What a Friend We Have in Jizōs 4

On the night of July 29, and Yoshitomo and Kiyomori led 600 cavalry and attacked Sutoku’s palace. They encountered a vigorous defense from Tameyoshi and Tametomo’s archers. Tametomo’s own left arm was six inches longer than his right, so powerful that he once sunk a full-sized Taira ship by firing a single arrow below the craft’s waterline (Fourteen years later, when the Taira captured him and left him useless by severing the tendons in his left arm, Tametomo committed seppuku, one of the first samurai on record to do so). 
Yoshitomo and Kiyomori simply set Sutoku’s palace on fire.  Go-Shirakawa ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne, Tameyoshi was executed, and Yoshitomo became head of the Minamoto. 
In 1160, in Kyoto, the Taira and the Minamoto clans began to factionalize again. Yoshitomo supported Emperor Go-Shirakawa, while Kiyomori supported his son Nijō, against him. But the Heiji Rebellion caught the Minamoto unprepared- the Taira burned down Go-Shirakawa’s palace, Yoshitomo was betrayed and executed by a retainer, and Kiyomori seized control, relegated the emperor to figurehead, and established the first samurai-dominated central government. Yoshitomo’s children were hunted down. His son, Yoritomo was exiled to a remote island under the rule of the Hōjō clan, another son Yoshitune, forced to enter a monastery, and all other siblings were executed. But the Taira would come to regret their leniency.
Kiyomori’s ascension to the highest circle of governance was one of two reasons for change in samurai status. The second, a further consolidation of power aloof from the Emperor in Kyoto, would come from the result of the next conflict.