HISTORY OF JAPAN LIBRARY

JAMES MURDOCH' HISTORY OF JAPAN FROM THE ORIGINS

TO THE ARRIVAL OF THE PORTUGUESE IN 1542 AD

CHAPTER XI.

THE GREATNESS OF THE TAIRA.

FOR the maintenance of order in the capital and in the Empire at large, the Court had come to be entirely dependent upon the strong arms and trenchant blades of the Minamoto and Taira warriors. In this situation lurked, not one, but many elements of danger. Not the least of these was the possible appearance of chieftains strong enough to weld the various discordant septs of their houses into a single unit promptly obedient and readily responsive to the behests of the autocratic will of the head of the clan. It might safely be predicted that in the event of any such contingency, civil war would be the infallible result. It would then become a question as to which chief and which house—Taira or Minamoto—was to play the part of Protagonist on the political stage; and such a question could be settled by nothing but the sharp arbitrament of sword. And with the Imperial power and the civil administration fallen into such decrepitude, the result of any such contest would be to make the victor the real master of the Empire.

Whether the mind of Taira Kiyomori really grasped that fact it is impossible to say. The probabilities are that it did not,—for Kiyomori, like Nobunaga, his descendant in the twentieth generation, was more remarkable for strength of will than for intellectual subtlety or originality. The minds of Kiyomori and Nobunaga on the one hand, and of Yoritomo and of Hideyoshi on the other, were cast in vastly different moulds—Kiyomori and Nobunaga were Japanese of the breed of Attila; Yoritomo and Hideyoshi—the latter especially— have claims, both as statesmen and warriors, to be placed in a much higher class. Both of these were richly endowed with that constructive imagination the lack of which renders the achievement of any great and lasting work in the domain of statesmanship well-nigh impossible. Whatever may have been the mental endowments of Taira Kiyomori, this supreme gift of the constructive imagination never became conspicuous among them.

When Kiyomori (1118-1181) succeeded his father, Tadamori, as Chieftain of the Ise Heishi in 1153 he was in the very prime of a vigorous manhood. Long before this, those elements of dissension and unrest that were to precipitate the great explosion of 1156 had been accumulating and multiply­ing apace. There were dissensions in the Imperial family, and there was yet another set of dissensions in the great Fujiwara household.

In 1123, Toba Tenno had abdicated in favour of his son, Sutoku Tenno, then an infant of five. There were thus two ex-Emperors,—a great-grandfather (Shirakawa) and the father (Toba) of the titular sovereign. In 1129, the great-grandfather died, and the father (Toba) at once stepped into his position and assumed the supreme direction of the affairs of the Empire. This, as has been already said, he continued to wield down to his death in 1156,—his most trusted hench­men being Taira Tadamori, and after the death of the latter, in 1153, his son, Taira Kiyomori.

About the date of the death of his grandfather, in 1129, the ex-Emperor Toba made four or five additions to the number of his secondary consorts. On one of these, the Lady Bifuku Mon-in, he lavished the greater part of his affections. The first issue he had by her were daughters; but, in 1139, she at last presented him with a son. Six months later, this baby was proclaimed Heir Apparent to the throne; and in 1141 the intrigues of the ex-Emperor Toba and his consort, the Lady Bifuku Mon-in, drove Sutoku Tenno, then 22 years of age, to abdicate in favour of this infant, who actually reigned for some fourteen years—down to 1155—as Konoye Tenno. From 1141 down to 1156 there were again two ex-Emperors,—a father and a son. Between these, relations were a good deal more than merely strained,—for Sutoku lived in constant dread of his life on account of the machinations of the titular sovereign’s mother, the Lady Bifuku Mon-in. Thus at last appeared what was above all to be dreaded by the Insci system. It was not indeed an Emperor’s and an ex-Emperor’s party; but it really amounted to that in substance, for the titular sovereign, Konoye, who died at seventeen, after a nominal reign of fourteen years, was never of the slightest consequence—except as a convenient puppet or figure-head. Meanwhile the young ex-Emperor Sutoku had begat progeny of his own; and he was not minded to have his beloved son, the Prince Shigehito, debarred from his rightful position of sovereign of Japan.

Here, indeed, were all the elements of yet another deadly succession quarrel. But the situation was still further complicated by discord in the house of Fujiwara, with which the Imperial family was still very intimately connected. Although, during the Insci rule, the Fujiwara Regents and Kwampaku and Chancellors wielded no real authority, these positions were still eagerly coveted, for, though they were little better than empty titles as far as the work of administration was concerned, they yet continued to confer the highest social prestige upon their occupants. At the accession of Toba Tenno in 1108, Fujiwara Tadazane (1078-1162), who had been Kwampaku since 1105, was made Regent; and when Toba attained his majority in 1113 Tadazane was again made Kwampaku, while he was also invested with the Chancellorship of the Empire. Eight years later on, he had the ill fortune to come into collision with the old ex-Emperor Shirakawa. The result was that he had to abandon official life and retire to his mansion at Uji, his eldest son, Tadamichi (1097-1164), then 24 years of age, replacing him as Kwampaku. Two years later, in 1123, on the accession of the infant sovereign Sutoku, Tadamichi became Regent; and in 1130, he became the youthful Emperor’s father-in-law. Meanwhile his protector, the old ex-Emperor Shirakawa, had died in 1129; and the ex-Emperor Toba then became the real ruler of Japan. Toba very soon had reason to be dissatisfied with Tadamichi; and so Tadamichi was relieved of office, and replaced by his father, who continued to act as Kwampaku down to 1140. One consequence of all this was that the relations between Tadazane and his son Tadamichi became the reverse of friendly. Meanwhile, in 1120, another son had been born to Tadazane; and on this child,—Yorinaga,—Tadazane lavished all his affection. As he grew to manhood Yorinaga was rapidly promoted from one great office to another; and, in 1150, at the age of thirty, he became Minister of the Left. In this year his adopted daughter, Masuko, became the consort of the boy Emperor Konoye, then eleven years of age. A little later on, Konoye Tenno married an adopted daughter of Yorinaga’s elder brother, Tadamichi. The brothers had been on bad terms before; but this struggle for ascendancy in the Imperial harem,—or, to speak more correctly, in the Imperial nursery,—seriously embittered the quarrel. The father, Tadazane, threw all his influence against his own first-born, and actually went so far as to deprive him of the family heirlooms that were always entrusted to the prospective head of the great Fujiwara Clan.

Suddenly, in 1155, Konoye died at the age of sixteen. It will be remembered that Konoye was the son of the ex-Emperor Toba, by his favourite, the Lady Bifuku Mon-in. Her lady­ship openly declared that her son, Konoye Tenno, had been poisoned at the instigation of his half-brother, the ex-Emperor Sutoku. During the last thirteen years, Sutoku’s position had been a very unpleasant one; he now went about in abject fear of his life.

The Lady Bifuku Mon-in had extorted a promise from the ex-Emperor Toba that one of their daughters should ascend the throne on the death of their brother, Konoye Tenno; but the record of the Empresses of the Nara period bad not been forgotten, and the national sentiment was found to be entirely averse to any more experiments in the matter of female Sovereigns, reigning in their own right. The succession question now narrowed itself down to a contest between three male candidates; or rather to two, for the ex-Emperor Sutoku was indifferent as to whether he or his son, the Prince Shigehito, should occupy the Imperial seat. Baulked in his project of making the Lady Bifuku Mon-in’s daughter Empress in her own right, the old ex-Emperor, Toba, now wished to have his fourth son, Masahito, proclaimed Sovereign. In this aim he was supported by the Kwampaku Tadamichi. This fact alone sufficed to induce Tadamichi’s brother, Yorinaga, and their aged father, Tadazane, to support the rival cause with all the influence, and all the resources, at their command. Their efforts proved abortive, however; and Masahito duly ascended the throne as Go-Shirakawa,—or Shirakawa II. At the same time his son Morihito, then twelve years of age, was proclaimed Prince Imperial.

This turn of affairs proved to be a serious blow to the prospects and projects of Yorinaga. He had asked to be entrusted with the education of the Crown Prince; but not only was his request rejected, but he was further deprived of his post of Noiron in the following year, 1156. In consequence of this, he attached himself still more closely to the interests of the ex-Emperor Sutoku, and sedulously endeavoured to fan his ex-Majesty’s discontent into a flame.

Just at this juncture, the old ex-Emperor, Toba, died (July 20,1156); and when Sutoku went to attend the solemn funeral service that same night he was met at the entrance and informed that according to the dying instructions of his father, no place could be found for him there. Mortally offended by this deadly public insult, Sutoku hurried back to his palace, sent for Yorinaga, and at the instigation of the latter, forthwith determined to repossess himself of the throne by the strong hand. Urgent orders were at once transmitted to the landed gentry in the neighbouring provinces and to the monasteries of Nara to move troops up to the capital with all possible expedition.

Intelligence of this was not long in reaching the ears of Shirakawa II and his advisers. During the last illness of Toba there had been rumours afloat to the effect that an attempt at a coup d’État might be expected upon his demise; and he had taken the precaution of sending for ten of the leading captains then in the capital, and making them subscribe to a bond pledging their loyal support to the Lady Bifuku Mon-in. The most prominent among these captains was the Governor of Shimotsuke, Yoshitomo, the eldest son and heir of Tameyoshi, the actual head of the house of Minamoto. Yoshitomo was now summoned in all haste; and he at once placed himself and a body of 400 picked men at the disposal of the Court. At the same time, troops under Minamoto, Taira, and Fujiwara captains were dispatched to seize strategic positions on all the avenues of approach to the capital, and there block the expected advance of the Nara Temple forces and the local samurai summoned to the support of Sutoku. On July 29, Taira Kiyomori (Governor of Aki) and his followers joined the Minamoto force under Yoshitomo.

Meanwhile two days before (July 27), Sutoku and Yorinaga bad betaken themselves to the old palace of Shirakawa II,—the vast enceinte of which they hastily strengthened as best they could. It was garrisoned by no more than a few hundred men,—less than 150 Minamotos, and about an equal number of Tairas, perhaps. The Tairas were under the command of Tadamasa, the uncle of Kiyomori, who led the Taira in the opposing camp. As for the Minamoto, they consisted of the younger brothers of Yoshimoto and their adherents, the whole body being under the direction of Tameyoshi (Yoshimoto’s father), the head of the clan.

This Tameyoshi bad some reason to repine about the lot that had befallen him. Grandson of Hachiman Taro, and son of that stormy-petrel Yoshichika, who had perished as a rebel in 1117, lie had been constrained to take the field against his grand-uncle Yoshitsuna at the age of thirteen (1109). His victory in this family feud made him Chieftain of the great Minamoto clan. In 1123 he was made Kebiishi for the express purpose of dealing drastically with the turbulent monks of Hi-ei-zan. His reward for this was the lower division of the fifth rank,—a very modest recompense indeed. And this was the end of his official career. He had aspired to the Governorship of Mutsu; but this office was bestowed on that local Fujiwara magnate who was then engaged on consolidating the greatest fief in contemporary Japan. Since then, for a whole generation, Tameyoshi bad been left in neglect by the Court; and now, in 1150, his brilliant son and heir, Yoshitomo, had outstripped him in the official hierarchy. Yet there is nothing going to show that the very able, though neglected, Minamoto chieftain and his eldest son and heir were on bad terms with each other. Besides Yoshitomo, Tameyoshi had eight or nine younger sons,—nearly all masterful, reckless, turbulent dare­devils. In the year before this (1155) one of these, Yoshikata, had been slain in battle by his nephew Yoshikura (a son of Yoshitomo), a boy of fifteen! The precocity of these Minamotos in the art of war, and in a minor degree in statecraft, is perhaps best illustrated by the instance of Tameyoshi’s eighth son, Tametomo. While still a mere boy his immense physical strength and his rough unruly ways made him a terror to the household, and so his father was constrained to get rid of him, and sent him away to Kyushu. This was in 1152, when Tametomo was no more than thirteen years of age. Arrived in Bungo he promptly set to work to attract followers, arrogated to himself the title of Sotsuibushi or General Superintendent of Police, and opened hostilities against some of the most prominent local magnates,—the Haradas of Hizen and the Kikuchis of Higo among others. His chief ally and supporter was Ata, the Acting-Governor of Satsuma, whose daughter he married. Most of the former supporters of his grandfather, the turbulent rebel Yoshichika, also rallied around him. For a few years the greater part of the Nine Provinces was kept in an unceasing turmoil. At last the Court interfered, and sternly called upon Tameyoshi to recall this enfant terrible of his. Tametomo, however, paid no heed to his father’s instructions, and as a consequence Tameyoshi was stripped of such modest rank and office as he held. Thereupon Tametomo. taking with him eight and twenty picked men, hurried up to Kyoto, and arrived there just in time to be able to join his father and his brothers in defence of the old palace of Shirakawa I. At that date he was only seventeen years of age; but even then he had attained a stature of seven feet, while his muscular development was prodigious. It took three or four ordinary men to bend the bow he used—a huge weapon 8ft. Gin. in length. His left arm was four inches longer than his right, and this enabled him to draw a bow-string eighteen hand­lengths (about 5ft.) and to release his bolts with terrific force.

In the council of war held on the 29th, Tametomo had ad­ocated a night attack on the headquarters of the Emperor’s adherents. But Fujiwara Yorinaga negatived the proposal. Meanwhile Yoshitomo and Kiyomori, on their side, had determined on a night-attack; and presently Sutoku’s supporters found themselves invested by a force of 1,700 men. Tametomo with his eight and twenty men were holding the Western Gate, and it was against this portal that Yoshitomo advanced. He was warned off by Tametomo, who shot off one of the silver studs ornamenting his helmet, the bolt burying itself in the gate-post. Presently Taira Kiyomori launched his troops at the position held by Tametomo, with the brothers Kagetsuna at their head. Tametomo shot one of them through the body, the shaft being sped with such force that it went on and mortally wounded the other. The garrison, though outnumbered by five or six to one, made a most obstinate and gallant defence; and it was not until Yoshitomo succeeded in firing the wood-work that the assailants could make any headway. There had been no rain for some time previously and the attack had been delivered in a terrific dust-storm raised by a strong west wind. The buildings caught like tinder, and the flames spread rapidly, lighting up the city for miles around with their lurid glare, while at the same time the palace of Sutoku, the great mansion of Yorinaga, and twelve other houses of the conspirators were blazing furiously. Presently the only resource left to the defenders was flight.

Yorinaga had fallen, struck by a stray arrow; but most of the other leaders escaped and went into hiding. It was announced that they were to be banished ; and then many of them shaved their heads and came out and gave themselves up. Among these was Tadamasa, Kiyomori’s uncle. The Emperor thereupon ordered Kiyomori to kill Tadamasa, and Kiyomori made no difficulty about carrying out his instruc­tions. Yoshitomo was at the same time commanded to kill his father. But this Yoshitomo refused to do; and then the Emperor threatened to entrust the commission to Taira Kiyomori. Thereupon one of Yoshitomo’s retainers pointed out that it would be a great disgrace to the clan if its head was executed by a Taira; and so at last, Yoshitomo allowed this retainer to carry out the Imperial commands. Altogether, about seventy of Sutoku’s supporters were sent to kneel at the blood pit. Since the revolt of Fujiwara Nakanari in 810,—that is for a period of 346 years—the death penalty had ceased to be inflicted on Ministers and officers of the Court. What especially intensified the general revulsion occasioned by these wholesale executions was the fact that they took place during the mourning for an Emperor and an ex-Emperor, for it was contrary to all precedent to exact the extreme penalty of the law at such seasons. The man who was chiefly responsible for the severity shown on this occasion was Fujiwara Michinori, whose wife had been the Emperor’s nurse, and who now enjoyed the full confidence of the Sovereign. On the other hand, one act of clemency has to be imputed unto him for righteousness on this occasion. The old Fujiwara chief, Tadazane, was to be rigorously dealt with, but Tadamichi induced Michinori to intercede for him. The long standing breach be­tween father and son was thus healed at last  and thenceforward they lived on the most affectionate relations.

Sutoku was banished to Sanuki, where he died in 1164 at the age of 46. His son, Prince Shigehito, was compelled to become a priest. Yorinaga’s sons and about twenty other members of his household were banished to distant parts of the Empire. Tametomo’s bravery had excited the wonder and admiration of the Court; so when arrested he was not decapitated, but merely exiled to the islands of Idzu, the sinews of his arm being cut as a precautionary measure.

It will be remarked that at this crisis each of the three Great Houses of Fujiwara, Minamoto, and Taira alike found itself a prey to divided counsels and split into rival factions arrayed in opposing camps. We are sometimes told that all the Minamoto except Yoshitomo supported Sutoku. This is glaringly incorrect. What is true is that Tameyoshi and all his surviving sons except Yoshitomo did cast in their lot with the ex-Sovereign. The exception is all important, for it was on Yoshitomo the Minamoto clansmen in the wider sense of the term placed all their hopes and reliance. His following in the famous night-attack of July 29 was three or four times as numerous as that of his father; and among his officers were many subordinate Minamoto chieftains of high prestige and great ability. One of his lieutenants was the founder of the great house of Ashikaga, and another was that famous scholar and soldier, Minamoto Yori- masa, who twenty-four years later on was destined to make the Empire ring with the gallantry of a more than septuagenarian warrior. As regards the Taira, Tadamasa carried with him some of the best and most influential captains among the Ise Heishi. Thus the conflict was by no manner of means a contest between Minamoto and Taira as such. That was to come three years later on.

To all outward appearances, now firmly seated on the throne, Shirakawa II took a firm hold on the reins of government. A determined attempt was made to revive, or revert to, the ordinances and machinery of Sanjo II. But Sanjo II and Shirakawa II were very different men. Shirakawa II had indeed a strong will; but his likes and dislikes, and the indulgence of his personal caprices, were of far greater consequence to him than were the genuine national interests committed to his charge. He was the most devout of Buddhists; but the intensity of his devoutness soon proved to be not incompatible with disordered morals and a profligate life. He quickly wearied of the irksomeness of the Imperial office, and in 1158 he abdicated in favour of his eldest son (Nijo Tenno), then sixteen years of age. Before his death, thirty-four years later on (1192), he was destined to see no fewer than five sovereigns ascend the throne,—two sons and three grandsons of his own. Some of these were nothing more or less than puppets of his own; but it was only during the first eight or ten years after his abdication in 1158 that his influence in administrative affairs was preponderant. The Insci system had indeed been of value as a makeshift; but with his ex-Majesty Shirakawa II. it got swept into the limbo of the expedients which have been tried and found wanting.

During Shirakawa II’s brief reign of two or three years (1155-1158) the real power behind the throne was that Fujiwara Michinori—(also known by his ecclesiastical name of Shinsai, for he had taken the tonsure in 1140)—whom we have seen urging the ruthless execution of Sutoku’s partisans even in a season of national mourning for a deceased sovereign. Taira Kiyomori’s prompt execution of his uncle Tadamasa had recommended him to Michinori. Minamoto Yoshitomo’s efforts to evade the invidious task of butchering his own father in cold blood had earned for him Michinori’s aversion. Hence, as it was really by Michinori’s advice that reward and punishment, promotion and degradation were meted out, Yoshitomo had to content himself with the modest recompense of the command of the cavalry in the Imperial Guard, while Taira Kiyomori was invested with the Governorship of Harima, and with the still more important office of Acting Viceroy of Kyushu. From this moment a struggle between Taira Kiyomori, then thirty-eight years of age, and Minamoto Yoshitomo, five years his junior, began. It is only the suppliant who competes; and Yoshitomo was weak enough to put himself in the position of a suppliant. Furthermore this gallant and chivalrous warrior—for such indeed he was—bemeaned himself so far as to resort to the hackneyed Fujiwara device of making merchandise of his female offspring; and sent a middleman to offer his daughter in marriage to Michinori’s son. The proffered alliance was rejected; and Yoshitomo’s well-earned chagrin was presently intensified by hearing of the sumptuous banquet that was given in honour of the nuptials of a son of Michinori with a daughter of Taira Kiyomori.

Just at this juncture Yoshitomo met his evil angel in the person of a certain Fujiwara Nobuyori. This Nobuyori, a descendant of Michitaka (who had been Regent and Kwampaku from 990 to 995), was then a handsome and graceful young man of six and twenty, with qualities, showy indeed, but entirely superficial. Thanks to the favour he had found in the eyes of Shirakawa II, he had early been invested with important offices both civil and military; and promotion had succeeded promotion with startling celerity. But the avidity and ambition of this spoiled child of fortune knew no bounds; and he was now importuning the ex-Emperor for the title and post of Commander in-Chief of the Guards. The ex-Sovereign was inclined to gratify his favourite and was indeed on the point of expediting the patent when Fujiwara Michinori adduced such cogent reasons for staying his hand, that Nobuyori’s hopes were blasted at the eleventh hour. Deeply chagrined at this. Nobuyori feigned illness, (eased appearing at Court, and devoted all his energies to knitting together a party strong enough to enable him to make away with Michinori and realise his prospects by main force. He found ready confederates among his own fellow-clansmen, the Fujiwara; but it was the services of the warlike Minamoto that he was most eager to enlist. Michinori and Taira Kiyomori were now hand-in-glove; Minamoto Yoshitomo had abundant reason for being dissatisfied with both of them. Accordingly Nobuyori used sweet words to Yoshitomo whenever they met; Yoshitomo was informed that in an alliance with Nobuyori lay the road to rich manors, high rank and office for himself and his sons, and a brilliant match for his daughter. An understanding was speedily arrived at, and the plot rapidly matured. At last all that was wanted was a favourable opportunity for action.

This presently offered itself when, on January 14, 1160, Taira Kiyomori and his eldest son, Shigemori, set out for Kumano with a few attendants. Five days later, on the night of January 19, 1160, the confederates, with 500 men, assailed the palace of the ex-Emperor, took possession of his person, cut down the guards, killed many of the inmates and finally fired the building and burned it to the ground. The ex-Emperor was taken to the Great Palace, while the Emperor Nijo was presently interned in the Palace of Kurodo and a strict guard set at all the exits. Next day Michinori’s mansion was burned, and his consorts and concubines and female attendants ruthlessly massacred. As for Michinori himself, he had by a lucky chance got a timely hint of what was to be expected. He at once rode off post-haste to the Emperor’s Palace; sent in a warning by one of the maids of honour, and then whipped his horse off into the darkness of the night. He reached Nara, and hid in a cavern there; but his lurking place was soon discovered; and a day or so later his head was on the public pillory in front of the prison in the capital.

With the Sovereign and the ex-Sovereign safely in their power, the conspirators at once began to carry things with a high hand. Nobuyori appointed himself Chancellor and Commander-in-Chief; Yoshitomo was advanced in rank and made Governor of Harima, while all the subordinate chiefs received more or less important offices. Of course, they gave out that they were acting in accordance with the Imperial instructions, and it was not difficult for them to get the Sovereign to set his seal to the documents placed before him, for his refusal to do so would infallibly have cost him his throne. Everything seemed to bid fair for the success of the coup d’état, when the prospects of the conspirators were dashed by a very dramatic incident. They had issued a summons to all the chief officers to assemble for discussion on the 29th, failure to attend involving the penalty of death. Fujiwara Mitsuyori, the elder brother of Korekata, one of Nobuyori’s most important lieutenants, and before the revolt Nobuyori’s superior officer in the Guards, put on his ceremonial robes, and made his way into the Council Chamber. “There he found Nobuyori occupying the chief seat, and all the other officers not in their usual places. He at once stopped and called out loudly: “How is it that you are all out of your places, and that the proper order of the Court is not observed?”. He then passed on, and boldly took his seat above Nobuyori, who quailed at this fine display of moral courage. Mitsuyori, on seating himself, asked in a loud voice what the meaning of all this was. No one ventured to reply. Thereupon Mitsuyori threw back his dress, and standing upright turned to his younger brother Korekata and angrily asked him why he had joined the rebels, and assured him that swift punishment would overtake all concerned in the wretched business Then with a few more blunt and bitter words, he passed out, none daring to stay him or to raise a hand against him. Six days later (February 4) the great effect of Mitsuyori’s bold front on this occasion became only too apparent.

Meanwhile the all-important question had become what were the Tairas doing. On their way to Kumano, Kiyomori and his son had learned of the outbreak, and with the aid of the Betto of Kumano they succeeded in getting about a hundred men together. With these they were on the point of returning to the capital, when it was reported that Minamoto Yoshihira was at hand with 3,000 troops. This Yoshihira (another Japanese Hercules), then 20 years of age, was Yoshitomo’s eldest son, born when his father was a youth of eighteen. At fifteen Yoshihira had had to take the field against an uncle of his own in Musashi and, as already stated, had defeated and killed him. He had now hurried up from Kamakura; and at a council of war had asked to be entrusted with troops to way­lay and kill the two Tairas. His request had been refused by Nobuyori; but the false rumour of his approach seriously disconcerted Kiyomori, who then thought of retiring into the Western Country to muster men there. But Shigemori would have none of this; they would certainly be outlawed as rebels if the conspirators were left to consolidate their position. So the Tairas, with their handful of men, boldly hastened back to the capital, and posted themselves in their Rokuhara mansion. Here they were presently joined by the nobles and functiona­ries in crowds, while their armed following soon assumed re­spectable proportions. And on the night of February 4, the Emperor, disguised as a maid of honour waiting upon the Empress, was borne along with her into the Taira stronghold! Fujiwara Korekata, overawed by his elder brother’s reproaches at the memorable council of January 29th, had resolved to do something to atone for his conduct, and had succeeded in bringing the Sovereign safely through the gates and guards of his Kurodo prison. Almost at the same time the ex-Emperor made good his escape; and the conspirators’ doom then became almost assured.

In the Kurodo Palace the flight of the Sovereign was soon discovered. But when it was communicated to Nobuyori, he was drinking deeply, if not actually drunk; and so he paid no attention to the communication. Next morning he speedily realised the extent of the disaster; and then he entirely lost his head. Yoshitomo kept cool, however; and ordering the matter to be kept secret he at once threw himself into the Great Palace to await the inevitable Taira attack there. In two or three hours it came. A body of 1.000 men in two corps, headed by Shigemori and his uncle Yorimori respectively, were launched against two of the gates. Shigemori at first had some success against Yoshihira; but after penetrating some way into the enclosure he was beaten out again. Yoshitomo was more than holding his own against Yorimori, when a feigned flight of the Tairas drew the defenders of the gate after them. Then all at once the Taira men turned, rushed through or past the pursuers, poured into the Palace, and occupied the gate. Thus dislodged from the Palace, the Minamoto assailed the Rokuhara. But just at this moment, Minamoto Yorimasa with his command of 300 men. hitherto camped outside the Palace, refused to move, and on being assailed by Yoshihira, passed over to the Tairas. The assault on the Rokuhara was a disastrous and bloody failure; and the Minamoto leaders had no course then open to them but to evacuate the capital.

In their retreat they found the road strongly held by the armed monks of Hi-ei-zan; and in this encounter the Minamoto lost heavily before they succeeded in breaking through. On reaching Seta, Yoshitomo ordered his men to disperse, and, attended by his sons Yoshihira, Tomonaga, and Yoritomo, and three or four followers, made his way through the storms and snowdrifts to Aohaka in Mino. Hence he dispatched his two eldest sons to raise fresh troops in Shinano and Kai; but his second son, Tomonaga, had been severely wounded in the encounter with the priests, and had to return. Yoshitomo then threatened to abandon him; but Tomonaga begged his father to kill him rather than to let him fall into the hands of their foes; and Yoshitomo actually complied with the request. Tomonaga was then a mere boy of fifteen. A little later his corpse was exhumed by Taira Munekiyo, who cut off the head, and sent it to be pilloried in the capital, along with that of Yoshitomo, who had meanwhile met his fate. He had got as far as Owari, on his way to raise a force in the Kwanto, when he was assailed and slain in his bath, by a retainer of his own who had proffered him a treacherous hospitality. This was on February 12, only twenty-three days after the assault on the ex-Emperor’s Palace.

On learning of the death of his father, Yoshihira abandoned his mission to Shinano and returned to the capital with the intention of assassinating the Tairas. His host betrayed him, and 300 men were sent to effect his arrest. But he cut his way through them and escaped,—only to be caught two or three days later on in Omi. On March 3, he was publicly decapitated on the Rokujogawara execution ground in the capital.

Meanwhile the headsman had been very busy, for thirty or forty of the conspirators had had to pay the extreme penalty. Among them had been Fujiwara Nobuyori; and he, the prime instigator of the whole disturbance, had made a pitiable appearance indeed. In the defence of the Great Palace, he had at once quailed at the stern clash of arms, and blenching before the Taira onset had precipitately abandoned the position entrusted to him and sought safety in the rear of Yoshitomo’s command. On the retreat of the Minamotos, Nobuyori, instead of accompanying them, hastened to the Ninnaji, forced himself into the presence of Shirakawa II, and with much weeping and moaning abjectly implored the ex-Sovereign to obtain a pardon for him. Shirakawa at once sent a note to the Emperor beseeching mercy for the suppliant; but no reply was returned to it. Meanwhile Taira troops arrived, seized Nobuyori and took him away to the Rokuhara, where Kiyomori, after upbraiding him bitterly, promptly consigned him to a richly merited doom.

This émeute of 1160 was of even greater consequence in the history of the Empire than the great disturbance of the Summer of 1156. It was the events of 1160 that finally opened the way to the establishment of a military despotism in Japan. It will be noted that in neither of the two outbreaks had the military class been the prime movers. The war of 1156 had been occasioned by a disputed succession to the throne, by dissensions in the Fujiwara House, and by the mortified vanity and thwarted ambition of a Fujiwara chief. The struggle of 1160 was mainly the outcome of a quarrel between two Fujiwara favourites. In both conflicts alike, the military men had been merely the tools, or, at best, the auxiliaries of ambitious and mutually jealous civilians. The contests had been by no manner of means contests of the pen with the sword; for the great warlike clans, so far from being able to combine and present a united front against the civilian authorities and magnates, were hopelessly at variance. And not only were Minamoto and Taira not in unison with each other; both clans were dogged by that curse of internal dissension which had proved the bane of the great bouse of Fujiwara, and eke of the Imperial line itself. In 1156 it had been a case in the Imperial House of brother against brother, of Sovereign against Sovereign; among the Fujiwara of son against brother and father; among the Tairas of uncle against nephew; and among the Minamotos of son against brothers and father. In that dire contest, the Tairas had been the chief gainers, for the death of Tadamasa, Kiyomori’s jealous rival, had made the latter undisputed head of the Ise Heishi, and removed a fruitful source of disunion and weakness in the counsels of the clan. On the contrary, Minamoto Yoshitomo was on the best relations with his father and brothers who perished on that fateful occasion; and the Minamotos had lost quite as much as the Tairas had then gained. Still the two great warlike clans remained fairly well balanced in strength and resources; and while this was so, any unquestioned domination of a military chief in the councils of the Empire was a virtual impossibility.

All that was altered by the events of 1160. When the heads of Yoshitomo and his two eldest son had been placed on the public pillory, the Taira had good reason for believing that they had nothing more to dread from Minamoto rivalry, for with the ablest surviving adult Minamoto, the illustrious scholar and soldier Yorimasa, Kiyomori was on the best of terms, and could readily count on his loyal support. The Emperor Nijo, while by no means a mere puppet, had to bend to the will of his father, the ex-Emperor Shirakawa II; and with Shirakawa II Kiyomori’s relations had always been satisfactory. Hitherto, behind his ex-Majestv Shirakawa II had stood Fujiwara Michinori, a very able, very astute, and—when reasons of State demanded it—a somewhat unscrupulous statesman, ready in case of emergency to deal with opponents by the drastic methods of a Richelieu or an Ii Kamon no Kami. Michinori’s head had lately been inspected on the public pillory by his chief rival in the affections and regard of Shirakawa II, Fujiwara Nobuyori, to wit; and now, in turn the skin was gradually peeling from the grisly lineaments of what had once been the handsome features of that very Nobuyori whose head had replaced the head of that rival he had “inspected’’ with such well-bred and insouçiant contempt. Where was his ex-Majesty now to turn for counsel? Without Michinori as Achitophel, Shirakawa II could scarcely hope to restore and maintain the system and institutions of his great-great-grandfather, Sanjo II. As for the Fujiwaras, they were not now especially dangerous; for their chief, the Kwampaku Motosane, instead of being an old, experienced, and rusé politician as had been the wont in the heyday of the fortunes of the great house, was a callow youth of sixteen summers. To this young man, who held office from 1159 to his death at twenty-four in 1166, the Tairas were careful to show a becoming measure of deference and respect. But it was instinctively recognised by them that it was the whims and caprices of his ex-Majesty Shirakawa II that had above all to be studied and consulted,—for the time being, at least. About the beginning of 1161 discord broke out between the ex-Emperor and his son, Nijo Tenno; but just when the son was attaining to years of discretion he died in 1166, and was succeeded by his son (Rokujo Tenno), an infant of two years! Three years later this baby Sovereign was virtually deposed by his grandfather (Shirakawa II), who then placed his own favourite son on the throne as the Emperor Takakura. The new Sovereign was only eight years of age, and he occupied the throne for eleven years,—down to 1180, the year before his death. Now, the mother of the new Sovereign was Kiyomori’s sister-in-law; and the Taira chieftain presently showed that it was his purpose to rise to supreme power by the exercise of traditional Fujiwara devices, backed by the substantial support of a now practically united military class.

As a reward for his services in February 1160, Kiyomori had been made Sangi and raised to the first grade of the third rank,—an exceptional measure of Court favour for a mere military man. At the same time, some of his sons and brothers were invested with Provincial Governorships; an office now of little or no consequence to mere civilians, but of great and increasing importance to military men, whose influence depended not so much on mere Court rank as on the number of swordsmen and mounted archers they could bring into the field, when occasion demanded. The chief competitors of the Tairas for these posts had been the Minamotos; now the Minamotos had, to all appearance, been annihilated; and hence the Ise Heishi could lay a wide foundation for their power. Before the death of Kiyomori in 1181, more than thirty of these gubernatorial positions had passed into the hands of members of the clan,—mostly in Central, Western, and Southern Japan. What it is all-important to observe is that what was to become a noted feature of feudal Japan—the confusion of administrative with proprietary rights—was now beginning to make itself apparent, if not actually conspicuous. Hence these thirty odd Taira Provincial Governorships were really so many feudal principalities in the germ.

If Kiyomori had followed his natural promptings and utterly exterminated the progeny of Yoshitomo in 1160 the course of the social and political development of the Empire would have been very different from that which the historian has to record. But in 1160, in the person of Yoritomo, the fourteen-year-old third son of Yoshitomo, Kiyomori spared not merely a deadly future rival, but what he himself was emphatically not—a master of statecraft of nearly, if not entirely and absolutely, of the very first rank.

This Yoritomo had an exceptional share of the traditional Minamoto precocity. Just before the struggle of 1160, he had gone through the gembuku ceremony,—the old Japanese analogue of the assumption of the toga virilis among the Romans, —had taken his place in the ranks, and in the defence of the Great Palace and in the subsequent encounters had fought like a seasoned veteran. At Aohaka, when Tomonaga, unable to execute his mission to raise fresh troops by reason of his rankling wound, returned to be killed by his father, among the many bitter things then said to him, perhaps the bitterest of all was that he should profit by the example of his younger brother Yoritomo. and try to play the man! Shortly after the assassination of his father, Yoritomo fell into the hands of that Taira, Munekiyo, who broke into Tomonaga’s tomb in order to take his head and send it to be pilloried in the capital. Arrived in Kyoto with his captive, Munekiyo was ordered to keep him in ward for the present; in a short time he would be publicly executed. Meanwhile Yoritomo’s grave demeanour had excited the compassion of his captor, who had asked him if he would like to live. “Yes,” was the reply; “both my father and elder brothers are dead; who but myself can pray for their happiness in the next world?”. Struck by his filial answer, Munekiyo went to the Lady Ike no Gozen, Kiyomori’s stepmother, who had become a nun after the death of her husband, Tadamori. She had borne one son of great promise, called Uma, on whom she had lavished all her affection, and whose early death had been the great affliction of her life. So, when in the course of his story Munekiyo told her that Yoritomo was the very image of what Uma would then have been had he lived, her feelings were deeply stirred, and her profoundest sympathy enlisted. She at once hurried off to Kiyomori to implore mercy for the youthful captive, lying under sentence of death. It was only after most importunate pleading that Kiyomori yielded, for he had counsellors about him who insistently urged the utter extermination of the whole turbulent Minamoto brood. At last, however, he reluctantly consented to mitigate the death penalty one degree: and so Yoritomo was banished to the wilds of the Idzu peninsula. Here he was placed under the strict surveillance of Taira partisans, on whose implicit fidelity Kiyomori flattered himself he could surely rely. In little more than a score of years it was to become abundantly manifest that the tears shed by the Lady Ike no Gozen on this occasion were destined to prove a veritable fount of calamity to the house of Taira.

Just at this juncture an incident occurred clearly indicating that the rough ferocity of Kiyomori’s nature, the reputed inflexibility of his will, and the soundness of his judgement, were all alike liable to be affected by the charms of female beauty, no less than by maternal importunity. The lady Tokiwa, Yoshitomo’s concubine, was perhaps the loveliest woman in the capital. She was the mother of three boys, all young,—in fact the last of them had been born only a few months before the great outbreak that proved so fatal to their father and their two eldest brothers. Tokiwa had got timely warning of the defeat and proscription of her lord and all his household; and with her youngest babe in her bosom, another strapped to her back, and with the eldest clasping her hand, she hurriedly passed out through a postern into the snowy roadway under the friendly cover of the blinding whirl of fleecy flakes. Instead of following her husband towards the North, she daringly set her face to the South, passed the great Taira mansion of Rokuhara with its flaring lights, and made for Fushimi. After untold hardships and a series of romantic and thrilling adventures, she at last safely reached the village of Ryumon in Yamato, and went into hiding there. Kiyomori’s eager search for her was utterly in vain; so he seized her mother, and threatened to kill her unless Tokiwa appeared with her offspring. When Tokiwa heard of this, there was a keen and painful conflict between maternal instinct and the teachings of the Classic of Filial Piety. The latter conquered, and Tokiwa presented herself before Kiyomori, who was so overcome with her dazzling beauty that he at once resolved to make her his concubine. She at first absolutely refused; but her mother, weeping floods of tears, dwelt on the misery of disobedience and on her future happiness; and Tokiwa at last yielded, on condition that the lives of her children were spared. Again the Taira vassals were all for ruthless and unrelenting measures; but against Tokiwa, supported by the pleadings of the Lady Ike no Gozen, they were powerless. All three boys when grown were to be sent to a monastery to be trained for the priesthood,—such was the compromise arrived at. As a matter of fact, Tokiwa’s relations with Kiyomori were comparatively brief; after bearing him a daughter, she became the spouse of a Fujiwara nobleman,—the Minister of Finance. It was an evil day for the Taira when the life of Tokiwa’s youngest child was spared, for the brilliant military genius of Yoshitsune contributed as much to the fall of the Heishi as the statecraft of his elder half-brother Yoritomo did.

But all these were things of the future never for a moment thought of or dreamt of by Kiyomori. For long years the sole and single Minamoto that caused him any disquietude was that redoutable archer of seven feet stature and four men’s strength, Tametomo, who had been banished to the isles of Idzu in 1156, after having had the sinews of his arm cut. Nine years afterwards, in the spring of 1165 (we are informed by the Japanese annalist), “Minamoto Tametomo set out with some vessels for Onigashima (the Isle of Demons) and took possession of this island.” Tametomo had opened up communication with Ata, his father-in-law, Acting Governor of Satsuma, and with his help had been able to make his way to the Luchus. Here he married the younger sister of one of the Anzu or territorial magnates who were then becoming too powerful to be controlled by the King of the group, and were fighting among themselves; and by this lady he became the father of the founder of the new dynasty of Luchu sovereigns. Three or four years later he made his way back to Oshima; and from this base he began to harry the shores of the opposite peninsula, and to levy blackmail upon the lieges. He was simply repeating the record of his grandfather Yoshichika and his own early record in Kyushu, and endeavouring to carve out a principality for himself in Eastern Japan. In 1170, the Vice-Governor of Idzu, Kudo Shigemitsu, was commissioned by the Court to make an end of him. The Kwanto troops were got under arms on the fourth month and attempted to carry his camp by surprise; but he defended himself valiantly with his archers. At last after most of his craft had been taken or sunk, and almost every one of his followers killed, he disembowelled himself at the age of thirty-three. This bald entry is unusually interesting inasmuch as it is the first authentic notice I have so far met with of that practice of hara-kiri, the “happy dispatch,” which was presently destined to become one of the most distinctive institutions of the feudalism of Japan.

Meanwhile with all dread of possible Minamoto rivalry thus thoroughly removed, Kiyomori found the ground cleared for a contest with the civilian Fujiwaras. For some time he abstained from any overt acts of hostility against them; his immediate intention being to work through and by them by means of that very device by which they had contrived to hold the titular Sovereign in their hands for generations. The circumstances of the time were highly propitious for such an attempt on Kiyomori’s part. The Kwampaku, Motozane, the chief of the clan, was, as has been said, a stripling of sixteen when he was invested with this high office in 1159. He had married a Fujiwara lady; but Kiyomori presently succeeded in giving her a rival in the person of his own daughter. In a short time Kiyomori’s ascendency over his youthful son-in-law was complete. Then suddenly, in 1166, Motozane died, at the age of twenty-four, leaving only one infant son, the offspring not of Kiyomori’s daughter, but of his Fujiwara consort. The boy was greatly attached to Kiyomori’s daughter, however. By the right of primogeniture, so far as it was recognised, he was the head of the clan. But then it had become the custom of the Fujiwara house to regard that member of it who became Kwampaku or Regent as its head,—or Uji-Choja. But to invest a mere baby with the Regency of the Empire was at this date still a moral impossibility; in fact Motozane’s investiture with that great office at sixteen had given rise to much adverse criticism among the Court nobles, who still, to a great extent, formulated the public opinion of the times. So, on Motozane’s death, his half-brother Motofusa, then twenty-two years of age, was made Regent. According to use and wont he should have become Betto of all the ancestral temples and shrines, and of the great family college, while the treasured heirlooms of the house and all its numerous manors should have been at once transferred to him. But just at this point Kiyomori, at the instigation of a certain Fujiwara Kunitsuna, thought fit to interfere. Motozane’s five-year-old son, Motomichi, was entrusted to the care of Kiyomori’s daughter; and both were in­stalled in a new mansion, which was entrusted to the watch and ward of stout and staunch Taira henchmen. The Regent, Motofusa, was deprived of the protectorship of certain of the ancestral temples and shrines, of all the Fujiwara manors in the west of Japan, and,—most important of all,—of the cherished family heirlooms and records which were invariably entrusted to the keeping of the Uji-Choja. All these were now transferred to the infant Motomichi, who was entirely in Kiyomori’s hands. Divide et impera,—that was Kiyomori’s policy towards the Fujiwara,—an astute policy enough, perhaps, but a policy for which his own unaided commonplace brain was not to be held accountable.

Meanwhile, this new arrangement had interfered with certain plans and projects of that ruse politician, the ex-Emperor Shirakawa II; and his ex-Majesty had been injudicious enough to give his tongue free rein.

A year before, the Emperor Nijo, that son with whom Shirakawa II had been on notoriously bad terms, had died a month or two after his abdication in favour of his baby son of two years (Rokujo Tenno). At his obsequies there had been a collision between the monks of Hi-ei-zan and those of the Kofukuji of Nara over the very worldly question of place and precedence at the ceremony, with the result that they had appealed to arms and fought it out in the streets, several subsidiary fanes being then fired and not a little ecclesiastical blood spilt. Even before the monks and their retainers had appeared in mail, there had been rumours afloat to the effect that the priests had been commissioned by the throne to chastise the insolence of Taira Kiyomori. The net result of all this was that his ex­Majesty Shirakawa II had to present himself before the redoubtable Kiyomori in what was virtually the guise of an abject suppliant! And Shirakawa II, in some respects, was remarkably astute, while Kiyomori was, if we read him right, exceedingly puzzle-headed. The stars in their (capricious) courses were fighting valiantly for Kiyomori.

One thing that induced his ex-Majesty to pay such undue deference to the humours of Kiyomori was that the younger sister of Kiyomori’s wife was the mother of Shirakawa II’s favourite son, and that the ex-Emperor was bent on placing that son on the throne at the earliest opportunity. In November 1166, three months after the death of the Emperor Nijo, and four months after the accession of his infant son, Rokujo (1166-1168), this lad, then six or seven years of age, was proclaimed Prince Imperial. A few weeks later, Kiyomori was named Naidaijin; and then, on the 4th March, 1167, without passing through the posts of Minister of the Right and Minister of the Left, he rose at a single bound to the Chancellorship of the Empire and the Junior Grade of the First Rank! For such extraordinary promotion there had been no more than one single solitary precedent among the proud civilian Fujiwaras; and, of course, for a mere military man to obtain such office, and such rank, was so utterly unprecedented as to be revolutionary! The most illustrious warrior of whom Japan could boast, Saka-no-Uye no Tamura Maro, had reaped the richest meed ever bestowed upon a soldier; and he had been amply satisfied with the Third Rank and the post of Dainagon. Naturally enough, this astounding rise of a mere military parvenu (as they held Kiyomori to be) gave the deepest umbrage to the Fujiwara clansmen, whose material resources he was in a measure appropriating, and whose position he was sap­ping by the exercise of the traditional Fujiwara device of making profitable merchandise of the daughters of the house, backed by the strong and unanswerable argument of the sword.

Kiyomori had many moral and intellectual weaknesses, but what is often regarded as venial, although really deadly unless redeemed by a wholesome sense of humour, often indeed as fatal to greatness as his heel was to Achilles—vanity, to wit —was not particularly conspicuous among them. Accordingly he made his tenure of the great office of Chancellor a brief one, and resigned it in the course of three months. But a few weeks afterwards he was rewarded by the baby Emperor with the gift of immense tracts of Koden in the provinces of Harima, Hizen, and Higo. As has been already explained, these Koden were tax-free rice-lands granted as a reward for distinguished national services. Those Kiyomori now received belonged to the first of the four classes into which Koden were divided; in other words, the vast and fruitful domains then bestowed on, or extorted by, the first Military Chancellor of the Empire were to be hereditary. Gifts of such Koden had indeed been not infrequent; but they had been of comparatively limited extent, and their recipients for the most part had been civilian Fujiwara Ministers or courtiers. What was peculiar in this grant to Kiyomori was, in the first place, the extraordinarily spacious dimensions of the tracts then assigned him; and, secondly, the fact that it marked a not unimportant step in the development of Japanese feudalism. The Fujiwara manors had been tilled by serfs and peasants superintended and governed by civilian stewards, whose chief duty it was to forward the revenues of the estates under their charge to the capital for the support of the civilian Fujiwara owners. These vast estates now bestowed upon, or extorted by, Kiyomori, were to a great extent portioned out among a fierce brood of stalwart fighting men as the guerdon of the armed support of themselves and their dependents in seasons of emergency. Here we meet with some of the most important notions of feudalism,— an element of contract, tenure of land by military service, and sub-infeudation. Moreover, the vast extent of these fiefs in the germ—for such indeed these estates were—and the formidable military power so unscrupulously wielded by their owner or his tenants, gave a fresh impulse to that tendency to “commendation” which it had been one of the chief concerns of the Kyoto government to check, a generation or two before.

Just at this point, a word of caution is necessary. This was by no means the beginning of the feudal system in Japan; it was only a very important step in its development in the West and South-West of the Empire. At the conclusion of the  Three Years’ War” in Northern Japan against the Kiyowara (1089), we have seen Minamoto Yoshiiye rewarding his troops with grants of land from his own estates, being constrained to this unusual step by the fact that the Court, insisting that the whole contest had been a private quarrel, had refused to recognise the services of the victors in any way. Minamoto Yoshiiye, however, was far from being a rich man; and such rewards as he could bestow, when fairly partitioned among his many deserving henchmen, must have been exceedingly moderate. It was not the extent of the material benefits they then received that Yoshiiye’s devoted followers chiefly took into their consideration, however. The large-souled generosity of the act appealed so strongly to the imagination of the military class that the tendency to “commend” themselves to the Minamoto chieftains received a great impulse on this occasion. As has been said, about this time there was only one really great fief in Japan,—that of Mutsu,—and it belonged neither to the Tairas nor to the Minamotos. At the other extremity of the Empire in Kuyshu, the feudal system was also spreading. In Chikuzen were the great houses of Harada and Munakata; in Hizen, those of Takagi and Matsuura; in Higo, the Kikuchi and the Ako; in Bungo, the Usuki, the Saeki, and others; in Osumi the Kimotsuki; and in Satsuma the Ata.

In the following year, Kiyomori’s position was still further strengthened. The ex-Emperor Shirakawa II was bent on deposing his infant son Rokujo (5 years of age), and replacing him by his own favourite son, only three years older. For this step Kiyomori’s support was necessary; and it was readily enough promised, since the young prince’s mother was Kiyomori’s sister-in-law. Accordingly, in March 1168, Rokujo was deposed and his uncle, Takakura Tenno (1168-1180), ascended the throne.

In the following December, Kiyomori became seriously ill, and fancying himself to he at death's door, “he shaved his head and entered religion.’’ The remedy proved effectual, and Kiyomori presently recovered. He had still thirteen years of life before him, and during that space of time he gave abundant indications of how very loosely his “religion’’ sat upon him.

“When the Devil was sick,

The Devil a monk would be;

When the Devil was well.

The devil a monk was he !”

It very soon became plain to the intelligence of Shirakawa II that he had made a serious mistake in placing a relative of Kiyomori’s on the throne, for in the household of the new boy sovereign, as in the administration at large, it was Kiyomori who really laid down the law. Mortified and chagrined in scores of affairs, Shirakawa II shaved his head, and became Ho-O, or Cloistered Emperor, in 1169,—six months after Kiyomori had taken the tonsure very much as he might have taken pills.

It was not for nothing that Kiyomori kept such a vigilant eye upon the youthful Sovereign and his entourage. We have already seen how very adroitly an elder daughter of Kiyomori’s was utilised to partition the prestige and vast resources of the head of the Fujiwara house, and to put the greater part of his manors at Kiyomori’s disposal. A still loftier destiny was in store for her younger sister, the Lady Toku. On February 9, 1171, Takakura Tenno, then eleven years old, was declared of age; and ten days later the Lady Toku, four years his senior, became his consort. Thirteen months after this (March 1172), she was proclaimed Empress of Japan!

This was indeed a terrible blow to the Fujiwaras. With the exception of a few of the favoured Fujiwara adherents of the Lady Toku’s elder sister, the Fujiwaras were carefully excluded from the household of the Empress, in which nearly all the offices were now assigned to Tairas. In 1178, the pregnancy of the Empress was announced, and she was then removed to the mansion of her eldest brother, Taira Shigemori, where, on December 22, she was delivered of a son. “The Cloistered Emperor, the Kwampaku (Fujiwara Motofusa), and all the officers of the Court proceeded to the Rokuhara to felicitate Kiyomori upon the auspicious event.” No great fetch of the imagination is necessary in order to figure to oneself what the intensity of the heart-burning must have been with which they proceeded to fawn and smile upon the upstart swaggering military parvenu, whose heavy yoke this “auspicious” event had done much to rivet upon every one of their necks. The whole thing was “mouth honour, breath which the poor heart would have fain denied but dared not”; and behind, what corresponds to vigorous tail-wagging in the canine world when a stronger dog or the wrath of a master with a stick has to be appeased, were “curses not loud but deep,” very deep. A fortnight or so later the Lady Toku’s babe was formally proclaimed Heir Prince. Then in 1180, when the Emperor Takakura abdicated in favour of the Lady Toku’s child of two years of age, Taira Kiyomori found himself in the proud and powerful position of grandfather of the reigning Emperor of Japan! The blue-blooded Fujiwara had, indeed, been very effectually hoist with their own petard!

But long before this Kiyomori’s conduct towards his quondam patron and ally, Shirakawa II, and the Fujiwaras had been so outrageously insolent and aggressive that it was now generally felt the situation had become intolerable. In 1170, Sukemori, the son of Kiyomori’s eldest son, Shigemori, had gone out hawking, and on returning had met the Sessho Motofusa and his cortège. Since Sukemori did not dismount as etiquette demanded, he was summarily pulled from his seat. On hearing of the incident, Kiyomori flew into a terrible rage. “Who dares to lay a hand upon the grandson of the man that holds the position I now hold?” he shouted. And straightway he sent a body of his men to meet the Sessho, drag him from his carriage, smash the vehicle to atoms, and to cut off the cue of every member of his escort. In 1177, the office of General of the Left became vacant. The post of General of the Right was then held by Shigemori, Kiyomori’s eldest son; and Shigemori was at once promoted to the senior command, while his former position was bestowed upon his younger brother, Munemori. Meanwhile no fewer than three Fujiwaras had been emulously striving and intriguing to obtain the appointment, and their resentment at being passed over was profound. Especially deep was the chagrin of one of them, Narichika. This Narichika, then a young man of twenty-two, had been one of the ringleaders in the great plot of 1160; and it was mainly owing to the fact that he was connected with Shigemori by marriage that his life was spared on that occasion. Returning after a brief term of exile, he quickly ingratiated himself with Shirakawa II, by whom he was promoted from one rather important office to another, till, in 1177, he was Dainagon. Among the priests by whom Shirakawa II was constantly surrounded, it was a certain Fujiwara Moromitsu, known as Saiko, who was deepest in his confidence; and with this Saiko Narichika had become very intimate. At this juncture these two and a few others determined to attempt the overthrow of the Tairas. The seat of their plottings was a villa in Shishigadani, one of the sequestered recesses of Higashiyama. According to some accounts these conferences were once or twice attended by Shirakawa II; according to others he was on the point of proceeding there, when he was dissuaded from going by his counsellors. What is perfectly plain is that his ex­Majesty knew very well what was in train in that lonely mountain retreat. In an evil hour for their fortunes the plotters invited a certain Tada Yukitsuna, a Minamoto, to join them. Yukitsuna very soon perceived that the success of the enterprise was hopeless, and that yet he could make exceedingly good capital out of it for himself.

Nearly a score of years before this Kiyomori had begun to erect his mansion of Fukuwara, where the city of Hyogo now stands, and as he rose to greatness it began to assume the aspect of a magnificent palace. Hither he had retired upon laying down the Chancellorship, and here he was now living. His visits to the capital were only occasional, but nevertheless there was but little that went on there, or indeed throughout the Empire at large, of which he was not speedily apprised. In the huge following he maintained were three hundred young pages whose special duty it was to keep him duly informed of everything they heard or saw; and besides these he had an elaborately organised secret service whose mysterious underground ramifications were everywhere. To elude the keen scent of Kiyomori’s invisible sleuth-hounds had come to be regarded as next door to an impossibility. And yet, notwithstanding, the conspirators in the lonesome villa in the secluded recesses of Higashiyama had succeeded in doing so most effectually. In this circumstance Minamoto Yukitsuna saw a great opportunity for the advancement of his own interests. Stealthily making his way to the Fukuwara, and there obtaining an interview with Kiyomori, he divulged all he knew about the Shishigadani conferences.

A day or so afterwards Kiyomori was in his Kyoto mansion,—the Rokuhara,—whence he at once dispatched his men to bring the priest Saiko into his presence. His Reverence at first professed entire ignorance of the Shishigadani assemblies, but on being subjected to “forcible examination,” or, in plain language, to the torture, his fortitude gave way, and he dictated and set his seal to an accurate and exhaustive statement of all he knew about the plot,—which was, in short, everything. Kiyomori’s next step was to send courteously worded invitations to Narichika and each of his fellow-conspirators to meet him in the Rokuhara, as he wished to have the pleasure of consulting them on some rather important business. Without the least suspicion of Yukitsuna’s treachery, and knowing nothing of Saiko’s arrest, much less of his damning confession, Narichika and most of his confederates hurried off to fawn upon the insolent upstart they hated with an unspeakable loathing and whose downfall they were sedulously plotting, with studied expressions of simulated delight. As soon as they made their appearance they were seized and bound. Then, after an anxious period of suspense, the dreaded Kiyomori came swaggering into the room, and addressed himself to Narichika: “ In 1160 you aided and abetted Fujiwara Nobuyori, and for doing so your life was justly forfeited. But thanks to my son Shigemori’s earnest entreaties your life was spared. After that you obtained governorships and manors, and have again become a great personage. What precisely is the grievance that has made you plot the ruin of my house?”. Narichika thereupon bowed his head to the ground, and by way of apology said: “Of course, I have no resentment against the Prince (Kiyomori). This must be some secret slander of some unknown enemy of mine.” Thereupon Kiyomori produced the priest Saiko’s confession from the folds of his dress, read it out in a loud voice, and after asking Narichika whether he was not ashamed to be found out practising such deception, struck him across the fate with the document, and then ordered some of the attendant Samurai to take him out and cut off his head.

Meanwhile intelligence of what was toward had been transmitted to Shigemori, Kiyomori’s eldest son, then Great General of the Left,—that is, under the Emperor, the Commander-in-Chief in Japan. He at once hurried off to the Rokuhara, where he arrived just in time to be able to save Narichika’s life on a second occasion. However, Shigemori’s intervention did not prove of any very ultimate advantage to Narichika, who, sentenced to be banished to Kojima in Bizen, was there put out of the way by special emissaries of Kiyomori a few months later on. Little commiseration can be extended to him; he was vain, pretentious, ungrateful, and, like Nobuyori (1160), at bottom that most despicable of all things in a man who aspires to political eminence, a thorough coward. He resorted as readily to the supreme argument of the weakest section of womankind—tears, to wit,—as Nobuyori did in 1160. Besides he proved himself to be deceitful and an arrant liar. To sympathise with the swaggering Kiyomori with his limited outlook upon life and upon the crying needs of the time is a difficult task; to sympathise with such adversaries of Kiyomori as the poltroon Narichika is absolutely impossible.

As for his Reverence Saiko, the especial confidant of his ex-Majesty Shirakawa II, his stature was minished by the length of his shaven pate. His two sons shared his fate, while all the other habitués of the Shishigadani villa found themselves confronted with all the sentimental horrors and real hardships of distant exile,—a lucky turn of the wheel of fortune for men of the true metal such as Fujiwara Hidesato, Minamoto Yoritomo, his uncle Tametomo, and Minamoto Yoshikuni among others, but deadly fatal to such hot-house plants as Sugawara no Michizane, and the average, commonplace, pampered Court grandee.

Kiyomori sent an official report of the whole affair to the Emperor; and then putting on his travelling attire he started on his return to his Fukuwara retreat. On his way, in the most unceremonious and nonchalant fashion, he stopped at the portals of the Cloistered Emperor’s palace, and sent in a message by the officer on duty there that what he had just done had been done in the interests of the State and the Sovereign primarily; his own life was a secondary consideration. At first it had not been Kiyomori’s intention to let Shirakawa II off so lightly as he did; in fact he was on the point of proceeding at the head of an armed force to seize the Cloistered Emperor when Shigemori appeared on the scene and made him desist. Kiyomori had a wholesome dread of his eldest son, and when Shigemori was announced on this occasion, his father hastily threw his priest’s robes over his armour to conceal it. But as be moved, his clothes kept opening, and so he had to explain why he was in war harness. He was then told if he must needs perpetrate such an outrage as he was contemplating he had better first take Shigemori’s head before attempting it. “I am an old man, and I was doing all this to see what metal my children were made of. If it seems to you that what I have done is bad, then take what measures you please to put it to rights.” When their father left the room Shigemori sharply rebuked Munemori and his other brothers for lending themselves to any such enterprise.

Shigemori’s regard for the law of the land, for truth, justice, and duty was as profound as was Kiyomori’s contempt for all such considerations. Over and over again the son found him­self called upon to remonstrate with the father, and to curb the latter’s tendency to unbridled lawlessness and outrage. Of the two, Shigemori was really in several respects the stronger man. When Kiyomori’s nerve failed him on hearing of Nobuyori’s attempted coup d’état in 1160, it was the youthful Shigemori’s resolution that saved the situation for the Tairas. Again, it was Shigemori who led the attack on the Minamotos in the Great Palace, while his father remained safely behind in the Rokuhara. When the Minamotos, dislodged from the Palace, made their abortive assault on the Rokuhara, whither the Sovereign had fled, Kiyomori lost his presence of mind utterly, and became so flustered that he put on his armour with the back part in front. When this was pointed out to him he said that it was perfectly right; as the Emperor was coming behind he had put on his harness so as to have the front part facing his Majesty; since it would be improper to have the back part of the armour turned towards an Emperor. When Kiyomori lost his head, as he not unfrequently did, his shifts and excuses, while not exactly Falstaffian, were certainly amusing in their way. In crises of personal peril we never hear of Shigemori quailing or losing command over himself.

Yet withal Shigemori’s character was not without a strain of weakness, while in certain matters his words and deeds exposed him to the reproach of narrow-mindedness. A week or so after the punishment of the Shishigadani conspirators, he retired from the command of the Guards, and early in 1179 he resigned the post of Naidaijin. He allowed himself to be beset with a haunting dread of what his father might do next, and of the probable consequences of the outrageous behaviour of the terrible old man, every year getting worse and worse. In the summer of 1179 Shigemori went to Kumano to supplicate the gods for—a speedy death! Such was the despairing view that he took of the situation. As if in answer to his petition, he contracted a malignant fever upon his return to the capital, and of this he died on September 3, 1179. A famous Chinese physician had just then arrived in Japan, and Kiyomori urged his son to send for him. But Shigemori stubbornly refused to do so, on the ground that if he were cured by a foreign leech when Japanese doctors had failed, it would be bad for the reputation of the Empire at large and of the Japanese medical faculty in particular. Besides, a mere roving vagrant foreigner should not be lightly admitted into the presence of one who had attained the rank of Minister of State!

“Shigemori was only 42, and he was greatly regretted by the Cloistered Emperor and by everybody.” Such is the entry in the record. Yet all the poignancy of Imperial priestly regret for the memory of Shigemori did not prevent his ex-Majesty from very promptly confiscating all Shigemori’s manors in Echizen! Moreover, just a month before Shigemori’s death, that sister of his whom Kiyomori had used so adroitly to partition the power and resources of the Fujiwaras, died; and, in collusion with the Kwampaku Motofusa, Shirakawa II had seized all her estates and the manors assigned to her adopted infant son, Motomichi, in 1166. Meanwhile this Motomichi, now 20 years of age, had been wedded to another of Kiyomori’s very serviceable daughters! Motomichi had been made Uji-choja, or Chieftain of the Fujiwara clan; but Moroiye, the 12-year-old son of his uncle Motofusa, was now promoted to the office of Chunagon, to which Motomichi vainly aspired although backed by the strenuous support of Taira Kiyomori. With so much of preliminary explanation by way of a setting for it, the following entry in the “Annals” should have no difficulty in speaking for itself in a sufficiently intelligible manner. “In December 1179 Kiyomori came up from the Fukuwara to the capital and gave the Cloistered Emperor to understand that he was greatly displeased with several matters. In consequence of his complaints the Kwampaku, Fuji­wara Motofusa, was banished to Bizen, the Chancellor of the Empire, Fujiwara Moronaga, to Owari, while the Dainagon, Minamoto Sukekata, and 13 officers of the Emperor were stripped of their ranks and discharged from their posts. On the same occasion Kiyomori obtained the promotion of his son-in-law, Fujiwara Motomichi. He then held the rank of Lieutenant-General of the Second Class; at a bound he rose to the great posts of Naidaijin and Kwampaku, although he was only twenty years of age. . . . Kiyomori caused the Cloistered Emperor to be conducted to the Toba Detached Palace. He confided the ward and surveillance of the capital to his son (and heir) Munemori, and then returned to the Fukuwara. All these evil designs of Kiyomori would have been carried out long before, but Shigemori had constantly opposed them. After his death, Kiyomori, seeing that nobody any more resisted him, had respect for nothing, and acted entirely upon his own caprice.”

It only remains to supplement this account by saying that Kiyomori did not go up from the Fukuwara to the capital alone, but at the head of several thousand armed men; and that he had then made his old friend and patron, the Cloistered Emperor Shirakawa II, a close prisoner, severely separated from all his usual attendants, except one single con­cubine, a single priest, and two or three menials.

The young Emperor Takakura took his father’s unfortunate position very much to heart, and by way of placating Kiyomori’s wrath he abdicated early in 1180, in favour of his own son and Kiyomori’s grandson (Antoku Tenno), then a child of three. After his abdication it was customary for the ex-Sovereign to proceed in state to some one or all of the shrines of Iwashimidzu, Kamo, Hiyoshi, or Kumano. These all belonged to one or other of the great monasteries of Hi-ei- zan, Miidera, or Kofukuji, whose priests profited by the Imperial largesses on such occasions. Great was the indignation of the bonzes of these temples when they learned that the new ex-Emperor had signified his intention of proceeding to worship the gods of Itsukushima or Miyajima, the lovely island in the Inland Sea some few miles distant from the city of Hiroshima. This unusual step was also prompted by the wish to conciliate Kiyomori, for the gods of Itsukushima were his tutelary divinities. As a young man of 28, Kiyomori had acted as Governor of Aki, in which province Miyajima lies; and during the third of a century that had elapsed since then (1146), he had continued to shower favours upon the shrine of the deities to whose gracious influence he mainly attributed his extraordinary good fortune. Ilis visits to the island were frequent; to facilitate his goings and comings he had caused much money and labour to be expended upon increasing the conveniences of the sea route between the Fukuwara and Hiroshima, the excavation of the Ondo channel being an important feature in the work. The honour of the visit of a new abdicated Emperor to the abode where his tutelary deities were enshrined,—an abode on which he had lavished so much of his great resources,—delighted Kiyomori beyond measure. But just then, in the midst of all the joyous bustle of preparations for the journey, the priests of the three great monasteries, with their mercenaries in arms, and all the usual sacerdotal paraphernalia of a ‘‘clamorous appeal,”—their divine trees, their sacred cars, and what not,—poured into Kyoto determined to keep the ex-Emperor in their midst. Kiyomori sent emissaries to “reason with them.” After much parleying he finally did succeed in having his way; and he and his son Munemori with a great train of armed followers escorted the young ex­Sovereign to Miyajima and back again.

But this deviation from the traditional use and wont of confining the solemn progress of a newly abdicated Sovereign to shrines under the control of the three Great Monasteries of Hi-ei-zan, Miidera, and the Kofukuji of Nara, and the admission of the upstart interloping family gods of the Taira to a share in the function and its substantial emoluments, had given dire offence to what when united was one of the three greatest military powers in Japan. At this time, of these the Tairas seemed to be easily the greatest; but as a matter of fact the Fujiyara of Mutsu in the extreme North could have very well held their own against Kiyomori and all his following in any armed strife, provided the Fujiwara of Mutsu acted on the defensive,—or rather on the defensive-offensive. Next in order came the Great Monasteries,—Hi-ei-zan, or the Kofukuji of Nara, the strongest among them,—but Miidera near Otsu not so very much the inferior of the two older fanes in wealth and military prestige. The weakness of these great priestly powers was that so far from acting in unison they were generally deadly rivals frequently at open war with each other. But for once this unwonted Imperial progress had united them by a common grievance; and all alike now cherished a grudge against Kiyomori and the Tairas, by whom indeed some of them had been not over-gently handled in 1177, and on other occasions.

And just at this very time a great plot for the overthrow of the Tairas was being woven under their very eyes,—as if in mockery of Kiyomori’s omnipresent and omniscient secret service. We have already seen Minamoto Yorimasa acting with Kiyomori in 1156, and deserting to the Taira side on the Held of battle in 1160. Yorimasa enjoyed a large measure of Kiyomori’s favour and confidence; in short it was to Kiyomori’s influence that Yorimasa owed his promotion to the third degree of Court rank early in 1179. At that date he had entered the priesthood. But in spite of his intimate relations with the Tairas and the favours he had received from Kiyomori, Yorimasa had for years been secretly brooding over the fallen fortunes of the Minamotos, and had long made up his mind to deal their hated rivals and oppressors a deadly blow before he died. He was now 75 years of age; the discontent of file armed monks furnished him with an opportunity he had long been eagerly looking for. However, nothing was said to them at first; it was to Mochihito, Shirakawa II’s fourth son and Takakura Tenno’s elder half-brother, that Yorimasa opened his mind. Mochihito’s mother was of humble birth, and so although now thirty years of age he had never been made a Prince of the Blood—he was merely a Prince. Diviners, fortune-tellers, exorcists, and all that brood were in great credit in those days; and a certain Shonagon who enjoyed an extraordinary reputation as a physiognomist had told Yorimasa that Prince Mochihito had the face of one who would surely be Emperor some day. Yorimasa now came to an understanding with the Prince. The former would summon all the Minamoto to rise and exterminate the Taira, and Mochihito would then be placed on the throne.

Early in May 1180, Yorimasa made his son Nakatsuna draw up and send out a summons to all the Minamotos in the Tokaido, Tosando, and Hokurikudo to rise and chastise the Tairas. The three Great Monasteries were now appealed to, and they all readily promised their co-operation. But within a month Kiyomori got to know something of the plot; on his way to the East with the summons, Minamoto Yukiiye had stopped at the shrines of Kumano in Kishu, where some of the priests were in the Taira secret service. One of these spies hurried off to the Fukuwara with the intelligence that there was an intrigue afoot in the capital, in which Prince Mochihito was involved. Kiyomori was promptly on the road to Kyoto at the head of several thousand men. His first step, on arriving there, was to convey the person of the ex-Emperor Shirakawa II from his Toba prison into the city, where he was strongly guarded. Prince Mochihito was stripped of his name and rank, made a Minamoto, and sentenced to distant banishment. One of the officers sent to effect his arrest was Yorimasa’s son Kanetsuna; and he was careful to give the Prince time enough to make his escape. His attendants made a stout defence; and when they were seized and “forcibly examined ” they disclosed absolutely nothing. Presently the Tairas learned that the Prince had taken refuge in the monastery of Miidera; and troops were sent to bring him into the capital. But they were beaten off by the monks, who stood to their arms and refused to allow the Prince to be taken away. Kiyomori then determined to storm the temple.

How much, or rather how little, lie really knew of the plot thus far, may be judged from the fact that it was no other then the arch-conspirator, the real ringleader in the whole affair, his trusted friend and protégé, Minamoto Yorimasa, that he now appointed to the supreme command of the attacking force! Of the real true actual situation of affairs Kiyomori had no inkling, until suddenly, on June 16, Yorimasa, his two sons, and fifty retainers threw themselves into Miidera. Even then, for three or four days more, Kiyomori failed to grasp the position. The only thing he did was to conciliate the Hi-ei-zan monks by bribes and promises; the result being that they detached themselves from their league with Miidera and the Kofukuji of Nara. This step was taken just about the time Yorimasa and his band threw themselves into Miidera; and when Miidera presently sent up argent messengers requesting immediate reinforcements from the great mountain monastery, Yorimasa was terribly disconcerted by learning that the request had been curtly and peremptorily denied. To hold Miidera against the Tairas backed by Hi-ei-zan was impossible,—so much was plain. At the council of war held at this point, Yorimasa advocated a sudden inrush into the capital and firing it—at that very time there was a strong wind blowing—and seizing the persons of Kiyomori, Munemori, and the other Taira chiefs in the midst of the resulting confusion. This daring counsel of the old man of 75 was received with the silence of disapproval; and it was resolved to evacuate Miidera and hurry southwards to effect a junction with the formidable forces of the Kofukuji of Nara.

So, with Prince Mochihito in their midst, a band of three hundred Miidera mercenaries, together with Yorimasa’s fifty odd retainers, set out for the South. At Uji, destined to become the centre of the tea-growing industry of Japan, the Uji-gawa, which connects Lake Biwa with the Inland Sea, was spanned by a bridge which was of great strategic importance in those and indeed in subsequent days. In Uji also, on the southern side of the stream,—that is on the Nara, and not on the Kyoto side,—stood the Byo-do-in, a Fujiwara chieftain’s country villa converted into a monastery in 1052. It had passed into the hands of the Abbot of Miidera shortly afterwards, and it was now one of the branch fanes of Miidera. Here Prince Mochihito and his train rested on their way to Nara. Meanwhile Kiyomori in Kyoto had mobilised some 20,000 men and issued an Imperial Decree appointing his sons Munemori and Shigehira commanders to smite the rebels. While Yorimasa and his small band of 350 men had been rapidly traversing the distance between Miidera and Uji, this force of 20,000 men had been advancing from the capital.

As things turned out, Yorimasa had been lucky enough to get across the Uji River before the Taira van arrived. Arrived, not appeared, I say advisedly, for the morning was one of impenetrable fog, where a man’s body at three paces’ distance was nothing more than a mere blurred outline which might have been mistaken for anything. Yorimasa, then 75 years of age, be it remembered, had been vigilant in seeing to it that outpost duty for his little band of priest mercenaries and household followers had been duly done, and so was promptly apprised of the approach of the Taira host. He ordered the planking of the greater portion of the bridge to be removed; and about 200 Taira horsemen galloped into space and were mostly killed by the fall. Presently a youth of sixteen, a certain Ashikaga Tadatsuna, succeeded in fording or swimming the stream at the head of three hundred of his Kumano retainers, and arrived in front of the Byo-do-in. Here there was a terrific encounter, and while it was in progress, the main host of the Tairas began to find its way across. Yorimasa’s chief concern soon became to get the Prince out of danger. The latter was able to slip off unperceived, Yorimasa acting as his escort. But they had not gone far before the old warrior was struck by a stray arrow.

Dragging himself back into the Byo-do-in, he stripped off his armour, and, seating himself upon his iron fan, he calmly disembowelled himself,—the second authentic instance of hara-kiri I have so far been able to find in the annals. His two sons also perished here, while his followers fell almost to a man. Prince Mochihito never reached Nara; he was likewise hit by a stray arrow and fell into the hands of his pursuers, who at once cut off his head and sent it to Kyoto. Meanwhile an army of 30,000 temple mercenaries had set out from Nara to join Yorimasa; on learning of the death of the Prince they returned.

The strange thing is that so very little was done to punish the monasteries for their part in the rising. When the matter was debated in the Supreme Council, the Fujiwara courtiers insisted that Miidera and Kofukuji should be left alone; and all that Kiyomori could do was to suspend their Abbots, confiscate certain of their manors, and deprive them of the control of some of their branch temples. And this was only a temporary triumph; in two months the clamour over this became so loud that Kiyomori had to give way and restore matters to their former position. It is true that Miidera was actually sacked and burned by Kiyomori's son Tomomori, while Tomomori's brother, Shigehira, at the same time fired the Kofukuji and Todaiji of Nara and executed 200 of the monks there. But this did not take place until December 1180, a full six months after the affair of Uji Bridge and the death of Yorimasa. In the meantime, Yoritomo had risen in the Kwanto and was making such headway there that Minamoto partisans in other parts of the Empire were emboldened to appear openly in arms. In Omi, they had attacked the Taira, and Miidera had given them support. It was this fresh offence that brought its fate upon the great monastery by Biwa strand.

The Tairas were not long in finding that this burning of the great fanes had been a cardinal mistake. So keenly was it resented by the courtiers that they refused to appear at Court, where the most important functions and festivals were attended by none except some Taira officials. Next year there was a great famine, and this was followed by a terrible pestilence, and these and other calamities were attributed to the offended deities whose wrath should properly have fallen upon the Tairas alone.

Kiyomori's dread of the Great Monasteries constrained him to the bold step of shifting the capital from Kyoto to the Fukuwara, where during the previous year or two immense labour had been expended upon improving the anchorage. The Emperor, his mother, the ex-Emperor Takakura, his father, the Cloistered Emperor Shirakawa II, — who, by the way, was kept a close prisoner, the whole Court, in fact, and all its officials, except the Fujiwara Minister of the Right, who was bitterly opposed to Kiyomori, were brought down to what is now Kobe, and housed in the Taira villas there. Presently the recalcitrant Minister of the Right had also to join the Court in the Fukuwara. But the whole proceeding had occasioned great and almost universal discontent, so profound that Kiyomori was fain to abandon the project after a six months' trial. In December 1180, the Court returned to Kyoto, Kiyomori meanwhile taking the misguided precaution of burning the nests of the turbulent monks he so greatly dreaded.

The temporary removal of the Court, while entailing much needless expense upon the courtiers, had plunged Kyoto into economic misery. The capital in these years was a sadly afflicted city. In 1177 a fire broke out while a typhoon was blowing, and the Palate and one-third of the citizens’ houses went up in flame and smoke, several thousand of the popula­tion perishing in the conflagration. Two months before the removal of the Court in 1180 a tornado had laid low every house, great and small, in three or four of the wards. But worse was still in store. “In 1180-2,” writes Chomei in his Hojoki, or Records of his Hermit’s Cell, “there was a very wretched state of things caused by famine. Misfortunes succeeded each other. Either there was drought in spring and summer, or there were storms and flood in autumn and winter, so that no grain came to maturity. The spring ploughing was in vain, and the labour of planting out the rice in summer came to naught. There was no bustle of reaping in autumn, or of ingathering in winter. In all provinces people left their lands and sought other parts, or, forgetting their homes, went to live among the hills. All kinds of prayers were begun, and even religious practices which were unusual in ordinary times revived, but to no purpose whatever. The capital, dependent as it is on the country for everything, could not remain unconcerned when nothing was produced. The inhabitants in their distress offered to sacrifice their valuables of all kinds, but nobody cared to look at them. Even if buyers came forward, they made little account of gold, and much of grain. Beggars swarmed by the roadside, and our ears were filled with the sound of their lamentations. Amid such misery we with difficulty reached the close of the first year. With the New’ Year, men’s hopes revived. But that nothing might be left to complete our misfortunes, a pestilence broke out and continued without ceasing. Everybody was dying of hunger, and as time went on, our state became as desperate as that of the fish in the small pool of the story. At last even respectable-looking people wearing hats, and not unshod, might be seen begging importunately from door to door. Sometimes while you wondered how such utterly wretched creatures could walk at all, they fell down before your eyes. By garden walls or on the roadsides countless persons died of famine, and as their bodies were not removed, the air was filled with evil odours. As the corpses changed, there were many sights which the eye could not endure to see. It was worse on the river banks, where there was not even room for horses and vehicles to pass. Porters and woodcutters too became so feeble that firewood got scarcer and scarcer, and people who had no means pulled down their houses, and sold the timber in the market. It was said that a load for one man was not enough to furnish him with food for a single day. It was strange to see among this firewood pieces adorned in places with vermilion or silver, or gold leaf. On inquiry, it appeared that people in their extremity went to old temples, stole the images of Buddha, and broke up the objects used in worship, of which these were the fragments. Such mournful spectacles it was my lot to witness, born into a polluted and wicked world. As a matter of course, parents died before their children. Again, infants might be seen clinging to the breast of their mother, not knowing that she was already dead ... The numbers of those who died in central Kyoto during the fourth and fifth months alone were 42,300. To this must be added many who died before and after; while if we reckon those who perished in the outlying quarters, the number has no limit. And then the provinces!”

During the thirty-three weeks of the Great Plague of 1665 there were 68,800 deaths in the whole of London. Here in two months we have as many as 42,300 in one section of Kyoto! Throughout the Empire at large the mortality must have been immense and the misery profound. And during all this time the country was in the throes of one of the greatest civil wars by which it has ever been racked. The ravages of this all-devouring pest and the famine by which it had been preceded and accompanied evidently go a long way to account for the strange lull in the military operations of 1182, and of the preceding and following month?. Plague and famine together were especially severe in the Home Provinces and the West, the seats of the Taira power, and made the mustering and maintenance of any overpowering force afoot almost an impossibility. The East meanwhile appears to have escaped comparatively unscathed, and here Yoritomo was busy establishing his position, consolidating his power, and organising for a supreme effort.

What it is important not to overlook is that by the priests and the people at large it was the Tairas who were regarded as responsible for the terrible calamities with which the centre of the country was then being so mercilessly scourged. This circumstance, coupled with the difficulty of reasoning with the belly when empty, must have sent many recruits to the Minamoto standard in the Kwanto, Echigo, and elsewhere.

In the meantime the Tairas had been seriously weakened by the loss of their masterful chieftain, the terrible old Kiyomori. In March 1181 he had fallen seriously ill, and on the 20th of that month the end was seen to be at hand. All his family and the chief retainers of the house were assembled round the couch of the dying man, and respectfully inquired what he would say. Sighing deeply, he replied, “He that is born must necessarily die and not I alone. Since the period of Heiji (1159) I have served the Imperial House. I have ruled under Heaven (i.e. the Empire) absolutely. I have attained the highest rank possible to a subject. I am the grandfather of the Emperor on his mother’s side Is there still a regret? My regret is only that I am dying, and have not yet seen the head of Yoritomo of the Minamoto. After my death, make no offerings to Buddha on my behalf; do not read the sacred books for me. Only cut off the head of Yoritomo of the Minamoto and hang it on my tomb. Let all my sons and grandsons, retainers and followers, each and every one follow out my command, and on no account neglect to do so.” With such words on his lips Taira Kiyomori passed away.

“ Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” Such measure of greatness as may be conceded to Kiyomori would seem to be derived from each of these sources in fairly even proportions. The merit of Tadamori and his position of trusted henchman to the two ex-Sovereigns, Shirakawa I and Toba I, had enabled him to lay a tolerably stable foundation for the fortunes of the Ise Hieshi; and when he died, in 1153, Kiyomori succeeded him as the Fidus Achates of Toba. Then came the great disturbances of 1156 and 1160; and both of these, especially the latter, turned out to be pieces of supreme good luck for Kiyomori. Both took him by surprise; the second found him utterly unprepared and in an apparently hopeless position of disadvantage. Indeed, but for the resolution of the youthful Shigemori, and the halting counsels of the conspirators, Kiyomori would in all probability have been ruined. As it was, the net result of the two great emeutes was the removal of Kiyomori’s powerful rival, his uncle Tadamasa, and the virtual extirpation of the Minamotos, the only counterpoise to the military might of the Tairas. Henceforth for a score of years the argument of the sword was in their hands alone; and this argument the Court and courtiers ha$ time and again to recognise as unanswerable. With this argument in reserve, Kiyomori felt he could safely retort upon the haughty Fujiwaras their own traditional device, and ultimately oust them from the exercise of it. The marriage of two of Kiyomori’s daughters to successive Fujiwara chieftains, still mere boys, and the astute counsels of that Achitophel, Fujiwara Kunitsuna, enabled Kiyomori to shackle the great civilian clan, and bend it more or less compliantly io his purposes. Then the ex-Em­peror Shirakawa’s fondness for his son by Kiyomori’s sister­in-law, and his wish to place him on the throne, was another rare stroke of good fortune for the Taira chief, whose armed support for the success of this project was absolutely indispensable. For his services on this occasion Kiyomori had many rewards; but perhaps the greatest of them all was the marriage of yet another of his daughters with the boy Sovereign. When this daughter became the mother of the Crown Prince, the fortunes of the house of Taira seemed to be assured. Their only military rivals had, as they believed, been virtually annihilated, and their civilian rivals, the Fujiwaras, supplanted and reduced to impotence.

Against all this, however, at the death of Kiyomori, in March 1181, had to be set the following not inconsiderable items. In the first place the bitter hatred of the Cloistered Emperor, Shirakawa II; the intense detestation of the Fujiwaras, with perhaps the exception of Kiyomori’s tool and son-in-law the Kwampaku Motomichi, then about 20 years of age; the deadly enmity of the Buddhist sects whose great fanes had been given to the flames; the dislike of the citizens of Kyoto who had suffered severely by the temporary removal of the capital; and the resentment of the superstitious among all classes for inviting the wrath of the gods, and so afflicting the Empire with miseries such as it had not known since the introduction of Buddhism in the time of the Sogas. All these elements of discontent and danger were indeed separate and distinct, and individually were perhaps each in themselves not so very formidable after all. But once bring them to a common focus! Just at this time, after the eclipse of a long night of twenty years, the sun of the Minamoto had again risen resplendently in the East. With that for a focussing point for all these elements of disquiet in the seats of the Taira supremacy, there was serious danger ahead indeed. At the same time, the infant Emperor (Antoku Tenno) was a Taira, entirely in the hands of his armed kinsmen, who held the capital, and controlled all it contained,—Cloistered Emperor, Fujiwara courtiers, suffering citizens, and vengeful hearted shaven-pated monks alike. Besides, more than thirty provinces were governed by Taira prefects; while the private estates and military resources of the clan, especially in the West and South-West, were immense. Under bold and able leadership the situation of the Tairas might well be regarded as the reverse of desperate, in spite of all the gathering, massing elements of unrest and menace by which they were now threatened. But for this bold and able leadership the Taira were very soon destined to find that they were utterly and sadly to seek, for Munemori, their new chief, was at once commonplace and poltroon. And. meanwhile, sedulously gathering into his pitiless grasp of iron every item that might be bent to the supreme purpose of crushing the overblown power and pride of the brood who had massacred his father and kinsmen, and of making himself the real master in Japan, Minamoto Yoritomo was building his great city of Kamakura and thinking out the future.

In the following chapter, we shall endeavour to trace the course of events from a Minamoto and Eastern point of view.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FALL OF THE TAIRA. YOSHINAKA AND YOSHITSUNE.