One of the Taira leaders, Masakado, emerged from his Shimosa base as the chief military power and principal arbiter of disputes throughout the southern Kanto area.

But perhaps because the eastern provinces had a long history of banditry, unrest, and minor revolts, the central government at first paid scant heed to Masakado and his fighting, intervening only when a suit was brought against him by one of his victims, and then simply to assess a mild punishment that was almost immediately canceled in a general amnesty.

Both Masakado and his enemies used the tactic of burning down the houses of their opponents' banrui and ashigaru and destroying their stored grain to weaken their resolve, from which we can understand that they were men of meager resources.

Although the organization of the armies of Masakado and his enemies were generally the same, they differed in one decisively important respect: the anti-Masakado forces were an alliance of warrior leaders, at times as many as five or six Taira and also a Minamoto and a Fujiwara, each with his own group of close followers.

Masakado's forces also included ashigaru armed with spears and shields, employed in mass tactics, in the tradition of the earlier imperial conscript armies.

[1] The fighting between Masakado and his opponents, as it evolved through its several stages, was destructive and murderous, but the participants continued throughout the first years to appeal to the court at Kyoto for justice.

The punitive expedition dispatched from the capital against Masakado arrived at the scene after his defeat, but its expected advent in the fighting presumably entered into the calculations of the contending sides.

Following the abandonment of the conscript-army system in the late eighth century and afterward, the statutory regime continued as before to rely for military strength on the richer and more powerful elements of rural society, asserting authority and control through a loose, evolving structure of ad hoc and permanent titles that deputized individual warriors to exercise force in defense of the regime or for the maintenance of public order.

Their ancestors had received appointments in the ninth and tenth centuries to provincial or military posts in the east and had settled and prospered there after the terms of their offices had expired.