The figure of Taira Kiyomori, head of the Taira clan and architect of its rise to supreme power, is utilized in popular woodblock prints in a radically different way from that of other Taira warriors. Though sharing the ferocity and intensity of the ideal nineteenth century warrior, and without question depicted as the epitome of warrior power, Kiyomori is rarely if ever presented an idealized figure, but rather as a symbol of the abuse of power. Significantly, the first images of Kiyomori only begin to appear around the 1840's, the decade in which government officials clamped down on popular artists, placing extreme limits on the colors, techniques, price and subject matter of woodblock prints. Kiyomori, perhaps the closest thing to a villain in the Heike Monogatari, is made to represent tyranny, and appear as the victim of its inevitable consequences. Though never parodied as in eighteenth century prints of warriors, Kiyomori is shown to be punished, and through this late Edo and early Meiji woodblock artists could obliquely comment on political tyranny. It was not long, however, as we shall see, before the government co-opted the popular print, and found a way to utilize it for its own purposes.

There are two standard depictions of Kiyomori in the mid-late nineteenth century, both showing him as a fierce, bald-pated and mustached warrior-type. The first represents Kiyomori's absolute power, showing him arresting the sunset by incantation, so that work on a temple he is sponsoring can be completed. The point of this image is partly to summon wonder at the miraculous abilities of a figure of great power, but in light of the second form of depiction of Kiyomori, is also to suggest a monstrous figure: a man so convinced of his own central place in the universe that he thinks he can rule the movement of heavenly bodies. Interestingly, most of the ukiyo-e artists leave it ambiguous whether Kiyomori has actually stopped the sun in its tracks with his prayers, or merely believes he has, the fantasy of the self-centered despot.

The second form of depiction that calls for the latter reading shows Kiyomori at the moment when the power balance is overturned, and supernatural forces begin to act on him, as he begins to hallucinate the skulls of his victims in his garden at Fukuhara. Both themes, though found in embryonic form in the Heike Monogatari are embellished and expanded upon by print artists, until the point of their criticism comes clear.

It is interesting, however, that many of the pictures of Kiyomori's confrontation with the skull transform this incident from a supernatural to a psychological phenomenon, from punishment for evil deeds from without to punishment from within. Depicting Kiyomori in a snow-covered garden at Fukuhara, or else looking the moon through a sliding door, by no means part of the original Heike description, they manage with just pictorial hints of skulls in vaguely-shaped objects to suggest that Kiyomori is seeing what he has within him, the memories of the lives he has taken and the suffering he has caused, not a ghostly apparition. Such psychological realism is a more powerful rejection of tyranny, suggesting its own inevitable death from within, and undoubtably hints of a belief that the days of the Tokugawa shogunate were likewise numbered.

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