Minamoto no Yoshitsune

Born in 1159 （Heiji 1） in Kyoto, the ninth son of Minamoto no Yoshitomo. His father was defeated and died the following year at the Heiji Rebellion, and his mother Tokiwa Gozen fled through the snow with three young children — the scene as transmitted by the Tale of the Heike.

His childhood name was Ushiwaka-maru. He was placed at Kurama-dera, and around the age of sixteen he left the temple and made his way to the Ōshū Fujiwara under Fujiwara no Hidehira.

When his elder brother Yoritomo raised troops in 1180, he rode to join him, and served thereafter as the field commander of the Genji army — cornering the Taira at Ichi-no-Tani, Yashima, and Dannoura.

But after Dannoura, his acceptance of court rank directly from Emperor Go-Shirakawa without Yoritomo's permission drove his brother to fury.

Ordered pursued, he fled once again to Ōshū, and in 1189, betrayed by Fujiwara no Yasuhira, he took his own life at the Koromogawa Palace.

He was thirty-one. His tragic end coined the phrase 'hōgan-biiki' （partiality for the underdog Yoshitsune） and inscribed him as the protagonist of Nō, kabuki, and fiction throughout Japanese cultural history.

“If I do not die here, the Taira cannot be destroyed.”

The contrast between battlefield genius and political defeat is the core of the Yoshitsune image. The conflict with Yoritomo was, as an institutional-history matter, a violation of the Kamakura regime's monopoly on court rank for its retainers — but later generations converted it into a story of sympathy known as 'hōgan-biiki.

' Across Nō, kabuki, jōruri, novels, and modern taiga dramas, he has held the seat of protagonist in Japanese cultural history without losing it for over four hundred years.

Overseas as well, the name Yoshitsune is widely known as a core figure of the Genpei War.