After Shijōnawate: In 1348, His Brother's Death Turned the Headship to Masanori

On the fifth day of the first month of 1348 (Shōhei 3), at Shijōnawate in Kawachi Province (the modern Shijōnawate City, Osaka Prefecture).

About 3,000 Southern Court troops led by Kusunoki Masatsura challenged head-on the 20,000-strong great army of the Northern Court's Kō Moronao, and after half a day of fierce combat were defeated.

Masatsura took his own life, aged about twenty-three. Twelve years after his father Masashige's death in battle at Minatogawa (1336), the Kusunoki house lost its head in combat for two generations in succession.

At this time, the one who was to inherit the headship in Kawachi was Masashige's third son Masanori.

Around eighteen at the time. Six years old when his father Masashige fell at Minatogawa, he had grown up under his elder brother Masatsura.

With the sudden death of his eldest brother Masatsura, the succession came around to him as the adult male remaining in the Kusunoki house.

It was a succession made while facing the deaths of two generations — his father at Minatogawa and his brother at Shijōnawate.

Masanori, like his father Masashige and elder brother Masatsura, continued to fight the Northern Court armies as a principal warrior of the Southern Court in Izumi, Kawachi, and Kii.

But Masanori's way of fighting contained elements qualitatively different from those of his father and brother.

Since his father Masashige's Minatogawa, the Kusunoki house had held the ideal of 'ending the war through reconciliation.

' Masanori would attempt to realize this ideal, throughout his forty-year life to come, as concrete peace negotiations.

Not the mere inheritance of the wills of his father and brother, but choosing the road of political executor of the thought they had shown at the end.