Before his father left for the battle that would kill him, Kusunoki Masashige knelt at Sakurai Station and told his eleven-year-old son to stay alive, to remember his loyalty to the emperor, and to fight when the time came. That farewell -- the "Sakurai no wakare" -- became one of the most painted, retold, and memorialized moments in Japanese history. Twelve years later, on February 4, 1348, the boy fulfilled his father's instruction. Kusunoki Masatsura, now a grown warrior and one of the last effective generals of the Southern Court, led his outnumbered forces out of Yoshino to meet the Northern Court army at Shijōnawate. He knew he would not survive. Like his father at Minatogawa, he chose to attack rather than retreat.
The battle belonged to the Nanboku-chō period (1336-1392), one of the strangest chapters in Japanese history: an era when two rival imperial courts each claimed legitimacy. Emperor Go-Daigo had broken free of the Kamakura shogunate only to see his Kenmu Restoration collapse when Ashikaga Takauji turned against him. Go-Daigo fled to Yoshino in the mountains of Nara Prefecture and established the Southern Court. The Ashikaga installed their own emperor in Kyoto as the Northern Court. For fifty-six years, Japan had two emperors, two sets of courtiers, and two armies in intermittent conflict. By 1348, the Southern Court was losing. Yoshino served as both imperial residence and last refuge, its mountain position the only advantage left to the loyalists.
Kō no Moronao, a powerful Northern Court general, advanced on Yoshino with a force that dwarfed Masatsura's army. The Southern Court's temporary palace lay exposed. Masatsura knew he could not hold it, but chose to march out and meet the enemy head-on rather than wait for a siege he would lose. His decision echoed his father's: Masashige had argued against his own final battle at Minatogawa, knowing the strategy was doomed, but rode to it anyway out of loyalty. Now the son did the same. Kitabatake Chikafusa, the scholar-statesman who served as one of the Southern Court's chief strategists, led a diversionary force toward Izumi Province to draw off some of the attackers. It was not enough.
The two armies collided at Shijōnawate, near what is now the city of Shijōnawate in Osaka Prefecture. In the chaos of battle, Masatsura fought his way toward Kō no Moroyasu, one of the Northern Court's field commanders, and engaged him in single combat. By some accounts, Masatsura was on the verge of taking Moroyasu's head when an arrow struck him. Wounded and unable to continue, Masatsura committed seppuku on the battlefield. His younger brother Masatoki, who served as his second-in-command, also died. The Northern Court won the field, but their victory was hollow in one respect: the Southern Court had already fled Yoshino, leaving the palace empty. There was nothing to capture but the mountains themselves.
The Kusunoki clan's story became, over the centuries, Japan's supreme narrative of doomed loyalty. The Taiheiki, the great chronicle of the Nanboku-chō wars, immortalized both father and son as paragons of selfless devotion to the emperor. Masashige's farewell to his boy at Sakurai Station was included in pre-war Japanese school textbooks and depicted by woodblock artists from Kuniyoshi to Gekkō. Masatsura's death at Shijōnawate completed the arc: the promise kept, the family destroyed, the cause lost but the honor preserved. Today, Shijōnawate Shrine in Osaka Prefecture enshrines Masatsura and other Southern Court warriors. The battlefield itself has been absorbed by the modern city, its terrain of rice paddies and low hills now covered by houses and roads. But the name endures, and so does the story of a son who rode out to die the way his father told him to live.
Located at approximately 34.40°N, 135.85°E in the Yoshino area of Nara Prefecture, in the mountainous interior of the Kii Peninsula. The historical battlefield lay in the foothills between the Yoshino Mountains and the Osaka plain. Mount Yoshino, the Southern Court's stronghold, is visible as a prominent forested ridge to the south. The modern city of Shijōnawate in Osaka Prefecture, where the battle's memorial shrine stands, lies approximately 30km to the northwest. Nearest major airports: Kansai International (RJBB) approximately 60nm to the west, Osaka Itami (RJOO) approximately 40nm to the northwest. The Yoshino district is heavily forested mountain terrain with narrow valleys.