It is the year 1180 and 30,000 troops are passing through the ancient Japanese capital of Heian-kyo, on their way to put down an uprising to the east
The revolt is led by Minamoto no Yoritomo, who has fewer than 300 supporters. And as the massive army advances from the west, he faces a more immediate threat.
Yoritomo’s small rebel alliance has been pursued for days by more than 3,000 warriors led by the samurai commander Oba Kagechika.
Now the rebels face seemingly impossible odds, for they are outnumbered ten to one. But Yoritomo has decided to gamble everything
It is time for the Genji to take a stand.
It is now 3 a.m. Yoritomo commands just 300 horsemen—including his father-in-law Tokimasa as well as four samurai brothers from the Sasaki clan. He has led them to the slopes of Ishibashi, a narrow valley just north of Izu peninsula, where they have established a position on the slopes of the mountain. They raise their standard and attach the proclamation issued by Prince Mochihito, urging supporters of the Genji clan to revolt against Lord Kiyomori and the overweening power of the Heike.
Yoritomo, whose father had led the Genji years ago, has taken up the prince’s challenge, and his first act of rebellion – a daring night time attack against Kiyomori’s regional governor – has been a surprise success. But it has stung the Heike into action and now he must reap the whirlwind caused by his act of defiance.
Yoritomo calls on his band of advisors and together they gaze across the valley at the enemy that is gathering. Torrential rain and gale-force winds make visibility difficult, but they can see that their opponent, the commander Oba Kagechika, has spread out his troops into several columns.
Suddenly, one of the Sasaki brothers, Takatsuna, points at the horizon.
“There, can you see?” he says.
Yoritomo peers into the distance. “Yes, smoke is rising – it seems to be from the rear of their army.”
“It must be the Miura clan,” says Tokimasa.
“Mm, perhaps Miura’s advance troops have arrived,” says Yoritomo, “and they’re setting light to Kagechika’s supplies. They are still a long way off, though.”
He turns his horse to face his allies. “This means Kagechika will not wait until dawn. We had best get ready. If our battle is lost and we get divided, we’ll meet across the water, at Awa. Good luck, everyone.”
As they take their positions, Yoritomo’s men watch nervously as Kagechika’s front lines, several thousand strong, advance toward them.
Kagechika’s archers begin to fire their arrows, forcing Yoritomo’s men to take cover. It is then Yoritomo learns that Kagechika has caught them in a pincer movement, for to the rear of their position is another smaller army led by an old enemy of Yoritomo’s - Ito Sukechika – who is now approaching from the other side of the slope, cutting off any chance of retreat.
The armies clash amidst howling winds and driving rain. Yoritomo’s men fight bravely but the odds are overwhelming. With no way to advance or retreat, they are forced to find a way up the mountain. The Sasaki brothers lead a band of defenders in a frantic rearguard attack - again and again they turn their horses and hurl themselves against the advancing troops.
Yoritomo himself pauses and turns around to fire at the enemy. Then he hears a thud and looks down and sees that an arrow has become embedded in the sleeve of his armor.
Takatsuna calls out to him “My Lord, you must escape – look, the ridge above the valley, I will meet you there.”
Lord Hojo meanwhile is caught trying to repel the main body of Kagechika’s men. He calls out across the battlefield to Yoritomo, “Flee, my Lord, Miura’s men have not arrived - the battle is lost. But we will find you!”
Yoritomo realizes he has no choice and urges his horse up the mountain slope. As he reaches the ridge, he looks down and sees his scattered troops fighting desperately as they break up and flee up the mountain slopes.
From a pocket of his tunic, Yoritomo takes out a small statuette of the Goddess of Mercy, holds it tight, and prays that it will help protect his men – and keep the Genji flame alive.
Yoritomo’s escape from the battle of Mt Ishibashi has passed into legend. Over the years, tales have been told of events that occurred as he fled across the mountains of Hakone. One famous story recounts how a young samurai named Kajiwara Kagetoki – who will later play an important role in our story - was ordered to track down and capture Yoritomo. Kagetoki served the Heike but secretly had sympathy for the Genji. When he detects that Yoritomo is hiding in the hollow trunk of a tree, he sticks his bow into the trunk and disturbs two doves who fly out – the ruse convinces the other pursuers that no one else is there, and Yoritomo is able to continue his escape.
It would not be the last time that birds would come to Yoritomo’s aid…
To prevent Yoritomo’s escape, the commander Kagechika set up barriers on all the roads leading from Ishibashi. Nevertheless, Yoritomo managed to make his way across the mountains and reached the sea coast at Cape Manazuru. There he took a boat – accompanied by just a small group of followers – and crossed to Awa province. There he was joined, as promised, by Hojo Tokimasa and others who had escaped from the mountain, and there was a brief reunion. Lord Hojo informed Yoritomo that his wife Masako would meet him at the fishing village of Kamakura – this is, if he can reach Kamakura without being captured by his Heike pursuers.
And so began a cat-and-mouse journey that would take Yoritomo in almost a complete circle through five provinces, on his way to reach Kamakura. Each day, with Heike pursuers on his tail, Yoritomo would manage to gain new followers.
Some of these were former Heike retainers who for one reason or another held a grudge against Kiyomori and decided to swap sides. One of those was a samurai named Edo Shigenaga, whose father had founded the Edo clan – a name that would be given to the city that grew up in this region, a city that later became known as Tokyo. In the late Heian period, the site of modern Tokyo was mostly farming land, but fortunately for Yoritomo many of the landowners traditionally supported the Genji, and resented the local deputies appointed by the Heike.
Within a month, Yoritomo’s forces had grown to become a reasonable army – some 27,000 men, some experienced samurai, others farmers and laborers eager for adventure and a chance to strike back at their Heike overlords.
On the 6th day of the 10th month – having completed a full circle of what is now Tokyo Bay – Yoritomo’s men entered the fishing village of Kamakura, where Yoritomo’s father once had his ancestral home. In just a few weeks Yoritomo had turned a complete disaster into the start of a full-fledged uprising. It was, according to the historian Stephen Turnbull, “the most remarkable reversal of fortune in Japanese history”
Kamakura would one day become the nation’s capital and give rise to the name of an historical era – the Kamakura Shogunate. For now, though, the village serves as Yoritomo’s base as he plans the first steps in his rebellion.
There is no dwelling fit for a samurai lord, so on his arrival Yoritomo instead takes up residence in a peasant’s house. The next day he visits the remains of his father’s mansion that over the years has fallen into ruin. Again, he recalls his last moments with his father – their parting in a snowstorm in the mountains to the east of the capital, how his last memory is of his father passing him the sword Higekiri – a sword that is in now, recalls Yoritomo bitterly, in the possession of the Lord Kiyomori, the man who captured and sentenced him to exile.
A few days after his arrival in Kamakura and after a reunion with his wife Masako, Yoritomo receives news that his men have captured Ito Sukechika – the man who had cut off Yoritomo’s retreat at Ishibashi. According to reports that were written much later, Sukechika is said to have murdered Yoritomo’s newborn son many years earlier, in the first years of his exile. Yoritomo is alleged to have fathered a child with Sukechika’s daughter; in his anger Sukechika took the child and drowned it in a nearby river. If the story is true, then Yoritomo must have been very tempted to execute him, but as it was, he allowed him to live, and remanded him into custody, after an appeal from Sukechika’s son-in-law Miura Yoshizumi.
Yoshizumi is now the head of the Miura clan, one of several samurai families that have now pledged loyalty to Yoritomo’s cause. At the battle of Ishibashi, the Miura clan had been unable to reach Yoritomo’s followers in time and after the battle had been pushed back to their stronghold of Kinugasa castle. There, as 3,000 Heike supporters advanced, Yoshizumi’s father, the 89-year-old Miura Yoshiaki, had ordered his family members to flee and to find Yoritomo. Meanwhile, the elderly clan leader remained alone in the castle where he pretended to lead a much larger force. Yoshiaki’s heroic last stand gave his clan members, led by Yoshizumi, time to escape before the old man was taken captive and executed.
Now with the Miura and Edo clans on his side, with Sukechika captured, and with an established base to use as his headquarters, Yoritomo is starting to believe that perhaps his rebellion has a chance.
But he has little time to pause. Reports are arriving in Kamakura that the Heike lord Kiyomori has sent a vast army - more than 50,000 strong and still growing in number - with the aim of crushing Yoritomo’s uprising. Soon Yoritomo must face for the first time the might of Kiyomori’s army. He knows he has come a long way since Ishibashi – but is he ready?
Two weeks after arriving in Kamakura, Yoritomo leads his troops across the Ashikaga Pass and down into the neighboring province of Sagami. There his army is reinforced by the Takeda clan from the province of Kai to the north. The combined forces arrive at the eastern bank of the Fujigawa river, in the shadow of the towering Mount Fuji.
Across a wide flat riverbed, Yoritomo’s men see the red banners of the Heike fluttering on the western bank –– the advance camp at the head of some 70,000 mounted men. There are reports that the Heike army is led by Kiyomori’s grandson Koremori, who is in his early 20s. Yoritomo smiles ruefully when he hears the news – clearly Kiyomori is so confident that he has appointed a novice to lead his troops, perhaps as a deliberate insult to the Genji rebel.
As Yoritomo surveys the two camps, he thinks of the battle that had taken place some months earlier across the Uji river to the west. That battle had largely been a clash between the Heike and the warrior monks of Miidera temple. This coming battle beneath Mount Fuji will be the first time since his father’s Heiji rebellion 20 years earlier that two armies of the Genji and Heike face each other. During Heiji, Yoritomo’s father had faced Lord Kiyomori himself; now it appears that Yoritomo will be facing Kiyomori’s grandson.
Yoritomo knows that he is clearly outnumbered, but what he does not know is that the mood among the Heike troops is not good: the army has become so large that supplies are running low, made worse by the fact that the country is experiencing a period of famine; the Heike are also anxious by rumors that Yoritomo has managed to gather over 50,000, 100,000 or even 200,000 men.
Morale among the Heike troops is now so low that the young Koremori has agreed to bring to the camp singing girls and courtesans from the local villages. And so, as the two sides face each other on the eve of what would go down in history as the Battle of Fuji River, many of the Heike warriors are either drunk or more concerned with entertainment than they are with the band of rebels who stands on the opposite bank of the river.
It is now midnight. A pair of Heike guards stands on patrol on the west bank, gazing across the river, searching and listening for any sign of movement. It is hard for them to make out any sound at all though, because of the constant laughter and cheering that comes from the tents behind them.
To the east, they notice that hundreds of fires have been lit across a vast area, as far as they can see. These are just cooking fires lit by local peasants who, fearful of the coming battle, have scattered into the wilds or onto boats on the river or out to sea. But to the Heike guards, the lights appear to be the campfires of a huge Genji army.
One of the guards turns to his companion: “The gods,” he says, “Moor and mountain, rivers and seas, the enemy is everywhere!”
Unknown to these Heike observers, at that moment a team of scouts led by a samurai from Kai, Takeda Nobuyoshi. is making a reconnaissance along marshland bordering the river. Takeda silently leads his 600 men across the river upstream and is just about to approach the rear of the Heike lines when one of his men disturbs a flock of geese nesting in the marshes.
Suddenly, it is as if the entire marsh has lifted into the sky, as a huge flock of geese launches skyward with a flapping of wings that sounds of thunder. As the geese fly toward Heike lines, Takeda raises the battle cry. The shrieking of the birds - combined with the shouting of Takeda’s men - creates panic among the Heike camp.
“Heaven help us, it’s the army of the Minamoto – there are hundreds of thousands of them!”
The Heike rush out of their tents, and as panic spreads, many of the guards abandon their position without even taking their belongings. So great is their haste that some of the warriors snatch up bows without any arrows, or take their arrows with no bow, or they spring onto each other’s horses. One soldier mounts a horse that is still tethered to its pole - he whips his mount and it starts galloping round in circles, as the warrior frantically tries to restrain it.
At first light, at the Hour of the Hare, 6am, Yoritomo raises the battle cry and his main army advances across river. But by the time they arrive on the west bank, they find not so much as a fly stirring in the Heike camp. Some of Yoritomo’s men eagerly rush through the deserted campsite, collecting armor that the Heike have abandoned in their haste; others haul away great curtains that had been used to surround the enemy camp.
Lord Hojo approaches Yoritomo with a broad smile. “My Lord, they are all gone.”
Yoritomo dismounts from his horse, removes his helmet, and rinses his mouth.
“Well,” he says looking around. “I deserve no credit myself for what has happened,”
He looks up to see a flock of geese flying back toward the slopes of Mount Fuji.
“All thanks are due to the Boddhisattva Hachiman,” he takes out a small statuette from his pocket, “and perhaps the Goddess of Mercy”
“Do we proceed, my Lord” Lord Hojo asks, “to the capital?”
Yoritomo pauses and looks in the direction of the Heike retreat.
“It is tempting, isn’t it, but we are still vulnerable. There are clans to the east who have not yet pledged allegiance – if we head to Heian-kyo, we leave ourselves open to attack from the rear.”
He climbs back onto his horse. “We need to consolidate, Tokimasa. We have had a victory today, but this is just the start.”
Yoritomo returns to his camp where he is greeted by his wife Masako.
“Congratulations on your victory, my lord,” she says, helping him take off his armor.
“Ha,” Yoritomo sighs. “We were lucky today – a flock of geese won the battle for us.”
Yoritomo stares at the ground.
“How much have I really achieved, Masako? In Izu, I watched from afar and did nothing as your father and the Sasaki brothers won the battle. At Ishibashi, yes, I fought but I was beaten and humiliated. And now at Fuji River, I achieved a victory but without even firing an arrow.
Yoritomo glances at his wife. “I won the battle because of lucky timing and a flock of birds. None of these are true victories, not like my father had…
“Yoritomo, it’s ok,” says Masako. “Maybe you are not destined to be a great military leader. But you are something much more important – you’re a beacon of hope, you are a cause worth fighting for. And that’s why above all you must stay alive, you know that; if you are gone, the cause will crumble.”
Yoritomo sits down wearily. “Yes, but if not me as the army’s leader, then who? Your father is loyal but he is not young anymore. Kiyomori has all his sons – and while he builds their own capital, he can even send his grandson against us.”
Masako grasps his hand. “One day, you too will have your own sons, Yoritomo, but for now we need someone that will inspire your men, who knows battle strategy, someone like you who can inspire loyalty but who is more…”
Yoritomo looks up. “Expendable?”
“Well, someone who is less vital to the cause than you are.”
“But who? My family has been all but extinguished.”
Masako pauses. “Well, there is your cousin, Yoshinaka in Kiso, he has started gaining support….”
Yoritomo shakes his head. “Yoshinaka is a loose cannon. If he takes on the Genji banner – and people look to him – that could be bad for us. Remember, he has no love for my father.”
“I don’t know,” he says, and takes out the statuette of the Goddess of Mercy from his pocket. “Perhaps we need a miracle.”
Masako smiles. “Well, it has worked for us before.”
Later that evening, a retainer suddenly enters Yoritomo’s quarters to announce that a visitor has arrived.
Yoritomo can hear shouting and steps outside to see what the commotion is about.
In the stone courtyard, he sees a dozen of his retainers, their swords drawn, surrounding a huge man wearing the clothing of a sohei, or warrior monk. The reason for their alarm is that the man brandishes a naginata – a single-edged blade attached to the end of a long pole. He also carries half a dozen assorted weapons hanging from his belt and on his back. He is by far the largest warrior Yoritomo has ever seen, and when he speaks, he has a voice like thunder.
“My master and I have travelled hundreds of miles, and this is the welcome we receive?!”
Yoritomo calls to his retainers. “Men, stand back. Let the monk speak.”
The guards gingerly step back from the man, who takes a step toward Yoritomo, and says: “My master requests an audience with the Lord of Kamakura.”
“I am he,” says Yoritomo. ‘And what is your name?”
“I am Musashibo Benkei,” announces the monk, “and I have accompanied my lord all the way from the far north. My master is the greatest, the most brilliant, the most skillful warrior in the land.”
Yoritomo smiles. “Well, monk. Let us see this warrior.”
Benkei steps aside and a man walks forward. He is much smaller than the monk, and his face is hidden by his helmet.
“I have travelled from Hiraizumi, my Lord – I came as soon as I received Prince Mochihito’s proclamation.”
Hiraizumi, thinks Yoritomo. It can’t be, surely…?
The visitor pulls off his helmet, and Yoritomo leans forward in amazement.
”You’re… Ushiwaka?”
The young-faced visitor nods. “It’s been a long time since I was known by that name. Now I am known as Yoshitsune. I pledge my allegiance to you, Lord Yoritomo” he falls to one knee. Then he looks up and smiles.
“It is good to see you, brother.”
In the next season of the first shogun, we’ll complete the story of Yoritomo’s rise, and see how he fought with and then against his brother Yoshitsune, in his mission to topple the Heike clan and gain the title of the first Shogun of Japan