Taira no Munemori

Taira no Munemori led the Taira clan to its destruction in the Genpei War and was beheaded after being taken alive at Dan-no-ura, which his own family's tradition treated as the greater disgrace. He was the third son of Taira no Kiyomori, the man who had made the Taira the dominant power in Japan and installed his own infant grandson as emperor, and he inherited the leadership in 1181 when Kiyomori died of a fever, telling his family to put no offerings before his grave but the head of Minamoto no Yoritomo. Munemori was not the soldier his father had been and the sources, which are mostly the Tale of the Heike and therefore literature as much as history, are merciless about him. Beaten at Kurikara, he abandoned the capital in 1183 and took the child emperor Antoku and the imperial regalia west to the Inland Sea. Yoshitsune destroyed the Taira at Ichi-no-Tani and Yashima with flanking marches nobody expected, and at Dan-no-ura in April 1185 the tide in the strait turned against them. Kiyomori's widow took the seven-year-old emperor in her arms and jumped into the sea, and most of the clan followed. Munemori and his son did not, and were pulled out of the water. They were paraded through Kyoto and executed on the road to Kamakura. The sword of the regalia was never recovered. Antoku is the youngest emperor in Japanese history and the only one killed in a battle. The Heike crabs of the Inland Sea, whose shells carry a pattern resembling a face, are said by fishermen to hold the drowned. Munemori's reputation has never been rehabilitated, and the case against him was written by the winners.

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