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Chapter 1: What made the Samurai such elite warriors?
The Gion Shoja bells ring the passing of all things. Twin Sal trees, white in full flower, declare the great man's certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure. They are like a dream one night in spring. The bold and brave perish in the end. They are as dust before the wind. So those are perhaps the most celebrated lines in all of Japanese literature.
They will strike a chord surely with all of our listeners. They are the classic evocation of the Buddhist teaching that all things will and must pass. And today on The Rest Is History, many things will be as dust before the wind. The lives of formidable and brave warriors, the power of mighty dynasties, and the peace and prosperity and security
that for many years had reigned in Kyoto, the great imperial capital of Japan. And Tom, these events, we know about them because they're described in the book of the Heike, which is the great war epic, the Iliad of medieval Japan, isn't it?
Yes. And those lines you quoted are from its opening and it's in the translation by Royal Tyler for Penguin Classics. And it's a tremendous read. So, Dominic, we met the Haika or the Taira, as they are better known in the first episode of this, our epic series on the rise of the samurai. And just to remind listeners about who the Haika or the Taira, as we'll be calling them, who they are.
They are an aristocratic dynasty that had first emerged in Japan in the early 9th century. They descended from a whole crowd of princes who had become surplus to imperial requirements. They were also much too expensive to maintain, and so they'd been deprived of their princely status. They'd been given the surname of Taira.
So they had effectively been banished from the silken court of Kyoto with its love of calligraphy and perfumes and cherry blossom. They'd gone off to the much rougher and wilder northeastern reaches of Honshu, the main island of Japan, and they'd made great names for themselves there.
These northeastern reaches of Japan in the early Middle Ages, this is where people lived who were viewed by the Japanese as barbarians. They'd only just been subdued, brought under the rule of the emperor in Kyoto, and so it's still very much a kind of feel of a frontier zone.
As a result of this, the Taira, even though they are descended from emperors, they're not as into writing poetry, I think it's fair to say, as the courtiers and the great lords who are back in Kyoto. Although they do still love a poem, as we will see. And we said how back in the court in Kyoto, warriors are despised. To be a fighter is to be seen as someone who is thuggish and uncultured.
But of course, this is not the case beyond the mountains that lie east of Kyoto.
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Chapter 2: How did the Taira clan rise to power in Japan?
There's a very unsettling detail about Bantori in Jonathan Clement's History of the Samurai. He writes, the verb for beheading in this context is not the stark slashing kiru of a ritual execution, but the unpleasant gritty kubinaji kiru, literally head twisting off and cutting. There's a sense that when you're taking a head, it's not a kind of neat slice.
You're pinning your enemy down and butchering him, hacking his head off in a kind of really brutal, savage manner. And any heads that are not hacked off in the heat of battle, they will be collected once the fighting is over, and they'll be brought to a kind of central point, piled up, identified, and tagged with labels.
And the point of these labels is that the higher the rank of the beheaded warrior, the higher the reward. And so there is a lot of beheading in Japanese art. And anyone who goes to the fantastic show on the samurai at the British Museum that's on at the moment, there are a lot of illustrations of severed bodies.
In the first episode, you were talking about how samurai culture was sort of perverted, as it were, and used as an inspiration for militaristic nationalism in the 1930s. There were loads of stories about beheading competitions by the Japanese soldiers in China when they took places like Nanjing. And, you know,
people would be fated for beheading dozens, hundreds of Chinese victims, you know, in an afternoon or something. Horrific to us. Do you think that's deliberate? That's a deliberate echo of what, of the sort of stories that are told about a samurai?
Yeah, because there's a lot of beheading in the tale of the Heike. And every Japanese warrior would be familiar with that and with these stories. Absolutely.
And for all that we talk about the sort of chivalry of the samurai and all this kind of thing, which, as you said in the first episode, again, may be a slight 19th century invention. There is a sort of real darkness and brutality to this story, isn't there? I mean, there are stories from the time of samurai atrocities, as it were. People are complaining to the court, aren't they?
The samurai are going too far, that they're causing absolute suffering and devastation.
Well, so the most famous modern film about the samurai, The Seven Samurai, revolves around samurai who are hired by peasants to see off the attack of bandits. But actually, certainly in this period, the border between samurai and bandit is very, very vague, very fluid. As you say, petitions are always being sent to the court in this period pleading for justice. Here's a typical example from 988.
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Chapter 3: What roles did the Minamoto clan play in the conflict?
And the physician then steps in and says, no, you can't do that. A blood relative cannot become medicine. And so Saddam Ali is annoyed about this. He sends a chamberlain down into the kitchens, and there they find out that a kitchen maid is pregnant. To quote the source for this, when they opened up the kitchen maid's belly and looked, it was a female fetus. And so they threw it away.
However, another was found elsewhere. The governor, which is Sadamori, survived. So the medicine worked. And as Carl Friday, who kind of quotes this story, the casual disregard displayed for human life in this tale is striking. I mean, and to us, it obviously is. But the thing is that Sadamore absolutely didn't feel that he'd done anything wrong. I mean, this is completely taken for granted.
So again, to quote Friday, on or off the battlefield, early medieval Japanese warriors appear to have held little concern for the lives of others. And I think this is absolutely one of the really obvious ways in which the ideals of samurai culture as originally constituted, they did not map onto the chivalric culture of medieval Christendom. Right. Interesting.
You wouldn't have had a knight behaving like that. The whole point of chivalry is to show respect to women. I think that even if slicing open women to remove their babies had been viewed as a crime, Still, I mean, what could anyone on the scene have done? Because Sadamori is the governor, and so he's been entrusted by the imperial authorities with the policing of his province.
And so in effect, he is the law. And the only way that this might change and the governor might find himself kind of arraigned for a crime is if a rival warlord could persuade Kyoto that he was a rebel. And that, of course, is what Sadamori had done with Masakado. because the rival lords of the Taira are perfectly capable of turning on one another.
Sadamori ultimately had won because he's not as good a warrior as Masakado, but he had better contacts in the court, and so he'd been able to pull those strings. He ends up being appointed the emperor's agent, and ultimately this is what dooms Masakado.
But we mentioned in the previous episode that there are actually two different clans, two different dynasties that are descended from the imperial family. So there's the Taira, but there is also the Minamoto. And the Minamoto are also embedded in the northeast of Honshu, aren't they?
Even more so, actually, in the long run.
And this is the real kind of the lawless kind of badlands of Japan.
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Chapter 4: How did the samurai culture differ from the imperial court?
This is now where you go if you want to see old-fashioned Japanese villages and It's very picturesque and very touristy, kind of the Cotswolds of Japan.
It wasn't remotely touristy back in the 11th century, it has to be said, and it will be featuring strongly in this story. But it is very mountainous, and what you really want if you're going to set up a rival power base to Kyoto is a plain where you can grow rice and food and all kinds of things.
And the Minamoto establish their power base in the largest plane in Honshu, and this is the plane of Kanto, so literally east of the barrier. So the barrier is the mountain separating it from Kyoto. It's broader, it's potentially much richer than Kansai, the plane west of the barrier on which Kyoto stands.
And it is in the 12th century still very undeveloped compared to Kansai, but it is full of potential. And in this period, it sees the establishment of a small settlement called Edo, which in due course will become Tokyo, the eastern capital, so the capital of Japan today. The eastern half of Honshu by the 12th century is essentially under the thumb of the Minamoto.
They have Shinano, this great mountainous region, and they have the plain of Kanto, Does this mean, therefore, that they are now the dominant power across the whole of Japan? Dominic, it does not mean that, because although the Taira have essentially abandoned the eastern half of Honshu to the Minamoto, they do have other fish to fry.
Because much more than the Minamoto, they have retained the perspective of the traditional Japanese aristocracy. The sense that the eastern reaches of Honshu are backward, are savage, not the place for a gentleman to be seen at all. It's the western half of the island, and Kansai particularly, because that's where Kyoto is, the Great Plain. It's Kansai that really matters.
This is why over the course of the 11th and 12th centuries, they had opted to withdraw from the eastern reaches of Honshu and start to focus their energies on what have always been the traditional heartlands of the Japanese Empire.
So by 1150, they have established themselves as clearly the dominant power in western Japan, and tellingly not just by land because they also control what is called the inland sea. For those not familiar with the geography of Japan, the southwestern island, the bottom tip of the Japanese archipelago, it's like a kind of Devon and Cornwall that is an island.
Then there's another island called Shikoku, and that is like a massive Isle of Wight which runs all the way along the southern coast.
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of the Uji Bridge battle?
Because he is now the first samurai lord to be the de facto, if not the de jure, master of Japan. And there are further questions that we will be answering after the break. How come Kiyomori owed this success to a fox? And why would he end up commemorated by the Japanese as one of the three great villains of history?
Craig, you're one of the three great villains of history up there with John Lennon and Virginia Woolf. So come back after the break and we'll be talking about this guy, Kiyomori, and there'll be some fox chats. Not fox tossing, sadly, but fox chats. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. The year is 1159 and Kyoto is a city in shock. There is smoke drifting over the rooftops of the capital.
The heads of some of the greatest men in Japan have been stuck onto spikes. And for the first time in Japan's history, a samurai bestrides the court like a colossus. And this is Taira no Kiyomori. Now, he has been descended from an emperor, because the Tyra are from the imperial family, albeit slightly obliquely.
But to the people, I mean, the literal pen pushers of the imperial court, the calligraphers and poets, he is a jumped up, common, vulgar parvenu. He's a soldier. Because he's a soldier. Right, exactly. Exactly.
I suppose they're not really pen pushers, are they? They're using brushes.
Brush pushers. That's actually worse than a pen pusher.
I think so. And the tale of the high key, who gives us this story, is very conscious of what has been lost with this. It gives us a very wistful sense of, you know, it's kind of like someone in 1916 looking back at the Edwardian period.
Ah, how lovely it was then on mornings beneath the blossoms, on nights bright with a perfect moon, to make music and poetry, to sport at football, archery, to vie for the prettiest fan, for the most attractive painting, the most amusing bug or plant. I like the fact that both football and botany and bug collecting is part of what is lost with the coming of the samurai.
And the role that Kiyomori plays in the destruction of this idyll, which of course, as we've been saying, is one in which warriors never had any place at all. This is sufficient to see him ranked by Japanese tradition, as we said before the break, as one of the three great villains of history. That is because he has been a traitor to the imperial throne.
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Chapter 6: How did Kiyomori's actions impact the samurai families?
The reason for this, and it's an absolutely classic example of how complex Japanese dynastic policies can be, is that Yoritomo's mother, so the mother of this 13-year-old boy, this Minamoto boy, is also Kiyomori's stepmother.
The two clans are actually linked.
Yeah. Yeah, there is intermarriage. And so Kiyomori's stepmother, Yoritomo's mother, pleads for Yoritomo's life. And Kiyomori thinks, well, he's 13 years old. What damage can he do? Particularly if I banish him from Kyoto so that he kind of grows up in provincial obscurity.
And so he's sent into exile, first on a small island and then to a mountainous peninsula called Izu, which is a kind of a coastal backwater just west of Kanto. It's a kind of a peninsula sticking out into the sea. And anyone who's seen Shogun, this is the region where John Blackthorne's ship in the first episode washes up.
And it is Kiyomori's expectation that Yoritomo will rot there until he dies. Yoritomo has three younger brothers, so even younger than him, and these are also banished. These are the sons of Yoshitomo by a low-ranking but incredibly beautiful lady-in-waiting called Takewa. Tokiwa, when Kiyomori had seized control of Kyoto, had fled the capital. It's a very, very famous scene in Japanese culture.
She is shown fleeing through a snowstorm, holding her two elder boys by their hands and holding the youngest, who is a little baby called Yoshitsune, wrapped up in her robes. and the snow sweeps down. If you go to the British Museum show about the samurai, the scene is beautifully illustrated there.
Tokiwa, snow blustering everywhere, little baby Yoshitsune, just a small arc of blue at Tokiwa's breast. But she can't make it through the snowstorm. She's captured, she's brought to Kiomori, and Kiomori is so enraptured by her beauty and by her charm that he says that he will spare her son's lives if she will come to his bed and become his concubine. And so she agrees.
And in due course, her three sons are sent off to be novices in a monastery outside Kyoto. And again, Kiyomori is expecting that this is to neutralize them, that they will grow up to be monks and effectively they will not become samurai. So that's his expectation. Whether that expectation is fulfilled or not, we will see in due course. Meanwhile, he thinks, I've dealt with the Minamoto.
I've killed the dangerous ones. I've banished the children. They're all dealt with. Don't need to worry about the Minamoto anymore. Now what's he going to do? Well, his aim essentially is to kind of maneuver himself into the very heart of the imperial state.
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Chapter 7: What led to the downfall of Kiyomori and the Taira?
So beautiful did he write and such scholarly talent did he display that by rights he should have assumed the throne because it's the ability to write and to be a scholar. This is what marks you out as a good emperor. But his ambitions now effectively are blocked by Kiyomori and his dynastic manipulations. And so at the ripe old age of 29, Mochihito increasingly feels he has nothing to lose.
He cannot put up with this. He decides, well, I'm going to launch a coup. And for support, he turns to pretty much the only significant Minamoto who is still there in Kyoto. This is a former samurai who's become a monk called Yorimasa. Yorimasa has been tolerated by Kiyomori because in the attempted coup of 1160, he had sided with Kiyomori against the Minamoto.
Yorimasa has come to feel increasingly guilty about this. He is also very offended as a Buddhist monk by what he sees as Kiyomori's contempt for Buddhist teachings. He feels that the Taira regime is kind of corrupting the teachings of the Buddha, and that despite the fact that Kiyomori is a very devout Buddhist, he may say he is, but he isn't in practice.
Is that because there's too much heads on spikes for this guy's liking?
All that kind of thing. But I think also Yorimasa associates Buddhist teaching with the proprieties of the court and feels that these are being trampled on and it's not what the Buddha would have wanted at all. So Yorimasa and Prince Moshihoto, they team up and they write this communique, which they send out in secret to key players across Honshu.
This communique condemns Kiyomori for his crimes against the teachings of the Buddha, and it specifically appeals to the Minamoto lords for military backing. It goes out to all the key Minamoto lords out in the eastern provinces. And the obvious focus of their hopes is Yoritomo. And Yoritomo, he was the 13-year-old son of Yoshitomo, the guy who had been spared by Kiyomori when he was 13.
And by this point, he is in his early 30s. He's still in Izu, this kind of backwater where Dutch ships get shipwrecked in the 16th century, all that kind of thing. He's lying low, but by now, he's grown up and he's very, very keen to have his vengeance. And he is a hard, ruthless, brilliantly calculating man. Dominic, I think he's a man after your own heart.
Oh, thanks. That's kind.
Slight smack of the Captain Bentine about him, I think.
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Chapter 8: What legacy did the samurai wars leave in Japanese history?
They're heading down to Nara to try and recruit more warrior monks, and then they will return and attack Kyoto. This is the plan. Now, bear in mind, the prince has spent his entire life doing calligraphy and making various perfumed forms of incense. He's not a practiced horseman. And so as they ride southwards towards Nara, he keeps falling off his horse. So he's not cutting an impressive dash.
Nevertheless, by sunset, the prince and Yorimasa have reached a key crossing point. This is a bridge over the deep and very churning rapids of a river called the Uji. They cross the bridge As they're doing this, Yorimasa is informed by his scouts that a huge squad of Taira cavalry are hot in pursuit. Yorimasa orders that the planks of the bridge over the Uji be ripped up.
The prince is sent to pass the night in a great Buddhist shrine called the Byodo Inn, which is still there in Uji to this day. It's stupefyingly impressive and beautiful, very rare survival from this period. So he goes off and camps out there. Meanwhile, Yorimasa And a crack squad of elite handpicked men stand guard over the skeleton of the bridge and wait for the dawn.
And their hope is that if they can only hold the bridge long enough, then monks from Nara will come to reinforce them and balance out the odds because as it stands, they are heavily outnumbered. So the night passes, the sun starts to rise, and with dawn, the defenders are able to see that the Tyre task force, many, many thousands strong, are descending on the river.
The vanguard of this Tyre force approach the bridge. They don't observe. I mean, this is what we're told, they must have been blind. But supposedly, they don't see that the bridge is missing its planks. They gallop out onto the bridge and fall into the river and are swept away on the boiling torrents. Would you not notice?
I mean, you would notice.
Poetic license. So the Tyra commanders, they are alerted to the fact that a large chunk of the bridge is missing. They raise their hands and say, they call a halt. They summon up their archers. And to quote the tale of the Heike, Their finest archers lined up their bows, fitted arrow to string and let fly.
Eurymasus' men, who were standing on the far side of the bank opposite the Tyra archers, they are ready to deal with this with all kinds of mad martial arts action, which is brilliantly described in the tale of the Heike.
So we're told that a particularly brave samurai called Tajima strides out alone onto the bridge, and he knocks down the arrows with his naginata, so using it a bit like a cricket bat or a baseball bat to knock them out of the sky. And a naginata is a sword crossed with a spear. It has a curved blade. I guess the European equivalent would be a halberd.
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