Kusunoki Masashige

Who They Were

Kusunoki Masashige (楠木正成, くすのき まさしげ) was a samurai and military commander of the Kamakura period, born in 1294 in Kawachi Province, the territory that now forms the eastern part of Osaka Prefecture. He is remembered as the ideal loyal samurai — a man who fought, and finally died, for an emperor whose cause was already lost.

His father was Kusunoki Masatoyo, and Masashige was the head of the Kusunoki clan. He held the court and military posts of kebiishi (検非違使, けびいし, a judicial and police official), saemonnojō (左衛門尉, さえもんのじょう, an officer of the Left Gate Guards), bugyō (奉行, ぶぎょう, a commissioner or magistrate) and shugo (守護, しゅご, a provincial military governor). He had three sons: Kusunoki Masatsura, Kusunoki Masanori and Kusunoki Masatoki.

Life and Career

Kusunoki Masashige enters the historical record as a commander fighting for Emperor Go-Daigo in the Genkō War (元弘の乱, げんこうのらん), the conflict that brought down the Kamakura shogunate. The shogunate had governed Japan from Kamakura since 1185, with the emperor reduced to a ceremonial role in Kyoto. Go-Daigo intended to change that, and Masashige was one of the warriors who took his side.

The war ended in 1333 with the fall of the shogunate and the start of the Kenmu Restoration (建武の新政, けんむのしんせい), an attempt to return real political power to the imperial court. Masashige was a leading figure in that restoration. It did not hold. Within three years Ashikaga Takauji, a former imperial general, began to reverse it, opening the period of civil war between the Northern and Southern Courts known as the Nanboku-chō wars.

In 1336, at the emperor's command, Masashige attacked Takauji in Settsu Province. He is said to have known the order meant defeat, and obeyed it anyway. On 4 July 1336 he fought the Battle of Minatogawa (湊川の戦い, みなとがわのたたかい) and, when the battle was lost, performed seppuku (切腹, せっぷく, ritual suicide by disembowelment). He died at the Minato River, aged about forty-two. The parting from his son Masatsura before he rode to that battle is remembered as the Parting at Sakurai (桜井の別れ, さくらいのわかれ).

Why They Matter

Kusunoki Masashige became the standard against which Japanese loyalty was measured. He is counted among the 日本三忠臣 (にほんさんちゅうしん), "Japan's three loyal retainers", alongside Fujifusa Madenokoji and Taira no Shigemori, and he is grouped in the tradition known as Sanboku Issō (三木一草, さんぼくいっそう).

His reputation rests on a single decision: he obeyed an order he believed would kill him, because it came from his sovereign. That made him useful to later generations with their own ideas about duty. The Meiji government, building a modern state around the emperor, awarded him the posthumous court rank of Senior First Rank (正一位, しょういちい) in 1880 — more than five hundred years after his death. He is also known by the honorific Dai Nankō (大楠公, だいなんこう), "Lord Kusunoki".

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 楠木正成. It is read in kana as くすのき まさしげ, and in romaji as Kusunoki Masashige. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

楠 — read kusu here. The character means "camphor tree", the large evergreen laurel that grows across warm parts of Japan and Korea. Its wood is prized for boats and furniture, and old camphor trees are often treated as sacred.

木 — read ki here. It means "tree" or "wood", and it is one of the most basic characters in the language. Combined with the first character, 楠木 (kusunoki) means "camphor tree" as a single word. The family name is therefore a tree name, the kind of place- or nature-based surname common among warrior families.

正 — read masa here. It means "correct", "right", "just" or "orthodox". It is a very common element in samurai given names, and it carries a clear moral charge: the man whose name contains "righteousness".

成 — read shige here. It means "to become", "to accomplish", "to complete" or "to achieve". Paired with the previous character, 正成 (Masashige) can be read as "righteous accomplishment" or "one who achieves what is correct".

Two notes on reading. First, the characters 正 and 成 have other, more common readings — 正 is often read sei or shō, and 成 is often read sei or naru. The readings masa and shige belong to this name specifically, which is why the kana spelling matters. Second, the name is sometimes written in the older kyūjitai form 楠木正成, which is identical here; the difference shows up in other characters of the period, not in these four.

Legacy

Kusunoki Masashige is bound to the phrase 七生報國 (しちしょうほうこく, Shichishō Hōkoku), meaning roughly "Would that I had seven lives to give for my country!" — the vow attributed to him as he died. It became one of the most quoted lines in Japanese patriotic writing, and it carried his name into the twentieth century.

His sons carried the family's military reputation forward: Kusunoki Masatsura and Kusunoki Masanori both appear in accounts of the wars that followed his death. The Battle of Minatogawa, where he died on 4 July 1336, remains the event with which his name is most tightly linked, and the Parting at Sakurai, when he left his young son behind to go to his death, is a set piece of Japanese literature and drama.

For more than six centuries he has served as the model of the loyal retainer: a commander who lost his battle, kept his word, and was rewarded with a rank he could not have imagined, granted by a government that had not yet been founded when he died.