The brave Kusunoki, after a lost battle at Minatogawa, near Hiogo, having suffered continual defeat, his counsels having been set at naught, and his advice rejected, felt that life was no longer honorable, and solemnly resolved to die in unsullied reputation and with a soldiers honor. Sorrowfully bidding his wife and infant children good-bye, he calmly committed hara-kiri, an example which his comrades, numbering one hundred and fifty, bravely followed.
Kusunoki Masashige was one of the honorable family who dwelt in Kawachi, and traced their descent to the great-grandson of the thirty-second mikado, Bidatsu (A.D. 572-585). The family name, Kusunoki (“Camphor”), was given his people from the fact that a grove of camphor-trees adorned the ancestral gardens of the mansion. The twelfth in descent was the Vice-governor or Iyo. The father of Masashige held land possessed at two-thousand “koku.” His mother, desiring a child, prayed to the god Bishamon for one hundred days, and Masashige was born after a pregnancy of fourteen months.
The mother, in devout gratitude, named the boy Tamon (the Sanskrit name of Bishamon), after the god who had heard her prayers. The man-child was very strong, and at seven could throw boys of fifteen at wrestling. He received his education in the Chinese classics from the priests in the temple, and exercised himself in all manly and warlike arts. In his twelfth year he cut off the head of an enemy, and at fifteen studied the Chinese military art, and made it the solemn purpose of his life to overthrow the Kamakura usurpation, and restore the mikado to his power.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
