The Warrior Chancellor: What Kiyomori Accomplished in 1167

On the eleventh day of the second month of 1167, in Kyoto. Taira no Kiyomori was appointed Chancellor of the Realm.

He was fifty. On that day, at the summit of Japan's ritsuryō system, a man of warrior origin stood for the first time.

The Chancellor of the Realm was the highest office of the ritsuryō system, and had for generations been limited to the Sekkanke or the imperial house.

Warrior appointment had no precedent. Kiyomori's tenure was only a little over three months before he resigned — but this was form: he retained real power thereafter as the 'Cloistered Chancellor' （Nyūdō Shōkoku）.

The core of Kiyomori's design of power lay in marriage policy and maternal-relative politics.

He placed his daughter Tokuko （later Kenreimon'in） as consort to Emperor Takakura, and the grandson born of them acceded in 1180 as Emperor Antoku.

As maternal grandfather of the emperor, Kiyomori became the first warrior figure to seize a position long monopolized by the Fujiwara Sekkanke.

The Tale of the Heike transmits that Taira no Tokitada said, 'Whoever is not of this house is not a person.

' Members of the Taira house who reached the rank of kugyō — sixteen. As a warrior-origin lineage, an unprecedented scale.

Kiyomori's brothers, sons, and grandsons occupied a substantial portion of the offices of Kyoto.

This oligopoly became the ground on which Prince Mochihito's call to arms （1180） produced anti-Taira uprisings across the country.

Thirteen years after his appointment as Chancellor, Kiyomori died in the fevered air of Kyoto.

The Taira as warrior government was completed in a single generation, and collapsed in a single generation.

But the precedent itself — that a warrior can stand at the summit of the state — was inherited without being lost, into Yoritomo's Kamakura shogunate and the lineage of warrior governments that followed.