True Victory is Victory Over Oneself (masakatsu agatsu)

True Victory is Victory Over Oneself in Japanese is 正勝吾勝 which is read masakatsu agatsu

正勝吾勝, read masakatsu agatsu: true victory is victory over oneself. The characters are far older than the saying. They open the name of a god in the 古事記, Japan's oldest chronicle: Susanoo swears an oath with his sister Amaterasu, wins it, and cries that he has won, and the eldest son born of that oath carries the cry in his name, 正勝吾勝, truly, I have won; in the next line, in the elation of winning, he breaks down the dikes of his sister's rice fields. Until aikido the four characters were that name and nothing else. Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, took them for his motto and read a teaching into them: 正勝, the right kind of victory, is 吾勝, victory over oneself, the defeat of the contending mind in one's own heart. He coined the reading, not the characters, and the reading is what this design says. The English title is John Stevens's literal rendering of 1995. The phrase is composed of the kanji 正 (read masa) meaning "correct; true", 勝 (read katsu) meaning "victory", 吾 (read a) meaning "self" and 勝 (read gatsu) meaning "victory".