Kusunoki Masashige - Part One

I first saw a version of the above picture when I was in my early 20's. It was in a Pelican book called The Samurai by H. Paul Varley (1974). I no longer have that book. I haven't seen the picture from the book anywhere else, but there are many painted versions of the same event. The picture shows a Samurai warrior saying farewell to his son. The warrior knows that he will never see his son again. He is going to fight a battle that he knows that he cannot win. He knows that he will die either in battle or by seppuku (ritual suicide) because he lost the battle.

The picture 'said' something to me. It had, of course, a caption that read something like "Kusunoki says farewell to his son", so I had an idea as to what it was about.

Kusunoki Masashige (楠木 正成) was a samurai warrior. Very little is known about him except for the last few years of his life. He was born about the year 1294 and died on the 4th of July 1336 by committing seppuku after losing the battle of the Minato River (or the battle of Minatogawa). Very little is known about his family line, the Kusonoki, which suggests he was probably fairly low down on the samurai hierarchy.

As an aside in Japanese, the family name comes first and the given name last.

He was a samurai warrior which means that he had all the rights, privileges, duties and responsibilities of a samurai, equally with all the other samurai.

However, within the samurai class, there was a feudal hierarchy. The wealthiest samurai were vassals of the clan chieftain. They, too, gave some of their lands to their vassals, and so on down the hierarchy with wealth, power and land getting less and less as you go down. Masashige was, probably, in the middle or near the bottom. He is recorded as "well to do" in some documents. He probably had a fief that supported his family and household with some peasant plots under him. He would have had, maybe, a small retinue of armed warriors of his own.

In the year 1331, a coalition of warrior clans rebelled against the Emperor Go-Daigo, who had been restoring the power of the Emperor (the Kemmu Restoration) over the Shogunate.

Go-Daigo issued a call to arms asking for assistance. Few answered this call. Among those who did were the Hojo clan and Masashige. The Emperor had had a dream while sheltering under a camphor tree (a Kusunoki) and this convinced him that the warrior who would save him would have that name.

From 1331 to 1336 Masashige engaged in a campaign, often a guerilla campaign, against the rebels led by a warrior called  Ashikaga Takauji. He proved himself to be a brilliant commander and tactician, holding out against great odds.

In 1336 the Emperor, not wishing to abandon the capital Kyoto to the advancing rebels and advised by a warrior chieftain called Nitta Yoshisuke, insisted, against Masashiges advice, that the advance of Takauji must be stopped by giving battle. This led to the battle named above and to Masashiges death.

This is his death poem:

"I could not return, I presume
So I will keep my name

Among those who are dead with bows."

That is a very brief description of Kusunoki Masashiges life. After the Meiji Restoration, when the Emperor was restored to power and the Shogunate and feudal system were abolished in the late 19th Century, he became a hero of almost god-like proportions because of his loyalty to the Emperor, and he was awarded the highest honour that Japan could award. Because of his loyalty to the Emperor.

The following is a close up of a statue of Masashige that stands outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

But, here, I want to contemplate why he came to mean so much to me and still does.

Was it because he was a samurai? One of my passions then, and now, was history, particularly military history, and especially pre-modern history. I had a very slim knowledge of the samurai, most of it wrong, as I later discovered. Reading the book I mention at the start triggered a deeper curiosity and I read everything that I could. There isn't so much available in English (as far as I am aware), but a lot in Japanese. There is also, in Japan, a huge archive of official and private documents going back centuries. All in Japanese of course.

I can't speak Japanese, although I have tried to learn it, without success.

As I said, the samurai are shrouded in an awful lot of myth-making and sheer nonsense. Much of this is relatively recent, as an interest in the so-called 'mysterious east' has grown in modern times.

A lot of this myth-making, however, began in Japan itself after the year 1600 when the Tokugawa (Edo) Shogunate was established and the long peace began. Samurai warriors slowly lost their military role during the 280 odd years of the Tokugawa (Edo) period. Also during this period the feudal system became formalised, enforced by law and the position of social groups became fixed. The harking back to a more warrior-like age of the samurai slowly began to lead to the romanticising of them and that period.

An example of this is bushido, the so-called 'warriors code.' This was, actually, a collection of slightly different codes. It prescribed the code of morality for a samurai warrior. Now, while there certainly existed a code of sorts from the earliest days of the samurai, it was a bit fluid and flexible.

However, the samurai seemed a bit special to me, in a way, and the picture at the top seemed, in some ways, to exemplify this code. Loyal to the wishes of his Emperor Masashige was prepared to die, even though the decision to fight went against all his military experience and knowledge.

But there are other warriors and warrior codes to be found in history. The European Knight of the same period is greatly undervalued and underestimated, I believe. There were codes, just as bendable however as bushido. The European Knight was just as capable of showing undying loyalty to the bitter end. The European Knight had fighting skills just as sophisticated as those of the samurai.

So why him?

Loyalty to a belief or an individual is not uncommon. Think of loyal nazis and loyal communists.

However, many of the last named were prepared to ditch their loyalty to save their own skins.

So undying loyalty may be a factor.

But loyalty to what? That is, surely, something to take into account. Loyalty to Nazism or communism seems grotesque to me. And Masashige was loyal to an Emperor, a supreme ruler. Another totalitarian or despotic system, which doesn't appeal much to me either.

Is it his military genius, because he was undoubtedly a very capable military leader? But there are other military geniuses in history, many of whom I admire too. Maybe because he fought with great skill and success against huge odds. But that is not unique in history either.

I think that, maybe, it is a little of all these things plus he was prepared to stand up, be counted and fight for what he believed. Plus, of course, the slightly exotic image I had of the samurai at that time.

Whatever the reason he remains a significant figure in my imagination and I am still interested in and admiring of him. And he, as it were, sparked my interest in a topic that has never left me.

Here is a picture of Kusunoki Masashige. I do not think that it is contemporary with him.

As I said, I intend to write a post that sets Masashiges story in a much wider context, a bit less personal.