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Updated: June 7, 2025
The agent of his flight was an iron-merchant who habitually visited the monastery on matters of business, and whose dealings took him occasionally to Mutsu.
Thus, when he learned that Yoshitsune had escaped to Mutsu, all his apprehensions were roused. By that time Hidehira had died, in his ninety-first year, but he had committed to his son, Yasuhira, the duty of guarding Yoshitsune.
Hidehira owned and administered the whole of the two provinces of Mutsu and Dewa, which in those days covered some thirty thousand square miles and could easily furnish an army of a hundred thousand men. The attitude of this great fief had always been an object of keen solicitude to Yoritomo.
Thus in the provinces of Omi, of Suruga, of Mutsu, of Iwashiro, of Iwaki, of Echigo, of Etchu, of Echizen, of Bizen, of Bitchu, of Bingo, of Harima, of Tamba, and elsewhere, there are found in later ages noble families all tracing their descent to one or another of the Shido shoguns despatched on the task of pacifying the country in the days of the Emperor Sujin.
Observing this incident, Noritsune, one of the best fighters and most skilled archers among the Taira, made Yoshitsune the target of his shafts. But Sato Tsuginobu, member of the band of trusted comrades who had accompanied the Minamoto hero from Mutsu, interposed his body and received the arrow destined for Yoshitsune.
At that time the term "Mutsu" represented a much wider area than the modern region of the same name: it comprised the five provinces now distinguished as Iwaki, Iwashiro, Rikuzen, Rikuchu, and Mutsu in other words, the whole of the northeastern and northern littoral of the main island.
An official who had been sent to Matsumae, in the province of Mutsu, to observe the state of affairs, reported that the villages to the east of Nambu had been practically depopulated and the once fertile fields converted into barren plains. "Although farmhouses stood in the hamlets, not a solitary person was to be seen on the road; not a human voice was to be heard.
By wholesale oaths, sworn in the most solemn manner, he had endeavoured to disarm the suspicions of his intended victim, and he so far succeeded that, when the attack was delivered, Yoshitsune had only seven men to hold the mansion against sixty. But these seven were the trusty and stalwart comrades who had accompanied Yoshitsune from Mutsu and had shared all the vicissitudes of his career.
He wielded the halberd with extraordinary skill, and such a huge weapon in the hand of a man with seven feet of stalwart stature constituted a menace before which a solitary wayfarer did not hesitate to surrender his sword. One evening, Benkei observed an armed acolyte approaching the Gojo bridge in Kyoto. The acolyte was Yoshitsune, and the time, the eve of his departure for Mutsu.
When news reached Date Masamune of the fall of all the Hojo's outlying forts and of the final investment of Odawara, he recognized, from his place in Mutsu and Dewa, that an attitude of aloofness could no longer be maintained with safety.
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