The accession of Sanjo II in 1069, the Fujiwara autocracy received its first serious check. The Kwampaku, Yorimichi, had duly married his daughters to the Emperors Shujaku II (1037-1045) and Reizei II (1045-1068); and yet he lived to see a non-Fujiwara Prince upon the throne. To elucidate this matter, as well as other important events in the history of the subsequent century, the following chart will be found of service:

 

In 1045, the Kwampaku, Yorimichi, had been hastily sum­moned by the dying Emperor Shujaku II, and informed by the sovereign that while his immediate successor was to be his eldest son, it was his wish that his second son, then a boy of twelve, should ultimately succeed his elder half-brother. Yorimichi’s half-brother, the Dainagon Fujiwara Yoshinobu, hearing of this, insisted that a second Frown Prince should immediately be proclaimed, but Yorimichi argued that there was no pressing need for doing so. Yoshinobu carried his point, however; and on the death of their father, one of the sons became the Emperor Reizei II, while the other was installed in the Eastern Palace as Heir to the Crown. During the odd twenty years of the reign of Reizei II, his younger half-brother lived in constant dread of being deprived of the succession; but as the Emperor’s Fujiwara consort proved childless, the young Prince at last came by his own and ascended the throne as Go-Sanjo (Sanjo II) in 1068. He had meanwhile married the adopted daughter of Fujiwara Yoshinobu, to whom he really owed his position, and who had been appointed his majordomo while Crown-Prince; and this lady became the mother of the next Emperor, Shirakawa. Yoshinobu’s devotion to the Crown Prince may have been not altogether disinterested; yet the fact remains that it was really he who broke the power of the great house of Fujiwara to which he himself belonged, and once more placed a sovereign on the throne who aspired to rule the Empire.

The aged Kwampaku, who had misgoverned the State for half-a-century, now found it advisable to transfer his office to his younger brother, Norimichi, then seventy-five years of age, and retire to his palace at Uji. But even there he was subjected to worries and mortifications. His brother Norimichi very soon made the discovery that the great office he held was nothing better than a dignified sinecure, for all the real work of directing the administration was undertaken by the new sovereign in person. Sanjo II, who had studied hard under Oye Tadafusa and other distinguished and able teachers, had acquired a statesmanlike grasp upon the pressing problems of the age; and when he ascended the throne at thirty-five he was ready with very drastic solutions of his own for some of them at least. He promptly established a new Council of his own—the Kirokusho, or Record Office—in which he presided personally, toiling from morning to night in the endeavour to restore efficiency to the administrative and judicial machinery. One of the earliest enactments of this new board was a derive for the confiscation of all manors erected since 1045; a little later it issued orders that the title-deeds of the Sho-en created before that date were to be produced; if there were no title-deeds, or if those produced were not in order, the estate was to be forfeited by the holder. A special messenger with a copy of this enactment was sent to the ox-Kwampaku, Yorimichi, at Uji; but although Yorimichi said he had no documents to show, it was found impossible to deal with his vast domains. One of the chief evils lying at the root of the Sho-en menace was the extension of the Provincial Governors’ tenure of office to a second, or even to a third or fourth term. In some cases governorships had become life-offices; in one or two instances they threatened to become hereditary. This was the reward for looking after the interests of the Kyoto Fuji­wara in the provinces. Accordingly it was now enacted that no Governor should hold office for more than a single term. It so happened that just at this time the great Nara fane of Kofukuji had been building the Nan-en-do, and the Governor of Yamato had been superintending the work. The Kofukuji, it will be remembered, was the ancestral temple of the Fuji­wara; and the Kwampaku, Norimichi, now petitioned that the Governor of Yamato should be exempted from the scope of the now decree. The Emperor at first sharply refused; but as the Fujiwara nobles went so far as to threaten to withdraw from the Court in a body the sovereign had finally to yield. Yet although thwarted by the Fujiwara on these two specific occasions, Sanjo II’s administration of four years (1068-1072) inflicted a blow on the prestige of the great clan from which it never recovered. Fujiwara Sessho and Kwampaku were frequently, indeed almost regularly, appointed; but during the following century these great offices were little more than honorary distinctions. Yet, after Sanjo II, the real power was not with the sovereign actually on the throne; it was the Ho-o, the Priest, or ex-Emperor who really directed affairs.

From a Sovereign who began his reign with a display of statesmanship, ability, and firmness of purpose the like of which had not been seen in Japan since the days of Kwammu, much—indeed, everything—was to be expected. If Sanjo II had continued to sway the fortunes of the Empire for thirty or forty, instead of for three or four years, it is possible to conceive that Japan would never have been ruled by Shoguns. But the accumulated evils of generations had become too deeply seated to be eradicated in such a brief reign as his proved to be. Unfortunately for the best interests of his subjects, Sanjo II died at the early age of thirty-nine, in 1073. In the previous year, he had abdicated and placed his eldest son, a youth of nineteen, on the throne as Shirakawa Tenno, his intention being to govern through him. Shirakawa was titular Sovereign for no more than fourteen years (1072-1086); but he was the real ruler of the Empire down to his death forty-three years later on, in 1129. He was not the first Cloistered Emperor; but he was the first Cloistered Emperor who continued to direct the administration after receiving the tonsure. During the twenty years’ reign of Shirakawa’s son Horikawa (1087-1107), the sixteen years of his grandson Toha (1107-1123), and the first six years of his great-grandson, Sutoku (1124-1141), the titular Emperor wielded no authority. Then, on Shirakawa’s death, his grandson, Toha Tenno, who had abdicated and become a Cloistered Emperor six years before, stepped into his position and really governed down to his decease in 1156, his two sons who meanwhile occupied the throne in succession being no more than figure-heads. Shirakawa II, another son of Toha’s, succeeded to the throne in the year of his father’s death (his elder brother, the ex-Emperor Sutoku, being still alive); and after a few months on the throne he also became a Cloistered Emperor who aspired to rule the State. But the day of Cloistered Emperors was past. Although Shirakawa II continued to be a very prominent figure in Japanese history down to his decease in 1192, he was at no time the real ruler of the country, for from 1156 onwards Japan was governed not by the sceptre, but by the sword. In that year the great military family of the Taira became all-powerful; the years between 1181 and 1185 saw its overthrow and the swift rise of the rival house of Minamoto to supremacy. When a Japanese speaks of the rule of the Cloistered Emperors (Insci), he refers to Shirakawa I and his grandson Toba. These really governed Japan from 1073 to 1156—a period of 83 years, during the first fourteen of which Shirakawa I was not cloistered, but titular Sovereign.

One of the purposes supposed to be served by this new form of administration was the curbing of the power of the Fujiwara Regents and Kwampaku; and in this special direction the device was eminently successful. Regents and Kwampaku and occasionally Chancellors were appointed; but they were attached to the Court of the titular Sovereigns. But Shirakawa I, the Cloistered Emperor, maintained a Court of his own, with officials and guards and all the state that surrounded the actual occupant of the throne. Moreover,—and this was the most important point of all,—he established in his retreat an administrative and judicial council of his own, at the head of which stood a Betto; and it was by this machinery, and not by the old Council of State with its subordinate eight boards, that the Empire was now actually controlled. The Dajokwan (Council of State) still issued its decrees. Where they did not dash with those emanating from the Chancery of the ex-Emperor they were valid; but in case of any conflict it was the ordinances sealed by the Betto that carried supreme authority. Shirakawa thus contrived to seize and to retain the power that had been wielded by the Fujiwara for generations; and so far succeeded in correcting one very grave abuse of long­standing. But the special remedy he provided for this evil gave rise to others infinitely worse. In a variety of insidious ways, the central stream of authority had been, and was being, deflected into numerous minor side channels. What remained of the main current was now further parted in twain. With conflicting decrees and ordinances emanating from two rival chanceries, public respect for the throne and its laws could not but be seriously impaired. The rise of two new parties,— an Emperor’s and an ex-Emperor’s faction,—could only be a question of time.

Had Shirakawa been a statesman of the calibre of his father, Sanjo II, the results of the Insci system might have very well proved much less disastrous than they ultimately did. But whatever he may have been, a statesman Shirakawa was emphatically not. Sanjb II, while grappling vigorously with the evils of the manor system, and providing for a sufficient national revenue, had insisted upon the strictest economy in the management of the finances, and curtailed all the luxurious extravagance of his Court and the capital. His son, Shirakawa, imitated him only in the simplicity of his diet. But unfortunately this was not from economic or political considerations; it was an outcome of superstition. The Buddhist injunction against the taking of life was to be strictly enforced, and infractions of it rigorously punished. Eight thousand fishing nets were seized and burned; no gifts of fish were to be offered to the Court; hunting and hawking were rigidly proscribed, and the hawks set at liberty. Sanjo II used to dine on a herring sprinkled with a little pepper, while his clothes had been of the simplest. Shirakawa would have nothing to do with herrings, or indeed with fish or flesh of any kind; but his extravagance and profuseness in other directions knew no bounds. There was indeed a certain amount of restrictive sumptuary legislation under his rule, but the edicts were rarely it ever enforced.

But it was not on the maintenance of a splendid court that the rapidly minishing national revenue was most squandered and frittered away. Like his younger contemporary, David I of Scotland—

                             Who illumined in his days

                            His lands with churches and with abbeys”

—Shirakawa Tenno was “a sore saint to the crown”. Immense sums were expended on temple-building progresses to sacred places, masses and other religious ceremonies, while the harvest reaped by Buddhist artists and artificers at the expense of the nation must have been an exceedingly rich one. Besides 5.470 scrolls or hanging-pictures painted and presented to various fanes, Shirakawa was responsible for the erection of one huge idol 32 feet in height, of 127 half that size, of 3,150 life-size, and of 2.930 three-feet images. Then of seven-storied pagodas the tale was twenty-one, and of miniature pagodas as many as 44,030. To meet the costs of all this the revenue trickling into the national treasury was, of course, utterly inadequate.

Before this time the sale of offices had been not unknown; in fact it had occasionally assumed the proportions of a public scandal. But what had hitherto been an occasional practice now developed into a regular system. First,—for a material consideration, of course,—the Provincial Governors’ term of office was prolonged from four to six years; next these posts could be purchased for life, and, finally, as many as thirty of them were allowed to become hereditary. Then the manor evil, which Sanjo II had striven so hard to check, now became more pronounced than ever. In order to obtain ready money, or its equivalent, great stretches of valuable national estate were once more wantonly alienated. On Shirakawa’s death in 1129, as has been said, his grandson, the ex-Emperor Toba, stepped into his position, and Toba made it virtually impossible for any successor of his to create new Sho-en; for, before his demise, of the soil of the Empire not more than one per cent, remained under the jurisdiction of the Provincial Governors! Sovereign, ex-sovereigns, Empress, Imperial consorts, Crown Prince, Fujiwara and other courtiers alike drew the bulk, indeed, almost the whole of their revenues, from their manors. The theory of eminent domain, while still doubtless maintained as a theory by Court lawyers, had, as regards practice, been whistled down the wind. And there it was virtually to remain till the Revolution, or Restoration, of 1868. It was mainly the rise and spread of the manorial system that brought about the fall of the centralised government established by the Reformers of 645. It is to this that the decay and long eclipse of the august line of the Sun-Goddess, so much deplored by Japanese historians, is to be chiefly attributed. Such being the case, it is neither the Fujiwaras, nor the Tairas, nor the Minamotos, nor the Hojos, nor the Ashikaga, nor the Tokugawas that must be saddled with the wite. The Sho-en system began to be a danger under the three learned Emperors, Saga, Junna, and Nimmyo (811-850) ; it effectually and finally paralysed the old centralised administration under Shirakawa I and Toba I. None of these five sovereigns were fools; not one of them was a weakling, for without exception they all had wills of their own, and when determined to have their own way, they almost invariably succeeded in making opponents bend to their purposes. But when a Japanese sovereign aspires to rule as well as to reign, it is well for him to be equipped with all the wisdom and attributes of a statesman. Of the one hundred and seven scions of the Sun-Goddess who have occupied the throne of Japan since the days of Nintoku Tenno, four, and four only, have shown themselves to have been so provided. These are Tenchi, Kwammu, Sanjo II, and Mutsuhito, who is probably the greatest of the four. Daigo II (Go-Daigo) is usually spoken of as one of the “three great Emperors of Japan.’’ As will be attempted to be shown later on, Daigo II was a comparatively second-rate man; very much inferior to Daigo I, who longo intervallo comes after the four sovereigns just mentioned.

The strange feature in the case is that Japan became covered with this network of manors in the teeth of constantly renewed prohibitory edicts. Under the two Cloistered Emperors there was almost as much of this farcical legislation as before. For instance, in 1091, the farmers throughout the Empire were forbidden to “commend” themselves to Minamoto Yoshiiye. Again, for instance, in 1127 new Sho-en were prohibited. In the decree of that year we are told that “the Shoji (officers put in charge of Sho-en by the owners) are earnestly inviting holders of public land to become tenants of the Sho-en”; and that “those who have become tenants on the Sho-en never return to their former status : and the Sho-en are all filled with farmers, while the public land in the districts (Gun) and villages (Go) is left wild and uncultivated.” These are fair specimens of the many anti-Sho-en decrees emanating from the Imperial chancelleries of the time. But the fact is that a gross mass of contemporary legislation was little better than dead-letter. The case of a certain Naito, a retainer of Taira Tadamori, is instructive. Summoned before the Kebiishi board for an infringement of the anti-life-taking law, he at once pleaded guilty of the offence, saying he would cheerfully submit to the penalty. What that exactly was he did not know; at the worst it would be no more than banishment or imprisonment. It was his duty to supply his master’s table with fish and game; if he failed to do so the punishment would be death, for a violation of certain of the House laws of the Minamotos and the Tairas was attended with consequences much graver than any infringement of the Imperial ordinances was. When reported to the ex-Emperor Shirakawa, the incident was passed over with a laugh, no penalty being inflicted. In these House laws of the Tairas and Minamotos we have a glaring case of an imperium in imperio. A century later, we shall find the great bulk of the Samurai class openly and avowedly exempted from the operation of the common law, and subjected to the provisions of a special code of their own,—the famous Joei Shikimoku of the Hojos (1232). The nucleus of this may not have been the Minamoto and Taira House Statutes; but it is legitimate to surmise that these House laws furnished the Kamakura feudal legislators with valuable hints.

Although the great military families were now rapidly rising in power and influence, we have many indications that their manors were as yet much less extensive than those of the Fujiwaras and other Kyoto courtiers. Minamoto Yoshimitsu had a dispute with a Fujiwara noble about a Sho-en in Mutsu. The case was submitted to Shirakawa, who after a long delay told Fujiwara that his claims were indisputable. However, to incur the enmity of Yoshimitsu would be a very serious thing. Fujiwara had many manors, and the loss of one would be of little consequence to him, whereas to Yoshimitsu, who had scarcely enough to support his family and followers, even a single manor was an important consideration. Therefore it would be advisable for Fujiwara to yield. Now, this Yoshimitsu was the brother of the great Yoshiiye, the Uji no Choja or head of the clan and all its branches; the brother of the Minamoto, in short.

Where the military men often found their opportunity was when a dispute about their possessions arose between two unwarlike courtiers. In 1091, a Fujiwara and a Kiyowara could not agree about some estates in Kawachi; one appealed to Minamoto Yoshiiye, the other to his brother Yoshimitsu, and a small civil war seemed imminent. The Court then had to interfere, and forbid Yoshiiye’s troops to enter the capital, and the farmers throughout the Empire to “commend” themselves to that captain. In Toba’s time a number of decrees were issued warning military men against becoming vassals of the Minamoto or Taira chieftains. But withal, during the Insei period (1086-1156), the power and possessions of these two great houses increased enormously.

At the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century we have seen the Fujiwara Regents using the Minamotos, whom they called their “nails and teeth,” as a buttress for their power. The influence of their Fujiwara patrons was now at an end; but the Minamotos were far from finding their occupation in the capital gone. The Cloistered Emperor established a guard corps of his own ; and in this the Minamotos at first found plenty of employment. At the same time they and the Tairas now discharged the duties of the old Imperial Guards, among whom, as we have seen, all discipline had so hopelessly broken down. However, as time went on, it was upon the Tairas that Shirakawa and Toba came more especially to place their trust.

The early seat of the Taira power had been the country around and behind Tokyo Bay; and at this date the Heishi stock, when united (as it very often was not), was all-powerful in the Kwanto, and very powerful in Mutsu. However, it was neither from the Kwan to nor from Mutsu that the greatest of the Tairas came. Taira Korechika, one of the four great generals of the early eleventh century, had been punished for carrying on a civil war against his brother, the Governor of Khimotsuke, by banishment to Awaji. On his release he settled in Ise, and there founded a branch house of the Taira known as the Ise Heishi. It was with Taira Masamori’s reduction of the revolt of Minamoto Yoshichika in Idzumo that the rise of the Ise Taira began. This Yoshichika was the second son of the famous Yoshiiye, Hachiinan Taro. Yoshichika had been appointed Governor of Tsushima, but he found the limits of the island too narrow’ for his ambition. So passing over to Hizen, he intermarried with the great house of Takagi there, and proceeded to carve out a domain for himself, the title-deeds being his own good sword. Already jealous of Yoshiiye and of the warlike Minamotos, Shirakawa jumped at the opportunity Yoshichika afforded, and sent Taira troops to crush him. His father vainly implored Yoshichika to submit; instead of doing so he killed the Imperial messenger sent to summon him to Kyoto. However, he soon had to yield. Sentenced to banishment to the island of Oki, he gave his guards the slip in Idzumo, killed the acting Governor there, seized the Government store-houses, and practically raised the standard of rebellion. In 1107, Taira Masamori with his retainers was commissioned to put down the revolt, and he did so effectually. His eldest son, Tadamori, then a boy of eleven, turned out to be a sort of Japanese Diomede, and raised the lower stories of the huge fabric of Tse Heishi greatness on the foundations thus laid by Masamori. He governed Harima, Ise, and Bizen in succession; and in the capital he became Kebiishi and the fidus Achates of Shirakawa, keeping by his side night and day. In 1129 he gained much reputation by the prompt check he gave to piracy in the Inland Sea. On his return to Kyoto, he became henchman to the ex-Emperor Tuba. His success naturally excited the jealousy of his rivals, but all their efforts to shake his position proved abortive. On his death in 1153, his son Kiyomori, who had served as Governor of Aki seven years before, became head of the House; and under him the Taira clan became virtually supreme in Japan, and governed the Empire according to its fantasy for fully a score of years.

Down to 1156, however, Taira prestige was more than equalled by that of the Minamoto. In connection with the rise of these two great military houses one peculiar fact must be noted. As has been asserted, the Taira were most numerous in the Kwanto, where, as well as in Mutsu, the various septs of the clan held a great, if not the greater, part of the soil. Yet it was by service in Western Japan and in the capital that successive Taira chieftains made the fortunes of the family. On the other hand, while the manors of the Minamotos mainly lay within a radius of sixty miles from Kyoto, it was in the extreme north of Japan, where they had little or no territorial foothold at all, that they mainly acquired their fame, and found their most devoted followers.

It will be remembered that for his services in the reduction of Abe Sadato (1062), Kiyowara Takenori had been appointed Chinjufu Shogun, and invested with the administration of the six districts in Mutsu composing the huge territorial domains of the Abé family. Takenori was succeeded by his son Takesada, and he in turn by his son Sanehira. Meanwhile administrative duties bad become confused with proprietary rights, and Sanehira had develop into a semi­independent feudal potentate. His brother Iyehira and his uncle Takehira chafed at the vassalage he had imposed upon them in common with all the other landed proprietors in the six districts, and were on the outlook for an opportunity to assert themselves. About the year 1084, seemingly, this came. A relative of Sanehira’s wife, a certain Kimiono Hidetake, came from Dewa to call on Sanehira, bringing valuable presents with him. At the moment of Hidetake’s arrival, Sanehira was engaged in a game of checkers with a friend, and paid no attention whatsoever to the newly-arrived guest. In high dudgeon Hidetake threw away the presents and hurried home to Dewa. Sanehira, on learning this, became highly incensed, mustered men and advanced into Dewa to punish Hidetake. The latter sent messengers to Takehira and Iyehira exhorting them to rise in Sanehira’s rear on their own behalf. Iyehira indeed needed but little prompting to do so; and on a sudden the greater part of Mutsu was furiously ablaze with the flames of civil war.

Either in 1086 or a little before, Minamoto Yoshiiye (Hachiman Taro), had come down as Governor of Mutsu; and to him Sanehira promptly appealed for aid, which was at once rendered. But when Sanehira and the Governor of Mutsu were engaged in operations against Hidetake, Takehira rose in their rear and joined forces with Iyehira. At this point the original authorities become exceedingly obscure and confusing in the details they furnish. Sanehira disappears from the scene and we hear no more of him. Iyehira and Takehira ultimately entrenched themselves in the strong stockade of Kanazawa in Mutsu, and here they were assailed by Minamoto Yoshiiye, his brother Yoshimitsu—who in defiance of orders had thrown up his office in Kyoto and hastened to Yoshiiye’s assistance—by Hidetake, and by Fujiwara Kiyohira. In the advance upon the stockade Yoshiiye observed a flock of wild geese rising in disordered flight from a forest in the distance, and at once concluded that an ambush was being laid there. It was as he supposed, and his keen observation saved his force from what might have proved a serious disaster. Once in the capital he had called on a Fujiwara statesman and had given him an account of one of his previous campaigns. The great scholar Oye Tadafusa happened to overhear the conversation, and remarked that it was sad to think that a man so ignorant of the art of war as Yoshiiye showed himself to be should be entrusted with high military command. Yoshiiye’s retainers informed their master of this remark, and asked his permission to kill the impudent critic. But Yoshiiye, so far from listening to their request, asked Oye to let him become his pupil; and under him he read the seven Chinese military treatises. Of these the chief is by Sonshi, who lived about 550 BC and in his ninth chapter he lays it down that “the rising of birds shows an ambush.” All this is significant as indicating the rise of a military class that was beginning to take itself and the soldier’s profession seriously. It also indicates that certain of the savants in the capital were now beginning to regard military treatises, and the principles of the art of war, as not unworthy of their attention. A few generations before such studies would have been scouted as vulgar and trivial, and a mere waste of time and effort. Tt must also be noted that it was by Oye Tadafusa, and men like him, that the real work of administration and legislation in the capital was now conducted. They kept the accounts, and drew up all the decrees and edicts and other important Government documents on which the high-born Kugé Ministers placed their seal often without so much as a single glance at their text or purport. These men had perhaps as much influence as a British permanent Under-Secretary of State; and when we find them thus seriously directing their attention to mastering the principles of the soldier’s profession, hitherto so much despised, we can form some idea of the change that was coming over the spirit of the times.

In the long-protracted siege of Kanazawa, Yoshiiye found the best of opportunities to imbue his troops with a sense of discipline and with a proper respect for the most important, albeit the most primitive, of military virtues. Day after day fierce assaults were delivered, and continued to be delivered, to but little purpose. Yoshiiye in his camp set apart special seats for the brave and for the shirkers; and after each assault, the soldiers were assigned their places according to their deserts. Soon even among those who were cowards by nature, life came to be regarded as of smaller consequence than honour; while the brave were stimulated to achieve still higher feats. A youth of sixteen, a certain Kamakura Gongoro, a Taira by birth, and the ancestor of the Nagao of Echigo, received an arrow in the eye in the course of one of the assaults. He merely snapped off the shaft; and then returned his enemy’s fire, and brought down the man who had hit him. When he took off his helmet, he tumbled to earth with the barb still in his eye; and when a friend, in extracting it, put his foot on his face to give himself a purchase, the youthful warrior swore he would have his life for subjecting him to such an indignity; for to trample on the face of a Bushi was an outrage that could be expiated only by the blood of the offender. However, in spite of all the gallantry of his men, Yoshiiye was forced to convert the siege into a blockade.

At last provisions in the stockade gave out, and Takehira asked for terms. Yoshiiye would give none. A little later the northern winter became so terrible that Yoshiiye’s men begged him to withdraw. He told them to burn their shelters, and warm themselves well that night; tomorrow the stockade would surely be in their hands. That very night Takehira and Tyehira fired their huts, and made their escape. However, they were overtaken, captured, and brought before Yoshiiye. who, after bitterly upbraiding them, ordered their heads to be struck off. Eight and forty of their following shared their fate.

Yoshiiye had early requested the Court to forward a commission to him for the reduction of the two Kiyowaras. But the Kyoto authorities refused to do so; and when Yoshiiye’s brother, Yoshimitsu, then in high judicial office in the capital, asked to be allowed to carry reinforcements to the Governor of Mutsu his request was refused. So leaving his insignia of office in the seat of judgement, he started off for the North on his own private responsibility. As the Central Government persisted in its refusal to issue any commission to Minamoto Yoshiiye, and furthermore declined to reward him in any way for tranquillising the province of which he was Governor (Mutsu), he threw the heads of the “rebels’’ away on the roadside and returned to Kyoto. He took good care, however, to reward his troops from his own private resources; and as a consequence the Kwanto warriors declared that in the case of any quarrel between the Court and the Minamotos, they would stand by the Minamotos!

From whatever point of view it may be regarded, the ex­Emperor Shirakawa’s policy here must lie unreservedly and uncompromisingly condemned. If Yoshiiye was really suppressing rebellion, he and his troops ought to have been rewarded, in consonance with a host of precedents. If, as the Court contended, he was engaged merely in a quarrel of his own. then the Court by implication sanctioned the right of private war. For no punishment was inflicted on Yoshiiye for prosecuting what the Court chose to call a “private war”!

At this date such power as the Minamoto wielded in the Kwanto and Mutsu was almost entirely the result of a moral ascendancy. As yet they had little or no territorial foothold in these quarters. On the conclusion of the Three Years’ campaign in the Far North, Yoshiiye and his brother Yoshimitsu returned to the capital, where they continued to act as virtual military commandants. It was the disgrace of Yoshiiye’s third son, Yoshikuni, that led to the settlement of the Minamoto family in the Eastern provinces. In the course of his duties as commander of the Palace Guards, Yoshikuni on horseback met the cortege of the Minister of the Right, Fujiwara Saneyoshi, in a narrow thoroughfare; and the Minister’s followers pulled him (Yoshikuni) from his horse. Thereupon Yoshikuni’s retainers promptly fired Sanevoshi’s mansion and reduced it to ashes. For this outrage their master was banished to Shimotsuke, where he settled and became the ancestor of some half-dozen of the greatest feudal houses in Japan,— of the Ashikaga, Nitta, Tokugawa, Hosokawa, Yamana, and Satomi. As the great clans of the Minamoto and Taira diverged into septs, the chiefs of the various sub-clans came to be known by the name of the village or district where their domains lay.

The following abridged genealogical chart of the Minamoto family indicates the origin of nearly a score of the “great names ” so prominent in the annals of the thirteenth and subsequent centuries :—

 

Then in the Eastern provinces the Tairas were represented by the Hojo, Soma, Miura, Kajiwara, Oba, Hatakeyama; with Jo and Nagao in Echigo, and less influential septs in Mutsu and Dewa.

What prevented either the Taira or the Minamoto from making their influence fully felt was disunion and internal dissensions. No one chief was sufficiently powerful to command the unquestioning obedience of the whole body of his clansmen. Thus it came to pass that it was by neither of these houses that the first great military fief was consolidated. This was the work of the great Fujiwara of Mutsu.

We have already seen that Fujiwara Tsunekiyo was involved in the ruin of Abé Sadato in 1062, and that his son, Fujiwara Kiyohira, was adopted into the Kiyowara family that succeeded to the Abé estates at that time. This Fujiwara had aided the Minamotos to reduce the Kiyowara (1086-1089). He was now made Inspector (Oryoshi) of Mutsu and Dewa, and, later on, Chinjufu-Shogun, while he at the same time succeeded to the lordship of what had been the domain of his maternal grandfather, Abé Yoritoki. Before his death, in 1126, Kiyohira had built up a semi-independent power, far greater and far more extensive than was to be found anywhere else in contemporary Japan. Thus it was in Ainu-land that the feudal system made its earliest appearance on any considerable scale. It will be remembered that from the ninth century it had been the policy of the Government to settle the Ainu in villages on the footing of ordinary Japanese subjects; that these villages were placed under head-men; and that a Superintendent-in-chief was appointed to exercise general control over the affairs of these communities. It was the holders of this office,—the Abés,—who laid the foundations of the great fief of Mutsu. The great bulk of the retainers must have been of Ainu, or mixed Japanese and Ainu stock. At the present day, marriages between Japanese and Ainu are generally sterile,—a thing not to be wondered at perhaps when we think of the vast difference in physical constitution occasioned by thirty or forty consecutive generations of savage life. But with the settled Ainu of the tenth and succeeding centuries the case might very well have been otherwise; among them the conditions of life were not so very dissimilar to those of their Japanese neighbours.

Thus, at the beginning of the twelfth century, there were three great military houses in Japan. The Taira and the Minamoto were weakened by chronic internal dissension; but on the other hand, the presence of their chieftains in the capital or its vicinity enabled them to play an all-important part in the astounding political developments of the century. The Fujiwara chief maintained strict control over his kinsmen and vassals; but the remoteness of his situation prevented him from exercising any great influence upon the course of national affairs at large. In addition to these three great clans, there was yet one more military power that had to be very seriously reckoned with,—that of the Great Monasteries.

About 970, as has been said, his Eminence, the Abbot of Hi-ei-zan, or Enryaku-ji, had formed a corps of mercenaries to protect the monastery and its possessions, and to prosecute its quarrels with its rivals and foes. The example had been promptly followed by several of the great religious foundations, among which the Monastery of Onjoji or Miidera, at the base of Hi-ei-zan, near Otsu, and the Kofukuji of Nara came to be the most notorious. By the end of the eleventh century any one of these great fanes could readily place several thousand men in the field at very short notice. Each of them had become a huge Cave of Adullam,—a refuge for every sturdy knave with a soul above earning a livelihood by the commonplace drudgery of honest work. Each of them had in truth assumed the aspect of a great fortress garrisoned by a turbulent rabble of armed ruffians. And each of them had degenerated into a hotbed of vice, where the most important precepts of the moral code were openly and wantonly flouted. In truth, at this date, 1100 A.D., Buddhism in Japan from a moral point of view was in not a whit better case than was the Church of Rome between the death of Sylvester II (1003) and the election of Leo IX (1049). And yet, in spite of the foulness of their lives, the prestige of the priests had never stood higher, while the resources of the monasteries had never been greater; and year by year they were adding to their wealth.

The years 1081 and 1082 were convulsed with armed strife between the Kofukuji and the monastery of Tamu-no-Mine on the one hand, and Hi ei-zan and Miidera on the other. In the latter contest, Miidera was burnt to the ground, and the most valuable of its treasures carried off by the assailants. Then the latter year saw the beginning of a new terror. A priest of Kumano had been killed by an Owari official. Thereupon three hundred of the dead man’s companions shouldered the Jinyo,—the sacred sedan in which the god is carried in procession on fête days,—marched to the capital, and there clamorously appealed for justice, or revenge. This practice was at once copied by the priests of Hivoshi, Gion, and Kitano, and a little later on (1093) by the Kofukuji. It would have been a bold man indeed who would have dared to offer violence to the sacred car that bore the shintai or god-body, for to do so was an outrage no less heinous than presuming to lay sacrilegious hands upon the Ark of the Covenant Henceforth it became common for the priests of all these temples to enter the capital sometimes thousands strong, and, with their sacred cars at their head, blockade the mansions of statesmen who had offended them, only withdrawing when their claims were satisfied. Now and then the Emperor and the ex-Emperor were the recipients of their attentions, and subjected to a blockade by these Japanese Dervishes. The nuisance presently was felt to be insufferable; and the protection of the Taira and the Minamoto was invoked. In 1095 a Minamoto killed eight of the leaders of one of these demonstrations and wounded as many. In 1113 Hi-ei-zan and the Kofukuji were on the point of fighting out their quarrel in the streets of the capital. Minamoto Mitsukuni was sent to hold the Hi-ei-zan troops in check, while Minamoto Tameyoshi advanced to Uji and came into conflict with the Kofukuji army, some 20,000 or 30,000 strong. The result was that the priests had to throw down the car with the Shimboku (sacred tree) in the middle of the road and beat a precipitate retreat. These are only a few instances of sacerdotal riot and disorder culled from many. Time and again the capital was thrown into a ferment of panic by the truculence of the monks and their armed bands. The ex-Emperor Shirakawa once remarked that although he was the ruler of Japan there were three things in the Empire beyond his control,—the freaks of the River Kamo (which often inundated and devastated the capital), the fall of the dice, and the turbulence of the priests!