was a 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 or from the name of his family temple. His posthumous name was . 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. Go-Daigo wanted to re-establish his rule in Kamakura and the east of the country without sending there a shōgun, as this was seen, just a year from the fall of its shogunate, as still too dangerous. As a compromise, he sent his six-year-old son Prince Norinaga to Mutsu Province and nominated him Governor-General of the Mutsu and Dewa Provinces. In an obvious reply to this move, Tadayoshi, without an order from the Emperor escorted another of his sons, eleven-year-old Prince Nariyoshi (a.k.a. Narinaga) to Kamakura, where he installed him as governor of the Kōzuke Province with himself as a deputy and de facto ruler. The appointment of a warrior to such an important post was intended to demonstrate the Emperor that the samurai class was not ready for a purely civilian rule. Since he ruled without interference from Kyoto and the area