Gempei War (redirected from Genpei War)

Gempei War

(1180–85) Final struggle between two Japanese warrior clans, the Minamoto (Genji) and the Taira (Heike), for supremacy in Japan, resulting in the Minamoto's victory and the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate (see Kamakura period). Stories of the rise and fall of the two families, with their Buddhist overtones of evanescence and their sense of heroic tragedy, have a popularity in Japan akin to that of Arthurian legends in English-speaking countries.