The several years of warfare following the failed attempt of Mochi hito andYorimasa to overthrow the Taira in 1180, usually known asthe Gempei (i.e., Minamoto-Taira) War, has been popularly portrayed as an epic struggle between two great warrior clans for con trol of the imperial court and its institutions. It is dramatized as a rousing tale of political intrigue and heroic battle, with victory going ultimately to the Minamoto because of the political adroitness andmilitary genius of the Minamoto overlord Yoritomo and the super human fighting abilities of the Minamoto generals, aided by the sometimes fumbling cowardice of Taira generals, whose martial valor is supposed to have been corrupted by the genteel life of the court.
That one-dimensional picture of clan rivalry is at once muddied by the presence of Taira and Minamoto warriors on both sides of the conflict and by major intraclan fighting, especially among the Minamoto. Unlike earlier wars in Japan, which were mostly military expeditions sent by the court, the Gempei War was a national civil war, the fighting extending from the Kanto and northeast coast tothe western end of Honshu. The war was also part of a broader po litical, economic, and social upheaval, a revolution that eventually resulted in a changed society, a society that may loosely be called feudal. Dominated by a new class of warriors supported by land rights conferred or confirmed at least in part by military chiefs, the country under the new regime was governed in large part by a warrior-controlled political structure, at the top of which stood the bakufu shogun in Kamakura.
The first stage of the war followed some months after Mochihito’s call to arms in the fourth month of 1180, when warrior uprisings began to challenge and in some instances overthrow Taira authority in many parts of the country. The greatest of the challenges came from two Minamoto cousins, Yoritomo (1147-99) and Yoshinaka (1154-84), grandsons of the Tameyoshi who had been executed after the Hogen Disturbance. They had escaped the slaughter at the time of the subsequent Heiji Disturbance, and had been living obscurely in the east and north.
Following defeat in the Heiji fighting, Tameyoshi’s sonYoshitomo had been killed as he fled eastward; his thirteen-year-old son and heir, Yoritomo, in an act of clemency, was exiled to the distant wilds of Izu Province (the Izu peninsula south of Tokyo). By the time news of Mochihito’s call to arms reached Izu in 1180, Yoritomo, now adult and married to Hojo Masako (1157-1225), a daughter of one of his custodians, Tokimasa (1138-1215), was on such terms with local warriors that, with his father-in-law’s backing, he was able in the tenth month to raise a force that attacked and killed the Taira deputy in Izu.
The warriors who rallied to Yoritomo’s cause were often not so much partisans of his clan as rebels against the old regime of theimperial court and its control of land rights. The conflict is accord ingly best described as a struggle between the military usurpers of that regime, the Taira, and warriors striving to gain secure access tothe management of land resources, rallying to the Minamoto. Inso far as the Minamoto fought merely for clan supremacy, or military overlordship, they were fortuitous leaders of a revolution long in the making.
Yoritomo accepted all warriors, whatever their earlier affiliations, if they would pledge allegiance to him. In return he issued, on his own authority, confirmation of their rights to land and office. Tousurp the powers of the imperial government in this way was a rad ical departure. Basing his authority on Mochihito’s call and his own ancestral association with the Kanto region, he claimed jurisdiction over all public and private land in the east. He claimed, in essence, to be the ruler of the region. His message to local provincial officials was to oust officials and agents of the central government and seize control of their estates and provinces. In the first two precarious months of Yoritomo’s bold program, he was joined by some Taira adherents and opposed by some Minamoto competitors.
The promise of secure and permanent confirmation of hitherto uncertain tenures was compelling. Province by province the tide turned inYoritomo’s favor. Some who at first opposed him or would not commit to him now joined his ranks. They were drawn less by the mystique of the Minamoto lineage than by calculations of how their in terests could best be served. Yoritomo established a military and administrative headquarters at Kamakura, a site northeast of Izu on Sagami Bay associated with his family for five generations since the time of Yoriyoshi. His offer of confirmations to eastern warriors brought more than troops and the provinces’ resources needed forthe forthcoming military struggle; it also built a new political organization essential for the long-term goal of ruling the now au tonomous eastern region.
In the tenth month the Taira at court dispatched an army under the command of Kiyomori’s grandson, Koremori, to subdue the outlaw Yoritomo. Yoritomo advanced to meet the enemy force of 70,000 that waited at the Fuji River, just west of Mount Fuji, with a force of «200,000 horsemen,» according to the wildly exaggerated account in the Tale o/Heike.6s In any case,Yoritomo may have had a numerical advantage that persuaded the Taira to withdraw without afight and return to the capital, further encouraging rebellious war riors in the east and in the provinces around the capital to riseagainst the reeling Taira. Yoritomo decided to consolidate his posi tion in the east rather than to pursue the Taira.
The Taira cause was by no means lost. Shortly after Koremori’s retreat, Kiyomori returned the court to Kyoto from Fukuhara, reinstated Go-Shirakawa’s administrative authority as senior retired em peror, and moved decisively against the great temples, attacking Onjoji and sending his fifth son, Shigehira, to burn Todaiji and Kofukuji in Nara in retaliation for their armed support of Minamoto forces. That piece of sacrilege, which occurred at the beginning of1181, deeply offended court society. The Kofukuji was the clan tem pie of the Fujiwara; the Todaiji served a similar role for several other noble families, and it was also revered by the imperial family as the historic Buddhist protector of the state. A month later Kiyomori died.
In the aftermath of the debacle at Fujigawa, the Taira leaders un dertook to mobilize military manpower and resources in the nine provinces surrounding and to the east of the capital. Kiyomori’sthird son, Munemori, was appointed to the new post of commander in-chief (sdkari), and three months later the Taira gained a victory overYoritomo’s uncle, Yukiie, at the Sunomata River (near modern Nagoya).That battle was followed by a two-year lull in the fighting,the effect in part of a famine that hampered the recruiting and pro visioning of troops, especially in the west. During this period of preparation for the inevitable confrontation of the military forces,Yoritomo had an advantage in his independence from central au thority, being able to seize control of provincial headquarters, lands, and shoen in the east to gain the men and supplies he needed.
The Taira, as administrators of the central government offices they had usurped, were constrained by the bureaucratic procedures of thecourt system. They requisitioned troops and supplies from the pro vincial administrators and shoen holders, but the process was slow and cumbersome and they encountered resistance. There was strong resentment of the Taira at court and among the temples, but perhaps more serious was the alienation of many of the provincial warrior class. The new Taira proprietorships in the provinces often reduced land rights and income of the local warriors, the very group that the Taira needed for their armies.
The Taira at court did little to cham pion the interests of the warrior class, while provincial warriors viewed with distrust the rise of the Ise Taira to high court position and intermarriage with court nobility.
The next challenge to the Taira that revealed the weakness of theirforces came not from Yoritomo, who continued to consolidate his ad ministration and military strength in the Kanto, but from his cousin Yoshinaka (commonly called KisoYoshinaka), who had responded to Prince Mochihito’s call a month after Yoritomo. Emerging from his refuge in the Kiso Mountains of Shinano (Nagano Prefecture), he continued to raise troops and won a series of small battles against Taira adherents.
The Taira sent a large army led by Koremori against him, but Yoshinaka scored a crushing victory in the fifth month of 1183 at Kurikara in Etchu (near the present boundary of Ishikawa andToyama prefectures near the Sea of Japan). This victory opened the road to Kyoto. Just three days before Yoshinaka’s seizure of the capital at the end of the seventh month, the Taira leader Munemori fled with his nephew. Emperor Antoku, to Kyushu, traditionally a center of Taira strength. Go-Shirakawa, who had evaded the Taira tojoin Yoshinaka at Mount Hiei the day before Munemori’s flight, or dered him andYukiie to pursue the fleeing Taira, referring now to the Minamoto forces as the «imperial army.»
Ignoring the absence ofthe imperial regalia with Antoku in Kyushu, the ex-emperor also installed his three-year-old grandson, Go-Toba (1180-1239, r. 11831198), on the throne to replace Antoku (although the latter, as the pos sessor of the regalia, is usually considered to have been the emperor until his death in 1185).
Yoshinaka’s occupation of the capital left the country divided intofour satrapies, each dominated by a different and hostile military au thority:
(1) Kyushu, Shikoku, and the Inland Sea provinces ruled mostly by the Taira themselves under Munemori;
(2) the capital, nearby provinces, and most of the provinces on the Sea of Japan from Wakasa Bay north of Kyoto northeastward nearly as far as theMogami River beyond the modern city of Niigata, all held by Yoshi naka;
(3) the interior and Pacific seaboard provinces east of the cap ital to the northern borders of present day Tochigi, Ibaraki, andGumma prefectures, ruled by the head of the main Minamoto lin eage, Yoritomo;
and (4) the domain of the Oshu Fujiwara occupying the upper tip of Honshu north of Yoshinaka’s andYoritomo’s spheres. Yoritomo, at his seat in Kamakura, was the head of the main line of Minamoto warriors, but he was in danger of being relegated to a peripheral status by Yoshinaka’s victories.
Yoritomo moved to buttress his position, taking several steps to gather the support of principal powers in the capital region. He made friendly gestures toward the great temples whose prayers were accepted as having contributed to the success of Minamoto arms; he returned landed holdings in theeast confiscated by the Taira to their rightful temple and noble own ers; he followed a policy of leniency in his treatment of captured Tairawarriors; and, perhaps most significantly, he established a secret un derstanding with Go-Shirakawa that led in the tenth month of 1183 to court recognition of both his civil and his military authority in the east.
(It is a matter of debate among historians, as to whether the court’s recognition of Yoritomo’s authority at this point in 1183 was a strengthening or an attempted invasion of his position.)
Following his occupation of the capital, Yoshinaka advanced down the Inland Sea coast in pursuit of his Taira foes, but with his army somewhat diminished by the return of warriors to their northern homes and the remainder weakened by months of hard marches and fighting, Yoshinaka was roundly defeated by his enemy midway downthe western leg of Honshu at Mizushima Bay (southeast of the mod ern cities of Okayama and Kurashiki), and he returned to Kyoto.
There, the hostility that his arrogance and his unruly warriors’plundering and looting had provoked throughout Kyoto society coa lesced into a rising against him by armed monks from Enryakuji and Onjoji, miscellaneous court warriors, nonwarrior ruffians, and cityriffraff, all gathered under the command of a Taira warrior in the ser vice of Go-Shirakawa at the ex-emperor’s Hojuji-dono palace and numbering, it was rumored, twenty thousand men.
Yoshinaka’s rela tions with Go-Shirakawa had already been strained by the favoritismthe ex-emperor had shown Yoritomo, but his discovery of secret communication between them, the discovery, too, of an assassin dis patched by Yoritomo to the capital to kill Yoshinaka, and the open armed defiance of his rule by the ragtag force at the Hojviji-dono were no doubt final straws in his burden of resentment.
Shortly after the beginning of 1184 he attacked and burned the ex-emperor’s palace and easily routed its inexpert defenders. Confining Go-Shirakawa atanother palace in the city, he also dismissed from court office the ex emperor’s courtiers and confiscated many of their landholdings. Atthe same time, he obtained for himself appointment to the long unused court title of «Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo» (seii taisho guri), which originally had been conferred directly by the emperor on the leader of an expedition to suppress the Emishi in the northeast. In Yoshinaka’s case, it was directed, of course, against Yoritomo as a declaration of war.
Yoshinaka’s forceful actions at the beginning of 1184 gave him a nearly complete stranglehold on the Kyoto government, but it also left him isolated and exposed, with only a small army (perhaps as few as six or seven thousand men) to confront enemies on three fronts: the Taira in the west; Yoritomo from the east; and the forces of the Enryakuji nearby.
The unchastened and ever-scheming Go-Shirakawa issued an order to Yoritomo calling on him to punish his wild northern cousin, a task that the Kamakura lord was ready for and probably only toowilling to perform. Rather than lead an army against Yoshinaka him self, however, Yoritomo prudently remained as usual ensconced in his eastern stronghold, dispatching to the capital instead a punitive force under the command of his brothers Noriyori and Yoshitsune(1159-89), the latter a general of peerless, if largely legendary, abil ity and accomplishment.
Yoshinaka, his forces outnumbered and still suffering from their recent defeat at Mizushima Bay, went down to defeat in battles at Uji and Seta on the outskirts of Kyoto, and he took his own life. The victory of the Minamoto brothers resulted in the consolidation of anti-Taira forces under the single command of the Kamakura lord. At lastYoritomo turned his attention to fighting the Taira, and the war entered its final stage.
The Taira had regrouped, following their flight from the capital to Kyushu, and had established a base on the small island of Yashima at the northeastern corner of Shikoku (near Takamatsu), from which, with their maritime superiority, they were able to control theInland Sea. Following their success at Mizushima, they advanced to ward the capital and constructed fortifications at Ichinotani near Fukuhara. Less than a month after Yoshinaka’s defeat, still in the early part of 1184, Yoshitsune outflanked the Taira at Ichinotani in adaring mounted charge down what had been thought to be an im passable cliff-like route behind the camp, routing the surprised Taira forces with heavy loss of life among the clan’s leaders.
In the fall,Yoritomo sent Noriyori’s army west from Kyoto down along the Inland Sea coast, and shortly after the beginning of 1185 it reached the province of Bungo in Kyushu behind the Taira islandbase of Hikoshima in the Shimonoseki Strait. Yoshitsune was or dered to resume his assault on the Taira, which he did in a daring seaattack on their stronghold at Yashima in the second month. Yoshitsune pursued his Taira quarry through the Inland Sea, at the west ern extremity of which, near the Hikoshima base, the remaining Taira, effectively bottled up by Noriyoshi’s army on the Kyushu shore, were finally annihilated in the spring of that year (1185) in a sea battle at Dannoura. Emperor Antoku was drowned at the end of the battle in the arms of his grandmother, it is said, a little more than one month past his sixth birthday.
Yoshitsune’s brilliant victories brought the war to a sudden con clusion. But these successes, as well as his fame and popularity at court, fanned Yoritomo’s suspicions concerning the loyalty of his halfbrother. They had been at odds since the previous year when Go Shirakawa, ever the troublemaker, conferred court title and rank on Yoshitsune in violation of Yoritomo’s specific instructions that court offices were not to be granted to his vassals, or accepted by them, without his authorization. The retired emperor had also granted Yoshitsune the rare privilege of entry to his private quarters.
Reportscontinued to reach Yoritomo accusing Yoshitsune of betraying pri vate ambitions. Yoritomo concluded that Yoshitsune andYukiie, whowere reported to be in collusion, should be destroyed. When Yori tomo’s attempt to assassinate Yoshitsune in Kyoto failed, Yoshitsune prevailed on Go-Shirakawa to issue an imperial command to attack Yoritomo. The retired emperor appointed Yoshitsune steward (Jito) of Kyushu andYukiie steward of Shikoku to empower them to raise troops. This plan was clearly hopeless.
Yoshitsune went into hiding and finally made his way with a few companions to the far northeast,where he found refuge with the Oshii Fujiwara whose leader, Hidehira, had been his protector during his youth. Unhappily for Yoshitsune, however, his patron died toward the end of the year of his ar rival in Hiraizumi (1187).
Hidehira’s successor, Yasuhira, quailing before Yoritomo’s threats, attacked and killed Yoshitsune in the fourth month of 1189 in a desperate attempt to save himself from thewrath of the Kamakura overlord. Yasuhira’s treachery failed to se cure his own safety, however; he fell before the large conquering army of an outraged and unappeased Yoritomo a few months later. Yoritomo did not rest until he had eliminated the last military power that could challenge his hegemony. The Oshu Fujiwara’s lands in Mutsu and Dewa, which Minamoto no Yoshiie had coveted in vain in the Later Three Years’ War more than a century earlier, at last came into the hands of his great-great-grandson.
Yoritomo was the final victor to emerge from the series of military contests that, for the first time since the seventh century, decided political supremacy. Beginning with the Hogen coup in the capital in1156, initiatives taken by warriors increasingly overwhelmed civil au thority, culminating in the great battles of the Gempei War.
Societywas fundamentally altered as the warrior gentry of the provinces cre ated a new political structure independent of the imperial court that supported a role for warriors in the administration of land. Thecourt became mostly subservient to the will of Yoritomo, and its eco nomic foundations were much eroded in favor of the warriors. The key relationship in society came to be that between military lord and his kinsmen and retainers.
The Lord of Kamakura (Kamakura-dono) chose to retain his ad ministrative headquarters (the bakufu) in Kamakura, maintaining an identity well separated from the machinations of imperial and noble cliques in Kyoto. Yoritomo seems to have had little need of court honors and titles, often resigning them soon after they wereconferred. Following the death in 1192 of Retired Emperor GoShirakawa, who opposed the appointment, the emperor gaveYori tomo the title seii taishogun, signifying chief of the warriors, but onlytwo years later Yoritomo expressed his wish to resign the title, a pro posal that was not accepted by the court. Yoritomo’s bakufu did not replace, for the most part, the ancient civil offices of the court. But he kept under his own control the political and judicial functions he considered essential for his purposes, building until his death in 1199the institutions and precedents that regulated the military and land administration functions of the warrior class.