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29 Chapter Two Minamoto Yoritomo Dreams from Exile The Barbarian-Subduing General, former Major Captain of the Right Inner Palace Guards, was a man of great destiny. He quelled the white waves of the western seas and calmed the green forests in the far north. Then he dressed himself in brocade hitatare, entered the capital, and was appointed urin taishôgun (Great General of the Royal Guards). . . . He renewed Buddhist law and royal law. He subdued the proud Heike and assuaged the people’s grief. He expelled the disloyal and rewarded the loyal, without favoritism or regard for proximity or distance. Who would have thought that the Major Captain, bereft of his mother when he was just twelve, separated from his father at thirteen, and exiled to Hirugashima in Izu Province would rise to be such a man of great destiny? Even he could not have expected it. —Enkyôbon Heike monogatari* he idea of shôgun has long captured the imaginations of both the Japanese and the rest of the world.1 The concept is a central tenet of cultural discourses de¤ning that nation: the shôgun is a great military leader, a lord over vassals, a man whose stoic masculinity epitomizes certain fundamental cultural beliefs and practices that de¤ne “Japaneseness .” Minamoto Yoritomo holds the honor of being the ¤rst of these men.2 Appointed shôgun in 1192 after defeating the Taira in the Genpei War, he became the prototype for this military of¤ce that would reshape the meaning of “military leader” and, in so doing, rede¤ne the Japanese political order for centuries to come. Such an illustrious fate did not seem his destiny thirty years earlier, however. Following the defeat of his father Minamoto Yoshitomo,3 he was sent into exile in Izu, where he languished in obscurity. He only rose again to prominence after twenty years when he took up arms against the Taira in a campaign that grew into the Genpei War.4 With his victory, he was granted broad jurisdiction over warrior affairs by the central government. T 30 Chapter Two He situated his headquarters in Kamakura, far from the sovereign’s capital . From this new base, he granted his retainers positions of power, thus initiating the attenuation of central political power that would propel warriors to the forefront of the political and social spheres. The age of the samurai for which Japan is so famous began, in other words, with the rise of Yoritomo. Although in this brief account Yoritomo has all the makings of a popular hero, he does not ¤t traditional de¤nitions of that role. He fought relatively little in the war that brought about the establishment of the Kamakura government, and he is peripheral in most of the tales recounting the con¶ict. The large number of nô plays depicting the pathos experienced by the men and women caught up in the war for the most part exclude him. His grave is remote and unimpressive, its one dilapidated souvenir stall unoccupied.5 Compared to the many memorable warriors of his time, ranging from his kinsmen Yoshitsune and Yoshinaka through his Taira rivals—Tadanori, Noritsune, Koremori, to name but a few—he does very little to rank as a cultural hero, either on the battle¤eld or off. To make matters worse, he is generally loathed for ordering the deaths of his cousin Yoshinaka, and, more importantly, his brother Yoshitsune.6 Yet it is hard to ¤nd narrative or dramatic accounts that hold him culpable for these acts: in contrast to archetypal villains like Taira Kiyomori or Lord Kira of Chûshingura (The revenge of the forty-seven rônin), he does not¤gure centrally in the tragic tales of his victims. Blame for his unpardonable acts is formally attributed elsewhere, and he is pushed into the shadows , remaining ever a troubling mystery. Yoritomo is chie¶y remembered for having authored a legal system that signi¤cantly altered the political map of Japan.7 As a political founding father, he redrew the contours of the realm so as to highlight the signi¤cance of the provinces. Largely as a consequence of this new emphasis , peripheral people and places were brought to the fore not only as historical and political subjects, but as narrative subjects as well—warriors, peasants, and itinerant performers became the central characters of newly emerging genres and works. As the heir to Minamoto hegemony, the ¤rst shôgun, and victor of the Genpei...

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