常在戦場 jōzai senjō Always on the Battlefield

The four characters say always and the battlefield and leave ready for the reader to supply, and a Japanese dictionary gives them as a precept: act always with the readiness of one on a battlefield. In Nagaoka, whose historian called it the one creed of its samurai, it was said of peace and of what peace does to people who forget, and kept by plainness of life and drill. A lord of Nagaoka made it a poem: 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 every day, and chooses 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 being (in)" and 戦場 (read senjō) meaning "battlefield".

The four characters first stand together in 陳壽's 三國志 (about 290), in the life of the Wu general 朱然, who was watchful all day as if always on the battlefield and drilled his camp even in peace; 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, by the books of 1943 and 1944, 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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