered the imperial anthology Tsukubashū.

Before the Ōnin War of 1467 to 1477 the Kyōgoku held the shugo posts of Ōmi, Hida, Izumo and Oki, but their power collapsed in the succession wars of the late fifteenth century. Under the Tokugawa the house recovered and was classed as a tozama daimyō family, while one branch served the shogunate as kōke.