From Kurama to Ōshū: How Ushiwaka-maru Became Yoshitsune

In December 1159, Minamoto no Yoshitomo was defeated and killed at the Heiji Rebellion.

In the early days of 1160, Tokiwa Gozen fled through the snow with three young sons — the scene as transmitted by the Tale of the Heike, the prototype of the 'Tokiwa flight' in Japanese literary history.

The third son was Ushiwaka, in his second year. The later Minamoto no Yoshitsune.

Mother and children were soon captured and brought before Kiyomori. The lives of the children were spared on condition that they enter the Buddhist orders — such is the storyline of the Tale of the Heike.

Ushiwaka-maru, at seven or eight, was placed at Kurama-dera （in the northern hills of Kyoto）.

According to Kurama-dera tradition, the boy Yoshitsune learned swordsmanship from warrior-monks and crossed blades with tengu in the mountains by night.

Many of these stories are later transmissions, thin in documentary support. What is certain is only the outcome: he decided to leave the temple where he was to enter the Buddhist orders and return to the secular world.

Around sixteen, Yoshitsune left Kurama. The tradition — including the Azuma Kagami — has him traveling with the gold merchant Kichiji to Ōshū Hiraizumi.

His destination was Fujiwara no Hidehira: third-generation head of the Ōshū Fujiwara, master of a Tōhoku made wealthy by gold and horses.

Hiraizumi was, one might say, the only 'other world' in Japan beyond the reach of Kiyomori's Taira surveillance.

Almost nothing is recorded of Yoshitsune's days in Hiraizumi. Hunts, horses, learning with monks, exchanges with local warriors.

That is only what can be imagined they were. History catches him again in a single moment — the news reaching Hiraizumi, when he was about twenty, that his brother Yoritomo had raised troops in Izu.

In that moment, Yoshitsune passed through the northern Kantō and rode to Yoritomo.

The man who was to rewrite the political map of Japan in the four years that followed had never once met his brother before their first meeting at twenty.