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Updated: June 8, 2025
Recourse was immediately had to the Fujiwara, whose position at the Imperial Court was paramount, and Umakai, grandson of the renowned Kamatari, set out at the head of thirty thousand men, levied from the eight Bands provinces, by which term Sagami, Musashi, Awa, Kazusa, Shimosa, Hitachi, Kotsuke, and Shimotsuke were designated.
Mention has already been made of Ariwara no Narihira, a grandson of the Emperor Heijo and one of the most renowned among Japanese poets. He was a man of singular beauty, and his literary attainments, combined with the melancholy that marked his life of ignored rights, made him a specially interesting figure. He won the love of Taka, younger sister of Fujiwara Mototsune and niece of Yoshifusa.
Nevertheless, Kiyomori, having contrived that the child should be entrusted to his daughter's care, asserted its claims so strenuously that many of the Fujiwara manors and all the heirlooms were handed over to it, the result being a visible weakening of the great family's influence.* *See Murdoch's History of Japan.
The most celebrated of these religionists were Saicho and Kukai immortalized under their posthumous names of Dengyo Daishi and Kobo Daishi, respectively. The former went to Changan in the train of the ambassador, Sugawara Kiyokimi, in 802, and the latter accompanied Fujiwara Kuzunomaro, two years later.
Twenty years passed before the ceremony could be performed, and means were ultimately furnished by the Buddhist priest Koken son of the celebrated Rennyo Shonin, prelate of the Shin sect who, out of the abundant gifts of his disciples, placed at the disposal of the Court a sum of ten thousand gold ryo,* being moved to that munificence by the urging of Fujiwara Sanetaka, a former nai-daijin.
But that the scions of either family confined themselves to the arts of peace, is not to be inferred. There were Fujiwara among the military magnates in the provinces, and we shall presently see the Minamoto taking the lead in the science of war. Already, indeed, the Fujiwara in the capital were beginning to recognize the power of the Minamoto.
To these four revolutionary periods, the social history of Old Japan presents but two correspondences. The first Japanese revolutionary period was represented by the Fujiwara usurpation of the imperial civil and military authority, after which event the aristocracy, religious and military, really governed Japan down to our own time.
During a period of one hundred and fifty years it remained the centre of military society and the focus of a civilization radically different from that of Kyoto. The Taira had invited their own ruin by assimilating the ways of the Fujiwara and of the courtiers; the Minamoto aimed at preserving and developing at Kamakura the special characteristics of the buke.
They simply harked back for some eleven or twelve centuries in their own history and resuscitated the administrative machinery that had first been installed in Japan by the genius of Fujiwara Kamatari and his coadjutors in 645 A.D., and more fully supplemented and organized in the succeeding fifty or sixty years.
They marry, eat animal food, practise robbery, and carry on coining operations without any fear of punishment. If a provincial governor attempts to restrain them, they flock together and have recourse to violence. It was by bandits under the command of wicked priests that Fujiwara Tokiyoshi, governor of Aki, and Tachibana Kinkado, governor of Kii, were waylaid and plundered.
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