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Yoshitsune defeats the warrior monk Benkei
“He stands on a bridge in Kyoto, the story goes, and every samurai he tries to cross it, Benkei fights him. And he is so invincible that he ends up with 999 swords. So he's got one sword to go to make the thousand. And his opponent is a very slight, elegant youth, wearing a woman's cloak, who'd been playing the flute as he approached the bridge. Well, maybe, because he turns out to be so formidable an opponent that Benkei ends up defeated.”
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The Taira clan dominates 12th-century Japan
“The Tyra have control over Kyoto, the great imperial capital. They have the imperial family under their thumb, and they had expelled the Minamoto pretty much from the kind of civilised centre of Japan. And they have all been disbursed to the barbarous northeastern stretches of Japan. They also control the inland sea, which kind of lies between western Honshu and the two islands south of it. So the the Taira basically rule the waves, right?”
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The Minamoto clan rises from eastern exile
“Yoshitsune had been brought up in complete ignorance of his father's identity. He did not know that he was the son of this great Minamoto lord. And then at the age of six, he gets packed off by Kiyomori to a monastery north of Kyoto on the slopes of Mount Karama. Kiyomori's plan is that Yoshitsune will grow up in harmless and ignorant seclusion as a monk. He doesn't know who his father is, doesn't know that he's a Minamoto, and he's a monk, so therefore, hopefully he's not going to grow up to become a samurai.”
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Yoshitsune blends historical fact with mythical lore
“It tells how he's this young boy in his monastery, and then a servant who is loyal to his father's memory reveals to him his true identity. And Yoshitsune then goes up onto the side of the mountain of Mount Kurama, and he meets the great Tengu, who is the spirit lord of the mountain. And very fortunately for Yoshitsune, the greatest teacher of martial arts anywhere in the cosmos, and the great Tengu instructs Yoshitsune in swordsmanship. So, in a sense, he is Yoda to Yoshitsune's Luke.”
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The 1180 mobilization marks a historical turning point
“It's only when Yoshitsune is 20, so this is in the year 1180, that at last we get real historical certainty. Because this is the year when he emerges from this kind of obscurity that he's been veiled throughout his youth, to join his half-brother, Yoritomo, who is now the head of the Minamoto clan. And this is a very dramatic moment because the two half-brothers have never met before. And it happens in the most iconic place, possibly in the whole of Japan in the shadow of Mount Fuji.”