Kō no Moronao

Who They Were

Kō no Moronao (高師直) was a samurai of the Nanboku-chō period, the era of the "Northern and Southern Courts" when two rival imperial lines each claimed the throne. He served Ashikaga Takauji, the first shōgun of the Ashikaga shogunate, and became the first man to hold the office of Shitsuji (執事, shitsuji), the shōgun's deputy. The post was not merely administrative: Moronao also commanded the shōgun's armies in the field.

He was a member of the Kō clan, and his father was Kō no Moroshige (高師重). He had at least two children, Sou no Moroakira and Sou no Moronatsu. His career made him indispensable to Takauji and, at the same time, produced enemies powerful enough to destroy him.

Life and Career

Moronao fought for the Ashikaga cause against the loyalist forces of the Southern Court throughout the wars of the Nanboku-chō period. Among the enemy commanders he killed were Kitabatake Akiie and Kusunoki Masayuki, two of the Southern Court's most capable generals. As deputy and general, he combined civil authority with battlefield command in a way that made him one of the most consequential figures of the Ashikaga regime.

He was also, by the standards of his time, an iconoclast with no interest in observing tradition — particularly where the Emperor was concerned. He is recorded as asking what use a king was, why such a person should live in a palace, and why anyone should bow to him, adding that if a king were needed for some reason, one could be made of wood or metal and all the living kings banished. The Taiheiki (太平記), the epic chronicle of these wars, portrays the Kō brothers as avid villains and accuses Moronao in particular of violence, greed and lewdness.

Both Moronao and his brother Moroyasu were extremely useful to Takauji, but their violent and imperious characters created many powerful enemies for their lord. Chief among these was Takauji's younger brother Ashikaga Tadayoshi, whom Moronao bitterly opposed and whose policies he fought against. This enmity became the main trigger of the Kannō Disturbance (観応の擾乱, Kannō no jōran), a divisive civil war between Takauji and Tadayoshi with serious repercussions for the whole country.

Takauji ultimately won, but in March 1351 he was initially defeated by Tadayoshi, and a truce was arranged with the help of the Zen master Musō Soseki, who was close to both sides. One condition imposed by Tadayoshi was that the Kō brothers retire from politics forever and become monks, which they did: Moronao became a Zen monk, and Moroyasu joined the Nenbutsu fraternity. They later left Hyōgo for Kyoto in Takauji's company, but never arrived. The Kō were captured and executed along with many dozens of their family at the Mukogawa River by forces led by Uesugi Akiyoshi, in revenge for their killing of Akiyoshi's father Shigeyoshi. Takauji, powerless, had to hand them over. Moronao died on 24 March 1351, in the second year of the Kannō era.

Why They Matter

Moronao matters for three reasons. First, he defined the office of Shitsuji at the very start of the Ashikaga shogunate, establishing that the deputy could be both the regime's chief administrator and the commander of its armies. Second, his feud with Ashikaga Tadayoshi turned a family rivalry into the Kannō Disturbance, a civil war that damaged the whole country and reshaped the Ashikaga regime from within. Third, his death was not a quiet end: he and dozens of his family were executed together at the Mukogawa River, and his own lord was forced to surrender him to his enemies.

His reputation in literature proved as durable as his career. The Taiheiki cast him as a villain, and that villainous name travelled far beyond the chronicles.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 高師直. It is read in kana as こう もろなお, and romanised as Kō no Moronao. The particle の (no) between the family name and the given name marks possession or affiliation, so the full form means roughly "Moronao of the Kō".

Breaking it down character by character:

• 高 — read here as こう (kō). It means "high" or "tall". As a family name element it is common, and it is the same character used in words like 高い (takai, "tall" or "expensive").
• 師 — read here as もろ (moro), part of the given name. It means "teacher", "master", or "model", and also denotes an army or a body of troops. It appears in words such as 教師 (kyōshi, "teacher") and 師団 (shidan, "division", in a military sense).
• 直 — read here as なお (nao), completing the given name. It means "straight", "honest", "upright", or "to repair". It appears in 正直 (shōjiki, "honest") and 直す (naosu, "to fix" or "to correct").

Note that the readings もろ and なお are nanori (名乗り), name-specific readings that apply to this individual and are not the everyday readings of these characters. A reader who knows only the standard on'yomi and kun'yomi would not guess 師直 as "Moronao" from the characters alone. The family name 高, by contrast, uses its standard Sino-Japanese reading こう.

The name is also encountered as Moronō, reflecting the common pronunciation shift of final -ao to -ō in Japanese speech.

Legacy

Moronao's posthumous life has been almost entirely as a villain. The Taiheiki, the epic dedicated to the events of the Nanboku-chō period, describes the Kō brothers as avid villains, and Moronao is accused of violence, greed and lewdness. That reputation crossed into the theatre: in the bunraku and kabuki play Kanadehon Chūshingura (仮名手本忠臣蔵), which depicts the vendetta of the 47 rōnin, his name is used to represent Kira Yoshinaka, the court official whose conduct provokes the revenge.

The substitution is a telling one. A historical deputy of the 1350s became the theatrical stand-in for a hated figure of a later era, because the name Kō no Moronao had come to mean a certain kind of arrogant, grasping official. For students of Japanese, the name is therefore worth knowing twice over: once as the first Shitsuji of the Ashikaga shogunate, and once as a byword for villainy on the kabuki stage.