Genpei War

Between 1180 and 1185, at the close of Japan's Heian period, the warrior clans of Taira and Minamoto fought a civil war for control of the imperial court and the country. The war ended with the destruction of the Taira at sea and the rise of Minamoto no Yoritomo, whose military government at Kamakura shifted real power from the court to the warrior class for centuries. Its name comes from the alternative readings of the two clan names, Gen for Minamoto and Hei for Taira.

The Taira and Minamoto had long competed for influence over the court. In the Hōgen and Heiji rebellions of earlier decades the Minamoto had tried and failed to break Taira dominance, and in 1160 they were nearly wiped out. Kiyomori, the Taira leader, had the young Yoritomo banished. In 1179 the Taira staged a coup, removing rivals from office, and in 1180 Kiyomori placed his two-year-old grandson, Antoku, on the throne. Prince Mochihito, a son of the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa, felt cheated of the succession and, with Minamoto no Yorimasa, called the Minamoto and the Buddhist monasteries to arms.

The plot was discovered. Mochihito fled to the temple of Mii-dera and then towards the Byōdō-in at Uji, outside Kyoto, where Taira forces caught up with him. In the battle at the Uji bridge in 1180 Yorimasa took his own life and Mochihito was soon captured and killed. Yoritomo now took up the Minamoto cause. Beaten at Ishibashiyama, he escaped and found allies in the east. Kiyomori retaliated against the monasteries that had backed the rising by besieging Nara and burning much of the city.

Kiyomori died of illness in the spring of 1181. Japan was then struck by a famine that lasted into the following year, and the war largely paused for nearly two years.

In 1183 Yoritomo's cousin Minamoto no Yoshinaka crushed a Taira army at Kurikara and advanced on Kyoto. The Taira, now led by Kiyomori's son Munemori, fled west, taking the child emperor Antoku and the imperial regalia with them. They set up a temporary court in Kyūshū and then at Yashima, off Shikoku. Early in 1184 Yoshinaka seized the capital and took the retired emperor into custody. Yoritomo sent his brothers Yoshitsune and Noriyori against him, and Yoshinaka was defeated and killed at Awazu in Ōmi Province.

The Minamoto then turned on the Taira, who were strong in their home waters around the Inland Sea and far better sailors. Yoshitsune and Noriyori stormed the Taira stronghold at Ichi-no-Tani in 1184, and survivors fled to Yashima. Almost a year later Yoshitsune attacked Yashima from the landward side, and the Taira took to their ships, escaping with the emperor and the regalia. A month later, in 1185, the two fleets met at Dan-no-ura in the Straits of Shimonoseki between Honshū and Kyūshū. The tides first favoured the Taira, then the Minamoto, and the desertion of the Taira commander Taguchi Shigeyoshi in mid-battle sealed the outcome. Many Taira nobles died, together with the young Antoku and Kiyomori's widow.

In late 1185 Go-Shirakawa granted Yoritomo authority to levy taxes and to appoint stewards and constables in every province. In 1192, after the retired emperor's death, Yoritomo received the title of shōgun. The Kamakura shogunate marked the beginning of a warrior-dominated feudal order in Japan. Kyoto remained the formal capital and the centre of court ceremony, but emperors lost effective political and military power until the Meiji Restoration under Emperor Meiji, more than six and a half centuries later, apart from a brief imperial restoration in the 1330s. Some historians treat Yoritomo's campaign of 1189 against the Northern Fujiwara as the war's true end, since it completed his control of the north-east.

The Tale of the Heike is the most famous of the many stories and plays inspired by the war. The red and white banners of the Taira and Minamoto are also said to have given Japan its national colours, still seen on the national flag.

Our 1200 map still shows imperial Japan under the old court order, while the 1279 map shows Japan under the Kamakura shogunate.