Ashikaga

Ashikaga lay in Shimotsuke Province, on the eastern side of Japan's old Tōsandō circuit. Roads connected this region with the Kantō plain and the mountain provinces of central Honshu, while the town developed its own institutions of learning and religion.

The origins of the Ashikaga School are uncertain, but its history becomes clearer in the fifteenth century. In 1439 Uesugi Norizane donated Chinese books and land and invited the Zen monk Kaigen to lead the school. Students, many of them monks, studied Confucian texts, especially the Book of Changes. Its reputation reached Francis Xavier, who described it in a letter in 1549.

The school continued under the Tokugawa shogunate, which granted it land. Major repairs in 1667–1668 were supported by the shogunate, court nobles and daimyo; the Confucian temple and gates survive from that work. Lightning caused a fire in 1754 that destroyed several buildings and old records, leaving gaps in knowledge of the school's earlier history.