The Rest Is History - 659. Dawn of the Samurai: Bloodbath at the Bridge (Part 2)

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠restishistory.com⁠ What made the Samurai such elite warriors? How did the Minamoto clan seize control of vast swathes of Japan in the 12th century? And, which of their Samurai rivals would enact their bloody downfall…? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the growing power of the Samurai in medieval Japan. _______ Advertise with us: [e-mail] To read our new newsletter, sign up at: therestishistory.com/newsletters _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton   Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After 19 years, they're back. Frankie Munes, Brian Cranston, and the rest of the family reunite in Malcolm in the middle, life's still unfair. After 10 years avoiding them, Hal and lowest demand Malcolm be at their anniversary party, pulling him straight back into their chaos. Malcolm in the middle, life's still unfair. A special four-part event, streaming April 10th on Hulu on Disney Plus. The Gionin' Shoja bells ringed the passing of all things. twin salle 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 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 Heiker or the Tyra, as they are better known, in the first episode of this, our epic series on The Rise of the Sears. samurai, and just to remind listeners about who the hiker or the Tyra, 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, and they're descended from a kind of whole crowd of princes who had become surplus to imperial requirements. They'd also much too expensive to maintain, and so they'd been deprived of their

princely status. They'd been given this surname of Tyra. And so they had, effectively been banished from the silken court of Kyoto with its love of calligraphy and perfumes and cherry blossom. And they've gone off to the much rougher and wilder northeastern reaches of Honshu, the kind of the main island of Japan. And they'd make great names for themselves there. And these northeastern reaches of Japan in the early Middle Ages, this is where people lived who were viewed by the Japanese as barbarians.

And they'd only just been subdued, brought under the rule of, the emperor in Kyoto. And so there's still very much a kind of feel of a frontier zone. And as a result of this, the Tyra, 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. That attitude is a luxury, isn't it? It's a luxury that comes with comforts and security.

Completely. And there, for centuries now, it has been the custom for an entire order of men. So they might be low-ranking nobles, they might be upwardly mobile peasants. to be raised from childhood in the saddle, shooting arrows, this kind of demanding skill, which marks them out as kind of an elite warrior. And it's not just boys who are being raised to do this. Girls are as well. To follow this path of the warrior, to ride spirited horses and to love great arrows and strong bows. Because if the men are riding off to war, then the women have to be able to fight and hold their strongholds. This is the thinking. And so the culture of these eastern provinces is really strikingly different to that of the great imperial court. And to serve as a

governor there, as the Taira lords often do, you need to have retainers, samurai in Japanese, steeped in the East's martial values, these people who've been raised in the saddle. And the question is, what do nobleman like the Tira have to offer the samurai, to offer these hardened warriors? presumably patronage and various kinds of reward, I guess. So spoils of war. Land, of course. Land in the pre-industrial world is always the key to wealth and power. But maybe help in obtaining a post from the government.

If you're not kind of habituated to the ways of the court, the Tyra Lord may be able to pull strings for you. And if he can't do that, then he can kind of give you maybe a position of authority on his own lands, as a kind of official or whatever. And the degree to which you get these prizes, these rewards, depends on how well you have done. And there are very kind of finely graded appraisals that govern the performance of a samurai. And the classic example of this is what in Japanese is called bantori, which is the taking and counting of heads. and this is done as a way of assessing your performance in combat. So 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 Kubinaiji Kuru literally head twisting off and cutting. So there's a sense that when you're taking a head, it's not a bit of, a kind of neat slice. You're pinning your, you know, your enemy down and butchering him, you know, 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 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 haiki. And, you know, 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, maybe 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 cause, 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. And so as you say, petitions are always being sent to the court in this period pleading for justice. So here's a typical example from 988. For the sake of their own honor and reputations, these samurai willfully pluck out people's eyes. Arriving at people's

homes, they do not dismount from their horses, but enter. Samurai on horseback tear down the wooden shade screens that hang outside homes and carry off tax goods. And what's interesting about that, that petition is that it's suggesting it's not just loot that the samurai after, they are also hungry for honour. And this is something that a samurai lord has to offer as well as material reward, has to offer a samurai a chance to kind of burnish his reputation, to win glory for himself, which will then be passed down through the generations to his descendants. So if there is a choice between losing face for a samurai or kind of inflicting, you know, collateral damage on hapless peasants or whatever, then the average samurai is always going to opt for the former.

He's always going to inflict savagery and violence. And there's a really horrible story that illustrates this told of Saddamori, who was the cousin and bitter enemy of Tyroneau Massacado, who we talked about in our previous episode, the guy with the flying head, the first samurai. And Saddamori had brought Massacardo, who was his cousin down in ruin, finished him off. But in his old age, Sadamori, he feels humiliated by the fact that in that campaign against Massacardo, he had been hit by an arrow in the thigh. And as he gets older, the wound starts to wake.

And he gets a limp. And for a samurai lord to have a limp is seen as a cause of shame and embarrassment. And so Sadamori sends to Kyoto for. for a physician who comes out to him. And this physician says, oh, well, if you've got a bad arrow wound in your leg and it's causing you pain, then obviously you need a medicine made from the kidney of a male fetus. And so Sadamori goes, okay. And so he summons his son and says, your wife is pregnant. I want you to slice open her stomach and remove the fetus. And the son kind of blanches this and says, oh, are you really sure? And the physician then steps in and

says, no, you can't do that. A blood relative cannot become medicine. And so Saddamori 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, you know, 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.

And I think that even if slicing open women to remove their babies had been viewed as a crime, you know, still, I mean, what could anyone on the scene have done? Because Saddamori 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 a 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 Saddamori had done with Massacardo,

because, you know, the rival lords of the Tyra are perfectly capable of turning on one another. And Sadamori ultimately had won, because he's not. not as good a warrior as Massacardo, 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 Massacardo. But we mentioned in the previous episode that there were actually two different clans, aren't there? Two different dynasties that are descended from the imperial family. So there's the, the Tyra, but there is also the Minamoto. And the Minamoto are all 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. The roughest, the most militaristic, the most samurai infested reaches of Honshu, the main island in Japan. And as a result of this, I would say by the end of the 11th century, the Minamoto are starting to outmustle the Taira. And so now when there is violence in these northeastern provinces, it's the Minamoto who are getting to present themselves as the agents of law and order and to cast the Tyra as the outlaws. So in 1027, for instance, there's a Minamoto warlord who topples a Tyra rival by writing to the imperial palace and saying this guy, this Tyra, he is a rat of wolf-like greed who had turned the structure of the court upside down, collecting taxes and tax goods for himself and ignoring imperial orders. And this is symptomatic of a broader trend so that by the 12th century, the Minamoto have clearly established themselves as the dominant power in these eastern provinces that lie to the

east of the mountains that separate them from Kyoto. And there are two particular regions that are their strongholds. So one of them is an upland region, called Shinano, absolutely in the interior of central Honshu. So if you look at the map of Japan, the main island of Honshu, Shinano is kind of basically bang in the middle. And it's almost impregnable because the terrain is so mountainous, except that it is scored by this river called Kiso, and this provides a kind of valley that scores the mountains, and it's easily defensible, but it's also strategically vital because it provides a way that army

from the mountainous heights of Shinano can kind of go down this valley and spill out into the plain. This is the Kiso Valley. So this is now where you go if you want to see kind of old-fashioned Japanese villages and kind of, you know, 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 plane, you know, 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 Kanzai, the plain west of the barrier on which Kyoto stands. And it is in the 12th century still very undeveloped compared to Kanzai, 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. So, the eastern half of Honshu by the 12th century is essentially under the thumb of the Minamoto. They have Shinano, this great kind of 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 kind of 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. And 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. And this is why over the course of the 11th and 12th century, countries, they had opted to withdraw from the eastern reaches of Honshu and start to focus their energies on what have always been the kind of traditional heartlands of the Japanese Empire.

And 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. and 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. And then there's another island called Shikoku, and that is like a massive Isle of White, which runs all the way along the kind of the southern coast. Yeah, much bigger than the Isle of White. Much, much bigger than the Isle of White. And so these two islands that abut Honshu, the main island, so Kushu and Shikuku, they kind of create this, what's called the inland sea. And the point of the inland sea is that it protects shipping from the violent storms that otherwise would kind of sweep down and be a constant danger. And so these are by far the securest shipping lanes anywhere, you know, the waters off Japan. And the Tyra essentially established their control over these waters. and they are particularly secured for them in the 1140s and 1150s by a brilliantly able and ambitious young governor who goes by the name of Kiomori.

And Kiomori founds new ports, both along the southern coast of Honshu and the northern coast of Shikoku. He dredges channels. He makes the shipping lanes more secure. and these shipping lanes in turn, once they've been secured, enable the Tyra to control trade, which thereby generates enormous wealth for them, to move troops much more easily than they can by land, because as we said, Japan is very, very mountainous. So taking troops by ships, you know, it's much faster than going by road. And of course, it provides ready access to Kyoto, because the plane on which Kyoto stands

is open to the inland sea. And if you control Kyoto, then of course you control the palace. And if you control the palace, then you control the emperor. And by now, the power of the Tyra and the Minamoto between them is becoming so preponderant that some of them, both Tyra and Minamoto, are starting to contemplate a tantalizing possibility, which, Dominic, you've been saying, you know, it was always something that was going to kick in in the long run. And this possibility is, what if they seize direct control of the emperor and use him as a puppet? Well, if there's a load of people armed with weapons, swords, and there's a lot of people armed with calligraphy kits, my money is always on them, people with the swords.

I'm not surprised to discover that I was right. You are right. Because all this time, as we said in the previous episode, the nobility in Kyoto have been behaving as though history has come to an end, as though you don't need to arm yourself. as though, you know, living a life of poetry and courtship and beauty and so on, as though that's never going to come to an end. But as always happens, you know, history never comes to an end. And if you don't harm yourself, you are always going to face problems. And for the court in Kyoto, the crisis point comes on a very specific day.

And this is the 20th of July 1156. And it comes with the death of the man who for more than 30,000, years had served as the power behind the imperial throne in Kyoto. And this was, his official title is his cloistered eminence, a man called Tobar. And he's a cloistered eminence because he had been emperor. He'd become emperor as a boy. He had then abdicated at the age of 20 and gone to a monastery. And he had presided from this monastery as the kind of the undisputed patriarch of the imperial family. So young emperors have succeeded him, but his cloistered eminence, Tober, remains essentially the guy who has the reins of power in his hands. And this may sound

mad to listeners. I mean, why, if you're the emperor, are you kind of retiring and becoming a monk and all this kind of thing? But it's the way that the imperial succession had been operating for basically three centuries by this point, by the mid-12th century. And the whole practice had been the brainchild of the third of the three great political dynasties in Japan, which we haven't mentioned until now, although we did in our series on Lady Murasaki. And this is a dynasty called the Fujiwara. And the Fujiwara had not done what the Tyra and the Minamoto had done, go out into the provinces and build a power base for themselves there. The Fujiwara had remained in Kyoto, and their field of operations had been the court itself. And to quote Ivan Morris,

his brilliant book on the world of Lady Murasaki and Genji, the world of the shining prince. The Fujiwara had imposed on the emperor a type of life cycle that was almost bound to keep him under the family's thumb, so the Fujiwara's thumb. He came to the throne as a callow youth and was promptly married to a Fujiwara girl. Their son would be appointed crown prince, and when his father was obliged to abdicate usually at the age of about 30, he would succeed him and the cycle would start again. And obviously, this works for the Fujiwara as long as you don't have violent warrior dynasties breathing down your neck. But the problem is that by the middle of the 12th century, the samurai are no longer confined to distant provinces. They've crossed the mountains,

they've entered Kyoto, they are roaming the streets of the capital. And as a result, the age of Fujiwara dominance is starting to go into eclipse. Because, from now on it is going to be the Tyra and the Minamoto, who between them decide the imperial succession. And with the death of his cloistered eminence, Tober rival factions of Tyra and Minamoto backing rival candidates for the throne. So at this point, it's not like the Tyra are backing one guy and the Minamoto are backing one guy.

Tyra and Minamoto are kind of mixing up, but these different factions are backing rival candidates for the throne. And this spells danger. ask a dim-witted question. Why if Tober has died and he wasn't emperor, why is there a succession crisis? Because Tobar in his role as the patriarch of the family plays a crucial role in deciding who is going to succeed him. So he is not officially emperor, but he does have authentic power because his prestige, his age, his intelligence, his sophistication means that his opinions are respected and even the Fujiwara have to kind of respect it. But now that he is gone, there isn't

anyone to play that role. And so this is why these rival factions of Tyro Minamoto are able to step in and fill the vacuum. And it turns to violence and the fighting is all over in a single night. And the reason for that tells you a lot about how cloistered and naive the courtiers in Kyoto have become. So one of these kind of Tyra Minamoto factions, they are swayed by a Fujiwara Grandi, who is a man very devoted to the teachings of Confucius. So still at this point in the Imperial Capital, Chinese culture is viewed with enormous respect. And so because Confucius says that it's very bad form to ambush people, you should play according to the rules. You know, don't rip up the rules of the game. He says it's against the law to launch a surprise attack.

Actually, the samurai are all about surprise attacks. This is idiocy from him. The bombing of Pearl Harbor didn't come from nowhere. This is a long samurai tradition. The other faction, they don't give a toss about Confucius. And so they say, well, of course we're going to launch an attack. So they ambush their opponents in the middle of the night. They burned down their headquarters, and they win a decisive victory. And the two leaders of the victorious faction, one is a Minamoto, one is a Tyra, they then, so the story goes,

they seal their pact with the blood of their captured opponents. So it's a bit like with the second triumvirate, Anthony and Octavian and Leopardus, kind of dipping their fingers in the blood of their own relatives. So one of these two leaders, a guy called Minamoto no Yoshitomo, he is said to have publicly beheaded his own father, Jesus, come on. I mean, that's a bit strong. You've got to do what you've got to do. And the other,

Tyrono Kiyomori, so he is the guy who's been operating in the inland sea, building all those ports and dredging the shipping lanes and all that kind of thing. He puts his uncle to death. I think that's fair enough. I mean, an uncle is an uncle, but your father is a different matter. These are the first public executions in Kyoto for three and a half centuries. And they leave no one in any doubt that a new era has dawned. Because the head. heads of these executed grandees are put on spikes and put up in the Kyoto marketplace. So everyone can see for themselves what's going on. So hold on. There's a bigger gap in Japan between the last public executions and these killings

than there would be if we had public executions tomorrow in Britain with the previous public executions. So it must have been a huge culture shock. Yeah, massive culture shock. And just in case, you know, anyone in the capital hadn't twigged that a new era had dawned and that they need to brace themselves for a culture shock, more drama is to follow. Because three years after this, in 1159, Minamoto no Yoshitomo, so he's the guy who supposedly had chopped off the head of his father, he's very resentful that Kiomori, his Taira ally, has received greater rewards at court than he has done. He thinks, screw this, I'm going to launch a coup. And he teams up with a very disgruntled

and massively alcoholic Fujiwara minister. And I think generally, if you're plotting a coup, it's not a good idea to team up with an alcoholic. Kiyamori has left Kyoto on pilgrimage. Kiyomori is a very devout Buddhist, and he's gone off on pilgrimage. And while Kiyomori is absent, the Fujiwari minister and Yoshitomo seize the 13-year-old emperor. They execute Kiyomori's most prominent allies in the capital, and once again stick their heads on spikes and put them in the marketplace of Kyoto. God, there's a lot of beheading in the series. Yeah.

there suddenly is. And Yoshitomo assumes that Kiomori is going to be intimidated by this, that he won't come back to the capital, that he'll retreat, and then he'll be kind of easy meat for Yoshitomo. But Kiomori does not do this at all. He's a very, very cool customer, very calculating, very shrewd. And rather than fleeing into the provinces, you know, which effectively would kind of doom any attempt to control the levers of power, he returns to the capital. he very, very coolly takes up residence in his own mansion and essentially dares Yoshitomo to do his worst. And then a week later, a fire breaks out in the palace. Very, you know, is it coincidence or has Kiomori started it?

Unclear. But what this does is that it enables the young emperor who has essentially been taken prisoner by Yoshitomo and is being held as a hostage. He dresses up as a woman, so cakes his face in heavy makeup, swathes himself in a kimono, manages to slip his guards amid the chaos of the fire into an ox drawn cart. They managed to escape the limits of the palace, and he makes his way to join Kiomori. And simultaneously, as this is going on, as the flames are kind of reaching into the sky above Kyoto, 3,000 samurai are seen approaching the capital. and people are kind of gazing out to try and distinguish what color their banners are, because the color of the Minamoto are white and the color of the Tyra banners are red, and as the samurai come closer and closer, people see that they are red. They are Tyra samurai. And the Minamoto samurai,

taken by surprise, completely outnumbered, put up a good fight, but are forced to flee. and Yoshitomo, who had attempted this coup, the Minamoto chief, he flees as well, he heads into the mountainous fastnesses east of Kyoto, takes refuge with an old ally, and this ally, knowing the way that the dice have fallen promptly murders Yoshitomo while he's in his bath, and that is the end of him. So Yoshitomo, you know, the Minamoto had played boldly, but they had lost. And instead, victory has gone to the Tyra, and so, specifically to the guy who now indisputably stands at their head, Kiamori. And so the court, Kyoto, and therefore the reigns of the empire are now in Kiomori's hands.

And the big question is, what will he do? 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 Kiomori 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, 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, Kiomori, and there'll be some fox chats. Not fox tossing, sadly, but Fox chats. Where are my gloves?

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When Westcham first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was pretty. peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. 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 Taira are from the imperial family, albeit slightly obliquely. but to the people, I mean the literal pen pushers at 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. I suppose they're not really pen pushes either. They're using brushes. Brushes. 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 it. what is lost with the coming of the samurai. And the role that Kiamori 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. And that is because he has been a traitor to the imperial throne. He has turned on the emperor. And this is the most shocking thing that anyone in Japan can do. And he's a domineering figure in the history of Japan. And posterity is appalled by him, but also, I think, impressed. He is a very impressive man. There's something perhaps of people's attitude to Cromwell about him, I think. Yeah, or Warwick the Kingmaker or somebody, I suppose. Why does he owe it all to a fox? That's the question that I think would be perplexing a lot of people. Because as a young man, he had gone hunting and he had shot a fox, and then to quote the source for this story, the fox changed into a beautiful woman and said

that if he would only spare her, then she would grant him all his desires. And so Kiamori let the fox go. And sure enough, the fox kept her word. And all Kiamori's wishes did come true, except that they were always shadowed by an ominous warning that the fox lady had also delivered, namely that when the moment of Kiamari's death approached, everything that he had achieved in his life would crumble away to dust. So he's given both opportunity, but told that ultimately it will all fade and go. And I think it's the measure of Kiamori's greatness and the way that he's commemorated as a very, very serious player in Japanese history that he clearly attracted stories like this. And I think also there is kind of something vulpine about him. He does have a quality of the

fox himself because he's very cunning. He's very artful. He's very scheming. But also, and it's quite a lot because we said it's a very devout Buddhist. He's very, very proficient. at strategically well-timed displays of salutary violence. He knows how to commit an atrocity in a way that will have a real impact. Yeah, because he has defeated the great Minamoto kind of warlord, his guy called Yoshitomo, and he executed his son, and then he had the second son's head put on a spike in Kyoto. So it's all about spectacular displays of violence that will intimidate his adversaries. Yeah, and the spike action in Kyoto is still very much going on.

So he's clearly very brutal where he feels he has to be. At the same time, he is, you know, this is part of the complexity of his character. He is also capable of really striking displays of clemency at the same time. And the most striking of these is the mercy that he shows the younger sons of Yoshitomo, the surviving sons. So Yoshitomo's heir, you know, his eldest and his second eldest son have been killed. But his third son, so he's now, you know, the older surviving son, is a 13-year-old boy, and this is a boy called Yoritomo.

And Yoritomo is spared by Kiomori. And the question, therefore, must be why? I mean, why would you spare the son of your bitterest enemy? 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 the mother of the this 13-year-old boy, this Minamoto boy, is also Kiamori's stepmother. The two clans are actually linked. Yeah.

Yeah. There is intermarriage. And so Kiyamori's stepmother, Yorotomo's mother, please for Yorotomo'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 mountain. peninsula called Isu, which is a kind of 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 Blackthorn's ship in the first episode washes up. And it is Kiomori's expectation that Yoritomo will rot there until he dies. Yorotomo has three younger brothers, so even younger than him, and these are also banished. And these are the sons. of Yoshitomo by a low-ranking but incredibly beautiful lady-in-waiting called Tokiwa. And Tokiwa, when Kiomore had seized control of Kyoto, had fled the capital, and 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 kind of sweeps down. And if you go to the British Museum show about the samurai, the scene is beautifully illustrated there. So Tokiwa snow blustering everywhere, little baby Yoshitsune, just a kind of small arc of blue Tokuas breast. But she can't make it through the snowstorm. She's captured.

She's brought to Kiyamori. And Kiyamori is so enraptured by her beauty and by her charm that he says that, you 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, Kiamori 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 kind of 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. So in the words of the tale of the Heke, tales of his deeds and ways surpass the imagination. Because to reiterate, no samurai lord has ever been in this position before. And over the years that follow this coup that has brought Kiyomori to power, he tramples down on every tradition that has been held precious by the

imperial court. So in 1160, he becomes the first samurai to be awarded an official court position. Seven years later, he becomes the chief minister. I mean, stupefying. Then in 1171, he does a Fujiwara and marries his daughter to the emperor. So this samurai, he's now the father-in-law of the emperor, stupefying. And then in 1178, he pulls off the big one because his daughter gives the emperor a son, which means that Kiomori now has every chance of seeing a Tyra, his own grandson, ascend the imperial throne of Japan. It is the most amazing moment of triumph. Incredible coup. And actually, it pays off, doesn't it?

Two years later, at the age of two, this boy, his grandson, is the emperor Antoku. Kiyomori has achieved the summit of all his desires. And yet, there must be loads of people in the court. The brush pushers and co. Who must regard this as the most tremendous assault on the traditions and the propriety of Japanese court? culture. Of course, they're all appalled. And Dominic, I'll tell you, the class of person who is most appalled is members of the imperial family, because, you know, they don't want the grandson of a Tyra samurai to sit on the throne that rightfully should be occupied by them. And a guy who's

particularly offended is a prince called Machihito. And he's the son of a former emperor and, you know, the brush pusher. His vibe is very much. not that of a samurai. I'll quote the tale of the haiko. 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, you know, his ambitions now effectively are blocked by Kiamori and his dynastic manipulations. And so at the ripe old age of 29, Machaito 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. And this is a former samurai who's become a monk called Yorimasa. And Yorimasa has been tolerated by Kiyomori because in the attempted coup of 1160, he had sided with Kiyomori against the Minamoto. and Yoramasa has come to feel increasingly guilty about this. He is also very offended as a Buddhist monk by what he sees as Kiamori'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 Kiomori is a very devout Buddhist, I mean, 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. And this communique condemns Kiomori for his crimes against the teachings of the Buddha. And it specifically appeals to the Minamoto lords for military backing. So it goes out to, you know, 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 Kiomori when he was 13, and by this point he is in his early 30s. He's still in Isou, 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, you know, 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 Benton about him, I think.

Does he have the surface cordiality of a Bentine? That's the question. Well, he does, because this is what has enabled him to avoid attracting the attention of Kiamori's spies. He's very good at suggesting a certain degree of amiability, but beneath that, there is a kind of hard, calculating core. And he has spent his time establishing very close links with the kind of the samurai and Isu, and also on the great plain of Kanto, which lies just to the east of Isu.

He has also married a female samurai, an honor Musha, as they're called. He was a woman trained in the practice of arms. And she is as impressive a woman, really, as Yoratomo is impressive, a man. And she is called Hojo Masako, and they are very well matched. And in the long run, they're going to prove themselves the Augustus and Livia of medieval Japan because both of them are going to demonstrate an absolute genius for the arts of politics and they are going to change the course of Japanese history. However, that's all in the future. For now, Yoritomo is very important to Yorimasa and the prince in their plotting. But the

prince and Yorimasa do also have another focus of their hopes. And these are the Buddhist monks whose monasteries up on the mountains that surround Kyoto are also key players in this story. The communique that goes to the Minamoto also goes to these monasteries. And in part, they are asking the monasteries for spiritual backing, but they are also asking for military backing. And this is because the monasteries are teeming with warrior monks. The monasteries basically run their own security, their own police force. And actually, when Kiamori's spies bring him news of what, you know, these two conspirators are up to, he's much more worried about the monks than he is about, you know, what the Minamoto in their kind of distant exile

might be getting up to. He's relatively unfazed by it. He thinks it's not a big deal. He sends his police to go and arrest Prince Machaito. But Prince Machiito, but Prince Machiato, but Prince Machahito, he kind of pulls off what by now is becoming a very familiar stunt for members of the royal family who are threatened by arrest. He dresses himself up as a woman and slips out of the palace escorted by his guards. And there's a tremendous account of this in the tale of the heke. Fleeing north up Takakura Street, they came to a wide ditch. The prince leaped it lightly. What a fine way for a lady to hop over a ditch. A passerby stopped to exclaim, staring suspiciously. To be fair, I've never seen a woman hop over a ditch.

Well, especially you wouldn't in Kyoto. I don't think that's the kind of thing. You wouldn't imagine Lady Murasaki hopping over a ditch. That would never happen. So anyway, so Prince Machaito, he escapes, gets out of the city, and he rides up to this monastery on a hill called Miedera. And there, a thousand monks rally to his cause. He's also joined by Yorimasa, who has bought a squad of perhaps 50 samurai.

And the hope is that all the other monasteries, neighboring Miedera, will rally to Prince Michoito's cause as well. Unfortunately, however, they do not. And so Prince Michoito decides that he is going to head southwards to another great centre of Buddhist monasteries. And this is a very ancient Japanese city called Nara, famous today still for its monasteries and also for its deer. And this was the city that before Kyoto had served the emperor as his capital.

And as I say, it's surrounded again by monasteries. And so therefore, again, teeming with a ready supply of warrior monks. And so this is the plan. Yorimasa, Prince Machaito. So Yorimasa is the monk. Prince Machuato is the guy ex-collegropha now in the doldrums. Yeah, a guy who dressed up as a woman and leapt over the canal, all of that. They've got samurai with them.

They've got warrior monks with them. 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 kind of making various perfume forms of incense. He's not a practice 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. And this is a bridge over the deep and very churning rapids of a river called the Uji. They cross the bridge, and as they're doing this,

Yorimasa is informed by his scouts that a huge squad of Tyra cavalry are hot in pursuit. And so Yorimasa orders that the planks of the bridge over the Uji be ripped up. And the prince is sent to pass the night in a great Buddhist shrine called the Biodo 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 hand-picked 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 door. the odds, because as it stands, they are heavily outnumbered. So, you know, the night passes, the sun starts to rise, and with dawn, the defenders are able to see that the Tyra task force, many, many thousands strong, are descending on the river. And the vanguard of this Tyra force, they approached 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, you know, they are alerted to the fact that large chunk of the bridge is missing. They raise their hands and say, you know, they call a haught. They summon up their archers, and to quote the tale of the hakeh. Their finest archers lined up their bows, fitted out. arrow to string and let fly. Yorimasa's men, who are standing on the far side of the bank

opposite the Taira 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 heke. 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, kind of knock them out of the sky. And a naginata is a kind of a sword crossed with a spear, has a curved blade. I guess the kind of the European equivalent would be a halberd. And he's kind of doing that playing arrow cricket with his naginata. And then as he's doing that, a monk, a warrior monk called Jomyo Meshu, he walks out onto another beam. Remember all the planks have been through.

thrown into the river. And he has a tremendous innings. So he kills 25 Tyra with his arrows, we're told. He then mows down another five with his naginata. And then when his naginata snaps in two, he pulls out his sword and he kills eight more Tyra. Then his sword breaks. Now he only has his dagger, so he draws that. And at this point, another warrior monk called Ichre, comes running up behind him, leaning his hand on Jomio's helmet, we're told, with, pardon me, Icheray leaped over him and lit into the foe. In that battle, he died. Meanwhile, Jomeo has crawled back to the bank and on the grass at the Bayodo Inn gate, he took off his armour and counted 63 arrow hits. 63, wow, good armour. You know, he's still going strong. And all day,

the Tyra attempt to force the bridge and all day they are held at bay by this incredibly outnumbered band of defenders. And they're waiting, of course, for reinforcements to arrive from Nara. And the sun rises high in the sky and then it starts to set. And still, no reinforcements. The road from Nara stands empty. It's only a matter of time. And finally, towards evening, a squad of 300 Tyra horsemen decide that they have no choice but to ride into the boiling rapids, even though they're likely to be swept away, because they are threatened with disgrace if they cannot get across and attack their enemy, they ride into the rapids and a few of them are able to make the crossing. And this demonstrates to their

fellow samurai that it is possible to ford the Uji. And so the entire Tyra army, thousands and thousands of horsemen then follow across. And many, of course, are swept away on the currents, but actually the mass of men, you know, they're able to work out the shore's path and they make it across and they are now on the same side as the defenders. And because they hugely outnumber the defenders, they're able to envelop them and there's tremendous slaughter and all of Prince Michoito's men are pretty much wiped out and among them is the prince himself. There is, however, one man whom the Tyra do not kill, and this is the old warrior, the warrior monk, Minamoto no Yorimasa. And he, you know, he's effectively been the general, he's been the guy in

command of this fighting force. He recognizes that it's all over. He recognizes the doom of his hopes. And so he summons his servant and says, you know, behead me, cut off my head. But the servant refuses. Take your own life first, my lord. Then I will oblige. And so Yorimasa turns to face the west where the sun is setting. And he intones the name of the Buddha ten times in a row. And then he composes poetry. And as he composes these lines, he speaks them. This forgotten tree never through the fleeting years burst into flower.

And now that the end has come, no thought but turns to sorrow. And then wishing to avoid any accusation of cowardice, he takes his sword and he takes his sword and he drives it into his belly and he slices open his abdomen, cutting left and right. And this is the most painful suicide imaginable. And now at last the servant is willing to behead him. So the servant draws out his sword, cuts off Yorimasa's head, and then that done, he ties it to a heavy stone, carries it to the banks of the Uji, and drops it into the river. And this will serve subsequent generations of samurai as the absolute paradigm of what is called sepulchal, belly slitting. It's not the first, but it is the model that everyone from this point on will emulate.

This is the moment that establishes the template. Yeah, it's the absolute archetype. And I think the luster of this death combined with, with the heroism of the Uji Bridge makes the battle of the Uji Bridge a kind of Japanese equivalent of the Battle of Thermopylae in Greek history. So it's a defeat that isn't just a defeat. The kind of the glamour and the glory of the defeat gives it the sheen of something approaching almost a victory. And in Isu, when news of this is brought to Yoritomo, the head of the Minatomo

clan, he is emboldened to raise the white banner of his clan in open defiance of Kiamori. And by late autumn, he has successfully rallied all the Lords of Kanto, so the great plain behind him. He's got their backing. And he has also established a capital in a place called Kamakora, which is a natural fortress on the coast of Kanto, where his father had always had his main base. And then the following month, after he's done this, a Tyra advance on Canto is beaten off in a completely farcical fashion. I mean, it's kind of as ludicrous as the defence of the Uji Bridge had been heroic.

So what happens is that the Tyra advancing along the road that winds around the mountains that will take them to Canto. And they meet with a Minamoto force that has been sent to block its path. Night falls. and in the darkness a squad of Minamoto samurai kind of head out from their positions to make a night attack on the Tyra. And as they're heading towards the Tyra positions, they disturb a flock of geese which rise up very, very clamorously kind of honking and beating their wings. And they fly directly into the lines of the Tyra. And the Tyra are thrown into a massive panic, turn on their heels and flee. And this is humiliating as the death of Yorimasa had been glorious.

And it's very, very bad publicity for the Tyra and particularly for Kiomori, who is appalled because he realizes that it's actually not going to be possible for him to snuff out this rebellion as he'd been expecting to. That he now faces a full-blown war with Yoritomo, the Minamoto captain, who was the very man whose life he had once spared, you know, back when he'd been a 13-year-old boy. Should never have done it. He was too soft. He's too soft and he's going to pay the price. I think he does feel that he'd been too soft. And so he is, in a way, because of that, he reacts with incredible brutality. When he needs to be brutal, he's perfectly willing to be brutal.

And so he is brutal now. And he stamps out any hint of rebellion in the lands around Kyoto. And the people who are treated with a particular savagery are the monks of Nara. These were the guys that Prince Michiito had been hoping to get. And they had actually kind of raised the banner of revolt against Kiamori. And so Kiamori sends his son ahead of a great squad of samurai, and they slaughter thousands of monks in Nara. Cutting the heads off again? Yeah, there's more head cutting.

They're tossed into gutters and ditches. Smoke filled the heavens, we're told. The sky was flame, and many of the holiest and most ancient shrines in the holy, of Japan are utterly incinerated. And we're told no disaster approaching this one can ever before have struck the teaching. So that's the teaching of the Buddha. Thank you. So Keir Mori, if you remember, he had had that interaction with the fox. And the fox had said, basically, all your wishes will come true. But as your death approaches, so all your, everything you have achieved will begin to crumble into dust.

And do you think he's got that sort of at the back of his mind as the war intensifies? Indisputably, because all kinds of presentiments of impending ruin had been visiting him. And these are described in the tale of the heikie. So there's a time we're told when Ki-a-Mori saw, and I quote, an enormous face of full bay-wide peering into the room where he lay. That would really unsettle you. I really would. I was so weird and sinister.

And then another morning, he opens the doors onto his garden, and he finds it piled high with skulls. And we're told a mountain of skulls now suddenly crammed with living eyes, all of them training on Lord Kiamori and a blinking glare. It's very studio gibbly, I think. Kind of very particular quality of horror. And on both occasions, Kiya Mori responds with his customary sang foie. He's not a man to panic at a kind of giant face leering in a disquality.

in through a window or a garden full of skulls. And the visions do fade away. But then in the wake of the burning of Nara, it's evident that his doom is now coming upon him because he begins to burn with the hottest temperature in world history. That's a big claim. In all world history. In all of world history, nothing compares with the temperature that Lord Kiyamori suffers. So we are told his only words, once his temperature gets him, were hot, hot. and he tries to calm it down by stepping into icy springs, and the water in these icy springs just steams, boils and turns to steam. He must have been properly hot.

Yeah, well, no one can approach him. And he's kind of lying on his bed, kind of writhing in agony for a month. And then finally, his wife kind of braves the heat, you know, because kind of risking being incinerated by it. Yeah, he's like the human torch from the Fantastic Four. And she says, you know, what's your dying wish, my lord? now that you're on your deathbed. His dying wish has to be said, it doesn't seem to me particularly Buddhist.

He says, never mind building me temples and pagodas, never mind pious prayers for me once I am gone. No, I want Yoritomo's head off and hung before my grave. That is the only commemoration I wish. I respect that. He's sticking to his guns. He certainly is. And so he dies pledging his family, the Tyra, to undying war with the Minamoto, and war, sure enough, is what both the Tyra and the Minamoto are going to get.

And this war is the most epic, the most famous war in the entire history of the samurai. It is the great samurai war. Speaking just for myself, I cannot wait to find out what happens next. And actually, members of the rest of history club, our own samurai war band, can find out what happens next right away. And if you want to join them, and in fact, if you want to hear, the next two episodes after that in the series, if you'd like to hear those right now, ad-free, and you'd love a load of other Japanese-style benefits, then I would suggest going to the Restis History.com and signing up, and you too can follow the way of the samurai.

And Dominic, am I not right that there is an excellent new newsletter? I can't believe I didn't mention it. So a lot of people have been saying that the new newsletter is comparable probably only to the tale of Genji and the pillowbook in terms of elegance of composition, in terms of the wealth of information, the information about medieval Japan, and just the sort of general sense of beauty and poise and sort of beautiful balance to it. Yes. That's certainly the feedback that I've had about the newsletter. Well, there is actually an extract from the tale of the hakei, if you're interested to know what it sounds like. There's an interview with the curator of the British Museum show. There's all kinds

of tremendous benefits, isn't it? Right. On that bombshell, Tom, al-a-a-a-a-a-zamas, and goodbye, everybody. Goodbye.