Motonari married a Kikkawa woman named Kunitsune, with whom he fathered three strong sons. This crucial first action of our newest daimyo set him upon a path of rigorous growth and power. Motonari repulsed the Takeda challenge in the Battle of Arita-Nakaide which saw the death of the noted Takeda retainer Kumagai Motonao and of the daimyo Takeda Motoshige himself. Motonari was but seventeen summers of age when Okimoto died and the wretched daimyo Takeda Motoshige tried to absorb our clan into his own.
We reached our height under Mori Motonari, son of our daimyo Mori Hiromoto, and brother to Hiromoto’s heir Okimoto. And we grew, playing off one clan against another and devouring both in the end, only to start the game anew. From the Chinese, we learned of Buddha and Sun Tzu, of Confucius and Zen, while from the Koreans we learned of piracy, pirates, and their ways. Both of these lands would have things we needed to grow strong, though we had no direct contact with those foreign devils. We are among the clans closest to the barbarous land of Korea, and nearest to the refined elegance of the Chinese. We grew strong in those hills, and reverent. We rose to fame as rulers of Aki Province, a collection of wooded hills near the western tip of the main island of Honshu, looking southwards over the sea towards the Chosokabe holdings on Shikoku.
Like those other clans, we too fought and scrambled to build our empire in the Land of the Rising Sun. Unlike other clans who claim descent from past emperors or even the gods themselves, we Mori claim our first ancestor to be Oe Hiromoto, a loyal and notable retainer of the august Minamoto clan from whom others claim as their lineage. “It is impossible to stand on our forested mountains, looking out over the sea in the morning, and not stand in awe at the rising sun.”