Always on the Battlefield

常在戦場, read jōzai senjō: always on the battlefield. Four characters that are a Chinese sentence, and a precept: live in peacetime with the readiness of a man in battle. They come from the 三國志, the history of the Three Kingdoms, in its praise of a general of Wu who had the drums beaten morning and evening in years of peace, so that every soldier in camp fell in dressed for battle and no one, least of all he, forgot the war. A samurai family in 三河, the 牧野, made the four characters the first article of their house rules; the domain they founded, 長岡, kept them as its one creed for two and a half centuries, and the domain's own poem on them tells a warrior to keep a heart that thinks, always and only, I am on the field of battle. Several of the designs, the scroll among them, brush 戦 in its older form 戰. 山本五十六, the admiral, was born in 長岡 and brushed the phrase all his life; after his death it became a wartime slogan. The English title is the house's own literal rendering; John Stevens's Always Present on the Battlefield (2001) is the published alternative. 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".