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Chapter 1: Who was Benkei and what is his significance in samurai history?
And so they fought, now closing, now breaking. What shall Benkei do? For when he thinks that he has conquered, with his little sword, the boy thrusts the blow aside. Again and again, Benkei strikes. Again and again, his blows are parried, till at last even he, mighty Benkei, can do battle no longer. So that's a scene from the Japanese Noh play, if you like Noh theatre.
It's called Benkei on the Bridge, and it was written in the 15th century. And it describes perhaps the most celebrated fight in the entire history of the samurai. So the British Museum right now, there are three different illustrations of this tremendous encounter. Tom, you love the story of Benkei on the Bridge, don't you? I do.
Who doesn't love the most famous fight in samurai history? Surely it's your favourite too. It's certainly in the top five of samurai fights. Yeah. And it's famous because it's endlessly retold and it's endlessly illustrated. And the backdrop to it is that Benkei is a lawless warrior monk, always the most dangerous kind of warrior monk. He is built like a rugby player. He's got bloodshot eyes.
He wears black armour and he holds seven weapons. So he has a sword. He has a staff. He has an axe. He has a sickle. He has a mallet. He has a nagatana. and he has a saw and a rake. He's not holding them all at the same time, presumably. No, he's not holding them all at the time. And I like the fact he has a saw and a rake so he can do a spot of gardening or something if he's... Yeah, yeah.
Those sort of Zen gardens of a lot of gravel.
Yes.
He could be raking his Zen garden.
He's ready and prepared for anything. I said he's a lawless warrior monk. And as lawless warrior monks often do, he vows to rob a thousand men of their swords. And so he stands on a bridge in Kyoto, the story goes, And every samurai who tries to cross it, Benkei fights him. And he is so invincible that he ends up with 999 swords. So he's got one sword to go to make the thousand.
And the scene which you narrated, this is him trying to get his thousandth sword. And his opponent is a very slight... Elegant youth wearing a woman's cloak, who'd been playing the flute as he approached the bridge. So, you know, kind of faint hint of the girly about him, I guess.
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Chapter 2: What events led to Yoshitsune's rise as a prominent samurai?
Right. But at first, they don't actually launch a great war of aggression, do they? Because Yoritomo, his priority is to consolidate his base because he knows that the Tyra won't attack him. Why won't they attack him, the Tyra, when they control the waves and stuff?
Well, they'd made an attempt, and we described it in the previous episode. They embarrassed themselves by running away from a flock of geese that kind of ran into them. Yoritomo has been able to control the road that links Kyoto with Kanto. He knows that the Taira are not strong enough to force that, so there's a bit of a deadlock.
And the other key event that has happened, which plays to the Minamoto's advantage, is the fact that in March 1181, Kiyomori had died, supposedly, of the hottest temperature in world history. And he had been a brilliant strategist, a brilliant strategist, whom the Taira basically find impossible to replace.
Right. But then, natural disaster, or… Well, you might seem a natural disaster. So we have plague and famine, don't we? So the four horsemen of the apocalypse, or however many horsemen there are, are beginning to rear their heads. So what's the story here? The famine is first and then the plague or vice versa?
Yeah, it's the famine first. And of course, it's caused by war because it disrupts the food supplies. So the famine had begun in the very early months of the war. and its grip tightens and tightens and tightens, and the plague then follows in the wake of it. In Kyoto, bodies start to pile up along the riverbanks, in the streets, terrible scenes. There is famine too in Kanto,
But because the plain there is larger and more fertile than Kansai, the plain that surrounds Kyoto, there is more food. This is a tremendous opportunity for Yoritomo because he's able very ostentatiously to muster reserves from his kind of granaries and his kind of rice depots. and send it to help people in the provinces around Kyoto.
The Taira are desperate to keep Kyoto fed, and so they have been stripping these same provinces that surround Kyoto and giving it to the people in the capital. The consequence is that the people around Kyoto are now starting to look to Yoritomo rather than to the Taira as the guy who is going to give them their food and keep them fed. Famine diplomacy.
And so Yoritomo's prestige soars and Taira prestige is very badly damaged.
So we get to 1183 and now Yoritomo is ready to effectively reignite the war. And he's basically going to get his brother, you know... trained in a monastery or wherever, trained by Yoda to do this for him, right? Because his brother is clearly the more competent commander. But then there's a twist.
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Chapter 3: How did Yoshitsune's childhood shape his future as a warrior?
We should probably take a break here because it's so tense. But what a cliffhanger. Return after the break to find out what happens next.
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Welcome back, everybody, to The Rest Is History. What tension and what a cliffhanger. We are now in early August 1183, so seven weeks after Kiso won that tremendous victory, unexpected victory with his blazing oxen and whatnot, at the pass of Kurikara. And Kyoto, the imperial capital, is a city on the edge, a city in panic because Kiso is closing in.
So he'd won a second victory, which we won't massively go into, 100 miles east of Kyoto at a place called Shinohara. And the survivors, the refugees, have been drifting into the capital. And the sound of approaching drums from the east of the Minamoto forces has been growing louder and louder. and louder and louder.
Yeah. And again, Kiso has split his forces into three. So he is leading a contingent that's coming directly from the east. There's another Minamoto expeditionary force, which is closing in on Kyoto from the south. And there is a third one that has gone right the way around and is now coming from the west. So the trap, in other words, is close to snapping shut.
And on the 13th of August, the leader of the Taira clan, who is the eldest surviving son of Kiyomori, a man called Munomori, and he, it has to be said, is not a very impressive bigger. He is a shadow of his father. Monomori gives orders for the evacuation of the capital.
To quote the tale of the Heike, men saddled horses, tightened girths and galloped north, south, east and west, carrying things to hide. Monomori orders the headquarters of the Taira in Kyoto to be put to the torch so that there will be nothing for Kiso to seize. And I think the atmosphere is very Saigon 1975. There's a sense of people fleeing.
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Chapter 4: What role did the Taira clan play in the samurai civil war?
So these are two men in Yoshitsune's army. Is that right?
Tell us the story about the two samurai. It's a good story. Yoshitsune's army is approaching the river Uji. The bridge is down. There are these stakes in the crossing places. It's clearly going to be very, very dangerous to try and make a crossing, but it's a classic samurai thing. In a situation like that, you prove your courage by being the first into the fray.
and there are these two samurai who are determined to be the first to cross. One of these is a guy called Kajiwara, and he finds this promontory that sticks out into the boiling currents of the river Uji, and so he makes for that. There is a second samurai, Sasaki, who sees him do it and follows him, and he's galloping behind
Kajiwara and he calls out to him of all the rivers here in the west this is the biggest your girth looks loose better tighten it and so Kajiwara leans down from his saddle to cinch the girth tighter and as he does so Sasaki speeds past him shouting loser plunges into the river and begins making for the far bank And Kajiwara is furious, of course.
He's been tricked, follows him in and tries to pay Sasaki back in the same coin. So he calls out, look out, Sasaki, don't play the fool out of a desperate thirst for fame. There must be ropes stretched underwater.
Sasaki draws his sword, he slashes at the ropes, he cuts them through, he gallops up the far banks, he rises in his stirrups, and he cries out in a stentorian voice, descended from Emperor Uda nine generations in the past, fourth son of Sasaki Hideyoshi, I am Sasaki Shiro Takatsuna, the first man across the Uji River. So it is so classic samurai. It's...
yelling out your forebears, announcing who you are, beating your chest, saying that you are the first into battle. Kajiwara, I mean, he's very cross, but he is the second. He manages to make it to the far bank as well. And their example inspires, first of all, hundreds of horsemen, then thousands to follow across the river. Lots of them are swept away, but lots of them make it across.
They overwhelm the defenders. Uji is taken alive. And the road to Kyoto lies open.
It's exciting. And Yoshitsune takes this road, doesn't he? Because he is in a hurry. He wants to get there quickly because he wants to find Go Shurikawa and he wants to get the legitimacy that the cloistered emperor can give him. Because Kiso, if he was smart, was going to kill this bloke. And Yoshitsune wants to get there first.
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Chapter 5: How did Kiso's strategies impact the outcome of the battles?
Bye-bye.