Yoshitsune Shin Takadachi - Background

Background

Like many jōruri and kabuki plays, Yoshitsune Shin-Takadachi was not an original narrative, but rather was based on an established series of stories, situations and characters already familiar to the audience, known as a sekai (lit. "world"). It is one of a great many stories and plays centering on the 12th century samurai commander Minamoto no Yoshitsune, younger brother of Shogun Minamoto no Yoritomo. A conflict arose between the brothers over suspicions that Yoshitsune, who led the Minamoto clan to victory in the Genpei War and thus allowed Yoritomo to gain power and become shogun, sought to overthrow his brother. The former was forced to flee Kyoto, and sought refuge in the Takadachi fortress in Hiraizumi, far to the north. He was soon attacked there by his brother's shogunal forces, defeated, and forced to commit seppuku.

Allusions are made in the play to the 1615 siege of Osaka, in which Tokugawa Ieyasu led shogunal forces against Toyotomi Hideyori, who had been gathering forces to oppose the shogunate, and who represented the last major opposition to Tokugawa supremacy. Several decades earlier, prior to the end of the 16th century, Ieyasu had been a vassal of Hideyori's father Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and had sworn oaths to serve the Toyotomi and to ensure Hideyori's succession to power. Following Hideyoshi's death in 1598, however, he betrayed his oaths and seized power for himself. The ban on relating these events onstage therefore derived not only from a general aversion to depictions of the honorable, high-class shogunate in the low-class world of the theatres, but also from a fear of the threat posed to the shogunate's power and stability by accusations of Ieyasu's disloyalty and betrayal.