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CHAPTER XII.
THE FALL OF THE TAIRA.
YOSHINAKA AND YOSHITSUNE.
IT will be remembered that after the great cataclysm
of 1160, which proved so fatal to the Minamoto, the life of Yoshitomo’s third
son was reluctantly spared by Kiyomori and that the youth was banished to Izu.
In the valley of the Kano-gawa,
some seven or eight miles from the point where the Tokaido begins to scale the
Hakone slope from the west, lies the village of Nirayama. At that date its site
was occupied by the manor of Hiru-ka-kojima, of which a certain Ito Sukechika
was lord. Although not a Taira, but a Fujiwara, he was an adherent in whom Kiyomori
felt he could place a full measure of reliance. So it was in Sukechika’s
mansion that the young Minamoto exile was placed. In the valley, nearer the
course of the stream, lay the estate of Hojo Tokimasa, who, of Taira descent,
had taken the name of the district he possessed as his own. This Tokimasa, a
humble distant relation of the great Ise Heishi chieftain, was entrusted with the
duty of seeing to it that his neighbouring “laid”, Ho Sukechika, should be
strict in the watch and ward he exercised over the boy committed to his charge.
Accordingly Yoritomo, endowed with an unusual measure of Minamoto precocity,
soon perceived that if he were ever to retrieve the disastrously fallen fortunes
of the great and illustrious house of which he was now the head, he must be
careful in all his goings and comings, and sayings and doings. So, as he grew
to man’s estate, his self-control, his mastery over his passions, or rather of
the expression of them, his unfailing cheerfulness in all circumstances, and,
above all, his unvaried courtesy towards, and consideration for, all he came in
contact with, won him an astonishing popularity among the professed clients of
the house which had wrecked his own. To say that he was of dauntless courage,
that he made himself a master of all the arts and accomplishments of the
warrior, is unnecessary; for he was of Seiwa-Genji stock. But the untutored
military ardour and gallantry of the warlike Minamoto had time and again been
the source of their undoing; and this consideration Yoritomo took deeply to
heart. So during his long exile of twenty years, he pondered profoundly over
the lessons of the past and of recent history; and, reading the puzzling signs
of the disordered times with astounding prescience, when the hour struck for
him to emerge on the political stage to play his part in the national drama, he
proved himself to be the possessor of. if not the best equipped, at all events
the most original mind in the realm of constructive statesmanship that had
hitherto appeared in Japan.
A few years before his great opportunity came in 1180,
he had got into serious trouble with his warder, Ito Sukechika. His graces of
person, his manly accomplishments, his polished and winning manners had easily
enabled him to conquer the affections of Ito’s daughter. When Ito learned that
he had become the grandfather of a Minamoto, his wrath was unbounded, and
Yoritomo had to flee for his life, and put himself under the protection of Hojo
Tokimasa.
Here again in course of time the relations between
Yoritomo and Tokimasa’s eldest daughter, Masa, by his first wife, became a good
deal more than friendly. It is said that Tokimasa knew nothing of this; to
judge from subsequent developments the probabilities are that he knew about it
very well. However, any marriage alliance between his house and the head of the
proscribed Minamoto clan might very well cost him his life. Accordingly, in the
course of his return from one of his visits to Kyoto, he betrothed his daughter
to the Acting-Governor of Tzu, Taira Kanetaka. On the
very night of the wedding the Lady Masa and Yoritomo figured as protagonists in
an incident such as is commemorated in the Border ballads of “Lochinvar” and “Jock
o’ Hazledean.” Like “Fosters, Fenwicks,
and Musgraves,” Kanetaka and his Taira kinsmen “mounted”
and “rode and ran”; but in spite of all their spurring the Lady Masa “wasna seen.” The Hojos, pretending to be hotly indignant,
joined in the hue and cry; and most probably carefully confined their search to
the wrong quarters. At all events, what is highly significant is that, when
Yoritomo and Tokimasa rose in 1180, their first step was to send 80 cavaliers
to kill the Acting-Governor Kanetaka, and to fire his
house. Then, shortly after this, the nuptials of Yoritomo and the Lady Masa
were publicly celebrated.
In May, or June, 1180, Yoritomo’s uncle, Yukiiye, had
arrived in the East with Prince Mochihito’s summons to the Minamoto to rise in
arms, and had handed a copy of the document to Yoritomo. The latter’s first
step was to show it secretly to his warder. Hojo Tokimasa; and the two were preparing
to move, when news came down about the affair of the Bridge of Uji and the
subsequent death of Prince Mochibito. This might have
served to keep them quiet; but a few days later, a message was received from
Yoritomo’s confidential agent in the capital that the Taira were about to
exterminate the Minamoto, and that Yoritomo should at once make good his escape
into Mutsu. This intelligence, backed by the robust counsels of His Reverence Mongaku Shonin, who practically urged that
“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.”
decided the plotters; and in July, Yoritomo secretly
dispatched trusty emissaries to summon all the Minamoto clansmen and
dependants to arms
This Mongaku Shonin was a
typical figure of the age. Endo Morito, as he was
originally called, lost his father at an early age, and was brought up by his
uncle, Haruki Michiyoshi. Before eighteen he had got a commission in the
Guards, and at that age he became enamoured of his beautiful cousin, Kesa Gozen, the wife of a fellow-officer,
Minamoto Wataru. When the lady steadfastly rejected his suit, the foiled lover
threatened to kill her aged mother if she did not yield to his wishes and
consent to the death of her husband,—or even if she informed on him. Thereupon
the Lady Kesa pretended to give way, and appointed a
night when Endo might say her husband. On that night, however, she persuaded
her husband to be absent; and dressing her hair in male fashion, and donning
his dress, lay down in his usual place. Presently the assassin stole into the
chamber and severed the head of his victim at a blow. When he held it up and inspected
it in the semi-darkness, and realised what had actually happened, his feelings
may be imagined. In horror and remorse he rushed to a temple, confessed his
crime, shaved his head, and though it was the very depth of winter, went out
and stood for twenty one days under the icy flood of a waterfall. His penance
over, he took the name of Mongaku, and devoted
himself to reconstructing the temple on Mount Takao. While on his rounds
begging for this purpose, he had, after forcing himself into the residence of
Shirakawa II been disrespectful to that Sovereign; and for this offence had
been exiled to Izu In 1179. It is said that while the ex-Emperor was strictly
confined in the Fukuwara (’June to December 1180) Mongaku found his way into his presence, and obtained a Decree from him commanding Yori-tomo
to take arms to free the Emperor from the tyranny of the Tairas. This account
may not be altogether authentic: but what is certain is that Yoritomo repaired
the temple of Takao made Mongaku its superior, and
always treated him with much regard.
Meanwhile Yoritomo was deep in secret counsel with
some half score of the lending gentry of Izu and Sagami. A perusal of the list
of their names reveals a highly significant, if not an astounding fact. There
was only one or two Minamoto among them; two were of Fujiwara descent, while
the Hojos, the Miuras, the Chibas,
and the Dois were all Tairas And these were only a few of the Kwanto Tairas
that arrayed themselves under the white banner of the Minamotos in the
internecine strife against the red flag of their own house. On the other hand,
many of the Kwanto Minamoto were at first distinctly hostile to Yoritomo’s
cause, and had to be reduced by force of arms.
This great contest was by no manner of means the
simple struggle between Taira and Minamoto it is usually represented to have
been. The fact is that without the whole-hearted and enthusiastic support of
the most prominent of the Taira gentry in the Kwanto, Yoritomo’s cause would
have been even more hopeless than that of Yorimasa’s had just proved to be. Among their other cardinal mistakes the Ise Heishi, on
acquiring what was virtually supreme power in Kyoto, had assumed the insolent
airs of the Fujiwaras and other Court nobles; and had time and again treated
their country cousins from the Kwanto with the scant courtesy accorded to poor
relations, whose roughness and rusticity of manner made them “impossibilities”
in the fashionable aristocratic circles of the fastidious and luxurious
capital. Besides, all those plums in the pudding of office—Provincial
Governorships—as they were regarded by the Kwanto Taira, were, together with
the still richer posts, carefully reserved by the Ise Heishi for themselves.
For years before 1180 all this had been the subject of discussion and the
origin of bitter remarks in many a Taira household in the Kwanto. Now, among
all the favoured and pampered Ise Heishi, who had so very cheaply risen to
supremacy in Japan, there was no one, and never had been any one, of the mental
capacity of their obscure Kwanto cousin Hojo Tokimasa, who had been “ honoured
” with the post of co-warder of Yoritomo in 1160.
At that date Tokimasa was a young man of twenty-two,
nine years older than his ward. Each independently had kept watching and
analysing the progressive phases of the political situation; and when nearly a
score of years later on, as mature men, they frankly, though secretly, opened
their minds to each other, they found that their views were identical and their
interests the reverse of antagonistic. Besides, the masculine-minded Lady Masa
was at once a model wife and a most dutiful daughter. Hojo Tokimasa’s alert
intelligence must have been able to divine the real drift of the turbid stream
of tendency long before the death of Shigemori on September 3, 1179. The
premature and unfortunate death of that honest and capable, though not
intellectually great, prospective Ise Heishi chieftain must have served to
convince him that nothing under Heaven could now preserve Kiyomori and his
heir, the common place poltroon Munemori, from riding for a fall. At this time,
or even before this time, be must have come to a full understanding with his
“prisoner"—and son-in-law. Tokimasa had acquired great influence among his
Taira kinsmen in Sagami, and in the provinces across the Bay, who were
frequently his guests. If we duly consider all this, it will perhaps become not
very difficult to understand how it was that so much devoted Kwan to Taira
support was accorded to Minamoto Yoritomo, whom the astute Mojo Tokimasa had
almost undoubtedly aided and allotted in playing the role of a Japanese “Jock
o’ Hazledean”—with his own strong-minded eldest
daughter as the “bride, sae comely to be seen.” It is usual to impute a large
share of Yoritomo’s administrative and organising success to Oe Hiromoto, a
descendant of the able and illustrious Tadafusa. It
is impossible to question the political and administrative ability and
originality of the distinguished Hiromoto, who attached himself to Yoritomo’s
fortunes in this year of 1180. But on the other hand, in all really large
questions of policy and diplomacy it is equally impossible to deny the supreme
importance of the services of that Taira Achitophel. Hojo Tokimasa, to the
cause of his son-in-law Yoritomo of the Minamoto.
At this date a certain Taira Tomochika, a relative of Kanetaka, the Acting-Governor of Izu, was harrying the county
in pretty much the same fashion as Minamoto Tametomo had done ten or a dozen
years before. So this was made an excuse for arming by the conspirators, who
forged an order from Prince Mochihito to punish him. With this document tied to
his standard Yoritomo crossed the Hakone pass at the head of 300 men and
advanced into Sagami on September 11, 1180. Three nights before, Hojo Tokimasa
with 80 men had burned the Acting-Governor’s mansion over his head and killed
him.
Yoritomo and his little band posted themselves on Ishibashiyama (Stone-Bridge-Hill); and here they found
themselves confronted by a hostile force of 3,000 men under Oba Kagechika, a Taira, whose brother was with Yoritomo; while
unknown to them a body of 300 under Ito Sukechika was advancing from Izu to
fall upon their rear. The night of September 14 set in tempestuously with a
rousing wind and a pouring rain. It was in the midst of this tempest that Oba
and Ito delivered their attack. Yoritomo’s men fought desperately and held out
till daylight. But numbers told at last; and the survivors had to flee.
Yoritomo escaped with the greatest difficulty. After a romantic series of
adventures, in the course of which he was on the verge of capture by his
pursuers on more than one occasion, he at last found safety in the wild
recesses of the Hakone mountain. Hence he worked his way towards the entrance
to Yedo Bay; and joined by the Miura and various
other adherents passed over to the Awa side. In Awa he found ready partisans in
the Oyama, Shimakobe, and others, while the Sagami
gentry kept coming over the water to join him. In a few days he was strong
enough to begin his march up the coast and round the head of the gulf. In
Shimosa, the Chibas and others came in; and by the
time he reached the left bank of the Sumida he found himself in command of a
force of 10,000 men. From Kadzusa he had not got the support he had expected,
and he began to suspect the good faith of the Vice-Governor, Taira Hirotsune,
on whose cooperation he had counted. However, while Yoritomo was encamped on
the Sumida, Hirotsune appeared at the head of 20,000 troops. The army now
crossed the stream and advanced into Musashi, where all the local chiefs
hastened to join it. When it presently passed into Sagami, not only the
waverers, but such former active opponents as Hatakeyama Shigetada rallied to the white flag. On reaching the Pacific coast again, Yoritomo
established himself at Kamakura.
Here, however, his first sojourn was a brief one. From
Awa, Hojo Tokimasa had been dispatched on a mission to Kai, to rouse the
Minamotos of that and the neighbouring provinces. The chief Minamoto family
there was the Takeda; and round the Takeda chieftains the mountain warriors
eagerly rallied. Hojo Tokimasa was on the point of sending his force to join
Yoritomo, then just crossing the Sumida, when instructions from the latter
arrived requesting the Takedas to pour into Suruga,
sweep it clear of Taira officials and partisans, and then retire to the Rise
stream. Here, they were told, an army from the Kwanto would presently be thrown
forward to join them. The Takedas overran Suruga
easily enough. Soon the Kamakura troops, with Yoritomo in command, defiled
across the Ashigara Pass; and by November 9, 1189, the combined forces, 27.0(10
strong, had advanced to the left bank of the River Fuji and encamped there. On
the opposite bank the red pennon was gaily fluttering in the breeze; and under
it were 50,000 tired and weary Taira troops, who had been hurried hot-foot up
from Kyoto and the country beyond.
Kiyomori had been greatly pleased when Oba Kagechika’s messenger had brought him the news of Stone
Bridge Hill. But when post after post from the Kwanto kept coming in with
intelligence of nothing but defection among the most trusted, if not trusty,
Taira partisans in that quarter, he was very disagreeably surprised. Then, to
heap evil upon evil, came the news that in Shinano there was a separate and
independent Minamoto revolt, and that Yoshinaka, the head of it, had not only
beaten Ogasawara, the Taira Governor of the province, but that he had reduced Kodzuke
to the south, and might soon be expected to lie raiding the Taira province of
Echigo to the north. As Kiyomori was the grandfather of the infant Emperor, an
Imperial commission to chastise the rebels was very readily procured for his
grandson, Koremori, who, accompanied by Kiyomori’s youngest brother, Tadanori,
and other members of the Taira family, had now, on November 9, 1180, arrived on
the right bank of the arrowy current of the Fuji.
The accounts of what then took place are obscure and
conflicting. What seems probable is that the Takedas,
on reducing Suruga to Minamoto subjection, had not fallen back to the Kise
stream. At all events it is likely that a part at least of their forces had
remained in Western Suruga, and that these now found themselves on the left
dank of the Taira army. What is clear is that November 13, 1180 had been fixed
by the general staffs of both the armies as the day for opening an action with
the usual preliminary arrow-flight, and that this action was never fought. On
the night of the 12th-13th November, one of the Takedas came in on the Taira rear; and the resulting confusion was such as ensued when
Gideon and his three hundred fell upon the hosts of Midian at the beginning of
the middle watch. Just at this moment the Taira chiefs, who had been assembled
in a council of war for hours, were approaching a decision. They had been
astounded by the virtual unanimity and the enthusiastic devotion of the Eastern
gentry in support of what they affected to call the rebel cause. For the Tairas
to advance into a country where feeling was so plainly and so bitterly against
them would be highly imprudent. Supposing they were to meet with a defeat beyond
the Ashigara Pass, the Kwanto would simply prove a death trap for them. Far
better to fall back upon their base in the West, and there stand upon the
defensive-offensive. Such seems to have been the general consensus of opinion
arrived at the moment when the Takeda chief fell upon the rear of the Taira
camp. This proved to be the clinching argument. When day dawned not a single
red pennon was to be seen beside the Fuji stream.
Yoritomo was for pursuing and advancing upon Kyoto.
But, fortunately for him, he listened to the remonstrances of his leading
officers, who insisted that the better strategy was to return and make his base
perfectly secure. In Shimotsuke were the Nitta, and in Hitachi the
Satake,—Minamoto families both,—but both hostile to Yoritomo and his cause.
Ultimately the Nitta gave in their adhesion without any fighting. But it was
far otherwise in the case of Satake Hideyoshi, who in his stronghold of Kanasa
held out stubbornly and gallantly against a strong investing force. At last the
fortress fell through the treachery of one of Hideyoshi’s kinsmen; but
Hideyoshi himself succeeded in making good his retreat to the North. Soon after
an arrangement was arrived at between him and Yoritomo, who however continued
to stand in such wholesome dread of his northern neighbour that when first summoned
to Court in 1183 he dared not leave Kamakura lest it should be attacked in his
absence. Before the year was out Yoritomo was in possession of Totomi, Suruga, Izu, and seven of the eight provinces of
the Kwanto. The remaining one, Kodzuke, had meanwhile been overrun by
Yoritomo’s cousin and rival, the brilliant leader, Yoshinaka.
It will be remembered that Yoshitomo’s eldest son,
Yoshihira, had made his first campaign at the age of fifteen, when he
vanquished and killed his own uncle Yoshikata, in Musashi. Yoshihira at that
time instructed one of his retainers to kill his uncle’s two-year-old son; but
the retainer, not much in love with the commission, had the child safely
smuggled out of the province, and reported that he had been duly made away
with. Yoshinaka, as he was afterwards called, was consigned to the care of
Nakahara Kaneto, whose estates lay in the mountain wilds of South-Western
Shinano where the Kiso takes its rise and gathers its earliest affluents. Here
Yoshinaka grew up to be a mighty man of war. When Prince Mochihito’s summons
reached him he was eight and twenty years of age, six years younger than his
cousin, Yoritomo. He promptly responded to the appeal, routed Ogasawara, the
Taira Governor of the province, and then pushed on into Kodzuke and reduced the
greater part of that province. When winter put an end to the brief campaign of
1180, the Minamoto chiefs had, indeed, ample reason for congratulating
themselves on its results.
Next year, Kiyomori died in March; and about May the
Tairas braced themselves for a great effort, and summoned all their clansmen to
arms. As this was the year of famine and pestilence the result was
disappointing; it was with great difficulty that a force of 20,000 men was set
afoot. However it proved sufficient to inflict a crushing defeat upon
Yoritomo’s uncle Yuki iye, who had meanwhile seized the province of Owari, and
to drive him back upon the Kwanto. After this there was a long lull of some
fourteen months in military operations,—the pest was working its ravages in
Kyoto and in the Taira country.
Echigo was the seat of the powerful Jo family, of
Taira stock. Unlike the Kwanto Tairas, it had remained steadfast to the cause
of its brethren, the Ise Heishi; and in response to an urgent appeal from
Munemori, the Jo chieftain in July 1182 raised a great force and threw himself
upon Yoshinaka. The results were terribly disastrous to the Taira cause. Jo was
utterly beaten; and Yoshinaka promptly overran Echigo, and then, wheeling round
to the left, he swept Etchu, Kaga, Noto, and Echizen
clear of Tairas and Taira partisans. In a few months he had wrested 10,000
square miles of territory from the supporters of the red flag. As winter was
then coming on, and the snow lay many feet deep in the Hokurikudo and the
passes leading thereinto from the capital, the Tairas had to resign themselves
to the situation till the soft and balmy winds of spring were abroad. Meanwhile
they worked hard at bringing up every available man from the West, where they
had succeeded in crushing all the malcontents; and late in April, or early in
May, 1183, a host of 100,000 men was poured into Echizen to make an end of
Yoshinaka.
The position of the latter at this time was indeed
perilous, for just a little before his own cousin Yoritomo had sent 10,000 men
up the Usui Pass to attack him. Jealousy, envy, suspicion, and cold-heartedness
were the great moral weaknesses of Yoritomo. Yoshinaka’s sudden and brilliant
success in Shinano and Kodzuke, although at first relieving him from a great anxiety,
had not been entirely pleasing to his cousin, for Yoshinaka had owed absolutely
nothing to Yoritomo, and so had shown no very great inclination to be
subservient to him. The Takeda chieftain had proposed a marriage alliance
between a daughter of his house and Yoshinaka’s son to Yoshinaka, but Yoshinaka
had rejected the overture. This refusal gave great offence; and the Takedas, now meeting Yoritomo day by day, kept on
slandering Yoshinaka to him. Yoshinaka was about to marry a daughter of Taira
Shigemori, and to join the Tairas in crushing Yoritomo,—such was a fair sample
of the tales the Takedas kept pouring into the ears
of the envious, jealous, and profoundly suspicious Lord of Kamakura. How far Hojo
Tokimasa was concerned in all this it is difficult to say. One of his daughters
had been married into the Takeda house; and Tokimasa’s dearest and chiefest thought was to make himself the real master in the
Minamoto counsels. It was of supreme importance to him that all inconvenient
rivals of his son-in-law, Yoritomo, should be removed from the scene,—quietly
and justly and decorously, if possible; but if not so possible, then removed
anyhow. Then, just at this time, Yoritomo had difficulties with a certain Shida
Yoshihiro; and the latter, getting the worst of it, had fled up the Usui Pass
and taken service with Yoshinaka. And as if all this were not enough, Uncle
Yukiiye, who had been so handsomely and summarily beaten out of Owari by the
famished Taira in the plague year, had contrived to add his quota to the
embroilment of the cousins. After kicking his heels for months in Kamakura, he
had pressed Yoritomo to give him the Governorship or Protectorship of a province. Yoritomo in reply told him to go and conquer provinces for
himself as he (Yoritomo) and Yoshinaka had done. Thereupon Uncle Yuki-iye also
saw fit to take an abrupt departure up the Usui Pass. The worst feature in the
proceeding. perhaps, was that he had taken a thousand horse-bowmen with him.
The net outcome of all this was that a Kamakura force was sent up into Shinano
to kill Yoshinaka. At this juncture Yoshinaka showed an unusual amount of good
sense,—a quality in which he proved himself to be signally deficient a year or
so later on when success had turned his head. When his retainers urged him to
fight Yoritomo, he remarked to them that internal dissensions had reduced the
house of Minamoto to impotence and made it the laughing-stock of the Empire.
Accordingly, they must all promptly retreat into Echigo, and leave Yoritomo’s
men to do their will in Shinano. When Yoritomo heard of this, he recalled his
troops. Yoshinaka was warned about Uncle Yuki-iye’s peculiarities; and in compliance
with his cousin’s suggestion sent his son, Yoshitaka, to Kamakura, to be
betrothed to Yoritomo’s daughter.
Meantime, while this comedy of family errors was being
enacted the snows were melting, and presently the head of the Taira columns had
defiled through the Omi-Echizen passes. Yoshinaka dispatched two of his best
officers with very scanty forces to hold the strong strategic position of Hi-uchi-yawa at all costs. These men
did their duty well; but they were finally overwhelmed by sheer weight of
numbers. The loss of this fortress was a serious blow to the fortunes of
Yoshinaka; it added immensely to Taira prestige, and all the Samurai of Echizen
hastened to range themselves under the red pennon. A little later the
Southerners encountered Uncle Yuki-iye in Kaga, and pushed him into Noto, where
he was beaten at Shio-san. While one Taira division
was left to deal with him, the main body pressed on into Etchu.
Meanwhile Yoshinaka had got his forces together. Advancing from Echigo he
caught the main Taira host in a trap at Tonami and cut it to pieces, some accounts
putting its losses at the almost incredible figure of 50,000. The news of this
relieved the pressure on Yuki-iye in Noto; and after Yoshinaka had again beaten
the Tairas at the Kurikara Pass, uncle and nephew
joined forces. At Shinowara the Tairas sustained
another bloody defeat, and after this they were simply hunted along the road
all the way to Seta, near the capital. From hence Yuki-iye advanced south
towards Yamato, while Yoshinaka encamped on Hi-ei-zan.
Taira troops had been dispatched from the capital to hold Seta and Uji, but
their commanders lost heart and fell back. Meanwhile Minamoto Yukitsuna and Ashikaga Yoshikane were threatening the city from Kawachi and Tamba respectively.
Munemori had appealed to the monks of Hi-ei-zan for suport, offering them
tempting inducements; but so far from listening favourably to him, they joined
Yoshinaka. Munemori now resolved upon flight; and in spite of the remonstrances
of his stronger-minded kinsmen, the capital was evacuated by his orders on August
14, 1183. On that day Munemori fired his mansion; and, taking with him the boy
Emperor, his eldest brother, the Emperor’s mother, and the Sacred Sword and
Seal, he set out for the West. It was his intention to make the Cloistered
Emperor accompany him also; but on the previous night (August 13-14) Shirakawa
II escaped and took refuge on Hi-ei-zan. The
Kwampaku, Motomichi, also made his escape, while the youthful Emperor’s two
youngest brothers were also left behind. On September 5, Munemori’s party
reached Dazaifu in Kyushu, and there the Court was temporarily established.
Immediately after the flight of the Tairas, the
Cloistered Emperor returned to the capital escorted by Yoshinaka at the head of
30,000 men, and assumed the direction of affairs. One of his first acts was to
strip more than 200 Tairas of their ranks and offices, and to declare the
possessions of the clan forfeited. Then came the question of rewards. Yoritomo
was at once summoned to Court, it being Shirakawa II’s intention to honour the
cousins at the same time. But Yoritomo could not come to Court at that time on
account of his apprehensions of what Satake might do in his absence. However,
when it came to the publication of the rewards for meritorious services,
Yoshinaka was displeased to find himself placed second to Yoritomo. Yet, he had
been handsomely dealt with on the whole. The fifth grade of Court rank was not
much in itself perhaps; but Yoshinaka was accorded a special privilege of
audience. At the same time he was appointed Commander of the Left Wing of the
Cavalry in the Imperial Guard and Governor of Echigo. But what was most substantial
of all perhaps was the free gift to him of no fewer than 140 of the 500
forfeited Taira manors. When he expressed his dissatisfaction with all this, he
was made Governor of Iyo instead of Echigo. Iyo was in the hands of the Tairas,
and Yoshinaka could find his profit in wresting it from them; Echigo he had
already overrun, and was so strong there that it did not much matter to him who
was the Governor.
But this was only the beginning of the troubles
between the Court and Yoshinaka. The latter had risen at the summons of Prince
Mochihito. Upon the death of that Prince (1180) his son had become a priest and
retired to the Hokurikudo for safety. This youth Yoshinaka had brought up with
him to the capital, and he was determined to have him placed on the throne as a
recognition of the distinguished services of his father. Now that the boy
Emperor, Antoku, had deserted the capital, it was
resolved that he should be replaced by a new sovereign. His third and fourth
brothers, five and four years old respectively, were brought before their
grandfather, the Cloistered Emperor. The elder commenced to cry, while the
younger crawled up and began to play round the old man’s knees. His tears on
this occasion cost the elder boy the throne of Japan, and his younger brother
was proclaimed Emperor (Go-Toba or Toba IU). But Yoshinaka had insistently
pressed the claims of the Hokuriku Prince, on the grounds of the merits of his
father. The Cloistered Emperor caused it to be explained to him that the Prince
was ineligible on two grounds: first he was the son of the son of a concubine,
and secondly he had become a priest. Yoshinaka continued to press his point in
spite of all this, however; and as it was ill work arguing with perhaps the
ablest captain in Japan enthusiastically supported by 50,000 trenchant blades
in Kyoto, where there was now no military force except those wild men from the
Shinano and Echigo mountains, Shirakawa II suggested that the question of the
succession should be decided by “divination.” Yoshinaka at once agreed, and his
protégé won! When, in spite of all this, the Hokuriku Prince was set aside,
Yoshinaka, we are told, gnashed his teeth with rage. This was on September 8,
1183, a little more than three weeks after the flight of the Tairas from Kyoto.
Yoshinaka’s best troops were rough and rude
mountaineers from Central Japan, whose appearance and mien and manners were far
more uncouth to the citizens of the luxurious capital than were those of the
Highlanders to the English in 1745. Yoshinaka himself was entirely
country-bred; he was no scholar; and he cared nothing whatsoever for “polite
accomplishments.” Hence he got laughed at by the well-bred, effeminate Court
grandees and fashionable dandies of Kyoto; and he was wreak enough and foolish
enough to allow that to ruffle his equanimity. Purposely, perhaps, he allowed
his troops to get seriously out of hand. In the capital they committed many
outrages; and roaming about the neighbouring country they established
themselves by force in the manors and villas of the courtiers, and lived there
at free quarters. When Yoritomo sent word that he could not come up to Court,
the Cloistered Emperor found it highly advisable to conciliate Yoshinaka, who was
made Governor of Shinano and Kodzuke in addition to his other posts. Meanwhile,
his ex- Majesty sent down an order to Yoritomo to occupy all the manors and
districts in the Tokaido, Tosando, and Hokurikudo which had been seized upon by
the Tairas, and after due investigation to restore them to their original
owners. Later on, when this came to the knowledge of Yoshinaka, his jealousy of
his Kamakura cousin was still further intensified. Then, in October, Yoshinaka
contrived to offend Uncle Yuki-iye very deeply; and Yuki iye began to work
against his nephew in secret. With no common enemy immediately in front of them
the Minamoto chieftains had fallen victims to the great curse of their house internal
dissension. Munemori’s precipitate evacuation of the capital on August 15th had
turned out to be no bad stroke of strategy after all! It had afforded the
Minamotos an opportunity to fall out among themselves, while the Tairas were
gathering strength for another great effort.
At Dazaifu, most of the local chiefs had at first
rallied to the red standard, but a few weeks afterwards a force raised in Bungo
by the orders of the Cloistered Emperor drove the Tairas from Dazaifu to Hakata
and thence to Hakozaki, and finally Kyushu had to be
evacuated. The opposite province of Nagato was friendly; and with the
assistance of the Acting-Governor of it, Antoku Tenno
was safely escorted to Yashima, in Sanuki, by water. Thanks mainly to the
services of a certain Taguchi, the whole island of Shikoku declared for the
Tairas, who now fortified themselves at Yashima and built a palace for the
young Emperor there. The Sanyodo also was favourable to their cause and by
November there were strong Taira forces afoot in that circuit.
To deal with these, Uncle Yuki-iye, who had been made
Governor of Bizen, was on the point of being dispatched from the capital, when
Yoshinaka pointed out to the Cloistered Emperor that while Yuki iye’s courage
could not be questioned, he was a most unfortunate commander, continually
getting badly beaten, and that he would find the task too much for him.
Yoshinaka was then pressed to assume command in person; and he dispatched three
of his officers to deal with the Tairas in Bizen, while he got ready for a
descent on Shikoku and for taking Yashima.
In December 1183, Yoshinaka’s officers were completely
routed by the Tairas at Mizushima on the borders of Bitchu and Bizen. At that
date Yoshinaka was in Harima making preparations to cross to Yashima; but he
had to hurry on towards Bitchu to repair the errors of his sub-commanders
there. The first body of troops he dispatched deserted and went over to the red
flag, and while he was engaged in reducing them he was startled by the
intelligence that a Kamakura army of 30,000 men under Yoshitsune was
approaching the capital. Although instructed by the Cloistered Emperor to
remain on the spot to prosecute the campaign, Yoshinaka abandoned his projected
descent on Yashima, and hurried up to Kyoto to prevent the Kamakura army from
entering it. As a matter of fact, there was no Kamakura army at all approaching
at that time; but Yoshinaka distrusted Yoritomo profoundly and dreaded him more
than he did the Taira. He now privately consulted Uncle Yuki-iye about the advisability
of evacuating Kyoto, and falling back upon and holding the provinces they had
conquered,—Shinano, Kodzuke, and the Hokurikudo. Uncle Yuki-iye promptly
informed the Cloistered Emperor of this, eking out the tale by saying that it
was Yoshinaka’s purpose to carry off his ex-Majesty’s sacred person with him
into the snowy wilds of the central mountains. When Yoshinaka found out that
Uncle Yuki-ive had not only basely betrayed his
counsels, but had slandered him grossly, Uncle Yuki-iye found it convenient to
get out of Kyoto. With his own retainers he advanced into Harima to meet the
Tairas, by whom, as usual, he was presently beaten disastrously. He then took
refuge in Kawachi; and here Higuchi, one of Yoshinaka's four devoted
companions, was looking for him, when Yoshinaka’s fate overtook him.
It seems tolerably clear that Uncle Yuki-ive’s character had been read correctly enough by the
astute Yoritomo. In short. Yoritomo was simply a Yuki-iye on a much grander
scale. Both were brave enough personally, neither one nor the other was a
military genius, both were intriguers, but with this difference that while
Yuki-iye’s outlook was the outlook of that vulgar thing called a politician,
Yoritomo could survey the whole general situation from the lofty and elevated
point of view of the statesman. But by nature Yoritomo was cold-hearted,
pitiless, ruthless,—as unscrupulous as Richelieu in his dealings with
opponents, when there was any question of “reasons of State.” Only too many had
ultimately cause to speak of him as the gallant and chivalrous Lannes wrote
about Napoleon during the siege of Dantzig:—“I have always been the victim of
my attachment to him. He only loves you by fits and starts, that is, when he
has need of you”. Such also at bottom was Uncle Yuki-iye’s nature, but on a
much smaller and meaner scale. He had very speedily found out that he had
nothing to expect from Nephew Yoritomo; and he had sense enough to grasp the
fact that Yoritomo never forgave. So when he sped up the Usui Pass with his
thousand horse bowmen to join Nephew Yoshinaka in Shinano, he was well aware
there was henceforth but short shrift for him if he ever found himself at the
mercy of the Lord of Kamakura. By the rough-mannered, simple-minded,
straightforward, and chivalrous Yoshinaka, in spite of the warnings from
Kamakura, Uncle Yuki-iye had been treated with the greatest kindness and
forbearance, even when he had proved himself to be hopelessly impossible as a
commander-in-chief. When Yoshinaka represented to the Cloistered Emperor that Yuki-ive was unequal to the task of reducing the Tairas in the
West (October or November 1183) he was strictly honest, and was acting in the
real interests of Yuki-iye as well as those of the Minamoto and Imperial cause
at large. Uncle Yuki-iye had meanwhile, and all along, been exerting himself
only too successfully to embitter Yoshinaka against Yoritomo,—if the two
cousins could be brought to eat each other up, Yuki-iye could then count on
being able to play the leading role on the political stage. Hence the poisonous
and insidious counsels poured into the ear of Nephew Yoshinaka. And behind
Nephew Yoritomo in Kamakura stood Yoritomo’s father-inlaw,
Hojo Tokimasa, infinitely subtle in his devices for advancing his own interests
and those of his house.
Some of the courtiers, exasperated by the excesses of
Yoshinaka’s troops, urged the Cloistered Emperor to muster a force to deal with
them. The monasteries of Hi-ei-zan and Miidera were
asked to send men to protect the ex-Emperor’s palace of Hosodji, whither the
child Emperor Toba II was presently removed for safety. The command of this
garrison was entrusted to Taira Tomoyasu, the Kebiishi, one of the favourites
of the Cloistered Emperor, who had shortly before come into collision with
Yoshinaka and had got the worst of it. On January 4, 1184, Yoshinaka attacked
the Hosodji, slaughtered the garrison, fired the buildings, and carried off the
Cloistered Emperor as a virtual prisoner. His ex-Majesty, now in mortal dread
of Yoshinaka, did everything he possibly could to placate him; all the former
lands of the Tairas were granted him, while an Imperial decree was dispatched
to Fujiwara Hidehira of Mutsu ordering him to smite Yoritomo. The latter,
instead of doing so, sent a copy of the documents to Yoritomo, who at once
forwarded it to the Cloistered Emperor, asking whether it had not been forged
by Yoshinaka. Shirakawa II now gave Yoshinaka a commission to punish Yoritomo;
but he secretly sent off two of his guards to request Yoritomo to send up
troops to deal with Yoshinaka.
The latter had indeed been carrying things with a high
hand. He had married the daughter of Fujiwara Motofusa and had thereupon made
his new brother-in-law, Moroye, a mere boy of twelve, Kwampaku and head of the
clan, Motomichi having to make way for him in both capacities. Yoshinaka then
caused the Naidaijin and forty-nine other officials to be dismissed. Meanwhile
Yuki-iye had been beaten at Muroyama in Harima by the
Tairas, who on their part had been uniformly successful since they established
themselves at Yashima, and there were flying rumours that they would soon be in
the capital again. It was even asserted that Yoshinaka had proposed to make
common cause with them against Yoritomo, but that the overture, though
favourably received by Munemori, had been rejected by the other chiefs of the
party. It was at this point that the Cloistered Emperor made Yoshinaka Sei-i-tai-shogun (Barbarian-Subduing Great General), while
secret emissaries were on their way to Kamakura to urge Yoritomo to come and
make an end of his cousin (February 1184)!
Meanwhile Yoritomo had been organising the administration
of the provinces he had mastered. He had dispatched the year’s taxes to the
capital under the escort of his brothers Noriyori and Yoshitsune. They had got
as far as Ise when the ex-Emperor’s secret emissaries met them. Courtiers were
at once sent off hot foot to Kamakura, while the two brothers with their 500
men awaited instructions. Yoritomo at once sent off a huge force,—as many as
60,000 men according to some authorities. Its advance was so sudden and so
secret that Yoshinaka was completely taken by surprise. He hastily sent a few
hundred troops to break down the bridges at Seta and Uji, and to obstruct the
enemy there. At Seta his foster-brother Imai Kanehira gallantly held the
passage of the river against 30,000 Easterners under Noriyori for some time;
but at Uji, Yoshitsune’s cavalry swam the stream,
and, breaking the scanty band of Northerners in front of them, came pouring
into the capital in one great continuous overwhelming flood. Yoshinaka and his
captains could only muster stray bodies of a few hundreds here and there; but
almost as soon as formed they were shot down or ridden over in the streets.
Yoshitsune soon contrived to get the person of the Cloistered Emperor into his
hands, and thus baulked Yoshinaka’s project of carrying him off to the North.
Presently it became apparent to Yoshinaka that the only hope left him was to
make good his flight. When, with about a dozen trusty comrades, he got as far
as Awazu, he was joined by Imai Kanehira, who had
just drawn back from Seta, where Noriyori’s men were
now finding their way across the river. Imai urged his friend and lord to
gallop off as fast as his steed could go. “Get back to the Hokurikudo and
Shinano, and hold that as your part of the Empire. Let the Tairas have the West
and Yoritomo the East. I will stay the pursuit here!” Yoshinaka at once dashed
off, but his steed “laired” in a half-frozen rice-field, and he himself was
shot down. On seeing this Imai put the point of his sword between his teeth,
fell off his horse, and drove the blade into his brain. Yoshinaka’s head was
taken and sent to be exposed on the pillory in the capital.
Imai was one of the devoted Shi-ten-no (Four Heavenly
Kings) by whom Yoshinaka was constantly attended. The others were Higuchi
Kanemitsu, Tate Chikatada, and Nenoi Yukichika. Imai ana Higuchi were brothers, sons of
that Nakahara Kanemichi by whom Yoshinaka had been
brought up. Their beautiful sister, Tomoe Gozen,
married Yoshinaka. She constantly kept by his side and commanded a body of
troops in all the battles he took part in. She was one of the thirteen who
accompanied Yoshinaka to Ayazu, where she killed the
Herculean Uchida Iyeyoshi, who tried to seize her. On
the death of Yoshinaka she retired to Tomosugi in Echigo
as a nun, and passed the rest of her days praying for the immortal welfare of
Yoshinaka. Not a few of the women of Japan, in this the truly heroic age of the
nation, were incontestably fine and great.
Such was the lamentable and deplorable end of the
brilliant Asahi Shogun! Yoshinaka was the possessor of military genius of a
very high order; in the field he was incontestably and immeasurably the
superior of Yoritomo, while at his best he was perhaps nearly the equal of his
cousin, Yoshitsune, by whom he had been caught napping, and undone. But a
statesman he was emphatically not; and for Court and Court life he showed
himself absolutely unsuited, while, for him and his sturdy mountaineers, Kyoto
had proved to be a veritable Capua.
Meanwhile the Taira cause was prospering apace. In
Kyushu, the partisans of the red flag had recovered their ground, and Kyushu
troops had hurried up to Yashima, while the Sanindo and Sanyodo were now
entirely in Taira hands. Just about the time the Kamakura army was hurrying up
to deal with Yoshinaka a great Taira host had established itself at the
Fukuwara and was making ready for an advance on the capital. For seven mile,
its tents, or booths, or bivouacs stretched along what is now the course of the
Sanyo Railway, while its east front extended as far as, and rested upon, the
Ikuta wood, through which from the hills to the sea a strong line of
fortifications had been hastily thrown up. On the west, at Ichi-no-tani (West Suma), a huge earthwork faced with stone and
crowned with wooden towers ran across the low ground down to below low-water
mark. A great fleet of warjunks and transports,
anchored close inshore, kept command of the sea. It is likely that the sea came
much further up towards the foot-hills than it does at present, and that the
hills were loftier and steeper and more impracticable than they are now, for
the ravages of the rain-storms of more than seven hundred years must have
worked serious changes on the contour and configuration of such loose-soiled,
sandy country as lies behind and to the west of Kobe. At all events, the Taira
leaders considered the mountain rampart behind them sufficient defence on that
side, and took no very special precautions there.
A few days after the death of Yoshinaka, the
Cloistered Emperor resolved to employ the Kamakura army against the Tairas, and
commissioned its commanders, Noriyori and Yoshitsune, to recover the Sacred
Sword and Seal. On March 19, 1184, 76,000 Easterners started from Kyoto. As
many as 56,000 of these under Noriyori took the direct Harima road; Yoshitsune
with the remainder (20,000) advanced into Tamba, with the intention of fetching
a compass and assailing the Taira entrenchments from the west. In two days both
Minamoto armies were in position for a simultaneous assault on the Taira lines,
both at Ikuta and at Suma. At the time the attack was delivered a strong wind
was blowing, sweeping the dust of the plain before it in swirling, blinding
clouds. The Tairas fought gallantly enough. During the last few months, they
had fought several fierce and determined battles, and had won them all; they
had forgotten all about their frantic race back from Echizen to the capital and
had regained confidence in themselves. So neither Noriyori at Ikuta nor Yoshitsune’s lieutenants at West Suma made any headway at
first; the defence had all the best of it.
It was the genius of Yoshitsune that won the great
battle of Ichi-no-tani. The youngest child of
Yoshitomo and of the Lady Tokiwa, he was now between 24 and 25 years of age.
How it came to pass that his life was spared by the fell Kiyomori in 1160 has
already been told. In due course of time his locks were shorn, and he was
placed as an acolyte in the Temple of Kurama. At eleven he had spelled out the Chronicles
of the House of Minamoto and determined to restore its fallen fortunes. It is
not at all strange, then, that his preceptors found him a listless and
unpromising pupil when they tried to drill him in the Sutras. The Abbot found
there was only one way of keeping him out of mischief, and this was to read Sonshi, the great Chinese military classic, and such works
to him. Then he was all attention. An iron merchant from Mutsu often had
transactions with the monastery; and with him the unruly acolyte had made
friends. In 1174, when he was fifteen, Yoshitsune, as he was afterwards called,
induced this merchant to smuggle him away to Mutsu, where he was well received
by the great feudal chief Fujiwara Hidehira. Along with him had gone the
Herculean Musashi- Bo-Benkei, a more unclerical cleric even than Friar John of
the Funnels, who one day in the pursuit of the gentle art of cutpursing had attacked the harmless-looking young acolyte
on Gojo Bridge in Kyoto and had got a terrible drubbing for his pains.
Yoshitsune had been six years in Mutsu when he heard that his half-brother
Yoritomo had risen against the Taira. During these six years he had assiduously
practised and perfected himself in the military arts and in all warlike
accomplishments. Before he was twenty-one he had acquired an extraordinary
reputation for bravery and ability in Mutsu; and so, when he started to join
Yoritomo, he was able to take 2,000 volunteers with him. The brothers, who had
possibly never seen each other before, met on the banks of the Kise-gawa in Suruga, the day after Yoritomo had fallen back from
the Fujikawa. Early in 1184, in company with his half-brother Noriyori, three
years his senior, Yoshitsune was put in command of the thousand men Yoritomo
dispatched to escort the taxes of the Kwanto up to Kyoto. How he and Noriyori
came to find themselves at the head of a host of 76,000 men has already been
told. In attacking the Taira at Ichi-no-tani they
were acting under the instructions of the Cloistered Emperor, not of Yoritomo,
who had merely commissioned them to crush Cousin Yoshinaka.
The valley of Ichi runs from the shore up to the foot
of a gap in the steep hills behind, called the Hiyodori Pass. At this time the
Hiyodori-goye was supposed to be impracticable for
every four-footed or two-fooled thing save perhaps wild-boar and monkeys. Yoshitsune’s training in Mutsu had been stricter even than
that of a Kwanto-bushi, and he was more proficient
than the best of them in mountain horsemanship.
A contemporary author thus speaks of the Kwanto-bushi and their ways: Their ponderous bows are san-nin-bari (a bow needing three ordinary
men to bend it) or go-nin-bari (five men’s bow); their quivers, which match these bows, hold fourteen or
fifteen bundles of arrows. They are very quick in their release, and each arrow
kills or wounds two or three foemen, the impact being powerful enough to pierce
two or three thicknesses of armour at a time; and they never fail to hit the
mark. Every Daimyo (owner of a great estate) has at least twenty or thirty of
such mounted archers, and even the owner of a small barren estate has two or
three. Their horses are very excellent, for they are carefully selected, while
as yet in pasture, and then trained after their own peculiar fashion. With five
or ten such excellent mounts each, they go out hunting deer or foxes, and
gallop up and down mountains and forests. Trained in these wild methods, they
are all splendid horsemen who know how to ride but never how to fall. It is the
habit of the Kwanto-bushi that if in the field of
battle a father fall, the son will not retreat, or if a son be slain, the lather will not yield, but
stepping over the dead, they will fight to the death.”
Accordingly, learning that the Tairas had trusted to
nature alone for protection to the north, he at once grasped that there was the
key to the position; and so he resolved to attempt the passage of the reputed
impassable Hiyodori gap. With seventy picked horse-bowmen he made his way to
the head of the impracticable pass; and then all poured down into the head of
the Ichi gorge like an avalanche of boulders. Yoshitsune’s purpose in attempting the gap was to find a way of delivering what Sonshi calls the “attack by fire.” While most of the band
fell furiously upon the right rear of the defenders of the earthworks, others
ran about applying the torch to everything that would burn. Soon that quarter
of the camp was a raging sea of devouring flames; and the sparks and blazing
debris, caught up and borne far and wide on the wings of the gale, presently
started conflagrations in the Fukuwara and elsewhere. The uproar and confusion
were terrible, and here and there sections of the Taira host fell into panic.
The assailants meanwhile made a great effort, and swept over the entrenchments
both at West Suinu and Ikuta. To extricate
themselves, the Tairas here and there began to cut each other down; and in the
wild scramble for the junks that ensued many were drowned. But for these junks,
the rout would have been a massacre. As it was, many of the best Taira captains
fell, and their heads were duly collected and sent to the capital. Shigehira,
that fifth son of Kiyomori who had burned the Kofukuji of Nara four years
before, was taken prisoner. Munemori, according to his wont, had made a speedy
discretion the better part of valour; he escaped to Yashima, where the
fragments of the beaten army presently began to reassemble.
Disastrous as the rout of Ichi-no-tani had been, it was by no means fatal to the Taira cause. Its chief material
result had been the loss of the five provinces of Harima, Mimasaka, Bizen, Bitchu,
and Bingo, where Yoritomo presently installed Kajiwara Kagetoki and Doi
Sanehira as Shugo, or Military Protectors. But the
Taira still held Shikoku, part of Kyushu, and the extreme west of the Sanyodo,
while their strong fleet of war junks gave them all but complete command of the
Inland Sea. Apart from the loss of many of their best captains and the
depressing moral effect of defeat, the most unfortunate thing for the Tairas,
in connection with Ichi-no-tani, was that the
incompetent and white-livered Munemori had survived it, to mismanage and
misdirect a flairs till the end. Had his brother Tomomori, or his gallant young
cousin Noritsune, been head of the clan in 1184 and 1185, the fortunes of the
Ise Heishi would doubtless have been very different.
As has been implied, their command of the sea secured
the Tairas complete immunity in Shikoku; and on the mainland nothing serious
was attempted against them for a full six months after Ichi-no-tani and the loss of the five Sanyodo provinces. Noriyori
had gone back to Kamakura; and in October, he arrived in Kyoto at the head of a
strong Eastern army, dispatched by Yoritomo to end matters with the Taira. On
getting his commission from the Cloistered Emperor, he left the capital on October
8, his objective being Nagato and Kyushu. Noriyori did not shine as a
Commander-in-Chief on this occasion. Their command of the sea enabled the
Tairas to land small bands on the left flank of the invaders to obstruct and
worry their advance; and the greatest success Noriyori could boast of was a
small affair against one of these parties at Kojima in Bizen. It was only on
February 13th, 1185, that he reached the Straits of Shimonoseki; and when he
arrived there, it was only to find himself outmanoeuvred by the able Taira Tomomori. Tomomori’s manors were in Nagato, and the Minamoto
invasion touched him most nearly. So, with a fleet of war-junks he suddenly
came down the Inland Sea, and fortified himself in Hikoshima, the island at the
outside (western) entrance to the Straits of Shimonoseki. As the Minamotos had
no fleet they could not cross into Kyushu; and Tomomori had been careful to
have Nagato laid waste. Accordingly Noriyori had to fall back into Suwo perforce, where rations soon became so scanty that the
Kwanto troops began to clamour for a speedy return to Kamakura. On March 4,
1185, Noriyori at last was able to lead his men across the water and land in
Bungo.
Here, as shown by the extant dispatches he sent to
Yoritomo, his position was the reverse of hopeful. The peasants had scattered
to the hills; there were no provisions for his troops; the whole country was in
sympathy with the Taira cause; and even the superior officers in the Kamakura
army were urging a prompt evacuation of the island and a retreat to the Kwanto.
Yoritomo, in several documents, urges Noriyori to hold on. But it is abundantly
plain that Noriyori could not have held on much longer; in fact, but for most
unexpected developments, Taira Tomomori, with his command of the sea, would
have infallibly made Bungo and Kyushu a deathtrap for Noriyori and his Kwanto
braves. Although an able officer, and a fine man, true and loyal to his friends
and relations, as well as to his superiors, Noriyori had clearly shown himself
to be no Yoshinaka, that brilliant military genius whom he had overpowered at Awazu by sheer force of numbers a year before. But
meanwhile, all unknown to him, even a greater than Yoshinaka was hurrying to
his rescue. At no time in the history of Japan,—not even in the great war of
1904-5.—has the transcendent value of supreme military genius been so signally
made manifest as at this crisis. Under the direction of mediocrities like
Noriyori and Munemori the war might have dragged on for years. The re
appearance of Yoshitsune on the scene sufficed to bring it to a brilliant and
decisive conclusion in five short weeks.
After Ichi-no-tani,
Yoshitsune, instead of accompanying Noriyori and the troops back to Kamakura,
had remained in Kyoto. This, and other circumstances, made Yoritomo displeased
with what he considered the self-will of his youngest brother; and when he
submitted a list of names to the Cloistered Emperor for reward and promotion, Yoshitsune’s was not among them. However, by his own
exertions Yoshitsune obtained a commission in the Guards, and the post of Kobiishi,
in which capacity he was responsible for the maintenance of order in the
capital. A little later on, he received the fifth grade of Court rank, and a
special privilege of audience. All this made him so obnoxious to the Lord of
Kamakura that Yoshitsune got no command in the new Eastern force levied to
crush the Tairas.
When four or five months had passed without anything
being achieved, and Noriyori’s starving officers were
urging the abandonment of the campaign, Yoshitsune represented to the
Cloistered Emperor that unless things were pushed more vigorously the
difficulties of reducing the Tairas would be enormously increased. Yoshitsune
thereupon received a commission as Tai Shogun (Great General); and after much
difficulty was allowed to leave Kyoto. A fleet of 420 craft had been got
together at Watanabe in Settsu, where the Military Protector, Kajiwara
Kagetoki, was directing operations; and here Yoshitsune had just arrived, when
a Court messenger appeared to advise him to entrust the expedition against
Yashima to his second-in-command, Kajiwara, and to return to protect Kyoto.
Kajiwara was unwilling to take orders from him; but Yoshitsune determined to
proceed notwithstanding.
On March 21, 1185 (the first anniversary of Ichi-no-tani), there was a terrific tempest; and under cover of it,
Yoshitsune proposed to run over to Shikoku and take the Tairas by surprise. But
Kajiwara refused to expose the armament to what he considered certain
destruction. Yoshitsune thereupon called for volunteers; and a small band of
150 devoted followers manned, and put to sea in, five of the war-junks. With
the storm howling behind them, they made an unusually speedy passage; and all
landed safely at Amako strand in Awa. Capturing the castles here by coups-de
main, they advanced hot-foot upon the Taira headquarters in Yashima. The
towns of Takamatsu and Mure were fired; and the terror-stricken townsmen poured
into Yashima with wild accounts of the great Minamoto host that was
approaching. Munemori’s consternation was overpowering; he at once issued
orders for all the clan to embark and take refuge on board the fleet. The
palace and the fortress were burned before their eyes; and Yoshitsune’s men posted themselves on the beach and began to rain arrows on them.
At this time, a trivial but picturesque incident did
much to disconcert the Tairas. On his visit to Miyajima in 1180, the Emperor
Takakura had presented the temple with thirty fans, each with the hi-no-inaru (the sun’s disc) upon them. When his son, Antoku Tenno, was taken there in the course of his
involuntary wanderings, the priest gave him one of these fans, assuring him
that the disc thereon was the spirit of his father, the late Emperor, which
would cause the arrows of the enemy to recoil upon them. The Tairas now placed
this fan upon the top of a pole erected in the bow of one of their junks; and a
Court lady dared the Minamoto to shoot at it. At Yoshitsune’s request, a certain Nasu no Yoichi Munekata accepted
the challenge. Riding as far into the water as he could, he took cool and
careful aim and launched his bolt. To the consternation of the Tairas the shaft
smote the fan on the rivet, and brought it down in fragments. Omens and
portents were of great consequence in those days; and this incident perhaps did
more to take the heart out of the Tairas and their partisans than had the loss
of their best captains a year before at Ichi-no-tani.
Yet in the ensuing battle some of them fought
gallantly enough,—especially Taira Noritsune, a month or two younger than
Yoshitsune, who brought down some of the best men in the little Minamoto band.
However, the Tairas finally drew off, rounded the promontory, and anchored in
Shido Bay. That night Yoshitsune was joined by Kono Michinobu,
the Minamoto partisan who had been twice hunted from Iyo by the Taira. He
brought thirty war-junks with him; and next day (March 24), Yoshitsune embarked
his men in these, and fell upon the Taira fleet in Shido haven. According to
his usual wont, Munemori promptly took himself out of danger; and, with Antoku Tenno and the whole Taira clan, hurried down the
Inland Sea to take refuge in Hikoshima, where Taira Tomomori had securely
entrenched and fortified himself. When, on March 25, Kajiwara Kagetoki arrived
off Yashima with 410 war-junks flying the white Minamoto pennant, he was deeply
mortified to learn that he must abandon all hope of reaping any crop of laurels
in Shikoku. The palace and fortress of Yashima were a smouldering heap of
ruins; and the Taira fleet was madly and frenziedly racing down the reaches of
the Inland Sea. Yoshitsune had most conclusively proved that there had been
even more than method in his madness when he braved the typhoon on March 21; in
three short days and nights he had accomplished the seemingly impossible.
Yoshitsune was Napoleonic in many ways, not the least important of which was
the unerring prescience with which he gauged the mental and moral qualities and
capabilities or disabilities of the leaders pitted against him. Push Munemori
boldly and unexpectedly, and he would not only infallibly “scuttle” himself,
but he would take many ten thousand times better men along with him.
A month was spent in reducing and organising Shikoku
and in reorganising and adding to the Minamoto fleet. It is to be observed
that, in a rough way, the Minamoto were to the Taira as the Spartans were to
the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War. For generations the Tairas had been
entrusted with the task of dealing with the troublesome pirates of the Inland
Sea; and so, many of them had become expert sailors and naval tacticians. The
Minamotos, called upon to reduce the North to subjection, had always fought on
land. As horsemen the Minamoto were far superior to the Tairas; but on the blue
water, where the Minamotos were no better than so many land lubbers, the Taira
supremacy had hitherto been unquestioned and unchallenged. The last week of
March and the first three weeks of April 1185 were busy weeks for Yoshitsune,
who, originally no sailor himself, was then assiduously converting Kwanto
horse-bowmen into highly efficient marines.
He had early learned that Munemori had fortified the
whole northern side of the Straits of Shimonoseki. Through this narrow sea-pass
of from 700 to 1,700 yards in width, the tides ebb and flow with mill-race
speed for seven miles; and these seven miles had been deliberately selected by
the Tairas as their base. We are told that Munemori had intended to retreat
into Kyushu, but that Noriyori’s force of 30,000 men
in Bungo had prevented him from doing so. If the Taira Intelligence Service had
been even half as efficient as the Japanese Intelligence Service has almost
unfailingly been, Taira Tomomori, if not Taira Munemori, must have known
perfectly well that Noriyori was in no position to prevent the Tairas from
going anywhere they chose to go. The purport of the extant dispatches of
Noriyori to his brother, the Lord of Kamakura, has already been adverted to. If
the Tairas had had a leader of the calibre of Yoshitsune, the fate of Noriyori
and his famished, despondent, and disaffected host of 30,000 Kwan to braves
would have been sealed—and that very speedily too. As things turned out, this
Kyushu army proved sufficient as a containing force, and held the Taira bottled
up in the Straits, while Yoshitsune made ready to deal them the last staggering
fatal blow.
That blow was delivered on the forenoon of April 25,
1185. It would have come a day or two earlier, but for the blinding deluge of
rain that began to fall just as Yoshitsune’s fleet
was getting under way on the 22nd. His conduct now was exactly the opposite of
what it had been a month before. In March the problem which he so brilliantly
and daringly solved was the same as that which baffled Napoleon in 1804-5,—to
make a descent on an opposite island whose coast was protected by a vastly
superior fleet. At that date Yoshitsune wished to avoid a naval action at all
costs. Now he was ready to encounter the Tairas on their own element, for in
everything, except perhaps in seamanship, he was superior to them. Even in
seamanship the inferiority of the Minamotos was no longer specially marked. The
whole of Suwo and nearly the whole of Nagato had gone
over to them; and from these provinces, as well as from Shikoku, they had been
joined by many chiefs who brought war-junks manned by seasoned crews along with
them. What the exact total of vessels under Yoshitsune was cannot be ascertained;
most accounts put it at about 700; the Azuma Kagami raises the figure to 840.
All agree that the Tairas had no more than 500 at this time. And the worst of
it was that not all of these could be depended upon.
At the time they settled in Shikoku, after being
hunted from Kyushu, the Tairas had owed much to the services of a local
magnate, Taguchi Shigeyoshi by name, who was in consequence entrusted by them
with high command. Latterly, however, Taguchi bad become disheartened by
Munemori’s incompetence and the disasters it had brought upon the Tairas.
Taguchi had taken part in the general flight from Shikoku; but he had left his
son with 3.000 men to hold his ground in Iyo. This son soon surrendered, and
was so handsomely treated by Yoshitsune that he was easily persuaded to write
to his father urging him to abandon the Taira cause as hopeless and come over
to the Minamotos, by whom he would be well received. Yoshitsune was presently
assured of the co-operation of a powerful ally in the very heart of the Taira
camp and counsels.
On the 22nd, the whole Minamoto fleet was at the
island of Oshima in Suwo. From here Miura Yoshizumi,
who had been through the straits several times, and was well acquainted with
the topography, was dispatched with a considerable squadron to make a
reconnaissance in force. He advanced and anchored about two miles from the
Taira outposts at Dan-no-ura. Intelligence of this at
once brought the Taira Admiral, Tomomori, up from Hikoshima with every
available craft; and a line of battle was formed just beyond the spot where the
straits begin to widen out into the Inland Sea. In a stirring address to his assembled
captains Tomomori gave them to understand that there must be no more
retreating,—on this occasion it was simply “do or die.” His remarks were
enthusiastically received by all, except by one, and that one was Taguchi
Shigeyoshi. The Admiral went to Munemori and urged him to put Taguchi to death;
but, as usual, Munemori could not make up his mind; and, the battle just then
commencing, Taguchi was allowed to take his place in the line.
As the great Minamoto fleet came up, its vessels fell
into position opposite the Tairas at a distance of about 350 yards from them.
After a long and hotly contested archery duel, they came to closer quarters;
and here the Minamotos had by no manner of means the best of it. They sustained
heavy loss, and were driven back three or four times; for even the most
effeminate of the Tairas, now that they found themselves in the position of the
proverbial rat assailed in his hole, fought with the fierce and reckless
ferocity of despair. So the day wore on, and up till a little before noon the
Minamotos continued to sustain more damage than they inflicted. Then the tide
showed a tendency to turn; and just at that moment Taguchi’s squadron suddenly
hauled down the red flag and went over to the enemy, Taguchi himself at once
proceeding on board the Minamoto flagship!
This defection was fatal to the Tairas; in less than
half-an-hour they were overpowered. Taguchi was eager to impart the
intelligence to Yoshitsune that the boy Emperor, Antoku,
his mother and grandmother, and many Taira Court ladies were on board one of
the vessels, which he now pointed out. Where the Emperor was, the Regalia would
be sure to be; and it was at once Yoshitsune’s chief
commission and great anxiety to recover the Regalia for the Cloistered Emperor
and the Sovereign of his choice. Accordingly the main object now became to
scatter the craft that surrounded and defended what was practically the
queen-bee ship, and to capture it and the invaluable freight it carried.
Presently the Admiral, Tomomori, went on board this Chinese-rigged vessel to
make report that the battle was lost and that if they continued to live it
would only be as the serfs and serving-maids of the Eastern boors. Meanwhile
Munemori had fallen into the hands of the foe; but his capture had been too
late to save the fortunes of the great house which his incompetence had done so
much to ruin. Tomomori wept tears of rage when he learned that his elder brother
had not had the courage to prefer death to surrender; and together with his
uncle Noriyori he threw himself overboard and perished. His mother, the Ni-i-no-ama, Kiyomori’s widow, seized the Sacred Sword and
plunged into the sea with it, while the Lady Azechi caught up the young Emperor in her arms and followed her. The Emperor’s mother
also went overboard, but both she and the Lady Azechi were rescued with boat-hooks by the Minamotos, who had meanwhile captured the
queen-bee ship, and completed the rout of the Tairas.
Yoshitsune’s dispatch on this occasion, although not so terse as the Spartan
dispatch from Cyzicus in 410 BC and the still more laconic dispatch of Byng
from Cape Passaro in 1718, is still concise and pregnant enough. It runs thus:
“On the 24th of this month in Nagato at Akamagaseki we had 840 war-vessels afloat. The Tairas met us with about 500 craft. At noon
the rebels were routed. Item.—The former Emperor has been drowned. Drowned
also: the Ni-i-noama (Kiyomori’s widow) and”—here follow the names and titles of six Taira
chieftains, among them the Admiral Tomomori.
“Item.—The young Prince and Kenrei-monin (i.e. Antoku’s young brother and their mother)
have been captured, and are safe. Item.—Taken prisoners: Tokitada, Munemori”—the names and titles of twelve more
males, four females, and four priests.
This short campaign of five weeks, in which Yoshitsune
had so brilliantly accomplished the task of crushing the Tairas in the West,—a
task in which Yoritomo’s commanders had failed so signally,—was so sound and
original in conception, and so daringly masterful in execution, that it
indisputably places Yoshitsune in the select company of Great Commanders. At
this time, be it remembered, Yoshitsune was only a little over twenty-four
years of age, three years younger than Napoleon and five years the junior of Hannibal
when they opened their Italian campaigns. Whether Yoshitsune had that generally
mutually exclusive combination of gifts, the political and the military, which
was so remarkable in the personality of Napoleon, must be left open to doubt,
for he was cut off at the age when Napoleon’s political career began. What is
indisputably beyond doubt is that in pure military genius Yoshitsune was nearly
if not indeed fully the equal of the great Corsican, while in the sphere of
politics, Yoshitsune’s elder brother, Yoritomo, has
abundant claims to be placed in the same class as Napoleon Buonaparte. In
Yoshitsune we see military, and in Yoritomo, political Japan at its very
best,—and at its very best, neither military nor political Japan has any reason
to bow the head to any nation. The harmonious combination the two brothers
were, indeed, perhaps greater than a single Napoleon. But unfortunately, just
at this juncture, the house of Minamoto was as fatally dogged by its old curse
of internal and internecine dissension and disunion as was the house of Atreus.
Yoritomo’s great consuming passion,—the lust for power,—made it impossible for
him to tolerate the existence of any rival, or even possible rival, near his
seat of authority. And in his youngest brother, with his extraordinarily
brilliant military gifts, Yoritomo’s cold and sullen jealousy, cruel as the
grave, detected a formidable future competitor to power and fame. The Lord of
Kamakura had taken serious umbrage at Yoshitsune’s masterfulness in the Ichi-no-tani campaign, and his subsequent
independent and self-reliant conduct in the capital. During the campaign of
1158, it would appear that oritomo studiously ignored
his youngest brother, and did not send him a single communication, while
scarcely a week passed without an exchange of dispatches between Yoritomo and
Noriyori. Yoshitsune’s extraordinarily brilliant
success in the meteoric Yashima and Dan-no-ura five
weeks’ campaign fanned the smouldering jealousy of Yoritomo into a lurid blaze
which could he extinguished by nothing but the death, or at least the
disappearance, of Yoshitsune from public life.
The evil angel of the two brothers was Kajiwara
Kagetoki. This Kajiwara had fought against Yoritomo at Stone-Bridge Hill in
1180; and after Yoritomo’s defeat there, he had been dispatched to search for
and seize the fugitive, he came upon Yoritomo concealed in a hollow tree; but
on looking into the retreat and seeing what it harboured he told his men there
was nothing there, and sent them off to prosecute their search in quarters where
they would be sure to find nothing. This incident was never, to his credit,
forgotten by Yoritomo. When Kajiwara, a few months later, ranged himself under
the white flag, he at once received the confidence of his new chief; and this
confidence he retained till the end. Kajiwara had been attached to Noriyori in
the Ichi-no-tani campaign, and with Noriyori his
relations had been harmonious. But it was not Noriyori’s and Kajiwara’s host of 56,000 that had reaped the laurels of Ichi-no-tani,—these had fallen to the 20,000 men under Yoshitsune
and Doi Sanehira, and above all to Yoshitsune and the seventy horsemen who had
come down the Hiyodori gap into the centre of the Taira camp. Kajiwara’s
chagrin over this was deep; and he was base enough to allow it to colour all
the reports of Yoshitsune and his doings he made to the Lord of Kamakura. Then
when, a year later on, Yoshitsune, perceiving that his brother’s trusted
mediocrities would never be able to crush the Tairas, obtained a commission
from the Court to undertake operations against Yashima, Kajiwara was greatly
enraged to find that he had to act as his second-in-command, and did everything
he could to thwart the projects of his superior officer. His opposition to Yoshitsune’s descent on Shikoku in the midst of a terrific
typhoon, and the amazing success of the Great Captain’s daring venture on that
occasion, had exposed Kajiwara to sarcastic comment; and Yashima and Dan-no-ura were gall and wormwood to him. On the 22nd of May 1185,
a dispatch from him arrived in Kamakura. This gave a long account of the battle
of Dan-no-ura, and wound up with an invective against
Yoshitsune, who was denounced as the deadly, though secret, foe of Yoritomo. “Saul
hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands”. Such, according to
Kajiwara, was the tenor of the discourse people were then holding in the West
and in the capital; and David (Yoshitsune) by speech and bearing was doing his
best to propagate this view of the situation.
So when, after being fêted and caressed in the
capital, Yoshitsune with his prisoners arrived at Koshigoye on the outskirts of
Kamakura on June 14th, seven weeks after the battle of Dan-no-ura, he was there met by Hojo Tokimasa, who informed him
that he had come to take charge of Munemori and his son, and to tell him
(Yoshitsune) that he must not enter the city. All Yoshitsune’s efforts to obtain an interview with his elder brother proved utterly
unavailing. Towards the end of his three weeks’ sojourn at Koshigoye he penned
and forwarded to Yoritomo one of the most pathetic documents in Japanese
literature,—a letter in which he movingly recounted the untoward circumstances
of his infancy,— that of a child who never knew a father’s love—of his harsh
upbringing of the services he had so ungrudgingly rendered— wherein he spoke
“of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ’scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach”
and of his misery at finding all these rated at naught
by reason of the venomous slander of cruel tongues, winding up by professing
his deep and loyal devotion, and conjuring Yoritomo by all that was most sacred
to dispel the groundless suspicions which he so sullenly cherished. Even this
most piteous and pathetic appeal to fraternal affection was all in vain.
On July 7, 1185, after having had two interviews with
Yoritomo, Munemori and his son were handed over to Yoshitsune, who thereupon
sorrowfully turned his face to the west and set out for Kyoto. Twelve days
later, at Shinowara in Omi, the Taira chief and his
son were executed by the orders of Yoshitsune, and their heads sent to be
pilloried in the capital. A day or two afterwards, that fifth son of Kiyomori,
Shigehira, who had burned the Kofukuji some five years before, was surrendered
to the monks of Nara, who now straightway put him to death. This was
practically the end of the house of Kiyomori.
However, it is a great mistake to talk about the
extirpation of the Tairas, for Yoritomo’s most ardent supporters had been the
chief of the great Taira septs domiciled in the Kwanto, who indeed, after his
death, became all powerful in the Kamakura administration. Moreover, even the
Ise Heishi were not completely extirpated on this occasion, for two members of
that house lived to raise the standard of revolt in Ise and Iga in 1204, when they were crushed by Hiraga Tomomasa. Furthermore, the third son
of the Admiral Tomomori who had commanded the Taira fleet at Dan-no-ura survived to found that house of So, which ruled the
island of Tsushima from 1245 down to the Revolution of Meiji (1868), while the
great Nobunaga was descended from the second son of Taira Shigemori, whose
eldest son, Koremori, and his son Rokudai, survived
the rout of Dan-no-ura for several years. Again, the
Taira ex-Empress Kenreimon-in, who was rescued from
the waves on April 24, 1185, died peacefully in Kyoto in 1213. As for Yorimori,
that brother of Kiyomori who had interceded for the life of the youthful
Yoritomo in 1160, he was now invited to visit Kamakura, where he was treated
with great courtesy and distinction. This by no means exhausts the list of
prominent members of the Ise Heishi sept who survived the overthrow of their
house. It is true that several Tairas were executed in 1185, and that several
Taira partisans were then banished from Kyoto to remote parts of the Empire.
But to talk of Hojo Tokimasa proceeding to Kyoto to execute the mandate of his
grandson “the Herod of Kamakura” is somewhat beside the mark. It was not so
much towards the Taira foe as towards his own Minamoto kith and kin that
Yoritomo showed himself cold-blooded, cruel, pitiless, and ruthless. In this
respect, in spite of all his greatness in the sphere of constructive
statesmanship, the Lord of Kamakura was much more of a Turkish Sultan than a
true son of Yamato. How far his father-in-law the preternaturally astute Hojo
Tokimasa, of the house of Taira, was responsible for this, it is difficult to
say.
For about twenty years, from 1160 to 1181, the Ise
Heishi, under the chieftainship of Taira Kiyomori, had been the dominant power
in the Empire. As has been alleged, Kiyomori’s sudden rise to power had, in the
first place, been mainly owing to a lucky chapter of accidents and the nerve of
his eldest son Shigemori in the great crises of 1150 and 1160, and, in the
second place, to his turning the traditional Fujiwara tactics against
themselves, and then still further supplanting the Fujiwaras in the exercise of
their traditional tactics vis a vis de the Imperial House. What made this
possible was the possession of broad untaxed acres and the support of thousands
of tenants holding their lands from the Tairas on a military tenure. The manors
of the Fujiwara nobles were even then much more extensive than those of the Ise
Heishi; but they were managed on a different principle. What the Fujiwaras
wanted was not so much a throng of armed followers, as monetary and material
resources to enable them to maintain splendid and magnificent establishments in
the capital, where they vied with each other in the lavish and sumptuous
ostentation of their banquets and entertainments and other social
functions—exceedingly effeminate and frivolous—in which preeminence conferred the supreme cachet of good form and distinction. Accordingly, when,
in 1156 and 1160, the question of the supremacy in the councils of the Empire
was put to the sharp arbitrament of the sword, the Fujiwaras, standing alone,
found themselves helpless, and had perforce to appeal to Taira or Minamoto for
support. In 1160, the Minamotos and the Fujiwara faction whose cause they had
rashly espoused were utterly crushed; and the victorious Fujiwara faction
presently found itself hopelessly at the mercy of the rising military caste —in
the person of Taira Kiyomori—which it had hitherto been wont to treat as humble
relatives and dependents. The net result of all this seemed to be that the
civilian Fujiwaras, who had in reality governed Japan for nearly three hundred
years, were to be supplanted by the Ise Heishi, who were to maintain their
ascendancy by the traditional Fujiwara device of making the daughters of their
house Empresses of Japan, buttressed by an unanswerable appeal to the strong
argument of the sword. Most unfortunately for the warlike Tairas, in the
persons of the effeminate Fujiwara courtiers,
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit,
and in spite of all that the fearless, gallant,
honest, but, at the same time, narrow-minded Shigemori could do or say, many of
the highest in position among the Ise Heishi began to vie with the soft-fibred
Fujiwaras in all the arts of empty ostentation and display. For the house of
Kiyomori this was the beginning of that descent to Avernus from which there is
no return. While those spoilt children of fortune, the Ise Heishi, were thus
carelessly, unthinkingly, and heedlessly allowing themselves to be sucked of
all the virility of their martial marrow, their obscure Minamoto rivals were
being kindly cradled in the rough and rude school of hardship and adversity. In
the wilds of Kiso, Yoshinaka was growing up to become the bearer of a name to
conjure with in Shinano and Central Japan; Yoshitsune in Mutsu was sedulously
and unweariedly schooling himself in that art of war of which he became such a
great master and such a brilliant exponent; while in Izu Yoritomo was
gradually, but steadily, winning golden opinions from his jailers and
neighbours, those mettlesome and robust Kwanto Taira, who could ill brook the
cold and haughty treatment accorded them by the fashionable and pampered Ise
Heishi in the capital, always giving them to understand that the visits of
ill-bred country cousins were an intolerable nuisance. And by the astute and
precocious Yoritomo every mistake committed by Kiyomori, his sons and kinsmen,
was carefully noted and deeply pondered over. Kiyomori’s insolent and
overbearing attitude towards the ex-Emperor and the great bouse of Fujiwara;
his weakness and lack of foresight in allowing himself to be inveigled into a
competition with the pampered and effeminate courtiers in the unmanly arts of
meaningless and wasteful display and ostentation, and, if not encouraging, at
all events failing to check, his clansmen and followers in their eagerness to
follow his most pernicious example in this respect; the reckless fashion in
which he roused the enmity of the powerful priestly caste and shocked all the
superstitious, if not the religious, susceptibilities of the nation at large;
the arrogance with which he rode rough-shod over every interest that was in any
way opposed to his own seeming interests and those of his house,—all these
cardinal errors of policy, and many others besides, were carefully marked,
learned, and digested by the apparently unthinking and un- reflective exile in Izu,
whose chief occupation seemed to be to get into amorous scrapes with the
daughters of his guardians and their neighbours.
Where duller minds see nothing, great statesmen have
always been swift to perceive that there are possible problems. Their first
care is to formulate these problems in clear and lucid terms; this much
accomplished, they have then to devise solutions for these problems. Every
mistake committed by the not very astute Kiyomori was of the utmost service to
Yoritomo. When he raised his standard at Stone-Bridge Hill in the early autumn
of 1180, most of his problems had been formulated; and with the aid of some of
the ablest administrators that Japan has ever produced he had found sound and
brilliant solutions for nearly all of them before his death at the age of
fifty-three in 1199. It was at the age of thirty that Napoleon began his
political career; in 1180 Yoritomo was then three years older. The great
Corsican reared the present institutions of France on the ruins of the feudal
system; it was Yoritomo’s task to organise the polity of Japan on a feudal
basis.
The next chapter will mainly be devoted to a
consideration of the methods and results of the constructive statesmanship of
Yoritomo, who in originality and in mental grasp in the sphere of politics has
a just title to be rocognised as one of the three
greatest statesmen that have appeared in Japan. He was fully the equal, if not
actually the superior, of the great Kamatari, whose work, after a long five
centuries and a half of life, was now decently but very unobtrusively buried. During
the last term of its existence, that work, it must be frankly confessed, was
moribund; and outside of Kyoto and the Home Provinces the authority of the
august descendants of the Sun-Goddess could make itself felt only on
sufferance. Yoritomo’s originality manifested itself, among other things, in
this: While making himself the Mayor of the Palace, he studiously kept at a
distance of more than three hundred miles—a journey of four days for a swift
courier—from the Court and its frivolities, and while professing to restore
those old institutions of Japan which had hopelessly outlived their usefulness,
he supplemented them by institutions which were so vitally necessary to the
changed and changing spirit of the times that they insensibly supplanted them.
Yoritomo’s last wish was to be regarded as a revolutionist. Above all things he
desired to be regarded as a conservative. Such, in some respects, he
undoubtedly was; but his conservatism was so largely adapted to the exigencies
of the evolutionary changes of the preceding four centuries that it at bottom
was really so far revolutionary as ultimately to impose upon the Empire of
Japan a system of law and polity which superseded everything that had ever
issued from Nara or Kyoto.
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