Who Is Minamoto no Yoritomo (Kamakura-dono)?
The Minamoto leader who defeated the Heike from Kamakura
Minamoto no Yoritomo was the leader of the Minamoto clan who defeated the Heike and set up a warrior government in Kamakura. He later became shogun, the first of the Kamakura shogunate.
In The Tale of the Heike, he had been exiled to Izu after the Heiji Rebellion, but he raises an army after receiving Prince Mochihito's call to arms. At the Fuji River, the huge Heike army flees without a fight, and Kiyomori hates Yoritomo until his dying breath, ordering, "Hang Yoritomo's head before my grave." Yoritomo himself stays in Kamakura and sends his younger brothers Noriyori and Yoshitsune to defeat Kiso no Yoshinaka and the Heike. A well-known episode tells how, before the Battle of the Uji River, he gave the famous horses Ikezuki and Surusumi to Sasaki Takatsuna and Kajiwara Kagesue.
After the Heike were destroyed, Yoritomo turned against his brother Yoshitsune, who had played such a large part in the victory, and hunted him down.
Episodes featuring this character3
NEWEpisode 5
An Old Monster-Slayer's Last RebellionThe Battle of Uji Bridge
Furious at an insult to his son, the aging Minamoto warrior Yorimasa rises against the Heike with Prince Mochihito, only to watch a young warrior lead a raft of horses across the river at Uji. Long ago, he brought down the Nue, a monster hidden in black clouds, with a single arrow. Now he looses one last arrow at an unseen target in the fog to let the prince escape, and writes his death poem at the Byōdō-in. The second arrow left over from that night has already traveled east with the prince's order, into the hands of a young Minamoto.
19 pages
NEWEpisode 6
The Army That Lost to a Flock of BirdsBattle of Fujigawa / Death of Kiyomori
Having moved the capital to Fukuhara, Taira no Kiyomori hands a vast army to his grandson Taira no Koremori to crush Minamoto no Yoritomo's uprising. But the Heike troops, already shaken by the old warrior Saitō no Sanemori's tales of eastern fighters, flee without a fight when a flock of waterfowl takes off in the night. The year after Nara's Great Buddha Hall burns, Kiyomori, a tyrant who still had a soft spot for his own family, is seized by a fever like fire. His last command: "Hang Yoritomo's head before my grave."
19 pages
NEWEpisode 9
He Sent Away His Best Samuraia Woman — The Death of Kiso Yoshinaka
Driven from the capital, Kiso no Yoshinaka flees to a lakeshore with only a handful of riders. He orders Tomoe, the fiercest woman warrior of all, to leave him, and resolves to die beside his childhood friend Imai no Kanehira. A lord and two loyal followers each choose their own path in this tale of a lakeside in the season of melting snow.
21 pages