常在戦場 jōzai senjō Always on the Battlefield

Be as ready in peacetime as in war: that is the precept. At every witness for seventeen centuries it has meant the same thing, readiness in peace, kept by discipline of the body and plainness of life. It is said of peace, never of war for its own sake, and of what peace does to people who forget. The one time it was turned into Japanese, it became a poem. The poem says a warrior is one who keeps a heart that thinks, always and only, I am on the field of battle. A person who chooses it takes a rule for the quiet years, and which battlefield is theirs.

Master Takase writes the four characters in block, semi-cursive and cursive script. She also writes them in her own font design. On the scroll, and on several of the designs, she writes 戦 in its older form 戰, the form the old books used.

The Japanese phrase 常在戦場 meaning "Always on the Battlefield" is composed of the word 常在 (read jōzai) meaning "always existing" and 戦場 (read senjō) meaning "battlefield".

The four characters are a clause from 陳壽's 三國志 (about 290), the historian's praise of 朱然's habit of readiness in peacetime; a samurai family, the 牧野, made them the first article of their house code by tradition in the sixteenth century, and the phrase became the creed of the domain they founded, 長岡, and the lifelong motto of the admiral born there, 山本五十六.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 常在戦場.

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