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Updated: June 15, 2025
If anyone was reported by these spies as having spoken ill of the Taira, he was seized and punished. One day Kiyomori's grandson, Sukemori, met the regent, Fujiwara Motofusa, and failing to alight from his carriage, as etiquette required, was compelled by the regent's retinue to do so.
Munemori and his son were executed finally at Omi. Shigehira, in response to a petition from the Nara priests whose fanes he had destroyed by Kiyomori's orders, was handed over to the monks and put to death by them at Narasaka.
Therefore, in 1179, on the death of Kiyomori's daughter, to whose care Motomichi had been entrusted in his childhood, the ex-Emperor, at the instance of Motofusa, appropriated all her manors and those of Motomichi.
At first she refused, but her mother begged her with tears to consent, and she finally yielded on Kiyomori's promise that her children should be spared. This mercy did not please the friends of the tyrant, who insisted that the boys should be put to death, fearing to let any one live who bore the hated name of Minamoto.
At the Court of the cloistered Emperor the post of gon-dainagon was filled by Fujiwara Narichika, who harboured resentment against Kiyomori's two sons, Shigemori and Munemori, inasmuch as they held positions for which he had striven in vain, the Left and Right generals of the guards. There was also a bonze, Saiko, who enjoyed the full confidence of Go-Shirakawa.
At an early stage, some vague news of the plot reached Kiyomori's ears and he hastened from his Fukuhara villa to Kyoto. But it soon became evident that his information was incomplete. He knew, indeed, that Prince Mochihito was involved, but he suspected Go-Shirakawa also, and he entertained no conception of Yorimasa's complicity.
It has been related above that one of Kiyomori's politic acts after the Heiji insurrection was to give his daughter to the regent; that, on the latter's death, his child, Motomichi, by a Fujiwara, was entrusted to the care of the Taira lady; that a large part of the Fujiwara estates were diverted from the regent and settled upon Motomichi, and that the latter was taken into a Taira mansion.
Munekiyo then determined to save the boy if possible, and he succeeded through the co-operation of Kiyomori's step-mother, whom he persuaded that her own son, lost in his infancy, would have grown up to resemble closely Yoritomo.
That such a peril should have been dreaded from such a source seems strange; but the Buddhist priests had shown a very dangerous temper more than once, and from Kiyomori's point of view the possibility of their rising to restore the fortunes of the Fujiwara was never remote.
The eldest of these was Yoritomo, then only fourteen. After killing two men who attempted to intercept his flight, he fell into the hands of Taira Munekiyo, who, pitying his youth, induced Kiyomori's step-mother to intercede for his life, and he was finally banished to Izu, whence, a few years later, he emerged to the destruction of the Taira.
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