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    Bushido: Samurai Ethics and the Soul of Japan
    Bushido: Samurai Ethics and the Soul of Japan
    Bushido: Samurai Ethics and the Soul of Japan
    Ebook150 pages2 hours

    Bushido: Samurai Ethics and the Soul of Japan

    By Inazo Nitobe

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    At the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan was evolving from an isolated feudal society into a modern nation, a Japanese educator wrote this book to introduce the rest of the world to his society's traditional values. Author Inazo Nitobé defines bushido (the way of the warrior) as the source of the virtues most admired by his people; rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honor, loyalty, and self-control. In this eloquent work, he explains the influence of the ideals and manners of the martial code and their role in forming the basis of the morals, ethics, and etiquette of Japanese culture, past, and present.
    This popular and informative book, translated into more than 30 languages since its original publication in 1900, takes an eclectic and far-reaching approach. Nitobé draws examples from indigenous traditions including Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism, and the centuries-old moral compass supplied by Japanese samurai and sages. He reinforces these illustrations by citing similarities and contrasts from ancient and modern philosophers and statesmen of the Western world.
    Generations of scholars and other readers with an interest in sociology have turned to this classic for insights into the nature of Japanese society. Its teachings are essential to gain a true understanding of the soul of Japan.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMar 13, 2012
    ISBN9780486137810
    Bushido: Samurai Ethics and the Soul of Japan

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    Reviews for Bushido

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    • 5/5
      This book is short, and accessibly written (provided you view ordinary late nineteenth-century writing as accessible).

      When reading this book, it is important to remember two things:

      1. It was written in 1900. The approach and the ethics therefore reflect the attitudes and society of the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first.
      2. It was written by a Japanese man who had seen the fall of the feudal system, to explain Japanese and, particularly, samurai culture to Westerners. In fact, it was originally written in English and only later translated into Japanese.

      Some people have criticised this book for its ethics in general - but I think this is unjust, as it's a book of its time. Although there are parts which do more than merely raise eyebrows, it is only fair to the book, and to the author, to acknowledge that our ethics are a century away from Nitobe's. It is unfair to expect a nineteenth-century Japanese man to have exactly the same moral values as twenty-first century Westerners.

      Others have criticised the book for its very intent: to explain Japanese culture in terms that Westerners could understand. Again, it's very easy to criticise from our twenty-first century internet-enabled Western point of view. If we want to know about Japan, or any other country, we can look it up on the internet in a few moments. In fact, nowadays, it's very hard not to know at least a little about other cultures unless you deliberately shut yourself off.

      It was different at the end of the nineteenth century: Japan had only just emerged from its isolation, and not only was its culture strange to the Western world, but most societies were much less multicultural than they are now, so people were less likely to have encountered a culture other than their own.

      Thus, Nitobe discusses Bushido with lots of Western and Christian comparisons and examples, because these are what will make sense to his chosen audience.

      The result is a very interesting book.

      Nitobe himself was born in 1862, so he was eight years old when feudalism was abolished, and ten when the carrying of swords was forbidden. This not only gives Nitobe a unique perspective, but also means that when the book was written, many Japanese people would have remembered the feudal system. To them, it was not some foreign (or even barbaric) practice - it was their own culture. It was normal.

      So with this book, there is a strange mix of explanation and defence. Nowadays, it's shocking to read the story of an eight-year-old samurai boy being order to commit seppuku (ceremonial suicide by disembowelment) and actually doing it. But under bushido - and to Nitobe, who seems to have been of the samurai class himself, or close to it - the story emphasises the strength of devotion to duty, and courage, of even samurai children.

      The attitude to women, too, is shocking nowadays. However, it's important to remember that since this was written in 1900, the attitude to women in the West wasn't much different. Admittedly, young girls in the West weren't given daggers in case they needed to commit suicide to protect their honour - but then, neither were boys. If you read much about the life of women in the West during the late 19th century, you do wonder who had the better deal: the samurai girl in feudal Japan, or the middle-class young woman in London.

      All in all, this is a very interesting and thought-provoking book - and not the least because it's not written as a scholarly study by an outsider, but by a man trying to explain (and, in some senses, justify) his own culture. It therefore has the result of telling the reader perhaps more about feudal Japanese society and culture than even the author intended.
    • 3/5
      What I actually got out of the book is what an educated Japanese man at the turn of the century thought of European culture. The parallels he draws between Japanese and European culture are pretty awesome.
    • 3/5
      An interesting book. Being a non-fiction book part philosophy/history bein g a bit 'dry' I expected it to be a bit dry. The quotations from so many western philosophers was done, I'm guessing, to give those of us with a western background a point of reference. I would rate this as a good introduction to Bushido but not as a first exposure to Japanese culture or history.
    • 5/5
      This is a phenomenally written book, and I love Japanese culture in general. Very informative as well.
    • 3/5
      Calling this adapted version of Bushido: The Soul of Japan a graphic novel is, at best, a stretch. An illustrated adaptation would be a more apt description as, with a few small exceptions, the images are in no way required to “tell the story.” And I can't avoid harping on my personal pet peeve regarding the “graphic novel” boom. A novel is a book of fictitious prose, I repeat, fictitious. A nonfiction title that uses a symbiotic combination of words and pictures to tell a story is graphic nonfiction. Additionally, I generally expect a graphic adaptation to be more accessible to a wider range of readers but, if that was a goal of this title, it certainly isn't evident. Many sections parse poorly for a modern reader of English and the teen manga fans who I hoped might enjoy this title would have a hard time getting through it.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Bushido - Inazo Nitobe

    History.

    INTRODUCTION

    AT the request of his publishers, to whom Dr. Nitobé has left some freedom of action concerning prefatory matter, I am glad to offer a few sentences of introduction to this new edition of Bushido, for readers of English everywhere. I have been acquainted with the author for over fifteen years, indeed, but, in a measure at least, with his subject during forty-five years.

    It was in 1860, in Philadelphia (where, in 1847, I saw the Susquehanna, Commodore Perry’s flagship launched), that I looked on my first Japanese and met members of the Embassy from Yedo. I was mightily impressed with these strangers, to whom Bushido was a living code of ideals and manners. Later, during three years at Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N. J., I was among scores of young men from Nippon, whom I taught or knew as fellow-students. I found that Bushido, about which we often talked, was a superbly winsome thing. As illustrated in the lives of these future governors, diplomatists, admirals, educators, and bankers, yes, even in the dying hours of more than one who fell on sleep in Willow Grove Cemetery, the perfume of this most fragrant flower of far-off Japan was very sweet. Never shall I forget how the dying samurai lad, Kusakabe, when invited to the noblest of services and the greatest of hopes, made answer: Even if I could know your Master, Jesus, I should not offer Him only the dregs of a life. So, on the banks of the old Raritan, in athletic sports, in merry jokes at the supper table when contrasting things Japanese and Yankee, and in the discussion of ethics and ideals, I felt quite willing to take the covert missionary retort, about which my friend Charles Dudley Warner once wrote. At some points, codes of ethics and proprieties differed, but rather in dots or tangents than as occultation or eclipse. As their own poet wrote—was it a thousand years ago?—when in crossing a moor the dew-laden flowers brushed by his robe left their glittering drops on his brocade, On account of its perfume, I brush not this moisture from my sleeve. Indeed, I was glad to get out of ruts, which are said to differ from graves only by their length. For, is not comparison the life of science and culture? Is it not true that, in the study of languages, ethics, religions, and codes of manners, he who knows but one knows none?

    Called, in 1870, to Japan as pioneer educator to introduce the methods and spirit of the American public-school system, how glad I was to leave the capital, and at Fukui, in the province of Echizen, see pure feudalism in operation! There I looked on Bushido, not as an exotic, but in its native soil. In daily life I realised that Bushido, with its cha-no-yu, j -j ts (jiu-jitsu), hara-kiri, polite prostrations on the mats and genuflections on the street, rules of the sword and road, all leisurely salutations and politest moulds of speech, canons of art and conduct, as well as heroisms for wife, maid, and child, formed the universal creed and praxis of all the gentry in the castled city and province. In it, as a living school of thought and life, girl and boy alike were trained. What Dr. Nitobé received as an inheritance, had breathed into his nostrils, and writes about so gracefully and forcibly, with such grasp, insight, and breadth of view, I saw. Japanese feudalism died without the sight of its ablest exponent and most convincing defender. To him it is as wafted fragrance. To me it was the plant and flower of light.

    Hence, living under and being in at the death of feudalism, the body of Bushido, I can bear witness to the essential truth of Dr. Nitobé’s descriptions, so far as they go, and to the faithfulness of his analysis and generalisations. He has limned with masterly art and reproduced the colouring of the picture which a thousand years of Japanese literature reflects so gloriously. The Knightly Code grew up during a millenium of evolution, and our author lovingly notes the blooms that have starred the path trodden by millions of noble souls, his countrymen.

    Critical study has but deepened my own sense of the potency and value of Bushido to the nation. He who would understand twentieth-century Japan must know something of its roots in the soil of the past. Even if now as invisible to the present generation in Nippon as to the alien, the philosophic student reads the results of to-day in the stored energies of ages gone. The sunbeams of unrecorded time have laid the strata out of which Japan now digs her foot-pounds of impact for war or peace. All the spiritual senses are keen in those nursed by Bushido. The crystalline lump has dissolved in the sweetened cup, but the delicacy of the flavour remains to cheer. In a word, Bushido has obeyed the higher law enunciated by One whom its own exponent salutes and confesses his Master—Except a grain of corn die, it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.

    Has Dr. Nitobé idealised Bushido? Rather, we ask, how could he help doing so? He calls himself defendant. In all creeds, cults, and systems, while the ideal grows, exemplars and exponents vary. Gradual cumulation and slow attainment of harmony is the law. Bushido never reached a final goal. It was too much alive, and it died at last only in its splendour and strength. The clash of the world’s movement—for so we name the rush of influences and events which followed Perry and Harris—with feudalism in Japan, did not find Bushido an embalmed mummy, but a living soul. What it really met was the quickening spirit of humanity. Then the less was blessed of the greater. Without losing the best in her own history and civilisation, Japan, following her own noble precedents, first adopted and then adapted the choicest the world had to offer. Thus her opportunity to bless Asia and the race became unique, and grandly she has embraced it—in diffusion ever more intense. To-day, not only are our gardens, our art, our homes enriched by the flowers, the pictures, and the pretty things of Japan, whether trifles of a moment or triumphs for all time, but in physical culture, in public hygiene, in lessons for peace and war, Japan has come to us with her hands gift-laden.

    Not only in his discourse as advocate and counsel for the defence, but as prophet and wise householder, rich in things new and old, our author is able to teach us. No man in Japan has united the precepts and practice of his own Bushido more harmoniously in life and toil, labour and work, craft of hand and of pen, culture of the soil and of the soul. Illuminator of Dai Nippon’s past, Dr. Nitobé is a true maker of the New Japan. In Formosa, the empire’s new accretion, as in Kioto, he is the scholar and practical man, at home in newest science and most ancient diligence.

    This little book on Bushido is more than a weighty message to the Anglo-Saxon nations. It is a notable contribution to the solution of this century’s grandest problem—the reconciliation and unity of the East and the West. There were of old many civilisations: in the better world coming there will be one. Already the terms Orient and Occident, with all their freight of mutual ignorance and insolence, are ready to pass away. As the efficient middle term between the wisdom and communism of Asia and the energy and individualism of Europe and America, Japan is already working with resistless power.

    Instructed in things ancient and modern and cultured in the literatures of the world, Dr. Nitobé herein shows himself admirably fitted for a congenial task. He is a true interpreter and reconciler. He need not and does not apologise for his own attitude toward the Master whom he has long loyally followed. What scholar, familiar with the ways of the Spirit and with the history of the race as led by man’s Infinite Friend, but must in all religions put difference between the teachings of the Founder and the original documents and the ethnic, rationalistic, and ecclesiastical additions and accretions? The doctrine of the testaments, hinted at in the author’s preface, is the teaching of Him who came not to destroy, but to fulfil. Even in Japan, Christianity, unwrapped from its foreign mould and matting, will cease being an exotic and strike its roots deep in the soil on which Bushido has grown. Stripped alike of its swaddling bands and its foreign regimentals, the church of the Founder will be as native as the air.

    WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS.

    ITHACA, May, 1905.

    CHAPTER I

    BUSHIDO AS AN ETHICAL SYSTEM

    CHIVALRY is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom; nor is it a dried-up specimen of an antique virtue preserved in the herbarium of our history. It is still a living object of power and beauty among us; and if it assumes no tangible shape or form, it not the less scents the moral atmosphere, and makes us aware that we are still under its potent spell. The conditions of society which brought it forth and nourished it have long disappeared; but as those far-off stars which once were and are not, still continue to shed their rays upon us, so the light of chivalry, which was a child of feudalism, still illuminates our moral path, surviving its mother institution. It is a pleasure to me to reflect upon this subject in the language of Burke, who uttered the well-known touching eulogy over the neglected bier of its European prototype.

    It argues a sad defect of information concerning the Far East, when so erudite a scholar as Dr. George Miller did not hesitate to affirm that chivalry, or any other similar institution, has never existed either among the nations of antiquity or among the modern Orientals.² Such ignorance, however, is amply excusable, as the third edition of the good Doctor’s work appeared the same year that Commodore Perry was knocking at the portals of our exclusivism. More than a decade later, about the time that our feudalism was in the last throes of existence, Carl Marx, writing his Capital, called the attention of his readers to the peculiar advantage of studying the social and political institutions of feudalism, as then to be seen in living form only in Japan. I would likewise point the Western historical and ethical student to the study of chivalry in the Japan of the present.

    Enticing as is an historical disquisition

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