The History of the Renaissance World (13 page)

Go-Sanjo remained on the throne only four years and then abdicated, aged thirty-nine. He had no intention of giving up his influence, though. He married Shirakawa to a Minamoto bride, supervised his coronation at age twenty-one, and then pushed through the appointment of his second son, the child with no Fujiwara connections, as Imperial Prince and heir. Then he remained behind the scenes, advising his sons and thwarting all attempts of the Fujiwara chancellor to control them.
*

He was able to do this for only a few months, dying unexpectedly before his fortieth birthday. But the sharp turn he had given to Japan’s power structure survived. Shirakawa followed in his father’s footsteps, refusing to obey his chancellor and favoring Minamoto and Taira courtiers over the Fujiwara. And like his father, he abdicated at the height of his power, handing over the throne at age thirty-three and taking monastic vows. But he continued to rule actively from his monastery, exercising as much control over his young successors—first his son Horikawa and then his grandson Toba—as the Fujiwara regents had once done. It was said by his subjects that there were only three things the retired emperor could not control: the floods of the wild Kamo river, the troublesome warrior monks who lived on Mount Hiei, and the throw of the dice.
⁴

This was the beginning of a two-hundred-year tradition of Cloistered Emperors, during which emperors abdicated at the height of their powers, leaving the throne to child heirs, and then went on ruling from behind the scenes. Everyone knew who was in charge: “After Shirakawa’s abdication,” says the
Gukansho
, “the state was governed for a long time by Retired Emperors.”
⁵

9.1 Japan under the Cloistered Emperors

It was not an entirely impractical system. The Cloistered Emperor regime neatly divided time-consumingritual duties (ceremonially important but politically pointless) from the equally time-consuming duties of actual governance. The sovereign on the throne took care of the first; the ruler in the monastery, the second. It also preserved an appearance of cooperation between the emperor-in-name and his Fujiwara advisor, while the actual power struggle between king and Fujiwara clan went on, more or less, in private.

But the Cloistered Emperor system also, inevitably, multiplied the battles for power within the royal family itself.

W
HEN THE THREE-YEAR-OLD
Emperor Konoe was crowned in 1142, the imperial household was already filled with crackling hostilities.

Those hostilities had unfolded over three generations. Back in 1107, the emperor of Japan had been four-year-old Toba; the Cloistered Emperor, wielding the real power from the traditional monastery, was Toba’s imperious and long-lived grandfather Shirakawa. When Toba reached his teens, Shirakawa arranged for him to marry the beautiful teenaged Shoshi—his own adopted ward. Court gossip said that Shoshi was much more than Shirakawa’s ward. When Shoshi gave birth to a son and heir in 1119, the baby was generally assumed to be Shirakawa’s, even though Toba claimed the child as his own.
⁶

The rumors got an imperial stamp of approval in 1123, when Shirakawa forced Toba to abdicate in favor of the four-year-old boy, who now became Emperor Sutoku. This relegated Toba, still just twenty-three, to a completely powerless position; he was now a Cloistered Emperor, but he was junior to his vigorous grandfather and inferior to his crowned son. Toba simmered in impotent resentment until Shirakawa finally died in 1129.

Once able to assume the real power of a Cloistered Emperor, Toba allowed his son-in-name to stay on the throne. But in 1139, Toba’s favorite wife, Tokuko, finally gave birth to a son—Konoe, his
actual
flesh and blood. Three years later, Toba forced Sutoku to abdicate in Konoe’s favor—just as he himself had been forced to abdicate in Sutoku’s favor, twenty years before.

9.1 Family line of Konoe and Sutoku.

This put Sutoku in exactly the same position Toba had occupied, all those years: junior Cloistered Emperor, powerless, resentful. Given the various hatreds and ambitions flying around the court, it is perhaps surprising that Konoe lasted thirteen years before someone slipped poison into his food.

At Konoe’s death, in 1155, Toba proposed that his next son (barring Sutoku, of course) become the new emperor; Sutoku objected, proposing either himself or his own oldest son as the logical candidate. Toba, who had more soldiers, won the argument; his son Go-Shirakawa (“Shirakawa the Second”) became the new emperor, and peace briefly descended on the royal house. “While Toba was alive,” the
Gukansho
tells us, “no rebellions or wars broke out.”
⁷

But Toba died barely a year later. Before his funeral had even ended, the courtiers, clan leaders, and samurai were lining up behind the rival brothers, Go-Shirakawa and Sutoku had commandeered two different royal palaces to use as their respective headquarters, and the capital city was preparing for war.

The sides did not break neatly along clan lines. Taira and Minamoto clan members could be found in both armies, as could Fujiwara officials. Sutoku’s right-hand commander was the Minamoto clan leader Tameyoshi, accompanied by his son Tametomo. In
The Tale of Hogen
, an account of the struggle written in the early fourteenth century, Tametomo is a superhero, more than seven feet tall: “Born to archery, he had a bow arm that was some six inches longer than the arm with which he held his horse’s reins . . . [and he used] a bow that was more than eight and a half feet in length.” Tametomo’s skill was restricted, though, by the presence of his brother Yoshitomo on the other side; Yoshitomo had been one of the first courtiers to declare himself a supporter of Go-Shirakawa, and had put four hundred hand-chosen samurai warriors at the emperor’s disposal.
⁸

The two sides finally met in battle on the night of July 29, 1156, in a brief and violent clash known afterwards as the Hogen Incident.
*
Tametomo picked off a number of warriors on the opposing side, but his brother Yoshitomo had the brilliant idea of sending an arsonist in to set Sutoko’s headquarters on fire. As the Cloistered Emperor’s men scrambled away from the flames, Go-Shirakawa’s archers took them down, one at a time. “Those who were afraid of the arrows and terrified by the flames even jumped into the wells in large numbers,” the
Tale of Hogen
says, “and of these, too, the bottom ones in a short time had drowned, those in the middle had been crushed to death by their fellows, and those on top had been burned up by the flames themselves.”

Sutoku’s forces were scattered, and the Cloistered Emperor himself was arrested and exiled. Yoshitomo had his own father put to death—a cold-blooded and vicious decision that, says the
Gukansho
, caused “some commotion around the country.” Tametomo was allowed to live, but the sinews of his arms were cut so that he could no longer use a bow.
⁹

Minamoto Yoshitomo considered himself the architect of Emperor Go-Shirakawa’s victory, but when the normal business of government resumed, a Taira clan member named Kiyomori (who had joined the emperor’s cause
after
Yoshitomo) managed to gain a higher position at court, and the emperor’s apparent favor. Before long, Yoshitomo and Kiyomori were at odds; and the hostility between them was fanned by a Fujiwara clansman named Nobuyori, who himself felt unappreciated by the emperor. “Having noted rivalry between Minamoto Yoshitomo and Taira Kiyomori,” the
Gukansho
explains, “and having assumed that the victor in a war between them would seize control of the state, he allied himself with Minamoto Yoshitomo . . . and began immediately to plot a rebellion.”
¹⁰

The inevitable fight—the Heiji Disturbance—broke out in 1159.

Go-Shirakawa had just abdicated in favor of his teenaged son, who became the emperor Nijo; Yoshitomo and Nobuyori waited until their Taira rival Kiyomori left the capital city Kyoto on a pilgrimage of devotion to Kumano, a sacred site nearly 175 miles of mountainous road away. When he was well away, five hundred Minamoto samurai surrounded the palace of the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, took him prisoner, and set his palace on fire. Others kidnapped the young emperor.

9.2 Detail from the
Heiji Scroll: Burning of the Sanjo palace.
Credit: Werner Forman / Art Resource, NY

Their intention was to force both rulers into declaring the absent Taira Kiyomori an enemy of the state, thus throwing the entire Taira clan into disfavor. But Kiyomori, getting word of the coup, came thundering back into Kyoto at the head of a thousand hastily gathered samurai, all loyal to the Taira cause. The conspirators were quickly overwhelmed. Young Emperor Nijo was rescued; the Cloistered Emperor escaped; and the troops of Minamoto Yoshitomo and Fujiwara Nobuyori, falling like leaves, finally scattered in the face of the Taira attack.

Nobuyori was taken prisoner, and Kiyomori ordered him taken to a nearby riverbed and beheaded. Yoshitomo managed to escape, during the battle, and fled barefoot to the south with his faithful retainer Masakiyo. But when it became clear that capture and execution was inevitable, he asked Masakiyo to behead him. Masakiyo reluctantly obeyed and then killed himself. When the pursuers caught up to the two corpses, they took Yoshitomo’s head back to Kyoto and hung it in a tree beside the imperial prison.
¹¹

In the aftermath of the Heiji Disturbance, Taira Kiyomori executed or exiled almost every important member of both rival clans. In the span of twenty years, the power of the Fujiwara had collapsed. Now the Taira clan was rising; but the Cloistered Emperor still controlled the palace, and the other clans waited their chance for revenge.

*
In 884, the Fujiwara official Mototsune invented for himself the post of
kampaku
, or “civil dictator.” The
kampaku
had as much authority over a grown emperor as a regent, or
sessho
, had over a child ruler. By the twelfth century, the titles
sessho
and
kampaku
seem to have often been used interchangeably, but the highest post in government—with authority over the throne itself—was almost always held by a Fujiwara official. See, for example, Ivan Morris,
The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 48ff.