How Did the Samurai Rise? Real Power at the Margins and Temples That Took Up Arms

The rise of the warriors is generally thought to have been caused chiefly by the decisive decline of the nobles at the end of the Heian period.

This flow reached beyond the provinces to the aristocratic society of Kyoto, the capital. The nobles, in financial trouble through their luxury, could no longer guard themselves, and they began to panic. They were forced into a situation where they had to change the old course entirely.

So they had no choice but to invite warrior bands with armed force to settle near Heian-kyo and grant them from the court the authority to guard. This is the greatest reason the warriors rose.

Among them were clans that had grown sick of Fujiwara politics and been driven from the center by the Fujiwara, and descendants of clans that had withdrawn to the provinces on their own.

In regions led by clans that loved their homeland and valued their people, the trust between clan and people was firm, and they grew considerably strong economically too.

In a lawless age they also had to prepare each day to meet attacks by bandits and thieves. Each honed its own armed strength, and the stability of order in the provinces came to depend on them completely.

After Fuhito's death, through his four sons the family split into four branches and fought for power. Their ties with the imperial house were already close, so the Fujiwara went on putting the emperor in front and working behind him as fixers.

The Northern branch of the Fujiwara in particular aimed to seize political power by marrying into the imperial house.

In October 1018, at fifty-three, at the height of his glory, Michinaga composed this poem:

This world, I think, is mine. Like the full moon, nothing in it lacks.

The political struggle was fierce even inside the Fujiwara themselves, so the situation at court grew unstable and it quickly lost its power to hold people together.

Many peasants fell into extreme poverty, and when crops failed or plague broke out, large numbers died, and the sight of corpses and the sick lying by the roadside became daily life.

The Taira government took shape from the 1160s to 1185, but the seeds of the new age had in fact been sown more than a hundred years earlier.

As a result the powerful clans of the provinces, that is the warrior houses, steadily gained strength. They bore the nobles' oppression and kept waiting, watchful as tigers, for the moment to overthrow the government of the nobles.

Because two decisive axes of Japanese history are Yamato (Nara) and Heian-kyo (Kyoto), I spent a stretch of the pandemic traveling daily to Nara to investigate the eras before the founding of the new capital, while also basing myself in Kyoto for a time to explore Heian-kyo itself.

Behind this transformation lay two forces: the decay of the military institutions established under the Ritsuryo legal codes since the reigns of Emperor Tenmu and Empress Jito, which created a military vacuum around the imperial court; and the explosive expansion of temples commanding this new faith.

Such movements began on a modest scale, but by the tenth century they had grown formidable. Though early records are sparse, an account from 894 notes that when pirates raided the island of Tsushima, monks from local temples took up arms and fought them off. At first, temples may well have taken to arms simply out of necessity for self-defense.

What began as sporadic skirmishes soon hardened into policy: temple leadership tacitly approved the presence of armed monks and then aggressively mobilized them to expand their power. Thus were born the sohei, heralding an era of convulsion—military organizations hiding behind the veil of religion.

From the standpoint of Japanese Buddhist history, it was the Fujiwara who inherited the Soga’s initiative and truly rooted Buddhism in Japanese soil. Viewing the Nakatomi solely through the lens of Shinto leads to a profound misunderstanding; they must be viewed through the lens of political realism. The subsequent pattern of the Heian period—in which Buddhist monks wielded direct political and military power—was born here.

The emblematic eruption of this runaway power came in 993, with the bitter schism between the Sanmon faction (山門派) of Enryaku-ji and the Jimon faction (寺門派) of Onjo-ji (popularly known as Miidera).

As these entangled interests collided, both sides mobilized their sohei and plunged into open warfare. After this watershed event, armed violence became chronic within the Tendai sect, and the temples took on the bizarre guise of fully militarized strongholds.

Heian-kyo was successfully founded, but because the court had leaned on powerful clans like the Hata, the Heian period inaugurated a new dynamic in which aristocratic houses, rather than the imperial family, came to wield de facto power across the provinces. Compounding this, the financially crippled court abolished the regular standing army in 792. The resulting vacuum in central military power opened the door for bandits, pirates, and provincial warrior bands to assert themselves.

Power shifted decisively: from the aristocracy to the temples, and from the temples to the samurai. Onto this stage stepped the Taira clan, who came to symbolize the arrival of the warrior age, led by Taira no Kiyomori at the vanguard of their golden era.