The Defection of 1369: Why the Head of the Kusunoki Surrendered to the Northern Court

In the summer of 1369 (Ōan 2 / Shōhei 24), in Kawachi Province. Kusunoki Masanori left the Southern Court and surrendered to the Northern Court and the Muromachi shogunate.

He was about thirty-nine, twenty-one years since inheriting the headship — a decision to abandon his own position as principal warrior of the Southern Court.

The reaction within the Southern Court was fierce, and Masanori was denounced as 'the shame of the Kusunoki house' and 'betrayal of his father Masashige.

The Southern Court of the 1360s had continued to shrink in strength — its base moved from Kyoto to Yoshino, to Anō (the modern Gojō City, Nara Prefecture), and to Kanshin-ji.

On the Northern Court and Muromachi shogunate side, the shogunate system had solidified under the second shōgun Ashikaga Yoshiakira, and the possibility of the Southern Court's military revival was declining rapidly.

In this situation, the judgment Masanori made was not continued unilateral armed resistance from the Southern Court side, but the road of entering the arena of negotiation with the Northern Court to end the war.

But Masanori's intent was not a simple defection. Having surrendered to the Northern Court, Masanori actively advanced Nanboku-chō peace negotiations within the shogunate.

He cooperated with kanrei Hosokawa Yoriyuki and served as the pipeline of negotiation with the Southern Court side.

He was involved as the shogunate-side window in multiple peace negotiations of the 1370s, and continued to seek a road to the survival of the Southern Court and the reconciliation of the courts.

From contemporary sources, it can be read that Masanori was not moving as a simple defector who catered only to the Northern Court side, but under the consistent aim of realizing peace.

From the Edo period on, Masanori's 1369 surrender was criticized as the representative case of 'disloyalty.

' Under the Meiji-Shōwa period imperial-nation historical view especially, he was severely denounced.

But postwar historiography reevaluated Masanori's lifelong orientation toward peace and repositioned him as not a mere defector but a politician who pursued the ending of the war.

That his father Masashige, right before Minatogawa, insisted on reconciliation with Ashikaga Takauji and was defeated, and that Masanori pursued peace for forty years, shows the continuity of the political thought of the Kusunoki house.