Battle of Kurikara

What Happened

On 2 June 1183, two armies met at Kurikara Pass, a mountain crossing on the road between the Hokuriku region and the capital at Kyoto. The Minamoto force, commanded by Minamoto no Yoshinaka, faced a much larger Taira army under Taira no Koremori. The Taira had been advancing north-east along the coast road, and the pass was the point where the mountains squeezed that road into a narrow, steep corridor.

Yoshinaka did not meet the Taira head-on. He split his force. One detachment attacked the Taira camp directly, while a second group worked around the Taira flank under cover of darkness and came down on them from the heights. The fighting continued into the night, and the Taira formation broke apart in the dark.

The rout became famous for a piece of theatre. Yoshinaka had a herd of oxen driven into the Taira lines with burning torches tied to their horns. In the darkness the stampeding, flaming animals looked to the Taira soldiers like a fresh army descending on them, and the retreat turned into a collapse. The Taira survivors fled back down the road toward the capital.

Background

The Genpei War (源平合戦, Genpei kassen) was a civil war between two warrior clans, the Minamoto (also called Genji) and the Taira (also called Heike). It ran from 1180 to 1185 and decided who would dominate Japan's military government for the next century and a half.

By 1183 the Taira were in the ascendant. They controlled Kyoto and the person of the child emperor, and their leader Taira no Kiyomori had dominated court politics for two decades. The Minamoto had been beaten back repeatedly, and their surviving leaders were scattered. Minamoto no Yoshinaka, a cousin of the more famous Minamoto no Yoritomo, had raised an army in the mountains of Shinano and was pushing south-west along the Hokuriku road.

The Taira sent an army north to stop him. The two forces met first at the Battle of Hannyano, and then again at Kurikara Pass. Kurikara was the decisive encounter of that campaign.

Why It Mattered

Kurikara turned the war. Before it, the Taira were the established power and the Minamoto were the challengers. After it, the Taira army in the north had ceased to exist as a fighting force, and the road to Kyoto lay open.

Yoshinaka followed up immediately. He marched south and entered Kyoto, and the Taira leadership abandoned the capital and fled west with the child emperor. The Taira never recovered the initiative. Two years later, at the Battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185, the Minamoto destroyed the Taira fleet and ended the war.

The battle also made Yoshinaka's reputation — and then destroyed him. His entry into Kyoto made him a political rival to his own cousin Yoritomo, and within a year Yoshinaka was killed fighting Yoritomo's brothers. Yoritomo went on to found the Kamakura shogunate in 1192, the first warrior government in Japanese history. The strategic lesson of Kurikara — that a smaller force can beat a larger one by attacking at night, from the flank, and by breaking the enemy's nerve rather than their line — became a standard reference point in later Japanese military writing.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 倶利伽羅峠の戦い, read くりからとうげのたたかい (Kurikara tōge no tatakai).

Broken down:

• 倶 — read ku here. A kanji used mainly in transliteration of Sanskrit sounds into Chinese and then Japanese. It carries no everyday meaning of its own in modern Japanese; in this name it is purely phonetic.
• 利 — read ri here. Its ordinary meaning is "profit", "advantage", or "sharp". Again, in this name it is phonetic.
• 伽 — read ka here. Another kanji used for transliterating foreign sounds, particularly Buddhist Sanskrit terms. It has no independent everyday meaning in this context.
• 羅 — read ra here. Literally "gauze" or "net", but here it is the fourth syllable of a phonetic transcription.
• 峠 — read tōge. This is the one kanji in the name with a real, concrete meaning: a mountain pass, the highest point of a road crossing a ridge. It is a Japanese-made character (kokuji, 国字) with no Chinese origin.
• の — read no. The possessive and linking particle, equivalent to English "of" or "'s".
• 戦 — read tatakai. Battle, fight, war.
• い — read i. The okurigana that completes the verb form tatakai, "a fighting" or "a battle".

So the whole name means, plainly, "the battle of Kurikara Pass".

The first four kanji, 倶利伽羅, are a Buddhist transcription. Kurikara is the Japanese reading of the Sanskrit name Kulika, a dragon king in Buddhist scripture, and the same word names the sword held by the deity Fudō Myōō (不動明王). The pass took its name from a local Buddhist association with that figure, not from anything to do with the battle itself. The alternative name for the engagement, 砺波山 (Tonamiyama), refers to the mountain ridge rather than the pass.

Key Figures

Minamoto no Yoshinaka (源義仲), also known as Kiso Yoshinaka (木曾義仲) after the Kiso valley where he raised his army. He commanded the Minamoto force at Kurikara and devised the night envelopment and the burning-oxen stratagem. He entered Kyoto after the battle, was driven out in 1184, and was killed that same year.

Taira no Koremori (平維盛). He commanded the Taira army at Kurikara. He survived the rout and returned to the capital, and later drowned himself in 1184 after the Taira defeat at Ichinotani.

Taira no Kiyomori (平清盛). The head of the Taira clan and the dominant figure in Kyoto politics until his death in 1181. His death two years before Kurikara left the Taira without their most capable political leader, and the clan's position in the capital weakened steadily afterwards.

Minamoto no Yoritomo (源頼朝). Yoshinaka's cousin and the eventual founder of the Kamakura shogunate in 1192. He was not present at Kurikara, but the Minamoto victory there served his cause, and he later turned against Yoshinaka as a rival.