道元論9On Dogen, Part 9

Having realized, through the ravages of severe illness, that his time in this world was drawing to a close, Taira no Kiyomori (1118–1181) moved to confront his final adversary. In November 1179, he engaged directly with the dictator of insei (院政), the cloistered rule, the Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa (1127–1192), the last remaining menace within Heian-kyo.

In the blink of an eye, the capital was occupied by the Taira clan. The aristocrats within the cloistered government who opposed the Taira were purged, dismissed, and swept away in a single stroke. Their leader, the Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, was captured and confined at the Toba Palace in the south of Kyoto, placed under strict Taira surveillance, effectively paralyzed. Thus, the shadow dictatorial system known as insei was declared suspended by Taira no Kiyomori. The struggle for hegemony between the Retired Emperor and the reigning Emperor, a conflict that had persisted for over a century, was brought to a temporary cessation.

However, amidst this triumph, Taira no Kiyomori harbored a profound source of anguish. Just months prior, in August—on the very eve of this upheaval—his eldest son and heir, Taira no Shigemori (1138–1179), to whom he had already transferred the headship of the clan and who possessed every quality requisite for succession, had succumbed to illness and passed away. Having built a golden age in a single generation, Taira no Kiyomori possessed an innate ability to instantaneously discern the nature of talent and the trajectory of the future. In his eyes, there was no leader capable of sustaining the Taira’s prosperity other than Taira no Shigemori. His remaining children appeared unreliable as successors; he could not deem them worthy of steering the helm through the turbulent era that would surely follow his own demise.

Here, Taira no Kiyomori made a drastic declaration, positioning it as his final magnum opus. In June 1180, having suspended the cloistered rule and completely suppressed the power structure of Heian-kyo, he announced the relocation of the capital to Fukuhara, in the vicinity of present-day Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture.

Had Taira no Shigemori—who was adept at balancing the Taira clan against Go-Shirakawa and could be considered sympathetic to the cloistered faction—remained alive, Taira no Kiyomori might have considered governing from Heian-kyo. But with that possibility extinguished, he reasoned that moving the capital to Fukuhara, where the majority of the populace was favorable to the Taira, would offer a significant strategic advantage for building a governance foundation for the new heir, Taira no Shigemori’s younger brother, Taira no Munemori (1147–1185).

However, in light of history, this proved to be a catastrophic failure. It was the symbolic fissure where Taira no Kiyomori’s piercing gaze, which had once read the era with perfect clarity, finally began to blur.

Indeed, the declaration of the move to Fukuhara threw the citizens of Heian-kyo into pandemonium; it is said that the capital became a ghost town of empty houses almost overnight. Simultaneously, the old powers—the aristocracy, the Imperial family, and the monks of Mount Hiei—offered their final, fierce resistance, knowing that if Heian-kyo were abandoned, their hegemony would literally turn to ash. Furthermore, Fukuhara had not been developed with the intent of becoming a capital; it lacked the infrastructure, including transportation networks, to support a metropolis. Consequently, the Fukuhara capital collapsed within six months, and in November 1180, the court was forced to return to Heian-kyo.

This was, effectively, the turning point where the momentum of the times shifted in favor of the old powers. Including the internal rifts within the Taira clan, this failure became a primary factor in the erosion of their centripetal force. For Taira no Kiyomori, who had hitherto solidified his defenses on all sides and constructed the era’s hegemony through brilliant strategy, the failure of this massive undertaking—his final gamble—became a fatal wound.

As the Taira hegemony began to tremble—caused by Taira no Kiyomori misreading the direction of the future due to the intervention of private desire born from his excessive concern for the clan's prosperity—the aspiring rulers of the next era could not possibly overlook this opportunity of a thousand years. After all, acquiring Taira no Kiyomori’s hegemony was synonymous with becoming the de facto monarch of Japan.

Sensing the unsettling undercurrents, Taira no Kiyomori moved to immediately reconstruct the façade of governance by the Imperial family. In March 1180, he arranged for the enthronement of the 81st Emperor Antoku (r. 1180–1185), a child born of his own daughter’s marriage into the Imperial line. However, a certain Imperial prince harbored a deep grudge regarding Emperor Antoku’s enthronement. This event served as the catalyst that would spiral into large-scale warfare, ultimately concluding in the destruction of the Taira clan. In this sense, this decision was the moment Taira no Kiyomori began to tighten the noose around his own neck.

From Taira no Kiyomori’s perspective, this measure was intended to restrain the Retired Emperor—the supreme authority in the insei system he had suspended—and to forcibly terminate the struggle for hegemony within the Imperial family, which had been one of the most vexing problems of his life. While the Imperial family may seem calm and peaceful today, historically, it has been perpetually fractured by succession disputes, serving as a constant source of civil war. Furthermore, for Taira no Kiyomori, producing an Emperor from his own bloodline provided the crucial rationale to legitimize the Taira hegemony. In any era, the Imperial bloodline has served as the foundation for legitimizing the ruler of the times.

In other words, the Taira bloodline and the Imperial line had coalesced within the warrior class, entering into preparation to forge a new era. Conversely, however, it can be said that Taira no Kiyomori gazed too intently at Heian-kyo, which had been thrown into chaos by his own declarations, such as the capital relocation. As a result, the beacon of the Taira’s destruction was lit in a region outside his field of vision, where the Taira’s command was tenuous. This was the rise of the Minamoto clan (Genji), the historical entity that had emerged as the sole existence capable of opposing the Taira.

However, rebellions against the Taira erupted across the land because of the existence of Prince Mochihito (1151–1180), a figure of Imperial descent who, in April 1180—the month following Emperor Antoku’s enthronement—found the situation intolerable. Prince Mochihito was the son of the Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, born of a noble mother, yet he harbored intense resentment that the right of succession had shifted to a figure drawing from the bloodline of the Taira warrior clan. Furthermore, the Taira had confined his father, Go-Shirakawa, in a coup d'état, during which Prince Mochihito’s own lands had been confiscated.

Thus, while Prince Mochihito held strong antipathy toward the Taira, he possessed no power to incite a rebellion unless approached by another. The figure who approached him was none other than Minamoto no Yorimasa (1106–1180), a man of Minamoto lineage.

The power structure of the Minamoto clan is labyrinthine and will be detailed in the next article, but to put it simply, Minamoto no Yorimasa was of the Settsu Genji lineage, a warrior group with a base in part of the Kansai region. Having sided with the victors in the great disturbances of 1156 and 1160, as previously written in this series, Minamoto no Yorimasa had been entrusted with political power as an elder of the Minamoto clan during the establishment of the Taira regime. He was a man deeply trusted by Taira no Kiyomori. Indeed, given that he served as a high-ranking court noble (kugyo, 公卿) under Taira no Kiyomori, he could be considered one of his closest aides.

It was this very aide who, harboring dissatisfaction with the absolute consolidation of power by Taira no Kiyomori and his clan, secretly approached the equally disgruntled Prince Mochihito and plotted a military coup against the Taira.

However, they underestimated the web of intelligence Taira no Kiyomori had spread; the coup plan was effortlessly leaked to the Taira side. Consequently, in May 1180, Prince Mochihito was expelled from the Imperial family for the crime of plotting rebellion, and his exile to Tosa Province (modern-day Kochi Prefecture), far from Heian-kyo, was decided.

Yet, at this juncture, although Prince Mochihito was charged, the existence of his co-conspirator, Minamoto no Yorimasa, curiously remained undiscovered. This would prove to be a fatal oversight for the Taira. Furthermore, the decision to exile Prince Mochihito was merely a façade; a secret order for his assassination had been issued for that very night. But because Minamoto no Yorimasa’s involvement had not been exposed, and because the very person who received the order to raid Prince Mochihito’s residence was Minamoto no Yorimasa’s own son, the assassination plan was immediately conveyed to Prince Mochihito’s side, allowing him to escape by a hair’s breadth.

The place to which Prince Mochihito fled was Mii-dera (Onjo-ji) Temple in Otsu City, Shiga Prefecture, east of Heian-kyo. As touched upon in this series, Mii-dera was a temple that had split from the Tendai sect due to factional conflict and stood in hostility to Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei. However, Prince Mochihito’s concealment at Mii-dera was discovered by the following day, and the Taira immediately organized a military force to attack the temple. At this time, unaware that the rebellion was orchestrated by Minamoto no Yorimasa, the Taira side appointed none other than Minamoto no Yorimasa as the leader of this force.

Had his treachery been known, he would have been executed that very day. Instead, having escaped this predicament, Minamoto no Yorimasa joined Prince Mochihito at Mii-dera, scheming to organize the rebellion against the Taira by any means necessary. However, the forces at Mii-dera alone were insufficient; they could not possibly stand against the Taira. It was here that they set their sights on Mount Hiei, which had long been in conflict with the Taira.

But Mount Hiei was historically hostile to Mii-dera, and from long experience, they knew well that opposing Taira no Kiyomori would bring ruin upon themselves. Furthermore, the request for aid was leaked to the Taira side. Taira no Kiyomori immediately dispatched an envoy to Mount Hiei, sending massive bribes and whispering sweet words: if they would attack their arch-enemy Mii-dera, the Taira would offer full cooperation. As a result, Mount Hiei declared neutrality in this matter and officially rejected the request from Minamoto no Yorimasa and Prince Mochihito. Moreover, many monks at Mii-dera were sympathetic to Taira no Kiyomori, who had a track record of curbing the excesses of Mount Hiei. Judging that the situation in the vicinity of Heian-kyo could no longer be altered, Minamoto no Yorimasa and Prince Mochihito sought cooperation from a different power.

This decision became the cause of an unfathomable catastrophe.

Abandoning Heian-kyo, and abandoned in turn by Mii-dera and Mount Hiei, the ringleaders of the rebellion, Minamoto no Yorimasa and Prince Mochihito, fled toward the temple forces that controlled the former capital of Heijo-kyo (modern-day Nara), which had flourished as the stronghold of Japanese Buddhism before the relocation to Heian-kyo. The temple forces in Nara had kept their distance from the Heian-kyo system, and the old aristocratic powers still held considerable sway there. In short, it was a hotbed for the outdated generation; consequently, they still viewed the events in Heian-kyo as distant tales of a foreign land and clung to the archaic perception that warriors were merely the watchdogs of the nobility. Ultimately, Kofuku-ji, the largest force in Nara boasting a massive army of warrior monks, being the tutelary temple of the Fujiwara clan that had formed the Heian aristocratic system, held an anti-Taira (or rather, anti-warrior) stance. They immediately responded to the call, accepting the request for aid from Minamoto no Yorimasa and Prince Mochihito.

However, as the two attempted to slip through the Taira encirclement to reach Nara, they were overtaken by Taira forces near Byodo-in in present-day Uji City. Before the warrior monks from Nara could arrive, Minamoto no Yorimasa and Prince Mochihito fell in battle.

But the situation did not end there. Enraged that the leader of the rebellion against the Taira was not merely Prince Mochihito but his own close aide Minamoto no Yorimasa, Taira no Kiyomori turned his fury toward the temple forces of Nara that had moved to aid the traitorous rebels. For the great temple powers of Nara, such as Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to return hegemony from Kyoto to Nara; there was no backing down now. The myriad warrior monks of Nara, to demonstrate their anti-Taira stance, captured the envoys sent by the Taira for negotiation, tattooed their faces, and beheaded them—a provocation of extreme brutality.

Taira no Kiyomori was incensed by this provocation. An incident that had initially ended with the exile of Prince Mochihito had, due to the undiscovered plot of Minamoto no Yorimasa, metastasized into a large-scale war between Heian-kyo (Kyoto) and the old capital, Heijo-kyo (Nara). Thus, Taira no Kiyomori ordered his fifth son, Taira no Shigehira (1158–1185), to lead a Taira army of 40,000 to advance on Nara and annihilate the forces of Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji. Executed in December 1180, this advance developed into a catastrophic event where the Great Buddha of Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji—landmarks famous today—were burned to the ground. The Taira retaliation demonstrated to the world their power to wipe out immense religious forces.

Since Nara was then called the "southern capital" (nanto, 南都) relative to Heian-kyo, this event is known as the burning of the southern capital (nanto yakiuchi, 南都焼討). For people outside Heian-kyo who were unconnected to the actual tactical situation, the burning of the southern capital served as a negative campaign, painting the Taira as diabolical entities who would burn the Great Buddha. It became a driving force for the plummeting of the Taira’s reputation across the regions. Indeed, Taira no Kiyomori had avoided total collision with Mount Hiei no matter the conflict, precisely because it was a matter of life and death regarding support. But by inflicting devastating damage on the massive powers of Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji, he invited the animosity of countless believers. In truth, this burning incident was primarily intended as a threat against the Buddhist forces of Nara; it is said that Taira no Kiyomori dispatched the army with the intent of arson itself, but strong winds that day caused the fire to spread uncontrollably, resulting in the burning of the Great Buddha and the death of many monks.

Amidst the intensification of this turmoil in the Kansai region, the rebellion orders that Minamoto no Yorimasa and Prince Mochihito had transmitted to Minamoto forces across the land before their deaths remained alive. Through a complex entanglement of factors, the era approached its climax under the banner of anti-Taira sentiment.

Here, a force rises to unfurl the flag of revolt against the Taira. It is crucial to note that while Taira no Kiyomori had nearly mastered western Japan as viewed from Heian-kyo, the eastern side was quite thin, and Taira influence was not particularly strong. Specifically, Izu in Shizuoka Prefecture, which would become the epicenter in eastern Japan, was a major outpost for exiles from Heian-kyo throughout the turbulent Heian period; consequently, it was populated by many descendants of families who harbored animosity toward the Taira.

And indeed, from among those with a history of exile in Izu, the figure who would eventually destroy the Taira emerged. His name was Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147–1199). At the time, he was a nameless figure, his father and brothers killed, having spent twenty years in exile in Izu, ignorant of affairs in Heian-kyo, possessing neither military might nor wealth.

Why had Minamoto no Yoritomo fallen into such circumstances? And from such misfortune, how did he ascend instantly to become the hegemon of the era? The moment Minamoto no Yoritomo awakened, the protagonist of the era transferred from Taira no Kiyomori to him.