Taira no Kiyomori (平 清盛, 1118 – March 20, 1181) was a military leader and kugyō of the late Heian period of Japan.

Kiyomori, emerging victorious with Yoshitomo (whose two eldest sons were killed), was now the head of the single most powerful warrior clan in imperial capital Kyoto.

Kiyomori showed mercy and exiled a few of Yoshitomo's surviving sons, including Yoritomo, Noriyori, and Yoshitsune – a benevolence that would turn out to be the Taira clan's downfall later on.

As was the norm, he soon relinquished the position and leadership of the Taira clan, with the goal of maintaining the social and political prestige of having attained the highest office in the land, but being free of the attendant duties.

[1]: 268, 285  The next year, in 1179, Kiyomori staged a coup d'état forcing the resignation of his rivals from all government posts and subsequently banishing them.

He then filled the open government positions with his allies and relatives, and imprisoned (house arrest) the cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa.

[1]: 275, 285 With the exertion of Taira power and wealth and Kiyomori's new monopoly on authority, many of his allies, most of the provincial samurai, and even members of his own clan turned against him.

Prince Mochihito, brother of Emperor Takakura, called on Kiyomori's old rivals of the Minamoto clan to rise against the Taira, beginning the Genpei War in the middle of 1180.

Kiyomori died early the next year from sickness, leaving his son Munemori to preside over the downfall and destruction of the Taira at the hands of the Minamoto in 1185.

He subsequently became a devotee of the goddess, despite his awareness that the benefits obtained through the Dakiniten rite (吒天の法, Daten no hō) would not be passed on to his progeny.

The Daiei Film production of Kenji Mizoguchi's 1955 film Shin Heike Monogatari (variously translated as Taira Clan Saga, Tales of the Taira Clan, and The Sacrilegious Hero) credits its story as "from the novel by Yoshikawa Eiji", which in turn is a 1950 retelling of the 14th-century epic The Tale of the Heike.

The opening introduction to the film, in its English subtitles, is Japan, in the Tenth and Eleventh centuries, was virtually controlled by the Fujiwara clan.

This story begins in 1137, in Kyoto, ancient capital of Japan.Unlike most other tellings, Mizoguchi's film includes only the story of Taira no Kiyomori's youth, depicting him as a heroic character, particularly in breaking the power of the tyrannical armed monks and their palanquin shrines, where he says at his father's grave "Father, with two arrows from my bow I destroyed a superstition that gripped men for centuries.