transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:12] And so they fought, now closing, now breaking. What shall Benkay do? For when he thinks that he has conquered, with his little sword, the boy thrusts the blow aside. Again and again, Benkay strikes. Again and again, his blows are parried. To that last, even he, mighty Benkay, can do battle no longer. So that's a scene from the Japanese Noh play, if you like Noh theater. It's called Benkay 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 Benkay on the Bridge, don't you?

Speaker 2:
[00:57] I do. Who doesn't love the most famous fight in samurai history? Surely it's your favorite too.

Speaker 1:
[01:02] It's certainly in the top five samurai fights.

Speaker 2:
[01:05] Yeah. And it's famous because it's endlessly retold and it's endlessly re-illustrated. And the backdrop to it is, is that Benkay 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 armor 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.

Speaker 1:
[01:33] He's not holding them all at the same time, presumably.

Speaker 2:
[01:35] No, he's not holding them all 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...

Speaker 1:
[01:40] Yeah, those sort of zen gardens of a lot of gravel. Raking his zen garden.

Speaker 2:
[01:46] He's ready and prepared for anything. 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 he 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 girlie about him, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[02:34] Yeah, but maybe lulling him into a full sense of security, is he?

Speaker 2:
[02:37] Well, maybe, because he turns out to be so formidable an opponent that Benkei ends up defeated.

Speaker 1:
[02:45] Oh, what?

Speaker 2:
[02:46] And we're told in the no play, he can do battle no longer. And he submits to his opponent. And from this point on, he is the victor's loyal follower. So he becomes his samurai. That's what samurai means, retainer.

Speaker 1:
[03:00] And who is this person who's defeated him?

Speaker 2:
[03:02] Well, he is a guy called Minamoto no Yoshitsune. And we actually met him in our previous episode, in which listeners may remember we were describing the outbreak of the great war between the Tyra clan and the Minamoto clan.

Speaker 1:
[03:22] So in 12th century Japan, so medieval Japan, the emperors have become slightly sort of...

Speaker 2:
[03:30] Kind of ciphers almost.

Speaker 1:
[03:31] Yeah, ciphers, almost like puppet figures. And these two clans loosely related to the imperial family, sort of semi-detached in the imperial family. What do they call the Tyra and the Minamoto? They are fighting for supremacy. And remind me, which is the one that is strongest in the West, in the Kansai area?

Speaker 2:
[03:48] So the Tyra have control over Kyoto, the great imperial capital. They have the imperial family under their thumb, and they had expelled the Minamoto pretty much from the kind of civilised centre of Japan. And they have all been disbursed to the barbarous northeastern stretches of Japan.

Speaker 1:
[04:07] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[04:08] Yoshitsune is a member of this clan. So hence Minamoto no Yoshitsune. And so this is the background for the fleeting appearance, as we said, of Yoshitsune in our previous episode. Because he was the baby who had been folded in the cloak of his mother, the concubine, Tokiwa, as she attempted to escape Kyoto in a snowstorm. And Tokiwa had become the concubine of Kiyomori, who was the most powerful man in Japan, the leader of the Tyra clan. And so therefore the inveterate enemy of the rival Minamoto clan. And Yoshitsune's father, Yoshitomo, had been the head of the Minamoto. And Yoshitomo had been killed in his bath. He'd been trying to get away, ended up murdered by a supposed friend. Kiyomori had only spared Yoshitsune out of affection for his mother because Tokio ends up as Kiyomori's concubine. And so Yoshitsune had been brought up in complete ignorance of his father's identity. He did not know that he was the son of this great Minamoto lord. He had no idea about that. And then at the age of six, he gets packed off by Kiyomori to a monastery north of Kyoto on the slopes of Mount Karama, great mountain north of Kyoto. And Kiyomori's plan is that Yoshitsune will grow up in harmless and ignorant seclusion as a monk. He doesn't know who his father is, doesn't know that he's a Minamoto, and he's a monk, so therefore, hopefully he's not going to grow up to become a samurai. But clearly, he's now out and about fighting warrior monks on a bridge. That plan hasn't worked out. So basically, the big question is, what's been going on in his life? How has he ended up this great warrior?

Speaker 1:
[05:49] Well, this is a great samurai tale, isn't it? So the story of his youth and how he basically grows up to become himself, and this is a story that evolved over the course of medieval Japanese history. People told it and retold it and elaborated on it, right?

Speaker 2:
[06:02] Yeah, and it becomes the best beloved of all the samurai tales, almost the archetypal samurai tale. It tells how he's this young boy in his monastery, and then a servant who is loyal to his father's memory reveals to him his true identity. And Yoshitsune then goes up onto the side of the mountain of Mount Kurama, and he meets the great Tengu, who is the spirit lord of the mountain. And very fortunately for Yoshitsune, the greatest teacher of martial arts anywhere in the cosmos, and the great Tengu instructs Yoshitsune in swordsmanship. So, in a sense, he is Yoda to Yoshitsune's Luke.

Speaker 1:
[06:44] Or Merlin to his Arthur, surely.

Speaker 2:
[06:46] Yes. I mean, there is something archetypal about this story. There's no question about it. And the great Tengu then leads Yoshitsune to a palace that is deep within the mountain, so embedded within the rock. And here he meets with his father, his dead father, the guy who had been killed in the bath, Yoshitomo. And Yoshitomo has been reborn as a Buddha. And Yoshitomo, I mean, he's not kind of peace and love. He's very much the go out and kill all my enemies, kill all the tyra, have vengeance for my overthrow. And Yoshitomo tells his son, you are going to grow up, and you are going to become the greatest of all the samurai. So you mentioned King Arthur. I mean, there's definitely a kind of King Arthur dimension there. The young boy who doesn't know his father, who gets adopted by a kind of great wizard, and is kind of given swords and all this kind of thing. But if you throw in the battle with Ben-Key on the bridge, which follow, he leaves the monastery, and he goes out to find his fortune in the world, and he runs into Ben-Key. There is also a very strong element there of Robin Hood, because I'm sure that people will be reminded Robin Hood meeting with Friar Tuck. And I know that Friar Tuck is a friar, not a monk, but basically, pretty much the same thing. It is kind of mad that islands at the opposite end of Eurasia should both have these 12th-century folk heroes who fight a kind of monk-like figure on a bridge.

Speaker 1:
[08:16] But Yoshitsune is a genuine historical figure. And Robin Hood and King Arthur, and indeed, Luke Skywalker are arguably not.

Speaker 2:
[08:25] Arguably.

Speaker 1:
[08:27] There must be some kernel of historical truth behind the stories of Yoshitsune, no?

Speaker 2:
[08:32] I mean, more than a kernel, he is a very, very significant historical figure. And in fact, he comes to rank as one of the greatest generals in the whole of Japanese history. And although lots of the stories that are told about him, and particularly about his youth, are obviously fantastical, they are hinting at aspects of his story that I think are genuinely mysterious, and they have evolved to try and explain things that admirers of Yoshitsune, once he had become this great general, they wanted to know where exactly he had come from, and there were clearly all kinds of puzzles around it. So he clearly was spared as a baby, despite being Yoshitomo's son. And presumably then the story of him being sent to the monastery is true. I mean, that does kind of make sense. But if he sent to the monastery, then at some point he must have learned swordsmanship. And if not with the Great Tengu, then from someone else. And as a youth, we know that he definitely did attract a band of formidable samurai. And maybe Benkei, this warrior monk, was one of them.

Speaker 1:
[09:35] Hold on, Benkei definitely existed.

Speaker 2:
[09:38] There are early sources, by which we mean kind of 60, 70 years after the events are supposed to have happened, that do describe a warrior monk called Benkei in Yoshitsune's train. The only issue being that he is described as being very thin and ascetic and not built like a rugby player. But you could see perhaps, you know, it's a better story if he becomes this kind of great hulking monster in black armour.

Speaker 1:
[10:02] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[10:03] I mean, essentially, we don't really know anything about his youth. He's a good swordsman. He has this band of samurai. He has discovered who his father is. And it's only when Yoshitsune is 20, so this is in the year 1180, that at last we get real historical certainty. Because this is the year when he emerges from this kind of obscurity that he's been veiled throughout his youth, to join his half-brother, Yoritomo, who is now the head of the Minamoto clan. And this is a very dramatic moment because the two half-brothers have never met before. And it happens in the most iconic place, possibly in the whole of Japan in the shadow of Mount Fuji, where Yoritomo is standing guard. And the reason that he is standing guard is because by this point, the Tyra led by Kiomori and the Minamoto led by Yoritomo are now at war.

Speaker 1:
[10:58] All right. Well, let's pull the camera back and let's have a look at the island of Japan and see what the state of play is. So let's start with the Tyra. They appear to be in the Ascendant, don't they? You already said that they control Kyoto, which is the imperial capital. They control the emperor, who is a puppet or a cipher, who is two years old and he is called Antoku.

Speaker 2:
[11:19] And he is the grandson of Kiomori.

Speaker 1:
[11:21] Right. And they also control the plane, the Kansai, on which Kyoto stands. So if you think of Japan, archipelago, the single biggest island in the middle is Honshu and they control the west of Honshu, right?

Speaker 2:
[11:33] Yes. And also the inland sea, which kind of lies between western Honshu and the two islands south of it, Shikoku and Kushu. So the the Taira basically rule the waves, right? They're effectively the only naval power in Japan.

Speaker 1:
[11:48] And then what's about their rivals, the Minamoto. So as I recall from last time, their heartland was around was the other the other great plain of Honshu, which is what's called the Kanto. And that surrounds what's now Tokyo, which doesn't exist at this point.

Speaker 2:
[12:05] Yes. The Minamoto capital is a place called Kamakura, which is a port just west of what will come to be called Tokyo Bay.

Speaker 1:
[12:13] Right.

Speaker 2:
[12:13] And from Kamakura, Yoritomo is able to command the Great Plain of Kanto and all the kind of the mountainous reaches of Eastern Honshu, which is the traditional home of the samurai. Yoritomo himself, so the head of the Minamoto, the elder half brother of Yoshitsune, is not a natural warrior, but he is a brilliant war leader. He's very ruthlessly pragmatic, very cold-hearted in his hunger for power. He's prepared to elbow anyone aside. But he's also very, very charismatic and commanding. And he has spent 20 years in exile. So, Kiyomori had spared his life when he was just a boy, had sent him off into exile. And he spent 20 years biding his time in exile. He completely has the virtues of patience. And he understands the importance of waiting for the perfect moment to strike. And in that, he's very different to Yoshitsune, whose great qualities are decisiveness and speed and aggression. And Yoritomo, when he meets this kind of young half-brother who he'd never met before, he very quickly comes to appreciate these qualities, to appreciate that his younger half-brother is potentially the great warrior, the great general that Yoritomo is self-aware enough to realise that he will never be. And so he starts to trust him with all kinds of military responsibilities, even though he's still very, very young.

Speaker 1:
[13:54] 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?

Speaker 2:
[14:09] 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. And so Yoritomo has been able to kind of control the road that links Kyoto with Kanto. And he knows that the tyra are not strong enough to kind of force that. So there's a bit of a kind of 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, if the hottest temperature in world history. And he had been a brilliant strategist, a brilliant strategist, whom the tyra basically find impossible to replace.

Speaker 1:
[14:54] Right. But then, natural disaster or what 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?

Speaker 2:
[15:09] 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. And in Kyoto, bodies start to pile up along the riverbanks, in the streets, terrible scenes. And there is famine too in Kanto, but because the plane there is larger and more fertile than Kansai, the plane 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. And 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. And so 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.

Speaker 1:
[16:20] Feminine diplomacy. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:22] And so Yoritomo's prestige soars and Taira prestige is very badly damaged.

Speaker 1:
[16:29] 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.

Speaker 2:
[16:50] Dominic, there is indeed a twist because spring 1183, the war does resume, the Taira and the Minamoto start to clash again directly. It does see the Taira launch a full scale assault on the Minamoto heartlands. And it does indeed see a very charismatic, a very able, a very aggressive young general kind of blazed like a meteor across the plains and mountains of Japan and establish himself as an absolute top samurai legend. But the amazing twist is that this general is not Yoshitsune, or at least initially it isn't. Because Kanto is not the only Minamoto stronghold. And listeners may remember from our previous episode that there is also a second Minamoto stronghold. And this is the upland region of Shinano. And this lay to the east of Kyoto and the absolute kind of interior of central Honshu. So it's basically in the middle of Japan. And it's very mountainous, difficult terrain, but not completely inaccessible because there is this river valley that cuts through it. And the river, the Kiso, helps to open up the western approaches if you are in Shinano. And these lead to Kyoto. And this means that from the perspective of the Tyre in Kyoto, any concentration of Minamoto forces in Shinano is a real threat. And just such a concentration over the course of the early years of the war is what has been happening. And it's been happening under yet another Samurai chief whose name begins with Y and ends in a vowel. So listeners will be thrilled to know that there is another of these Minamoto popping up. And this is a guy called Minamoto no Yoshinaka.

Speaker 1:
[18:41] Before you plunge into that, Tom, let's just pause a second to get these three people in there and clear who they are because they're so similar. Yoritomo, which guy is Yoritomo again?

Speaker 2:
[18:51] Yoritomo is the brilliantly cold, ruthless, pragmatic head of the Minamoto clan.

Speaker 1:
[18:56] Right. So, okay, he's the mastermind. Yoshitsune, who is he?

Speaker 2:
[19:01] He is the younger half brother, dashing, brilliant, got the warrior monk at his back, King Arthur, Luke Skywalker, that kind of figure.

Speaker 1:
[19:10] Gotcha. And then the third man, Yoshinaka, you're about to tell us who he is. He is their cousin, right?

Speaker 2:
[19:17] Yes. So his father had been killed, not by Kiomori, but in a Minamoto blood feud. And so he'd grown up slightly off the Tyre radar. They hadn't really kind of worried about him as he was growing up. And he'd grown up in Shinano and made it his stronghold. And he had come to identify with it so strongly that he took the name of the river that ran through it, Kiso. And so I think because it's so confusing to have, you know, all these Ys with vowels on the end of their name bubbling around, we should call him Kiso. He was called Kiso as well as Yoshinaka. So we'll call him Kiso.

Speaker 1:
[19:51] Brilliant. This is a dream.

Speaker 2:
[19:53] And by 1183, Kiso in his kind of great mountain fastness east of Kyoto, has become a really pressing threat to the Taira. And they are starting to worry that he might launch a direct attack on them from Kyoto. But they're also worried that he's established his control over the lowland road that goes along the coast of northern Japan, which is also a kind of, you know, it's very accessible. So it goes around all these mountains that are in the middle of Honshu. And they don't want him to seize control of that either. And so in the spring of 1183, the Tyre send an enormous expeditionary force, supposedly 100,000 men, I mean, maybe not that much, but a lot of men along this coastal road, along the northern coastal road. And their aim in sending such an enormous army is to absolutely guarantee victory. They're going to eliminate Kiso. And then once they've done that and they've secured their northeastern flank and cleared Shinano of Minamoto forces, they can then head southwards towards Kanto, turn all their forces against Yoritomo, who is based there, and finish off the war. So that is the strategy. It's a strategy of the total annihilation of all the Minamoto forces beginning with Kiso.

Speaker 1:
[21:14] Good plan. Or is it? Because they advance along this road, don't they? The coastal road for about 200 miles, and they win a couple of skirmishes, the Taira, and then they reach a mountain pass. Always an ominous moment, I think, in an invasion.

Speaker 2:
[21:28] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[21:29] So it's the end of May, and the pass is called Kurikara. And they hear that Kiso is coming the opposite way, so they kind of rush on. And effectively, they want to get through the pass before him, don't they? So they can meet him on the ground on the other side. But what happens?

Speaker 2:
[21:44] Well, they want to do that because they know that they vastly outnumber the forces that Kiso has. So if they can meet on an open plain, then it will absolutely kind of be to their benefit. But when they reach the top of this pass, Kurikara, they see something that makes their blood run cold. And this is a great mass of Minamoto banners fluttering over the ridge on their left, far more Minamoto banners than they had ever thought that Kiso would have been able to bring into the field. Obviously, they don't want to continue their march down the pass into the flatlands below, with their flank exposed to this vast Minamoto force. And so they halt their advance and make camp and basically kind of just wondering, what do we do now? And this is exactly what Kiso wants them to do, because the flags are a decoy. It's a kind of classic samurai stratagem. Most of them are phantom banners. And so the sight of these banners, it tricks the tyrant into thinking that Kiso has far more men on the peak of the past than he actually does. The actual number of men on this pass is only 3000. And these men, Dominic, are commanded by a guy called Yoda. So again, the kind of Star Wars echoes are throughout this story.

Speaker 1:
[23:01] Yeah, he's come from the Dagobah system. So Kiso arrives the next day, doesn't he? To join Yoda. Yeah. But he has 20,000 men. He has a substantial force. So they remind us that Tyra had 100,000. That was the claim.

Speaker 2:
[23:17] 100,000. So still outnumbered 5 to 1 pretty much.

Speaker 1:
[23:20] But his plan is basically he's like a Hannibal. I mean, every battle comes back to Hannibal's battles. He wants to surround them, doesn't he? And basically use their own ridiculous weight of numbers, make them unmanoeuvrable, they will get in each other's way, and he will be able to outflank them and make darting attacks that will destroy them. Correct?

Speaker 2:
[23:40] Well, he has a very complicated and very clever stratagem. So he's divided his forces into three. He and Yoda, I love saying that, he and Yoda are now on the ridge above the pass, directly opposite the Tyra. Meanwhile, unknown to the Tyra, a second contingent of Kiso's men have taken up hidden positions far below at the foot of a precipice directly behind the Tyra positions, which is known locally as Hell Valley. So there's nothing good about being on the edge of a precipice that leads down to somewhere called Hell Valley. There is also a third contingent, again, unobserved by the Tyra. They have no idea that it exists, who were climbing a very wide and narrow mountain path beyond the site of the Tyra. Their aim is to go in the rear of the Tyra and cut off their retreat, so that they can't march back down the way that they came. It's going to take this third contingent a whole extra day to reach their positions, because they're having to go a long way round. As the 2nd of June dawns, Qiso is doing all that he can to kill time, to keep the Tyra distracted, to give that 3rd contingent the opportunity to get into their positions. So all day long, Qiso and his men are kind of engaging in classic displays of samurai peacocking. So this involves shouting out their lineage, boasting about how distinguished they are, issuing challenges, engaging in ritualized displays of archery, all this kind of thing. And in The Tale of the Heike, our great source for this war, these displays are often described as happening in the context of actual battles themselves, which I think clearly didn't happen. It's too homeric to imagine that people are stopping in the middle of the battle and shouting out their lineage and all this sort of thing.

Speaker 1:
[25:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Speaker 2:
[25:41] But I think that when you have the opportunity to kind of shout at an enemy, it's absolutely what they're up to. And we're told in The Tale of the Heike, and the Tyre suspecting no scheme to drive them towards the ravine played along with them poor men until the light began to fail. And as the sun sets, so the Tyre notice for the first time that in their rear a Minamoto force is starting to assemble and drawing up ranks and is now blocking off their retreat. And even as they notice this, the sun sets, darkness descends, it's night, and then all at once, storming down the slope towards them. The Tyre see a great rolling surge of torches and they feel the earth starting to shake. And of course, they're terrified that a massive army that seems to have sprung from nowhere is attacking them and they falter and they start to break and they turn. But it's not a massive army, it's an enormous herd of oxen with burning torches tied to their horns. And so again, Barry Hannibal, people who listen to our series on Hannibal, that was the kind of trick he'd love to pull. And the oxen stampede smashing into the Tyre, many of whom are sent stumbling, falling into the vast ravine that yawns behind them, others are trampled underfoot, others are cut down by the Minamoto forces who've now begun to attack them both from the ridge where Kiso and Yoda are stationed, and also that third contingent who are marching down in their rear. And there isn't any escape for the Minamoto, not even for those who make it alive to the bottom of Hell Valley, because that is where the third contingent of men is waiting, the people who've been lying in ambush for exactly this moment. And we're told that all these vast numbers, these thousands upon thousands of men had marched up to the summit of the Kurokara Pass, and of these huge numbers, only 2,000 survive. So to quote the tale of the Heiki, down hurtled the father, down the son, down the brothers, elder than younger, down the lord, his retainer behind him, men piling on horses, horses on men, over and over till mounts and riders, 70,000 of the Tyre, edge to edge choked the yawning ravine, springs ran blood, the dead lay in mounds. To this day, so it is told, arrows strike nicks and sword cuts mark the rocks up and down Kurekara.

Speaker 1:
[28:24] The result of this is the most crushing and decisive victory ever won by a Samurai commander, right? Because the Tyre invasion has been driven back, the Tyre forces are in headlong chaotic retreat, and Kiso pursues them with extreme prejudice, doesn't he?

Speaker 2:
[28:41] He does, because he wants to complete the route. And so huge question now, hanging over the prospects for the war. You know, are the Tyre going to be able to make a comeback? Will they be able to continue the war at all? If they can't, what does this mean for the Minamoto? And also, of course, what does Kiso's stunning victory mean for Yoritomo, the head of the Minamoto, who's had nothing to do with this? Is there potential perhaps for the cousins to fall out? Because Yoritomo is not the kind of man who likes being unexpectedly upstaged. So unbelievable tension, Dominic.

Speaker 1:
[29:19] Incredible tension. 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. Welcome back, everybody, to The Rest Is History. What's tension and what's a cliffhanger? We are now in early August 1183. So it's seven weeks after Quito won that tremendous victory, unexpected victory, with this blazing ox and whatnot, at the pass of Kurekara. And Kyoto, the imperial capital, is a city on the edge, a city in panic because Quito is closing in. So he'd won a second victory, which he 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.

Speaker 2:
[30:19] Yeah. And again, Quito 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 Quito 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 Munamori. And he, it has to be said, is not a very impressive figure. He is a shadow of his father. And Munamori gives orders for the evacuation of the capital. So to quote the, the tale of the Heike, men, saddled horses, titan girths and galloped north, south, east and west, carrying things to hide. And Munamori 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, the atmosphere is very Saigon, 1975. There's a sense of, you know, people fleeing, you need to kind of burn the evidence of your occupation. And you have this pool of black smoke starting to drift across the capital.

Speaker 1:
[31:34] Well, you say people fleeing, but there are some people in particular whose fate is crucial. And chief among them, we haven't really talked about the imperial family specifically. So what's going on with them?

Speaker 2:
[31:46] Well, we said how they're kind of ciphers. That's not entirely true. They are players. Their key role is to provide legitimacy to whoever controls them. And so it's really important for the tyra that they keep the emperor in their hands, because if they lose the emperor to Kiso, then it's Kiso and the Minamoto who will become the defenders of legitimacy and the tyra will immediately kind of be transformed into outlaws. And so that evening, as the tyra headquarters is burning and all the various tyra lords are preparing to evacuate Kyoto, Munamori comes to the Imperial Palace and he comes into the presence of his sister, Kendra Aemonin, who is the mother of the emperor, so the daughter of Kiyomori. And he speaks to her in strictest confidence. And he says to her, I believe that the world would somehow always be as we knew it, but now you see everything has changed. And he says to Kendra Aemonin, you have to go and you have to take your son, the five-year-old, Antaku, the emperor, you have to take him with you. And so mother and son leave the next morning at six o'clock in the imperial palanquin and they take with them crucially the imperial regalia. And this is a mirror, a jewel and a sword that had been brought to earth two millennia before by the grandson of the sun goddess. And this matters because you cannot become an emperor without that regalia. It's just not possible. So they set off the emperor, his mother, all the Tyre lords, the imperial regalia. And as they abandoned Kyoto, so we're told, clouds trailed about the eastern hills and a bright moon lit the dawn. Everywhere cocks were crowing. No one had dreamed it would come to this. And the emperor is going with his uncles and the other Tyre lords, and they abound for the inner sea and the fleet, which remains their great strength. Because as we said, the Tyre are the lords of the ocean, the lords of the inner sea, and the waters beyond it. And because the Minamoto have no ships, this offers them a prospect of continuing the war.

Speaker 1:
[34:08] Yeah. But one person doesn't go with them. And this is somebody called Go Shirakawa. And Go Shirakawa is the most cunning and slippery, isn't he, of all the what they call the cloistered emperors. So explain to us the role of Go Shirakawa.

Speaker 2:
[34:26] So we've mentioned before, a cloistered emperor is an emperor who has reigned and then abdicated. And this was absolutely standard practice. It was a way in which the kind of the various lords who effectively controlled the empire were always able to ensure that no emperor was in a position to kind of establish a supremacy over them. So Go Shirakawa was slightly unusual because normally the emperors would rule as children, as boys, and then have to abdicate as they were approaching adolescence. Go Shirakawa had come to the throne in his late 20s, and he of course had been obliged to abdicate as all emperors were after he'd ruled only for three years. But because he was that much older and because he was naturally very shrewd and cunning, he'd remained a very active player in court politics. And he had very reluctantly accepted the supremacy of the tyra. You know, he'd found it a humiliation to be subordinated to a samurai lord. And Prince Mochihito, who led that rebellion that we finished with in the previous episode, the guy who fought by the bridge and ended up being killed there. Prince Mochihito had been Go Shirakawa's son, and somehow Go Shirakawa had avoided suspicion of complicity in that plot. I mean, he must have been embroiled, but Kiyomori kind of left him alone, and he's still very much on the scene. And now, with the Tyre leaving and Kiso fast approaching the capital, his chance has come. So on the 13th of August, as the Tyre are evacuating Kyoto, Go Shirakawa slips away unnoticed from Kyoto. And we're told the cloistered emperor stole away to seek refuge on Mount Hiya. And Mount Hiya is east of Kyoto, and it's where one of Japan's most famous monasteries stood. It still stands to this day. But it was also more saliently where Kiso and his army had just arrived. And so the big question is, can the cloistered emperor, Go Shirakawa and the great samurai warlord, Kiso, do business? And Dominic, indeed, they can.

Speaker 1:
[36:37] Well, that's exciting. So they clearly strike a deal because Go Shirakawa returns to Kyoto a few days later. So 17th of August, and he's got an escort at this point of 50,000 mounted warriors. And above them are flying the banners of the Minamoto. The white banners of the Minamoto said, this is a massive twist.

Speaker 2:
[36:59] It is. So again, the tale of the Heike, no such banner had been seen to enter the capital for a good 20 years and more. These were astonishing events. And Go Shirakawa with this escort of Minamoto warriors is able now back in Kyoto to set himself up in a splendid palace. And this is called the Hojuji. And it includes a temple with a kind of incredibly vulgar sounding golden hall. It's got an ornamental lake. It's absolutely wonderful. And Go Shirakawa settles himself in there with great enthusiasm. And from the Hojuji, he issues decrees, which confirm to the world that everything has indeed been turned upside down, and that the Tyra are now the outlaws, and it's the Minamoto who are the defenders of the throne. And Go Shirakawa formally strips 160 Tyra lords of their court offices. And of course, there is a further problem, which is that they don't have the emperor, but Go Shirakawa thinks that he has a solution. And he eyes up Anteku, the emperor's, his little half-brother, he's only about two years old at this point, and he picks up this little boy, bounces him on his lap, and he sobs to think I had never seen this little boy before. And he prophesies that the boy's descendants will rule for a hundred generations, clearly lining him up to become a replacement emperor. But there is this problem, they don't have the imperial regalia, because the tyra have taken it with them. It's with Anteku. So that is an issue, but it's not an insuperable one, because Gosher Akawa has a great general who can go after the tyra and hopefully get the imperial regalia back. And this of course is Kiso. And Gosher Akawa gives Kiso an absolutely splendid title. And this is the Asahi Shogun, the general of the rising sun.

Speaker 1:
[39:04] Okay, that is a good name. Unfortunately, Kiso doesn't quite live up to that tremendous name, does he? Because basically, he's come from the sticks. He's come from the kind of agricultural badlands of Shinano, the kind of mountains. And he and his men do not behave with the elegance and courtesy that is expected of visitors to the imperial capital.

Speaker 2:
[39:24] No, so it's like, you know, Buckingham Palace has been taken over by the Wurzels or something. So, Kiso Samurai are roaming around Kyoto kind of pillaging and drinking cider and driving tractors and all that kind of thing.

Speaker 1:
[39:36] Right.

Speaker 2:
[39:37] And this is terrible for Go Shirakawa, who's been raised in, you know, the sophistication and delicacy of the imperial court and doesn't want these bumpkins in the slightest. And so he looks around for another horse to back. And of course, there is really only the one option and this is Moritomo no Yoritomo, the Lord of Kanto, the head of the Minamoto clan, Kiso's cousin.

Speaker 1:
[40:02] But he and Kiso are in alliance, right?

Speaker 2:
[40:04] Well, Yoritomo has been watching with mixed emotions. I think it's fair to say on the one hand, he's delighted that Kiso has destroyed the tyrant's hold on Kyoto. On the other hand, he doesn't really want Kiso to have too much power because then he might rival himself for control of the Minamoto clan. This is why Yoritomo is very interested to hear from Go Shirakawa. Go Shirakawa is very, very interested in Yoritomo because Yoritomo is not a bumpkin. He has immense military reserves, so he has at least as many men as Kiso. Above all, basically, he's a completely ruthless bastard who is jealous of Kiso and resentful of his success. Go Shirakawa is shrewd enough to realize that there is great scope here for making mischief. So he writes Yoritomo a secret letter, essentially inviting him to come to Kyoto and liberate the city from his cousin, who Go Shirakawa describes as the wild monkey of Kiso.

Speaker 1:
[41:10] So meanwhile, Kiso is oblivious to this, and Kiso has been saying to Go Shirakawa, my plan is I'm going to march on the Kanto and I'm going to get rid of Yoritomo. He's completely oblivious to the fact that his patron is in touch with the one man that he's actually planning to go and eliminate.

Speaker 2:
[41:26] Yes, and this isn't what Go Shirakawa wants at all, because Go Shirakawa actually wants the regalia back. That's his priority because he wants to enshrine the reigning emperor's little brother, Gotoba, he's called, as the new emperor. And so he says, don't bother attacking Yoritomo, don't do that yet. Go and attack the tyra, they're the priority. Go and eliminate them. And Kiso can see the force of this argument because he doesn't want to allow the tyra to kind of recover from their meltdown. They've still got their fleet, the seas of theirs, there's still a kind of massive brooding threat. You know, and Kiso wants to get the imperial regalia back as well. He wants a new emperor. He wants to have this little boy directly under his thumb. And so that autumn, when Kiso leaves Kyoto at the head of his troops again, he is targeting not Yoritomo but the Tyre.

Speaker 1:
[42:15] So just hold on on that. Go Shirakawa suggesting that. Is that a ruse? Is that a part of a plot? That's genuine.

Speaker 2:
[42:22] Well, Go Shirakawa's priority is to eliminate the Tyre.

Speaker 1:
[42:25] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[42:25] And also he wants an alliance with Yoritomo, so he doesn't want Kiso going off and attacking Yoritomo rather than the Tyre.

Speaker 1:
[42:31] He doesn't want Kiso to be killed in this attack or anything like that.

Speaker 2:
[42:34] I think he'd quite like it if he was. I mean, that would solve all kinds of problems. I mean, every time Kiso goes off and fights a war, there is always a prospect that he might end up dead. So Goshe Rokawa is basically trying to get him out of the capital. And if he dies in battle, then that's brilliant. And if he defeats the Tyre and gets the Imperial Regalia back, then again, every which way Goshe Rokawa is a winner. So he's playing quite a shrewd and subtle game. Now in the event, Kiso's campaign against the Tyre goes very badly wrong. Kiso has never fought at sea. He's rustled up a kind of makeshift fleet, but it gets very badly mauled. And on the same day that he's defeated at sea, a task force that he sent by land to attack the Tyre is also defeated. So he returns in a slightly bedraggled state. And just to put Kiso in an even worse mood, when he gets back to Kyoto, he discovers what Goshe Rokawa has been up to with Yoritomo, essentially trying to kind of elbow him aside and kind of build bridges with Yoritomo. And he is understandably furious. And what's more, Goshe Rokawa has formerly condemned Kiso's men for robbing all the local farmers, for going out from the city and kind of robbing their storehouses and nicking all their rice and all that kind of thing. And Kiso is furious. There are paddy fields everywhere. What business does he have this cloistered emperor censoring them for feeding their horses rice leaves from a few? So Kiso, you can understand, is pretty pissed off by this. And so being the man that he is, a man fond of kind of decisive, dramatic action, he takes the obvious course. He launches a coup and he marches on the Hojoji Palace, you know, this great place with the lake and the Golden Hall and everything, you know, with his men. It's not an easy nut to crack because the Hojoji Palace is guarded by a crack squad of warrior monks. So, you know, they're not sort of lightly challenged. And also, of course, the fact that this is the first time a cloistered emperor has been directly attacked by samurai. And so the shock to, you know, what is centuries worth of respect for the imperial office is off the scale. Go Shirakawa, you know, he may no longer be ruling emperor, but he had been emperor and he is descended from the sun goddess. And so at the palace gates, Qiso's men are met by an unarmed chamberlain who addresses them in the most outraged terms. In days gone by, this chamberlain says, when a herald read out the sovereign's decree, dead plants and trees put forth flowers, fruit promptly ripened on the bow, and demon powers bowed in a sense. And Qiso's response to this is, silence him! And he orders a full-blown assault. And a storm of flame-tipped arrows are sent flying into the palace. Its fittings, its timbers blaze into fire. The chamberlain flees. So actually do most of the monks. I mean, they may be warrior monks, but they're not prepared to stand up to Qiso's battle-hardened samurai. And those who do stay are slaughtered. Vast piles of heads are raised. The heads of a hundred of the guards employed by Go Shirakawa in the palace are harvested, stuck on spikes along the riverbank. And meanwhile, listeners may be wondering, what if Go Shirakawa himself, the kind of slippery, conniving, calculating cloistered emperor. Well, those guards who had not been slaughtered and decapitated had tried to bundle him into a palanquin. And they had tried to bundle the infant, soon-to-be emperor Gotoba into a boat and row him out onto the lake. But the samurai had come after both of them. They'd been taken prisoner. And Gosha Rekawa was put effectively under house arrest in a second palace. And Gotoba, this little boy, he was escorted to not even a palace, just to a private mansion. And the tale of the Heike cannot, you know, just kind of goes overboard with the horror and the pathos of this scene. The pathetic nature of this progress truly defies description. And it's such a, it's such a historic moment because, you know, the Golden Age of Imperial Kuto was clearly over by this point. An age that had been characterized by incredible respect for the emperor, kind of painstaking devotion to etiquette, a refusal, essentially to have kind of dealings at all with samurai. But even so, the treatment that is being meted out by Kiso to both a former and reigning emperor, is understandably greeted with complete shock across Japan. Nothing like it has ever been seen before.

Speaker 1:
[47:49] More shocking than the, what happens to the Roman emperors at the end of the Western Roman Empire, surely. Because of the court rituals, the ethos of courtesy and elegance and respect and deference and all of that was so much more pronounced in Japan than it was in Rome. Am I right?

Speaker 2:
[48:05] We compare Kyoto to Versailles.

Speaker 1:
[48:06] If the Mongols had sacked Louis XIV's France.

Speaker 2:
[48:10] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[48:11] Or something.

Speaker 2:
[48:11] Yeah. It's something like that. Yeah. It's seen, I mean, it's treating the emperor who should be treated, you know, who's the descendant of a goddess, cosmically mandated, with this lack of respect. You know, it's like seeing Marie Antoinette in a wagon. That's shocking.

Speaker 1:
[48:28] But there's one more contender who's still around and that is this guy, Yoritomo, he's the cousin of Kiso. This must be a gift to him because they are now implacable enemies. And for Yoritomo, his cause now has legitimacy because he can say, I'm defending the empire against this country bumpkin, can't he?

Speaker 2:
[48:47] It's brilliant for Yoritomo. And we said how he always waits for the perfect moment before striking, always waits for opportunity to be everything that he needs it to be. And I think the opportunities for him now are twofold. So as you say, he can launch an attack on Kiso and, if he defeats Kiso, seize control of Kyoto and present it as his defense of imperial legitimacy and also the fact that he is bringing peace to a suffering land. Remember that he had been supplying grain to the starving who lived around Kyoto. And now again, he can say, well, I am bringing you peace, where neither the tyrant nor my cousin had been able to bring peace. But, there is also another factor which Yoritomo very much wants to keep quiet. And this is the fact that anything which damages the prestige of Kyoto and its standing as the undisputed capital of Japan is only playing into his hands because Yoritomo, exceptionally, he is the first samurai lord to feel this. He has no loyalty to Kyoto. He hadn't lived there since he was 12. And his base is Kamakura, his fiefdom is Kanto, his recruiting grounds are the eastern half of Honshu. He recognizes that if he is going to rule Japan, it is pointless for him to do it from Kyoto. He has to do it from the east, which had always been the traditional stronghold of the Minamoto. And this, I think, is the measure of how clear sighted he is, how unsentimental, how innovative. Because this, again, is a completely revolutionary development. The idea that Japan might not be ruled from Kyoto, that it might be ruled from Kanto instead, it's impossible for most people even to contemplate it. And yet, Yoritomo, it's this kind of plan that he has fully formed in his mind. So he is fully on for sending an armed expedition against Kiso and hopefully seizing control of Kyoto and effectively kind of bringing it into the Empire of the East. But he's not planning to lead this campaign himself. He wants to fight fire with fire. And so he entrusts the war against Kiso to a second young Minamoto general who like Kiso is very dashing, bold, charismatic. And this of course is Yoshitsune. Yoshitsune has an elder brother, Minamoto Noriyori, brilliant name, Noriyori. And so Noriyori is sent to pacify Kiso's old stronghold, Shinano, you know, like a kind of mountainous stronghold, and then to advance on Kyoto from the east. And Yoshitsune is instructed to take the coastal road that leads along the south coast of Japan and then upwards towards Kyoto from the south. And so Kiso effectively is facing a two-pronged invasion. Noriyori from the east, Yoshitsune from the south. And so he has no option but to divide his forces. And one army is sent to block the advance of Noriyori from the east. And they reach the Setter Bridge, it's called, which crosses the southernmost tip of this huge lake, Lake Biwa. In fact, it's Japan's largest lake. And when they get there, they pull the bridge down so that the Minamoto forces hopefully won't be able to cross. And the second army is sent southwards to a place that we have already visited in this series. And this is Uji, which was the scene of the dramatic battle for the bridge that we described in our previous episode. An Uji bridge, like Setta Bridge, is pulled down. As had happened in the first battle, the planks are pulled up and tossed into the sea. And also because they know that it's possible to ford the river, everyone knows this because the events of that previous battle had been so celebrated, they drive stakes into the riverbed at the fording points to try and stop cavalry from crossing. Meanwhile, Kiso himself waits in Kyoto where he will receive news from the two fronts and wherever the threat seems most pressing, he will then advance from Kyoto and go and bring reinforcements and try and hold the Minamoto attack wherever it's most pressing.

Speaker 1:
[53:03] So it's Uji that becomes the epicentre of the action, isn't it? It's Uji that Yoshitsune reaches that first and there's been a battle there four years before. So everyone knows, you know, there could be a repeat of it and everyone knows that you can get across this river, you can forward the river because that's what happened last time. And so there's this story, isn't there, the two samurai who are rushing, they're competing to be the first to cross this river. So these are two men in Yoshitsune's army, is that right? Yeah, well, tell us the story about the two samurai. It's a good story.

Speaker 2:
[53:41] So 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. And one of these is a guy called Kajiwara, and he finds this prometry that sticks out into the boiling currents of the river Uji. And so he makes for that. And 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 under water. But 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 Shirō Takatsuna, the first man across the Uji River. So it is so classic samurai. It is yelling out your forebears, announcing who you are, beating your chest, saying that you are the first into battle. Kajiwara, I mean, he is very cross, but he is the second. He manages to make it to the far bank as well. 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. Because Uji is taken and the road to Kyoto lies open.

Speaker 1:
[55:55] Oh, 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 Shirakawa, 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.

Speaker 2:
[56:13] Yes. So he goes hairing up the road from Uji to Kyoto, and he arrives at the palace where Go Shirakawa was under house arrest. And Yoshitsune dismounts, he knocks, he announces himself in a ringing voice. I'm sure there's lots of stuff about his great ancestry and all that kind of thing. And he finds that he has arrived in time. Go Shirakawa is still alive. And understandably, he greets the arrival of Yoshitsune with enormous relief and gratitude. You know, he's safe. He's got rid of this awful kind of bumpkin. He is under the protection of Yoritomo and his dashing younger brother, Yoshitsune.

Speaker 1:
[56:54] Craigy. But we don't know what's happened to Kiso, do we? So what's happened to him? And what is he planning? Well, we will be finding out in the final episode of this epic series in which the great civil war of the samurai will reach its blood soaked and terrifying climax. And not only that, Tom, but we'll be meeting history's most famous female samurai. So it would be nice to get a woman onto the show. That will be exciting. There will be a spectacular mass suicide. We shall finally be encountering something that, again, sadly lacking from the series, which has been samurai crabs. And we will be continuing the swashbuckling story of the hero of this story, who is, of course, Yoshitsune. So if there are any members of our own samurai brotherhood out there, the members of the Rest Is History Club, you can hear that episode right away. And of course, you'll also be getting all the fantastic content in the special extended newsletter. If you would like to join the Rest Is History Club and get the host of unbelievable benefits that come with it, then you merely need to go to therestishistory.com. And on that note, Tom, arigato gozaimasu and sayonara everybody.

Speaker 2:
[58:05] Bye bye.