The 1381 Return to the Southern Court: Masanori Staked His Last Ten Years on His Father's Will

In 1381 (Eitoku 1 / Kōwa 1), in Kawachi Province. After twelve years with the Northern Court, Kusunoki Masanori returned again to the Southern Court.

Around fifty-one, it was his second change of allegiance. Behind this return were the political confusion on the Northern Court side from the fall of kanrei Hosokawa Yoriyuki (1379, Kōryaku Political Change) and the peace-negotiation approach from the Southern Court side.

Masanori began to move again as the bridge for direct negotiations between the two courts.

After Masanori's return to the Southern Court, negotiations between the Northern and Southern Courts entered full swing in the 1380s.

On the Northern Court side, the third shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (this site's id 57) established personal rule and positioned the integration with the Southern Court as a long-term objective.

Masanori, as one of the Southern Court side negotiating parties, continued contact with the Yoshimitsu side.

The accumulation of this decade of negotiation became the foundation for the realization of the Meitoku Reconciliation (Nanboku-chō reconciliation) of 1392.

Masanori's date of death is transmitted as around 1389, but no fixed source exists.

He was around sixty. Three years before the Nanboku-chō reconciliation (1392). Masanori left this world to the end without seeing the realization of peace.

But when the two courts were reconciled under Yoshimitsu in 1392, Masanori's forty years of effort were certainly included among the decades of accumulated peace negotiations that lay behind it.

Father Masashige (Minatogawa, 1336), elder brother Masatsura (Shijōnawate, 1348), and Masanori (1389?

). Of the three generations of the Kusunoki, two died young in combat; only the third son Masanori survived into old age.

But Masanori chose not the road of fighting and dying, but the road of pursuing peace and dying a natural death.

The two sides — 'the martial and the peaceful' — that the three generations of the Kusunoki showed embody one ideal of the warrior politics of Japan in the Nanboku-chō period.

Kanshin-ji holds the head mound of the father Masashige, and transmits the memory of Masanori as the mortuary temple of the Kusunoki house.