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常在戦場 jōzai senjō Always on the Battlefield

This is a philological study of 常在戦場 (jōzai senjō), a clause from the 三國志's praise of a Wu general in about 290. It follows the phrase through a samurai family's house code, a Japanese domain's three-century creed, a lord's 1787 dream and poem, and Admiral 山本五十六's lifelong motto, to a reversed-order twin transmitted through a different Edo house and into English by Sadler and Cleary, and finds that in every Japanese witness the phrase is said of peace, and of what peace does to men who forget.

Japanese Scroll of Always on the Battlefield (jōzai senjō) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Always on the Battlefield (jōzai senjō)

Always on the Battlefield (jōzaisenjō) on a traditional Japanese Scroll by Master Eri Takase.

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Abstract

常在戦場, always on the battlefield, is a clause from 陳壽's 三國志 (about 290), praising a Wu general who kept the readiness of war in a time of peace. This study follows it through a samurai family's house code in the sixteenth century, a Japanese domain's three-century creed, a lord's 1787 dream and poem, and the lifelong motto of Admiral 山本五十六, born in that domain — and a second, reversed-order line, 戰場常在, carried through a different Edo house into the two English translations of the 武道初心集. It finds one sense held for seventeen centuries: readiness in peace, kept by discipline of the body and plainness of life, and never war for its own sake.

Overview

The sense. One sense, from the Wu camp to the naval air station: readiness in peace, kept by discipline of the body and plainness of life. 陳壽 praises it in a general; the 牧野 rule it for their sons; 高野 makes it the cure for debt and drills it in a tent once a year; 忠精 dreams it; the admiral brushes it; the state prints it on everything. The phrase never meant war for its own sake. In every Japanese witness it is said of peace, and about what peace does to men who forget.

The words. Four characters and one sentence: 常 always, 在 to be in, 戦場 the battlefield. The old books write 戰場 or 戰塲, and the modern 戦 is the current form; the reading is the Chinese one throughout, jōzai senjō, and the one time the phrase was turned into Japanese it became a poem, 戰の庭にあるぞと常にただ思ふ心をたもて武士, keep a heart that thinks, always and only, "I am on the field of battle": that is a warrior. One Edo book and the anecdote it carries write the four characters in the other order, 戰場常在, senjō jōzai, and hang them on a 武田 veteran's wall; the sense is the same, and the witnesses are below. The dictionaries define it as a precept, act always with the readiness of one on a battlefield, and that is what it has meant at every witness; what changed was who was being told, a general's soldiers, a family's sons, a domain's samurai, a navy, a nation.

The text in English. No Meiji dictionary here enters it, and the American proverb collections have no place for it. The first English is of the 武道初心集's reversed order, in both translations of that book.

The historical record

About 290. Chen Shou 陳壽, 三國志, the Book of Wu, chapter 56, the biography of Zhu Ran 朱然. Zhu Ran (182–249) held 江陵 for Sun Quan 孫權 against the Wei; the historian's closing appraisal of him is where the four characters stand. 然長不盈七尺，氣候分明。內行修潔，其所文采，惟施軍器，餘皆質素。終日欽欽，常在戰場，臨急膽定，尤過絕人。雖世無事，每朝夕嚴鼓，兵在營者，咸行裝就隊。以此玩敵，使不知所備，故出輒有功: He was under seven feet tall, his bearing clear and sharp. His private life was clean; the only ornament he allowed was on his weapons, and all else was plain. All day long he was watchful, as if always on the battlefield; in a crisis his nerve held, far past other men. Though the world was at peace, morning and evening he had the drums beaten, and every soldier in camp fell in dressed for battle. With this he confounded the enemy, who could not tell what he was preparing for, so that whenever he marched he won. [1] The four characters are a description of a habit, not yet a maxim, and the Qing rhyme dictionary 佩文韻府 indexes the passage under 戰場, which is how an Edo reader would meet it as a phrase [2].

The sixteenth century by tradition. The 牧野 family's wall-text from 牛久保 in 三河, read in the 1931 history of 長岡 city. The 牧野 held 牛久保 castle between the 今川, the 武田 and the 徳川, and a list of house rules called the 參州牛久保之壁書, the wall-text of 牛久保 in 三河, is the family's own account of what that made of them. Its first article is the four characters: 一常在戰塲の四字, item: the four characters "always on the battlefield" [3]. Then 弓矢御法と云ふ事, the way of bow and arrow; 禮義廉恥と云ふ事 (古語之由), propriety and shame, an old saying; the etiquette of attendance, of the saddle, of the road, of greeting the old, of the seat, of the eye and the hand; how to take a man who has barricaded himself, how to witness a seppuku and how to second one; 貧は士之常と云ふ事, poverty is the samurai's normal state; a samurai's manners bear on his lord's reputation; 百姓に似る共、町人に似るな, be like a farmer if you must, never like a townsman; 鼻は欠とも、義理は欠な, lose your nose before you fail a duty. Eighteen articles in the city history and in the 1931 biography of Kawai Tsuginosuke 河井継之助, which adds the family's own note that the retainers of the old lords held it in high regard, acted on it in all things and taught it to their sons [4]; twenty-seven in two books of 1944 [5][6]. Its date is a guess in every witness, probably of the time of Makino Narisada 牧野成定 (1525–1566), the grandfather of the first lord of 長岡. No manuscript is here; none is in the National Diet Library's digital index.

The sixteenth century by tradition again, and about 1725 in writing. Baba Nobuharu 馬場美濃守 of the 武田 house, in Daidōji Yūzan 大道寺友山's 武道初心集 and in the 名将言行録. A second house, with no tie to the 牧野, kept the same four characters in the other order. Daidōji Yūzan (1639–1730), trained in the 甲州 school of war, wrote his primer for young samurai late in life, about 1725; it went round in manuscript and was printed at 松代 in 1834 [7]. Its chapter on duty, after a page on how the warriors of the civil wars slept in armor on brown rice and salt soup and how a samurai born in peace has no cause to grumble at guard duty, ends: 甲州武田家ノ老臣。弓矢功者ト呼レシ馬塲美濃ト申タル士。戰塲常在ト申ス四字ヲ書テ壁間ニ懸置。平生ノ受用ト仕候由申傳ヒ候。初心ノ武士心得ノタメ仍如件, it is handed down that a samurai called 馬場美濃, an elder of the 武田 house of 甲州 and known as a master of bow and arrow, wrote the four characters 戰場常在 and hung them on his wall for his daily use. Set down for the instruction of young samurai. [8] That is Baba Nobuharu 馬場信春 (d. 1575), and the 名将言行録 tells it of him in its own words: 信房常ニ戰塲常在ト云四字ヲ、壁間ニ掛ケ置キ、平生ノ誠トセリ, 信房 always kept the four characters 戰場常在 hung on his wall, and made them his everyday sincerity [9]. A third Edo text, the 列公間話 of the 池田 lords printed in the 史籍集覧, quotes it as a saying in the compiler's own voice: 私曰戰塲常在トテ治國ニ武之心懸厚ク務ル將ハ敵ニ成テ六ケ敷可存, I say: a general who, "always on the battlefield" as the phrase goes, governs his country with his mind on war is a hard enemy to face [10]. In this order the National Diet Library's index has the phrase in print from 1869, twenty books to 1944, most of them the 武道初心集 passage quoted in books for soldiers (1892, 1902, 1913, 1917, 1927) and the primer itself reprinted for them in 1943. The 1944 textbook that praises the admiral's 常在戰場 quotes the 武道初心集 on the same page, the one place the two orders meet [11].

The eighteenth century. 高野常道, 昇平夜話, read in the 1923 edition. The 牧野 came to 長岡 in 1618 and the phrase became the domain's word for itself. 高野常道, called 餘慶, the domain's scholar, tutor to the ninth lord and, by a 1944 biographer's reckoning, an ancestor of 山本五十六 five generations back, wrote a book of Talks in Peacetime on why samurai go broke, and the four characters are his answer three times. 何程靜謐安泰の御代たりといへ共、武士の生立、本は貴賤上下を嫌ず、常在戰場と云文字を常に心頭に挾で身の榮耀を好ず、質素を宗とし: however calm and secure the age, a samurai is raised, high or low, to keep the characters "always on the battlefield" at the front of his mind, to take no pleasure in show, and to make plainness his rule [12]. Debt comes when men rest in the long peace and forget the household teaching of 常在戰場. And he describes the cure: a camp-hut meeting every summer, a day of marching in armor, mounting, shooting, taking heads, and eating brown rice with miso in a tent, its purpose being that the samurai not forget the sense of 常在戰場.

1787. Makino Tadakiyo 牧野忠精, the ninth lord, a dream and a poem. On the second night of the first month of 天明 7 the lord dreamed he rode out to battle and came home to the rising sun. He wrote it down: 覺めてつらつらおもふ、かゝる事はゆめにしも限らじ、もののふたらんものは、常在戰場と云ふ心をこそ、しばしも忘るまじき事ぞ, waking, I thought it through: such a thing need not be only a dream; one who would be a warrior must not for a moment forget the heart called 常在戰場, and made the poem: 戰の庭にあるぞと常にただ思ふ心をたもて武士 [13]. It is the one Japanese sentence the four characters have ever been turned into, and the Nagaoka historian who printed it in 1915 adds: 『常在戰塲』との一語は、長岡武士の一信條なりしなり, the single phrase 常在戰場 was the one creed of the Nagaoka samurai [14].

1938 to 1944. The war. Before 1915 no Japanese book in the National Diet Library's index prints the four characters in this order (the reversed 戰場常在 is in print from 1869, above); from 1938 they are everywhere. A publisher's blurb for wartime-system editions says the nation needs the vigor of 常在戰場 (eight books, 1938–41); a factory directory lists a company whose factory spirit is always on the battlefield; the commentary on the mobilization law, the judo hall's history of 嘉納治五郎, the Ministry of Education's readers. In 1943, after the admiral's death, the navy minister Yonai Mitsumasa 米内光政 dictated a book titled 常在戦場: his forty years in the navy were from first to last one 常在戰場 spirit, and its editor lists the phrase among the elements of the 山本 spirit to be pressed on a hundred million people [15]. The 1944 textbook explains where he had it: 山本五十六元帥は中學生時代からこの言葉を好み、後年揮毫するにもよくこの四字を以つてした, the admiral liked the phrase from his middle-school days and in later years often brushed these four characters, from the head of the old Nagaoka domain's precept, and it prints the poem, wrongly, under the founder Tadanari 忠成's name [16].

The dictionaries today. 大辞泉: いつでも戦場にいる心構えで事をなせという心得を示す語, a term for the precept that one should act always with the readiness of one on a battlefield; no source, no date [17]. JMdict enters it as a yojijukugo, being combat ready at all times [18]. Neither names the 三國志, the 牧野, or the admiral.

What is not a source. The 1944 textbook sets the phrase beside the 葉隠's 常住死身, to live as one already dead, and a 1944 Confucian daily-reader beside the proverb 油断大敵; those are neighbors on a page, not origins. The budō reception in English (below) attaches the phrase to Nakayama Hakudō 中山博道 and to Funakoshi Gichin 船越義珍; no Nagaoka witness names either, and the Nagaoka line does not run through them. The phrase is not in the Chinese classics as a maxim; it is a clause of one biography, and its life as a motto is Japanese.

The text in English

1941. A. L. Sadler, The Code of the Samurai. There was a certain Baba Mino, a veteran of renown under the house of Takeda of Kai, who wrote out and hung up on the wall as his life's maxim the four characters that signify "The field of battle is my normal abode." [19]

1999. Thomas Cleary, Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido Shoshinshu, Tuttle, the chapter Military Service. It is related that a famous warrior known as the Master Archer used to have a sign on his wall with four words he applied in everyday life: "Always on the Battlefield." I note this for the edification of novice warriors. [20]

2001. John Stevens, Budo Secrets: Teachings of the Martial Arts Masters, Shambhala. A calligraphy of the four characters by the kendō master Nakayama Hakudō, captioned Jozai Senjo, "Always Present on the Battlefield", and, of the karate founder Funakoshi Gichin, his personal motto was jozai senjo, "Always present on the battlefield of life, ready …" [21].

2010. Denny Holzbauer, Truth for Fighters. ALWAYS PRESENT ON THE BATTLEFIELD, with a section on its history [22].

2011. Takashi Inoguchi and Purnendra Jain, Japanese Politics Today, Palgrave Macmillan. Of Diet members and their districts: they say "we are always on the battle field" (Jozai Senjo) [23].

2015. Naval War College Review, vol. 68 no. 3. A citation of Kensuke Onishi's book NGO, Jozai Senjo, rendered Always Prepare Yourself as If You Are on a Battlefield [24].

The Library of Congress's union catalog records the 1943 米内 book and a Nagaoka pamphlet, 『長岡藩風と常在戦場の精神』, The Nagaoka domain's character and the spirit of 常在戦場, by title [25]. Agawa's biography of the admiral, the standard one in English, is outside this record.

Today. Four English forms are in print: Sadler's The field of battle is my normal abode and Cleary's Always on the Battlefield, both of the 武道初心集's 戰場常在; Stevens's Always Present on the Battlefield; and the plainer always on the battle field of the political-science book. The house's title is the literal rendering of 常在戦場, and it is word for word what Cleary printed in 1999 for the reversed order, the earliest known print of these four English words; Stevens's credit stands for his. A rendering must keep always and battlefield and must not add ready or prepared, which the Japanese leaves the reader to supply.

A reading

The four characters are the 三國志's, in praise of a general who beat the drums morning and evening in peacetime so that no one, least of all he, forgot the war. A samurai family in 三河 made them the first line of its house rules; the domain that family founded kept them for two and a half centuries as its one creed, in a scholar's book on debt, in a lord's dream, in a yearly day in armor eating camp rice; the admiral born there brushed them all his life, and the state, when he died, printed them on everything. A second line, with no tie to Nagaoka, runs from Baba Nobuharu's wall through the 武道初心集 to Sadler and Cleary with the characters reversed, and it is the one an English reader is likeliest to know, from Cleary's Code of the Samurai.

References

  1. 陳壽『三國志』吳書十一, 朱治朱然呂範朱桓傳, at Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/三國志/卷56
  2. 佩文韻府, 鳳文館, 1885 and 1890 printings, indexed under 戰場. National Diet Library, from the library's search index. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
  3. 長岡市 編, 『長岡市史』, 1931, § 第十六節 藩風, the 參州牛久保之壁書. National Diet Library pid 1176291, scan 131. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1176291/1/131
  4. 今泉鐸次郎, 『河井継之助伝』, 目黒書店, 1931. National Diet Library pid 1223547, scan 26. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1223547/1/26
  5. 日本文学報国会 編, 『定本国民座右銘』, 朝日新聞社, 1944. National Diet Library pid 1039842, scan 14. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1039842/1/14
  6. 文部省 編, 『高等科修身編纂趣意書』第1, 1944. National Diet Library pid 1460844, scan 36. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1460844/1/36
  7. 「武道初心集」, 日本大百科全書, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/武道初心集
  8. 大道寺友山, 『武道初心集』, in the 1894 print. National Diet Library pid 860499, scan 39. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/860499/1/39
  9. 『名将言行録』, 1869 print. National Diet Library pid 778853, scan 41. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/778853/1/41
  10. 『列公間話』, in 『史籍集覧』第11冊, 1906. National Diet Library pid 1920318, scan 118. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1920318/1/118
  11. 文部省, 『高等科修身』, 1944. National Diet Library pid 1460841, scan 65. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1460841/1/65
  12. 高野常道, 『昇平夜話』, in 滝本誠一 編『日本経済叢書』續 第2巻, 大鐙閣, 1923. National Diet Library pid 930919, scans 22, 35 and 62. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/930919/1/22
  13. 今泉鐸次郎, 『北越名流遺芳』第1集, 1915. National Diet Library pid 1185239, scan 16. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1185239/1/16
  14. 今泉木舌, 『長岡三百年の回顧』, 1917. National Diet Library pid 948596, scan 40. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/948596/1/40
  15. 米内光政 述, 『常在戦場』, 大新社, 1943. National Diet Library pid 1058250, scans 2–8. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1058250/1/2
  16. 文部省 編, 『高等科修身編纂趣意書』第1, 1944. National Diet Library pid 1460844, scan 36. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1460844/1/36
  17. 「常在戦場」, デジタル大辞泉, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/常在戦場-531590
  18. JMdict, 「常在戦場」. gokanji/data/gokanji.db words 2790470.
  19. A. L. Sadler, translator, The Code of the Samurai (Daidōji Yūzan, 武道初心集), StoneBridge Press dual-language edition, 2011, pp. 121–122.
  20. Thomas Cleary, translator, Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido Shoshinshu, Tuttle, 1999, the chapter "Military Service".
  21. John Stevens, Budo Secrets: Teachings of the Martial Arts Masters, Shambhala, Boston, 2001.
  22. Denny Holzbauer, Truth for Fighters, 2010.
  23. Takashi Inoguchi and Purnendra Jain, Japanese Politics Today, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
  24. Naval War College Review, vol. 68, no. 3, 2015, citing Kensuke Onishi, NGO, Jozai Senjo.
  25. Library of Congress union catalog, entries for 米内光政's 1943 book and 『長岡藩風と常在戦場の精神』.

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Checked · Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), 2026-09-15, citations — every item tested at its address; a couple resolve; nothing found to differ; the rest not openable; an unflagged hit in a book held here (Cleary) taken up