Heian Japan's Warrior Monks Never Existed. This Did.

[00:00:00]The most feared army in Japan is marching today.

[00:00:03]I am in it.

[00:00:04]I make sake.

[00:00:05]First time?

[00:00:06]Stay next to me.

[00:00:07]Do exactly what I do.

[00:00:09]That drum, up on the mountain?

[00:00:11]That is the call-up.

[00:00:12]When it sounds, every brewer in Kyoto shuts his shop.

[00:00:15]And walks.

[00:00:16]My name does not matter.

[00:00:18]My seal does.

[00:00:19]This mark on my barrels means the god of Mount Hiei protects my shop.

[00:00:23]Nobody robs me.

[00:00:24]Nobody undercuts me.

[00:00:26]The tax collectors know my street.

[00:00:27]We have never had a long conversation.

[00:00:30]In return, on the day the drum sounds, I carry.

[00:00:33]You came to see the warrior monks.

[00:00:35]Everyone does.

[00:00:36]Keep looking.

[00:00:37]By the palace gates tonight, you will understand.

[00:00:40]Kyoto.

[00:00:40]The winter of 1169.

[00:00:43]The man closing his brewery is a jinin, a shrine affiliate of Hie, the great shrine at the foot of Mount Hiei.

[00:00:49]Brewers, grain lenders, toll-keepers: ordinary businessmen inside a sacred franchise.

[00:00:54]Today, hundreds of them are reporting for duty.

[00:00:56]On the biggest days, the capital swore it was thousands.

[00:00:59]A governor's man has wronged the Mountain's people.

[00:01:02]So the Mountain is going to court.

[00:01:04]ALL of this... is going to court.

[00:01:06]We have five moves.

[00:01:07]Learn them from the bottom.

[00:01:09]Today my shoulder goes under move two, and at the gates you will see why nothing like it exists anywhere else on earth.

[00:01:16]Move five?

[00:01:17]Paper.

[00:01:21]Yes.

[00:01:22]Monks sue.

[00:01:22]Temples are the most patient litigants in Japan.

[00:01:25]They keep every deed and every boundary stone.

[00:01:29]For centuries.

[00:01:30]So the petition comes first.

[00:01:32]Always.

[00:01:33]Filed politely.

[00:01:34]Filed properly.

[00:01:35]And everyone in the capital understands what a petition from us really is.

[00:01:40]A RECEIPT.

[00:01:41]Proof, for later, that we asked nicely.

[00:01:44]Sixty years after this march, Japan's warrior government wrote a law against exactly this playbook: banning sacred processions into other men's estates, banning loan collection behind holy objects.

[00:01:56]You do not write a law against a thing that is not working.

[00:01:59]And when the answer is slow, the Mountain does not send a second letter.

[00:02:07]Move four.

[00:02:08]The god goes silent.

[00:02:09]No festivals.

[00:02:10]No blessings.

[00:02:11]No prayers for the emperor's health.

[00:02:13]No rites for the harvest.

[00:02:15]The whole machinery of heaven.

[00:02:17]Shut.

[00:02:17]And here is the beautiful part.

[00:02:19]They take the god's own vessel.

[00:02:21]And they leave it somewhere inconvenient.

[00:02:23]In a road.

[00:02:24]At a bridge.

[00:02:25]Before a rich man's gate.

[00:02:26]You cannot move it.

[00:02:27]Touching it wrongly is sacrilege.

[00:02:29]You cannot walk past it.

[00:02:31]It is a god.

[00:02:32]In the road.

[00:02:33]My father worked through one of the silences.

[00:02:35]He said the worst part was the quiet.

[00:02:38]No drums.

[00:02:39]No songs.

[00:02:40]A whole city holding its breath, waiting to learn what it owes.

[00:02:44]Ritual suspension was a documented tactic: abandon the sacred cart or tree at a strategic site, and normal government business froze until restitution was made.

[00:02:54]Four years after this march, the sacred tree of Nara will sit at the regent's own villa at Uji while a toll war burns behind it.

[00:03:01]No weapon drawn.

[00:03:02]The city simply stops working, until somebody pays.

[00:03:06]That is move four.

[00:03:07]The god rests.

[00:03:08]The city stops.

[00:03:13]Move three belongs to the other great temple, Kōfukuji, in Nara.

[00:03:17]Their god travels as a TREE: a sacred branch of the Kasuga shrine, hung with holy mirrors.

[00:03:24]When the tree walks, Nara walks behind it.

[00:03:27]And the capital asks one question: what do they want, and can we give it before that branch reaches the gates?

[00:03:33]In 1093, a governor named Takashina Tameie seized fields the temple claimed.

[00:03:39]Kōfukuji mobilized on the sixth day of the month.

[00:03:42]The tree entered Kyoto on the twenty-sixth.

[00:03:44]That same night, the court removed Tameie and sent him into exile.

[00:03:47]Here is the detail historians love: the monks never produced clear title to that land.

[00:03:52]They did not have to.

[00:03:54]The tree was in the city.

[00:03:56]Twenty days from marching to exile.

[00:03:59]My cousin waited three YEARS for a judgment about a fence.

[00:04:03]He did not have a god to carry.

[00:04:08]Move two is on my shoulder right now.

[00:04:11]Put your hand on the pole.

[00:04:12]Grip here.

[00:04:13]Do not stumble.

[00:04:13]Not for your sake.

[00:04:15]You are replaceable, forgive me.

[00:04:17]For HIS.

[00:04:17]The mikoshi.

[00:04:18]The palanquin of the god of the Mountain.

[00:04:21]Understand what is on your shoulder.

[00:04:23]This is not a symbol of the god.

[00:04:25]For every soul kneeling along this street, the god is INSIDE.

[00:04:29]Now watch the soldiers at the gate.

[00:04:32]Watch their bowstrings.

[00:04:33]Every one of them is doing the same arithmetic.

[00:04:36]An arrow that hits a carrier makes a martyr.

[00:04:39]An arrow that hits the palanquin makes the archer a man who shot a god.

[00:04:44]In court, forever, against a plaintiff who cannot die.

[00:04:48]Twenty-two years before this night, Taira soldiers loosed arrows at the god's vehicles at Gion.

[00:04:54]The court suspended both commanders responsible, the head of the Taira clan among them.

[00:04:59]Not every arrow was punished.

[00:05:01]One year the man responsible walked free, and the court simply paid for the repairs.

[00:05:05]But often enough.

[00:05:06]Tonight, the court will order Taira no Shigemori, its leading general, to clear these men from the gates.

[00:05:12]Three times it will order him.

[00:05:14]Three times, he will decline.

[00:05:16]That is what the capital feared.

[00:05:18]Not an army.

[00:05:19]A lawsuit you could not win, walking toward you.

[00:05:22]So no.

[00:05:23]They CAN shoot us.

[00:05:24]Nothing stops them.

[00:05:25]It is only the most expensive arrow a man will ever loose.

[00:05:29]The gates are opening.

[00:05:30]They always open.

[00:05:35]Move one is a reputation.

[00:05:37]Nobody has to carry it.

[00:05:38]You have heard the stories they tell in the capital: giants on the mountain, blades taller than a man, an army of monster monks.

[00:05:46]Look around this procession.

[00:05:48]Find one for me.

[00:05:48]I will wait.

[00:05:50]He is right to tease you.

[00:05:51]The famous image, the white cowl and the tall clogs and the great curved blade, solidified centuries later, in theater and Edo-period prints, around legends like Benkei.

[00:06:01]Even the word for it, sōhei, warrior monk, does not exist tonight.

[00:06:05]It will be coined in 1715, five and a half centuries after this march.

[00:06:09]The Mountain's own records tell a different story.

[00:06:12]A tenth-century register lists twenty-seven hundred monks enrolled.

[00:06:15]When an abbot demanded an assembly to count heads, two thousand came.

[00:06:19]The famous three thousand was a letterhead, not a headcount.

[00:06:23]And a century and a half after tonight, one temple's toll dispute left a duty list: ninety-two names.

[00:06:29]Twenty were monks.

[00:06:30]Seventy-two were laymen.

[00:06:31]Hall workers, retainers, estate men.

[00:06:34]Men like him.

[00:06:35]The Mountain's real army is a book of loans.

[00:06:38]We lend the grain.

[00:06:39]We pour the capital's sake.

[00:06:41]The court can fight monks.

[00:06:42]It cannot fight the people who feed it, move it, and pour its drink, all at the same time.

[00:06:47]THAT is move one.

[00:06:48]Be everything.

[00:06:49]I am not gentle, you understand.

[00:06:52]Six years ago the Mountain razed its brother temple across the lake.

[00:06:56]The fourth time.

[00:06:57]That night both mountains chanted for the dead.

[00:07:00]The same sutras, to the same Buddha.

[00:07:02]By spring, both were suing again.

[00:07:05]The court knew all of it, and could do almost nothing.

[00:07:09]Seventy years after this march, its own Distillery Office will try to levy Kyoto's brewers directly.

[00:07:14]Most already pay the shrine.

[00:07:16]The levy will fail.

[00:07:17]And Kyoto will still be telling a story about the retired emperor Shirakawa, by every measure the most powerful man of his age.

[00:07:24]Ah.

[00:07:25]I know this one.

[00:07:26]Three things, the old emperor said, refused to obey him: the water of the Kamo river.

[00:07:31]The fall of the dice.

[00:07:33]And the monks of the Mountain.

[00:07:34]Did he say it?

[00:07:36]Who knows.

[00:07:36]The city says he said it.

[00:07:38]For our purposes... that is better.

[00:07:40]He probably never said it.

[00:07:42]The line surfaces in war tales written long after his death.

[00:07:45]But the city that kept repeating it was in a position to know.

[00:07:48]That night, the man at the center of the dispute was exiled.

[00:07:52]The order was reversed within the week.

[00:07:53]So the Mountain pressed again, and six weeks later, won again.

[00:07:57]It never needed to win quickly.

[00:07:59]It only needed to never stop.

[00:08:02]We leave the god at the gates tonight.

[00:08:04]He does not need us for the arguing.

[00:08:07]Tomorrow I open my shop again.

[00:08:09]Protected, taxed, and, when the drum sounds, owned.

[00:08:12]Every seal has two sides.

[00:08:14]The great blades are in museums now, polished for warrior monks who mostly never existed.

[00:08:19]The legend got the armor.

[00:08:21]The truth kept the receipts.