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Updated: May 23, 2025
The great Oye no Hiromoto, who contributed more than any other man to the conception and organization of the Kamakura system, and of whom history says that without him the Minamoto had never risen to fame, survived his colleague by only four years, dying, in 1225, at the age of seventy-eight.
Yoritomo encountered him one day, and was so struck by his venerable appearance that he invited him to his mansion and would have had him remain there permanently. But Saigyo declined. On parting, the Minamoto chief gave him as souvenir a cat chiselled in silver, which the old ascetic held in such light esteem that he bestowed it on the first child he met.
Yoshinaka replied by sending his son Yoshitaka, the same youth to whom Takeda Nobumitsu had proposed to marry his daughter. He was now wedded to Yoritomo's daughter, and the two Minamoto chiefs seemed to have been effectually reconciled.
Of the military clans proper, the most powerful were the Minamoto and the Taira. By deputing to these clans the conduct of all important matters relating to war, the Fujiwara eventually lost their high position and influence.
Thus, after three generations occupying a period of only forty years, the Minamoto family was ruined, and the reins of power were effectually transferred to Hojo hands. It would seem natural, in the sequence of events, that the office of shogun should now descend to the Hojo.
But the Buke could not realize their ambition without a bitter struggle among themselves, the longest and the fiercest war in Japanese history. The Minamoto and the Taira were both Kuge; both claimed imperial descent. In the early part of the contest the Taira carried all before them; and it seemed that no power could hinder them from exterminating the rival clan.
This man traces his pedigree back to Minamoto no Yoritomo, who founded the Shogunate in the year A.D. 1192. The whole of the Etas in Japan are under his jurisdiction; his subordinates are called Koyagashira, or "chiefs of the huts"; and he and they constitute the government of the Etas.
For several generations the Abe family had exercised sway there, and its representative in the middle of the eleventh century extended his rule over six districts and defied the authority of the provincial governors. The Court deputed Minamoto Yoriyoshi to restore order. The Abe magnate was killed by a stray arrow at an early stage of the campaign, but his son, Sadato, made a splendid resistance.
Stated thus briefly, the complication suggests merely a quarrel for the succession, but, regarded more closely, it is seen to derive rancour chiefly from the jealousies of the Fujiwara brothers, Yorinaga and Tadamichi, and importance from the association of the Minamoto and the Taira families.
It owes its name to some fancied resemblance to a horse's hoof, either in colour, or in the semicircular marks often seen upon the stone in its natural state, and caused by its tendency to split in curved lines. But the story goes that the bateiseki was formed by the touch of the hoofs of a sacred steed, the wonderful mare of the great Minamoto warrior, Sasaki Takatsuna.
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