The political history of the two decades following the Heiji Distur bance until the beginning of the war between the Minamoto and Taira (the Gempei War, 1180-85) is discussed more fully in Chapter 9. We are concerned here specifically with the rise to power at court of Taira no Kiyomori and his kinsmen.
In the Hogen and Heiji conflicts, the Taira mobilized retainers in particular from Bizen and Bitchii provinces (most of what it now Okayama Prefecture) on the Inland Sea and from Iga and Ise(northern Mie Prefecture) southeast of the capital. Those were re gions where Taira leaders since the time of Kiyomori’s grandfatherMasamori had been custodial governors (zuryd). Following the dec imation of the Minamoto leaders in the Heiji fighting, Kiyomori, as the triumphant hegemon of warriors, had no difficulty in recruiting numbers of the Minamoto’s roto as well as others to his organization. In the following years the Taira developed their network of allies, not only in western Japan and in the capital area, where they had longbeen prominent, but also in the east. The commission given by Go Shirakawa to Kiyomori’s son, Shigemori, to be prepared to provide military security and police functions wherever needed throughoutthe country, gave him the opportunity to extend Taira military influ ence. The economic position of the Taira was also strengthened bytheir seizing control of some shoen of Minamoto and courtier fami lies. The appointment of Taira relatives to more and more provincial governorships also strengthened the financial position of the Taira.
More impressive than Kiyomori’s military and economic gains were his rapid promotions in the court hierarchy. In 1160 he received the Third Rank, the first of a warrior family to join the senior nobles (kugyd). In 1167 he rose to the post of Chancellor (daijo daijiri), and the First Rank, the pinnacle of the bureaucratic structure. He arranged the promotion of several Taira kinsmen to the ranks of the senior nobility and membership in the Council of State. He left the chancellorship after a few months, speaking of poor health, and took holy orders; but he had made his point, and continued to assert his influence on court appointments and policy decisions. An adroit politician, Kiyomori took full advantage, after the Heiji affair, of the rivalry for power between the senior retired emperor and his son, Emperor Nijo, both of whom courted him with rewards as they vied for his military support.
He also played the game of marriage poli tics in the Fujiwara style to advance his personal relationships in the highest court circles. His eight-year-old daughter was married to the future regent Motozane in 1164. His connection with Go-Shirakawabecame familial when his Taira sister-in-law, Shigeko (Kenshum mon-in), bore the retired emperor a son, later enthroned as Emperor Takakura (1161-81, r. 1168-80). Subsequently Kiyomori’s daughterTokushi became Takakura’s consort, and their son, the infant An toku, was placed on the throne by his grandfather, Kiyomori, in 1180, at the height of his control of the court.
Contemporary sources do not, for the most part, comment criti cally on the rapid advancement of Kiyomori, as a person of warrior lineage, to such high position at court. The explanation of his initial acceptance may lie in prevalence of the rumor, which appears inseveral sources, that his natural father was actually Emperor Shirakawa. The source considered the most reliable says that the em peror, upon the death of Kiyomori’s mother, gave the two-year-oldchild for adoption to Taira no Tadamori, who thus became his ge nealogical father.
The Tale of Heike {Heike monogatari) gives a dramatic account of the «flowering fortunes» of Kiyomori at the height of his success:»Not only did Kiyomori himself attain the pinnacle of worldly success, but his entire family shared his prosperity.» The account enumerates the high offices held by three of his sons and the good mar riages of seven daughters. «Sixteen Taira ranked as senior nobles,more than thirty were courtiers, and more than sixty held appoint ments as provincial governors, guards officers, or members of the central bureaucracy. It was as though there were no other people in the world.»
Although the key to Kiyomori’s ascendancy was ultimately his mil itary strength, he climbed the ranks of court position and advancedhis kinsmen by employing the familiar techniques of the civil cour tiers rather than by intimidation, at least until 1177. In time, however, Kiyomori’s growing power at court caused increasing resentment among courtiers, and Go-Shirakawa in particular sought to check his strength, leading to an organized attempt in 1177 (the so-calledShishigatani plot) by officers of the retired emperor’s household, act ing in league with some military figures, to move against the Taira leader. The plot was discovered and crushed before it could be put into action, however, leaving Kiyomori more powerful than ever but with a heightened enmity toward Go-Shirakawa and his court.
One issue of contention was over control of the landholdings of the regental house. When Regent Motozane, who was married to Kiyomori’s daughter, Moriko, died in 1166, Kiyomori arranged for her to inherit most of the estate, passing over Motozane’s eldest son, Motomichi, the explanation given being that Motomichi was too young to assume such a responsibility. He was only six years old, it is true, but Moriko herself was just ten. When Moriko died in 1179,the Fujiwara leaders demanded that the holdings revert to Mo tomichi. At that point Go-Shirakawa intervened in the dispute andconfiscated the property. He also confiscated the holdings of Shige mori, Kiyomori’s heir, when he died the next month.
Kiyomori countered this threat to his power with a military coup in the eleventh month of 1179. He led several thousand warriors fromFukuhara and paraded them in the capital. He demanded the dis missal of thirty-nine officials, retainers (kinshiri) of Go-Shirakawa, and replaced them with Taira adherents. The retired emperor was placed under house arrest and moved to the Toba-dono. Kiyomori was declared a traitor by his distraught imperial enemy, but all power was now in his hands. Three months later, Go-Shirakawa’s son, Takakura, was forced to abdicate and was replaced as emperor by Kiyomori’s infant grandson. Kiyomori’s climb to full control of thecourt had taken two decades, but his victory was short: he died of ill ness early in 1181.
Takakura, upon his abdication, instead of paying his respects atthe nearby shrines of Iwashimizu Hachimangu and Hie (or Hiyo shi), as was the recent custom, went on pilgrimage to a distant shrine under Taira patronage on the small island of Itsukushima off the Inland Sea coast near what is now the city of Hiroshima. The Iwashimizu Hachimangu and Hie shrines were linked by religiousand other ties to the powerful Onjdji Temple at Otsu, and the tem ple’s angry reaction to the Taira-inspired imperial slight contributedto the formation of a potentially powerful coalition of anti-Taira interests among the armed monks of that temple, their sometime ene mies at the Enryakushi on Mount Hiei, and the monks of Kofukuji, the Fujiwara clan temple at Nara.
Open, military opposition to Taira rule began, however, not in thetemples but within the imperial court itself. Among the few Minamoto chieftains to survive the Heiji Disturbance was a remote rel ative of the clan leader Yoshitomo named Yorimasa (1104-80), an aged warrior-courtier connected also with the Fujiwara through hismother. In the court’s neglect of deserving Minamoto warriors fol lowing the Heiji fighting,Yorimasa’s career had not prospered, but in his old age he had been permitted a considerable degree of court success, rising to the ranks of the senior nobility (the first Minamoto warrior to do so). What Yorimasa’s specific motives may have been is not known, but whether they were resentment of pastTaira injustice and highhandedness or simply opportunistic personal ambition, inthe fourth month of 1180 he persuaded Go-Shirakawa’s son Mochihito (1151-80) to issue a call to warriors everywhere for the chas tisement of the Taira.
Mochihito’s call to arms was a bold and dangerous step, one that soon cost him his life. But in agreeing to take it the prince may have believed he had more than sufficient grievance against the Taira to justify the risk, as well as an adequate prospect for success among the disgruntled, ambitious warriors in the provinces. He may haveshared his father Go-Shirakawa’s hostility toward Kiyomori, encour aged by his Fujiwara connections, but he also had his own personal complaints against the Taira dispensation. At the time of Kiyomori’s coup d’etat in 1179, Mochihito suffered the confiscation of a rich landholding.
The following year, 1180, his hope of succeeding his cousin Takakura on the imperial throne was dashed when Kiyomori obtained the succession for his grandson. Deprived of his property and disappointed in his fondest hope by the all-powerful Taira leader, Mochihito must have been a willing auditor for any proposal aimed at the destruction of the Taira.
The plot against the Taira became known, however, before the conspirators had their supporters in place, and under threat of arrest and exile, the prince fled the capital to the protection of the Onjoji Temple. The temple responded to his plea for help and attempted to rally also to his cause the armies of the Enryakuji and the Kofukuji, but when that attempt failed to bring to the prince the hoped-for support, he set out accompanied by Yorimasa and a body of warriors to obtain the backing of the monks at Nara. Overtaken by a large Taira force at Uji, he was slain in the ensuing battle and rout, and his wounded commander Yorimasa was seized and allowed at the ageof seventy-six to commit suicide. The first stage of the Taira Minamoto conflict thus came to an abrupt conclusion the month after the prince’s fateful order, but that call to arms had galvanized Minamoto warriors in many regions, preparing the way for the great battles that achieved the prince’s aim of removing the Taira from the court.
During the tense and uneasy days just after the deaths of Mochi hito andYorimasa, Kiyomori abrogated the administrative authority of Go-Shirakawa’s household office (in-no-cho) and announced the transfer of the emperor and two ex-emperors to what he intended to be a new imperial capital at Fukuhara near the Inland Sea coast. Taira men had been the «beneficial holders» (chigyo) of the district in which Fukuhara was located since 1162, and after Kiyomori took holy orders in 1168 he had made his residence there, continuing to direct affairs, and receiving visits at his hillside retreat from at leastone Chinese trader and also, before their falling-out, from the exemperor Go-Shirakawa. It was from Fukuhara that Kiyomori had de scended on the capital in 1179 to carry out the palace coup that year.
Now, in 1180, after Mochihito’s reliance on temple armies in the vicinity of the capital during his attempt to overthrow the Taira, and after a long earlier history of disruption in the city caused by those monks, Kiyomori may have been seeking to escape the threat of the temple forces by the move to Fukuhara some fifty miles distant. Kiyomori seems to have had a particular interest and involvement in seagoing trade, and in that connection he turned his resources to the improvement and development of an old port near Fukuharacalled wada-no-tomari. Little is known about the nature or the vol ume of the traffic passing through the port, but it lay only about a day’s voyage from the entrance to theYodo River, the shipping route into Heian, and it would have been a convenient port of call for both domestic and foreign bottoms navigating the Inland Sea.
Throughits waters, one may assume, passed trading ships bearing the Chi nese books, the Zen Buddhist texts, and the copper coins that were helping to transform the contemporary intellectual and economic life of Japan.
The emperor and the ex-emperors were temporarily housed in residences of Kiyomori’s sons at Fukuhara, and planning for the new capital proceeded apace. After only a few months, however, toward the end of the year of die court’s arrival at Fukuhara and at a time when construction of an imperial residential palace had just been completed, the entire project was abandoned, the imperial party and the courtiers and officials all hastening back to Heian. The reasonsfor the abandonment of Fukuhara after such a short time remain obscure, but the cramped space of the site, its windswept, dismal loca tion, the ill health of Takakura, and the outbreak at just this time of Minamoto uprisings in the east were possibly key considerations.
The removal of the court and its government to Fukuhara leftHeian tattered, dazed, and desperate. The Enryakuji, Heian’s guard ian temple, was moved to declare itself an enemy of the Taira tyranny,and the many followers of the court, unable to obtain living accom modations at Fukuhara, also had cause to resent the Taira leadership.
The city had suffered a devastating fire just three years earlier, and it had become more desolate than ever when people dismantled build ings in order to ship the materials to Fukuhara.