BUSHIDO by Inazo Nitobe

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

ABOUT ten years ago, while spending a few days under the hospitable roof of the
distinguished Belgian jurist, the lamented M. de Laveleye, our conversation turned
during one of our rambles, to the subject of religion. "Do you mean to say," asked the
venerable professor, " that you have no religious instruction in your schools?" On my
replying in the negative, he suddenly halted in astonishment, and in a voice which I
shall not easily forget, he repeated " No religion ! How do you impart moral education?"
The question stunned me at the time. I could give no ready answer, for the moral
precepts I leaned in my childhood were not given in schools; and not until I began to
analyse the different element that formed my notions of right and wrong, did I find that
it was Bushido that breathed them into my nostrils.
The direct inception of this little book is due to frequent queries put by my wife, as to
the reasons why such and such ideas and customs prevail in Japan.
In my attempts to give satisfactory replies to M. de Laveleye and to my wife, I found
that without understanding feudalism and Bushido*(Pronounced Booshee-doh'. In
putting Japanese words and names into English, Hepburn's rule is followed, that the
vowels should be used as in European languages, and the consonants as in English.)
the moral ideas of present Japan are a sealed volume.
Taking advantage of enforced idleness on account of long illness, I put down in the
order now presented to the public some of the answers given in our household
conversation. They consist mainly of what I was taught and told in my youthful days,
when feudalism was still in force.
Between Lafcadio Hearn and Mrs. Hugh Fraser on one side and Sir Ernest Satow and
Professor Chamberlain on the other, it is indeed discouraging to write anything
Japanese in English. The only advantage I have over them is that I can assume the
attitude of a personal defendant, while these distinguished writers are at best solicitors
and attorneys. I have often thought, - "Had I their gift of language, I would present the
cause of Japan in more eloquent terms." But one who speaks in a borrowed tongue
should be thankful if he can just make himself intelligible.
All through the discourse I have tried to illustrate whatever points I have made with
parallel examples from European history and literature, believing that these will aid in
bringing the subject nearer to the comprehension of foreign readers.
Should any of my allusions to religious subjects and to religious workers be thought
slighting, I trust my attitude toward Christianity itself will not be questioned. It is with
ecclesiastical methods and with the forms which obscure the teachings of Christ, and
not with the teachings themselves, that have little sympathy. I believe in the religion
taught by Him and handed down to us in the New Testament, as well as in the law
written in the heart. Further, I believe that God hath made a testament which may be
called "old" with every people and nation, - Gentile or Jew, Christian or Heathen. As to
the rest of my theology, I need not impose upon the patience of the public.
In concluding this preface, I wish to express my thanks to my friend Anna C.
Hartshorne for many valuable suggestions.
I.N




INTRODUCTION-to CONTENTS-

AT the request of his publishers, to whom Dr. Nitobe 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 186o, 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 Yahkee, 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,
ju-jutsu (" 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. Nitobe
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. Nitobe'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. Nitobe 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 splendor 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 civi1isation, 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. Nitobe 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. Nitobe 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.



'' That way
Over the mountain, which who stands upon
Is apt to doubt if it be indeed a road;
While if he views it from the waste itself,
Up goes the line there, plain from base to brow,
Not vague, mistakable! What's a break or two
Seen from the unbroken deserts either side?
And then (to bring in fresh philosophy)
What if the breaks themselves should prove at last
The most consummate of contrivances
To train a man's eye, teach him what is faith?"
ROBERT BROWNING,
Bishop Blougram's Apology.

"There are, if I may so say, three powerful spirits,
which have, from time to time, moved on the face of
the waters, and given a predominant impulse to the
moral sentiments, and energies of mankind. These
are the spirits of liberty, of religion, and of honor.
HALLAM,
Europe in the Middle Ages.

"Chivalry is itself the poetry of life."
SCHLEGEL,
Philosophy of History.




BUSHIDO

CHAPTER I-to CONTENTS-

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, sill 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*[History Philosophically Illustrated (3d ed., 1853), vol.ii, p. 2.]. Such
ignorance, however, is amply excusable, as the third edition of the good Doctor's work
appealed 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 on the comparison between European and
Japanese feudalism and chivalry, it is not the purpose of this paper to enter into it at
length. My attempt is rather to relate firstly, the origin and sources of our chivalry;
secondly, its character and teaching ; thirdly, its influence among the masses; and,
fourthly, the continuity and permanence of its influence. Of these several points, the
first will be only brief and cursory, or else I should have to take my readers into the
devious paths of our national history; the second will be dwelt upon at greater length, as
being most likely to interest students of International Ethics and Comparative Ethology
in our ways of thought and action; and the rest will be dealt with as corollaries.
The Japanese word which I have roughly rendered Chivalry, is, in the original, more
expressive than Horsemanship. Bu-shi-do means literally Military-Knight-Ways - the
ways which fighting nobles should observe in their daily life as well as in their vocation ;
in a word, the "Precepts of Knighthood," the noblesse oblige of the warrior class. Having
thus given its literal significance, I may be allowed henceforth to use the word in the
original. The use of the original term is also advisable for this reason, that a teaching so
circumscribed and unique, engendering a cast of mind and character so peculiar, so local,
must wear the badge of its singularity on its face; then, some words have a national
timbre so expressive of race characteristics that the best of translators can do them but
scant justice, not to say positive injustice and grievance. Who can improve by
translation what the German '' Gemuth " signifies, or who does not feel the difference
between the two words verbally do closely allied as the English gentleman and the
French gentilhomme?
Bushido, then, is the code of moral principles which the knights were required or
instructed to observe. It is not a written code; at best it consists of a few maxims handed
down from mouth to mouth or coming from the pen of some well-known warrior or
savant. More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten, possessing all the more
the powerful sanction of veritable deed, and of a law written on the fleshly tablets of the
heart. It was founded not on the creation of one brain, however able, or on the life of a
single personage, however renowned. It was an organic growth of decades and centuries
of military career. It, perhaps, fills the same position in the history of ethics that the
English Constitution does in political history; yet it has had nothing to compare with
the Magna Charta or the Habeas Corpus Act. True, early in the seventeenth century
Military Statutes (Buke Hatto) were promulgated ; but their thirteen short articles
were taken up mostly with marriages, castles, leagues, etc., and didactic regulations
were but meagerly touched upon. We cannot, therefore, point out any definite time and
place and say, " Here is its fountainhead." Only as it attains consciousness in the feudal
age, its origin, in respect to time, may be identified with feudalism. But feudalism itself
is woven of many threads, and Bushido shares its intricate nature. As in England the
political institutions of feudalism may be said to date from the Norman Conquest, so we
may say that in Japan its rise was simultaneous with the ascendancy of Yoritomo, late
in the twelfth century. As, however, in England, we find the social elements of feudalism
far back in the period previous to William the Conqueror, so, too, the germs of feudalism
in Japan had been long existent before the period I have mentioned.
Again, in Japan as in Europe, when feudalism was formally inaugurated, the
professional class of warriors naturally came into prominence. These were known as
samurai, meaning literally, like the old English cniht (knecht, knight), guards or
attendants - resembling in character the soldurii, whom Caesar mentioned as existing
in Aquitania, or the comitai, who, according to Tacitus, followed Germanic chiefs in his
time; or, to take a still later parallel, the milites medii that one reads about in the
history of Mediaeval Europe. A Sinico-Japanese word Bu-ke or Bu-shi (Fighting Knights)
was also adopted in common use. They were a privileged class, and must originally have
been a rough breed who made fighting their vocation. This class was naturally recruited,
in a long period of constant warfare, from the manliest and the most adventurous, and
all the while the process of elimination went on, the timid and the feeble being sorted
out, and only " a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength," to borrow Emerson's
phrase, surviving to form families and the ranks of the samurai. Coming to profess
great honour and great privileges, and correspondingly great responsibilities, they soon
felt the need of a common standard of behaviour, especially as they were always on a
belligerent footing and belonged to different clans. Just as physicians limit competition
among themselves by professional lawyers sit in courts of honour in cases of violated
etiquette; so must also warriors possess some resort for final judgment on their
misdemeanours.
Fair play in fight! What fertile germs of morality lie in this primitive sense of savagery
and childhood. Is it not the root of all military and civic virtue? We smile (as if we had
outgrown its) at the boyish desire of the small Britisher, Tom Brown, "to leave behind
him the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one."
And yet, who does not know that this desire is the corner-stone on which moral
structures of mighty dimensions can be reared? May I not go even so far as to say that
the gentlest and most peace-loving of religions endorses this aspiration? The desire of
Tom is the basis on which the greatness of England is largely built, and it will not take
us long to discover that Bushido does not stand on a lesser pedestal. If fighting in itself,
be it offensive or defensive, is, as Quakers rightly testify, brutal and wrong, we can still
say with Lessing, "We know from what failings our virtue springs."*[Ruskin was one of
the most gentle-hearted and peace-loving men that ever lived. Yet he believed in war
with an the fervor of a worshipper of the strenuous life. "When I tell you," he says in the
Crown of Wild Olive, " that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is
the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. It is very strange to me to
discover this, and very dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact......
I found, in brief, that. all great nations learned their truth of word and strength of
thought in war, that they were nourished in war and wasted by peace; taught by war
and deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were
born in war and expired in peace. ]"Sneaks" and "cowards'' are epithets of the worst
opprobrium to healthy, simple natures. Childhood begins life with these notions, and
knighthood also; but, as life grows larger and its relations many-sided, the early faith
seeks sanction from higher authority and more rational sources for its own justification,
satisfaction, and development. If military systems had operated alone. without higher
moral support, how far short of chivalry would the ideal of knighthood bare fallen! In
Europe, Christianity, interpreted with concessions convenient to chivalry, infused it
nevertheless with spiritual data. " Religion, war, and glory were the three souls of a
perfect Christian knight," says Lamartine. In Japan there were several sources of
Bushido.

CEAPTER II-to CONTENTS-

SORTRCBS OF BUSHIDO

I MAY begin with Buddhism. It furnished a sense of calm trust in Fate, a quiet
submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, that
disdain of life and friendliness with death. A foremost teacher of swordsmanship, when
he saw his pupil master the utmost of his art, told him, " Beyond this my instruction
must give way to Zen teaching." "Zen" is the Japanese equivalent for the Dhyana, which
"represents human effort to reach through meditation zones of thought beyond the
range of verbal expression."*[Lafcadio Hearn, Exolics and Retrospectives, p. 84.] Its
method is contemplation, and its purport, so far as I understand it, to be convinced of a
principle that underlies all phenomena, and, if it can, of the Absolute itself, and thus to
put oneself in harmony with this Absolute. Thus defined, the teaching was more than
the dogma of a sect, and whoever attains to the perception of the Absolute raises himself
above mundane things and awakes "to a new Heaven and a new Earth."
What Buddhism failed to give, Shintoism offered in abundance. Such loyalty to the
sovereign, such reverence for ancestral memory, and such filial piety as are not taught
by any other creed, were inculcated by the Shinto doctrines, imparting passivity to the
otherwise arrogant character of the samurai. Shinto theology has no place for the
dogma of "original sin." On the contrary, it believes in the innate goodness and Godlike
purity of the human soul, adoring it as the adytum from which divine oracles are
proclaimed. Everybody has observed that the Shinto shrines are conspicuously devoid of
objects and instruments of worship, and that a plain mirror hung in the sanctuary
forms the essential part of its furnishing. The presence of this article is easy to explain:
it typifies the human heart, which, when perfectly placid and clear, reflects the very
image of the Deity. When you stand, therefore, in front of the shrine to worship, you see
your own image reflected on its shining surface, and the act of worship is tantamount to
the old Delphic injunction, "Know Thyself." But self-knowledge does not imply, either in
the Greek or Japanese teaching, knowledge of the physical part of man, not his anatomy
or his psycho-physics ; knowledge was to be of a moral kind, the introspection of our
moral nature. Mommsen, comparing the Greek and the Roman, says that when the
former worshipped he raised his eyes to Heaven, for his prayer was contemplation,
while the latter veiled his head, for his was reflection. Essentially like the Roman
conception of religion, our reflection brought into prominence not so much the moral as
the national consciousness of the individual. Its nature-worship endeared the country to
our inmost souls, while its ancestor-worship, tracing from lineage to lineage, made the
Imperial family the fountain-head of the whole nation. To us the country is bore than
land and soil from which to mine gold or to reap grain - it is the sacred abode of the gods,
the spirits of our forefathers: to us the Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a
Rechtsstaat, or even the Patron of a Culiurstaat - he is the bodily representative of
Heaven on earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy. If what M.Boutmy*[The
English People, p. 188.] says is true of English royalty - that it "is not only
the image of authority, but the author and symbol of national unity," as I believe it to be,
doubly and trebly may this be affirmed of royalty in Japan.
The tenets of Shintoism cover the two predominating features of the emotional life of
our race. - Patriotism and Loyalty. Arthur May Knapp very truly says: "In Hebrew
literature it is often difficult to tell whether the writer is speaking of God or of the
Commonwealth; of Heaven or of Jerusalem; of the Messiah or of the Nation itself."* [
Feudal and Modern Japan, vol. i, p. 183.] A similar confusion may be noticed in the
nomenclature of our national faith. I said confusion, because it will be so deemed by
a logical intellect on account of its verbal ambiguity; still, being a frame work of
national instinct and race feelings, it never pretends to systematic philosophy or a
rational theology. This region - or, is it not more correct to say, the race emotions which
this religion expressed? - thoroughly imbued Bushido with loyalty to the sovereign and
love of country. These acted more as impulses than as doctrines; for Shintoism, unlike
the Mediaeval Christian Church, prescribed to its votaries scarcely any credenda,
furnishing them at the same time with agenda of a straightforward and simple type.
As to strictly ethical doctrines, the teachings of Confucius were the most prolific source
of Bushido. His enunciation of the five moral relations between master and servant (the
governing and the governed), father and son, husband and wife, older and younger
brother, and between friend and friend, was but a confirmation of what the race instinct
had recognised before his writings were introduced from China. The calm, benignant
and worldly-wise character of his politico-ethical precepts was particularly well suited
to the samurai, who formed the ruling class. His aristocratic and conservative tone was
well adapted to the requirements of these warrior statesmen. Next to Confucius,
Mencius exercised an immense authority over Bushido. His forcible and often quite
democratic theories were exceedingly taking to sympathetic natures, and they were
even thought dangerous to, and subversive of, the existing social order, hence his works
were for a long time under censure. Still, the words of this master mind found
permanent lodgment in the heart of the samurai.
The writings of Confucius and Mencius formed the principal text-books for youths and
the highest authority in discussion among the old. A mere acquaintance with the
classics of these two sages was held, however, in no high esteem. A common proverb
ridicules one who has only an intellectual knowledge of Confucius, as a man ever
studious but ignorant of Analects. A typical samurai calls a literary savant a
book-smelling sot. Another compares leaning to an ill-smelling vegetable that must be
boiled and boiled before it is fit for use. A man who has read little smells a little pedantic,
and a man who has read little smells yet more so; both are alike unpleasant. The writer
meant thereby that knowledge becomes really such only when it is assimilated in the
mind of the leaner and shows in his character. An intellectual specialist was considered
a machine. Intellect itself was considered subordinate to ethical emotion. Man and the
universe were conceived to be alike spiritual and ethical. Bushido could not accept the
judgment of Huxley, that the cosmic process was unmoral.
Bushido made light of knowledge of such. It was not pursued as an end in itself, but as
a means to the attainment of wisdom. Hence, he who stopped short of this end was
regarded no higher than a convenient machine, which could turn out poems and
maxims at bidding. Thus, knowledge was conceived as identical with its practical
application in life; and this Socratic doctrine fond its greatest exponent in the Chinese
philosopher, Wan Yang Ming, who never wearies of repeating, "To know and to act are
one and the same."
I beg leave for a moment's digression while I am on this subject, inasmuch as some of
the noblest types of bushi were strongly influenced by the teachings of this sage.
Western readers will easily recognise in his writings many parallels to the New
Testament. Making allowance for the terms peculiar to either teaching, the passage,
"Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be
added unto you," conveys a thought that may be found on almost any page of Wan Yang
Ming. A Japanese disciple*[Miwa Shissai] of his says - "The lord of heaven and earth, of
all living beings, dwelling in the heart of man, becomes his mind (Kokoro); hence a mind
is a living thing, and is ever luminous": and again, "The spiritual light of our essential
being is pure, and is not affected by the will of man. Spontaneously springing up in our
mind, it shows what is right and wrong: it is then called conscience; it is even the light
that proceedeth from the god of heaven." How very much do these words sound like
some passages from Isaac Pennington or other philosophic mystics! I am inclined to
think that the Japanese mind, as expressed in the simple tenets of the Shinto religion,
was particularly open to the reception of Yang Ming's precepts. He carried his doctrine
of the infallibility of conscience to extreme transcendentalism, attributing to it the
faculty to perceive, not only the distinction between right and wrong, but also the
nature of psychical facts and physical phenomena. He went as far as, if not farther than,
Berkeley and Fichte, in Idealism, denying the existence of things outside of human ken.
If his system had all the logical errors charged to Solipsism, it had all the efficacy of
strong conviction, and its moral import in developing individuality of character and
equanimity of temper cannot be gainsaid.
Thus, whatever the sources, the essential principles which Bushido imbibed from then
and assimilated to itself, were few and simple. Few and simple as these were, they were
sufficient to furnish a safe conduct of life even through the unsafest days of the most
unsettled period of our nation's history. The wholesome unsophisticated nature of our
warrior ancestors derived ample food for their spirit from a sheaf of commonplace and
fragmentary teachings, gleaned as it were on the highways and byways of ancient
thought, and, stimulated by the demands of the age, formed from these gleanings a new
and unique type of manhood. An acute French savant, M. de la Mazeliere, thus sums up
his impressions of the sixteenth century: "Toward the middle of the sixteenth century,
all is confusion in Japan, in the government, in society, in the church. But the civil wars
the manners returning to barbarism, the necessity for each to execute justice for himself,
- these formed men comparable to those Italians of the sixteenth century, in whom Taine
praises 'the vigorous initiative, the habit of sudden resolutions and desperate
undertakings, the grand capacity to do and to suffer.' In Japan as in Italy 'the rude
manners of the Middle Ages' made of man a superb animal, 'wholly militant and wholly
resistant.' And this is why the sixteenth century displays in the highest degree the
principal quality of the Japanese race, that great diversity which one finds there
between minds (esprits) as well as between temperaments. While in India and even in
China men seem to differ chiefly in degree of energy or intelligence, in Japan they differ
by originality of character as well. Now, individuality is the sign of superior races and of
civilisations already developed. If we make use of an expression dear to Nietzsche, we
might say that in Asia, to speak of humanity is to speak of its pains; in Japan as in
Europe, one represents it above all by its mountains. "
To the pervading characteristics of the men of whom M. de la Mazdiere writes, let us
now address ourselves. I shall begin with Rectitude.

CHAPTER III-to CONTENTS-

RECTITUDE OR JUSTICE

HERE we discern the most cogent precept in the code of the samurai. Nothing is more
loathsome to him than underhand dealings and crooked undertakings. The conception
of Rectitude may be erroneous - it may be narrow. A well-known bushi defines it as a
power of resolution; - "Rectitude is the power of deciding upon a certain course of
conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering ; - to die when it is right to die, to
strike when to strike is right." Another speaks of it in the following terms: " Rectitude is
the bone that gives firmness and stature. As without bones the head cannot rest on the
top of the spine, nor hands move nor feet stand, so without rectitude neither talent nor
leaning can make of a human frame a samurai. With it the lack of accomplishments is
as nothing." Mencius calls Benevolence man's mind, and Rectitude or Righteousness his
path. "How lamentable," he exclaims, "is it to neglect the path and not pursue it, to lose
the mind and not know to seek it again! When men's fowls and dogs are lost, they know
to seek for them again, but they lose their mind and do not know to seek for it." Have we
not here "as in a glass darkly" a parable propounded three hundred years later in
another clime and by a greater Teacher, Who called Himself the Way of righteousness,
through whom the lost could be found? But I stray from my point. Righteousness,
according to Mencius, is a straight and narrow path which a man ought to take to
regain the lost paradise.
Even in the latter days of feudalism, when the long continuance of peace brought
leisure into the life of the warrior class, and with it dissipations of all kinds and
accomplishments of gentle arts, the epithet Gishi (a man of rectitude) was considered
superior to any name that signified mastery of learning or art. The Forty-seven
Faithfuls - of whom so much is made in our popular education - are known in common
parlance as the Forty-seven Gishi.
In times when cunning artifice was liable to pass for military tact and downright
falsehood for ruse de guerre, this manly virtue, frank and honest, was a jewel that
shone the brightest and was most highly praised. Rectitude is a twin brother to Valour,
another martial virtue. But before proceeding to speak of Valour, let me linger a little
while on what I may term a derivation from Rectitude, which, at first deviating slightly
from its original, became more and more removed from it, until its meaning was
perverted in the popular acceptance. I speak of Gi-ri, literally the Right Reason, but
which came in time to mean a vague sense of duty which public opinion expects an
incumbent to fulfil. In its original and unalloyed sense, it meant duty, pure and simple, -
hence, we speak of the Giri we owe to parents, to superiors, to inferiors, to society at
large, and so forth. In these instances Giri is duty; for what else is duty than what Right
Reason demands and commands us to do? Should not Right Reason be our categorical
imperative?
Giri primarily meant no more than duty, and I dare say its etymology was derived from
the fact, that in our conduct, say to our parents, though love should be the only motive,
lacking that, there must be other some authority to enforce filial piety; and they
formulated this authority in Giri. Very rightly did they formulate this authority ? Giri -
since if love does not rush to deeds of virtue, recourse must be had to man's intellect and
his reason must be quickened to convince him of the necessity of acting aright. The
same is true of any other moral obligation. The instant Duty becomes onerous, Right
Reason steps in to prevent our shirking it. Giri thus understood is a severe taskmaster,
with a birch-rod in his hand to make sluggards perform their part. It is a secondary
power in ethics; as a motive it is infinitely inferior to the Christian doctrine of love,
which should be the law. I deem it a product of the conditions of an artificial society - of
a society in which accident of birth and unmerited favour instituted class distinctions ,
in which the family was the social unit, in which seniority of age was of more account
than superiority of talents, in which natural affections had often to succumb before
arbitrary man-made customs. Because of this very artificiality, Giri in time degenerated
into a vague sense of propriety called up to explain this and sanction that, - as, for
example, why a mother must, if need be, sacrifice all her other children in order to save
the first-born; or why a daughter must sell her chastity to get funds to pay for the
father's dissipation, and the like. Starting as Right Reason, Giri has, in my opinion,
often stooped to casuistry. It has even degenerated into cowardly fear of censure. I
might say of Giri what Scott wrote of patriotism, that "as it is the fairest, so it is often
the most suspicious, mask of other feelings." Carried beyond or below Right Reason,
Giri became a monstrous misnomer. It harboured under its wings every sort of sophistry
and hypocrisy. It would have been easily turned into a nest of cowardice, if Bushido had
not a keen and correct sense of courage, the spirit of daring and bearing.

CHAPTER IV-to CONTENTS-

COURAGE, THE SPIRIT OF DARING AND BEARING

COURAGE was scarcely deemed worthy to be counted among virtues, unless it was
exercised in the cause of Righteousness. In his Analects Confucius defines Courage by
explaining, as is often his wont, what its negative is. ''Perceiving what is right," he says,
"and doing it not, argues lack of courage." Put this epigram into a positive statement,
and it runs, " Courage is doing what is right." To run all kinds of hazards, to jeopard
one's self, to rush into the jaws of death - these are too often identified with Valour, and
in the profession of arms such rashness of conduct - what Shakespeare calls " valour
misbegot " - is unjustly applauded; but not so in the Precepts of Knighthood. Death for a
cause unworthy of dying for, was called a "dog's death." To rush into the thick of battle
and to be slain in it," says a Prince of Mito, "is easy enough, and the merest churl is
equal to the task; but," he continues, "it is true courage to live when it is right to live,
and to die only when it is right to die" - and yet the prince had not even heard of the
name of Plato, who defines courage as ''the knowledge of things that a man should fear
and that he should not fear." A distinction which is made in the West between moral and
physical courage has long been recognised among us. What samurai youth has not
heard of "Great Valour" and the "Valour of a Villain?"
Valour, Fortitude, Bravery, Fearlessness, Courage, being the qualities of soul which
appeal most easily to juvenile minds, and which can be trained by exercise and example,
were, so to speak, the most popular virtues, early emulated among the youth. Stories of
military exploits were repeated almost before boys left their mother's breast. Does a
little booby cry for any ache? The mother scolds him in this fashion: "What a coward to
cry for a trifling pain! What will you do when your arm is cut off in battle? What when
you are called upon to commit hara-kiri?" We all know the pathetic fortitude of a
famished little boy-prince of Sendai, who in the drama is made to say to his little page, "
Seest thou those tiny sparrows in the nest, how their yellow bills are opened wide, and
now see! There comes their mother with worms to feed them. How eagerly and happily
the little ones eat! but for a samurai, when his stomach is empty, it is a disgrace to feel
hungry." Anecdotes of fortitude and bravery abound in nursery tales, though stories of
this kind are not by any means the only method of early imbuing the spirit with daring
and fearlessness. Parents, with sternness sometimes verging on cruelty, set their
children to tasks that called forth all the pluck that was in them. "Bears hurl their cubs
down the gorge," they said. Samurai's sons were let down to steep valleys of hardship,
and spurred to Sisyphus-like tasks. Occasional deprivation of food or exposure to cold,
was considered a highly efficacious test for inuring them to endurance; Children of
tender age were sent among utter strangers with some message to deliver, were made to
rise before the sun, and before breakfast attend to their reading exercises, walking to
their teachers with bare feet in the cold of winter; they frequently ? once or twice a
month, as on the festival of a god of learning, - came together in small groups and
passed the night without sleep, in reading aloud by turns. Pilgrimages to all sorts of
uncanny places - to execution grounds, to graveyards, to houses reputed of being
haunted, were favourite pastimes of the young. In the days when decapitation was
public, not only were small boys sent to witness the ghastly scene, but they were made
to visit alone the place in the darkness of night and there to leave a mark of their visit
on the trunkless head.
Does this ultra-Spartan system*[The spiritual aspect of valour is evidenced by
composure - calm presence of mind. Tranquillity is courage in repose. It is a statical
manifestation of valour, as daring deeds are a dynamical. A truly brave man is ever
serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the
heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind.
Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who,
in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for
instance, can compose a poem tinder impending peril, or hum a strain in the face of
death. Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice is taken as an
infallible index of a large nature - of what we call a capacious mind (yoyu), which, far
from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more.
It passes current among us as a piece of authentic history, that as Ota Dokan, the great
builder of the castle of Tokyo, was pierced through with a spear, his assassin, knowing
the poetical predilection of his victim, accompanied his thrust with this couplet:
"Ah! how in moments like these
Our heart doth grudge the light of life";
whereupon the expiring hero, not one whit daunted by the mortal wound in his side,
added the lines:
" Had not in hours of peace,
It learned to lightly look on life."
There is even a sportive element in a courageous nature. Things which are serious to
ordinary people, may be but play to the valiant. Hence in old warfare it was not at all
rare for the parties to a conflict to exchange repartee or to begin a rhetorical contest.
Combat was not solely a matter of brute force; it was, as well, an intellectual
engagement.
Of such character was the battle fought on the banks of the Koromo River, late in the
eleventh century. The eastern army routed, its leader, Sadato, took to flight. When the
pursuing general pressed him hard and called aloud, " It is a disgrace for a warrior to
show his back to the enemy," Sadato reined his horse; upon this the conquering chief
shouted an impromptu verse :
"Torn into shreds is the warp of the cloth" (koromo).
Scarcely had the words escaped his lips when the defeated warrior, undismayed,
completed the couplet :
"Since age has worn its threads by use."
Yoshiie, whose bow had all the while been bent, suddenly unstrung it and tuned away,
leaving his prospective victim to do as he pleased. When asked the reason of his strange
behaviour, he replied that he could not bear to put to shame one who had kept his
presence of mind while hotly pursued by his enemy.
The sorrow which overtook Antony and Octavius at the death of Brutus, has been the
general experience of brave men. Kenshin, who fought for fourteen years with Shingen,
when he heard of the latter's death, wept aloud at the loss of ''the best of enemies." It
was this same Kenshin who had set a noble example for all time in his treatment of
Shingen, whose provinces lay in a mountainous region quite away from the sea, and
who had consequently depended upon the Hojo provinces of the Tokaido for salt. The
Hojo prince wishing to weaken him, although not openly act war with him, had cut off
from Shingen all traffic in this important article. Kenshin, hearing of his enemy's
dilemma and able to obtain his salt from the coast of his own dominions, wrote Shingen
that in his opinion the Hojo lord had committed a very mean act, and that although he
(Kenshin) was at war with him (Shingen) he had ordered his subjects to furnish him
with plenty of salt - adding, "I do not fight with salt, but with the sword," affording more
than a parallel to the words of Camillus, "We Romans do not fight with gold, but with
iron." Nietzsche spoke for the Samurai heart when he wrote, " You are to be proud of
your enemy; then the success of your enemy is your success also." Indeed, valour and
honour alike required that we should own as enemies in war only such as prove worthy
of being friends in peace. When valour attains this height, it becomes akin to
Benevolence. ] of "drilling the nerves" strike the modem pedagogist with horror and
doubt - doubt whether the tendency would not be brutalising, nipping in the bud the
tender emotions of the heart? Let us see in another chapter what other concepts
Bushido had of Valour.

CHAPTER V-to CONTENTS-

BENEVOLENCE, THE FEELING OF DISTRESS

LOVE, magnanimity, affection for others, sympathy and pity, were ever recognised to be
supreme virtues, the highest of all the attributes of the human soul. It was deemed a
princely virtue in a twofo1d sense: princely among the manifold attributes of a noble
spirit; princely as particularly befitting a princely profession. We needed no
Shakespeare to feel - though, perhaps, like the rest of the world, we needed him to
express it - that mercy became a monarch better than his crown, that it was above his
sceptered sway. How often both Confucius and Mencius repeat the highest requirement
of a ruler of men to consist in benevolence. Confucius would say, - "Let but a prince
cultivate virtue, people will flock to him; with people will come to him lands; lands will
bring forth for him wealth; wealth will give him the benefit of right uses. Virtue is the
root, and wealth an outcome." Again, "Never has there been a case of a sovereign loving
benevolence, and the people not loving righteousness." Mencius follows close at his heels
and says, "Instances are on record where individuals attained to supreme power in a
single state, without benevolence, but never have I heard of a whole empire falling into
the hands of one who lacked this virtue. Also, - It is impossible that any one should
become ruler of the people to whom they have not yielded the subjection of their hearts.
Both defined this indispensable requirement in a ruler by saying, '' Benevolence -
benevolence is Man."
Under the regime of feudalism, which could easily degenerate into militarism it was to
benevolence that we owed our deliverance from despotism of the worst kind. An utter
surrender of "life and limb" on the part of the governed would have left nothing for the
governing but self-will, and this has for its natural consequence the growth of that
absolutism so often called ''oriental despotism," as though there were no despots of
occidental history !
Let it be far from me to uphold despotism of any sort; but it is a mistake to identify
feudalism with it. When Frederick the Great wrote that " Kings are the first servants of
the State," jurists thought rightly that a new era was reached in the development of
freedom. Strangely coinciding in time, in the backwoods of North-western Japan,
Yozan of Yonezawa made exactly the same declaration, showing that feudalism was not
all tyranny and oppression. A feudal prince, although unmindful of owing reciprocal
obligations to his vassals, felt a higher sense of responsibility to his ancestors and to
Heaven. He was a father to his subjects, whom Heaven entrusted to his care. According
to the ancient Chinese Book of Poetry, " Until the house of Yin lost the hearts of the
people, they could appear before Heaven." And Confucius in his Great Learning taught:
"When the prince loves what the people love and hates what the people hate, then is he
what is called the parent of the people." Thus are public opinion and monarchical will or
democracy and absolutism merged one in the other. Thus also, in a sense not usually
assigned to the term, Bushido accepted and corroborated paternal government -
paternal also as opposed to the less interested avuncular government. (Uncle Sam's, to
wit!) The difference between a despotic and a paternal government lies in this, that in
the one the people obey reluctantly, while in the other they do so with " that proud
submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of heart which kept alive, even
in servitude itself, the spirit of exalted freedom."*[Burke, French Revolution] The old
saying is not entirely false which called the king of England the "king of devils, because
of his subjects' often insurrections against, and depositions of, their princes," and which
made the French monarch the "king of asses," because of their infinite taxes and
impositions," but which gave the title of the king of men to the sovereign of Spain "
because of his subjects' willing obedience." But enough!
Virtue and absolute power may strike the Anglo-Saxon mind as terms which it is
impossible to harmonise. Pobyedonostseff has clearly set forth before us the contrast in
the foundations of English and other European communities ; namely, that these were
organised on the basis of common interest, while that was distinguished by a strongly
developed independent personality. What this Russian statesman says of the personal
dependence of individuals on some social alliance and in the end of ends on the State,
among the continental nations of Europe and particularly among Slavonic peoples, is
doubly true of the Japanese. Hence not only is a free exercise of monarchical power not
felt as heavily by us as in Europe, but it is generally moderated by paternal
consideration for the feelings of the people. "Absolutism," says Bismarck, "primarily
demands in the ruler impartiality, honesty, devotion to duty, energy and inward
humility." If I may be allowed to make one more quotation on this subject, I will cite
from the speech of the German Emperor at Coblenz, in which he spoke of "Kingship, by
the grace of God, with its heavy duties, its tremendous responsibilities to the Creator
alone, from which no man, no minister, no parliament, can release the monarch."
We knew benevolence was a tender virtue and mother-like. If upright Rectitude and
stern Justice were peculiarly masculine, Mercy had the gentleness and the
persuasiveness of a feminine nature. We were warned against indulging in
indiscriminate charity, without seasoning it with justice and rectitude. Masamune
expressed it well in his oft-quoted aphorism-" Rectitude carried to excess hardens into
stiffness ; benevolence indulged beyond measure sinks into weakness."
Fortunately mercy was not so rare as it was beautiful, for it is universally true that "
The bravest are the tenderest, the loving are the daring." "Bushi no nasake" - the
tenderness of a warrior - had a sound which appealed at once to whatever was noble in
us; not that the mercy of a samurai was generically different from the mercy of any
other being, but because it implied mercy where mercy was not a blind impulse, but
where it recognised due regard to justice, and where mercy did not remain merely a
certain state of mind, but where it was backed with power to save of kill. As economists
speak of demand as being effectual or ineffectual, similarly we may call the mercy of
Bushi effectual, since it implied the power of acting for the good or detriment of the
recipient.
Priding themselves as they did in their brute strength and privileges to turn it into
account, the samurai gave full consent to what Mencius taught concerning the power of
love. "Benevolence," he says, ''brings under its sway whatever hinders its power, just as
water subdues fire: they only doubt the power of water to quench flames who try to
extinguish with a cupful a whole burning waggon-load of fagots." He also says that "the
feeling of distress is the root of benevolence," therefore a benevolent man is ever
mindful of those who are suffering and in distress. Thus did Mencius long anticipate
Adam Smith who founds his ethical philosophy on sympathy.
It is indeed striking how closely the code of knightly honour of one country coincides
with that of others ; in other words, how the much-abused oriental ideas of morals find
their counterparts in the noblest maxims of European literature. If the well-known
lines,

Hae tibi erunt aries - pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis, et debellare
superbos,

were shown a Japanese gentleman, he might readily accuse the Mantuan bard of
plagiarising from the literature of his own country.
Benevolence to the weak, the down-trodden or the vanquished, was ever extolled as
peculiarly becoming to a samurai. Lovers of Japanese art must be familiar with the
representation of a priest riding backwards on a cow. The rider was once a warrior who
in his day made his name a by-word of terror. In that terrible battle of Sumano-ura,
(1184 A.D.) which was one of the most decisive in our history, he overtook an enemy and
in single combat had him in the clutch of his gigantic arms. Now the etiquette of war
required that on such occasions no blood should be spilt, unless the weaker party proved
to be a man of rank or ability equal to that of the stronger. The grim combatant would
have the name of the man under him; but he refusing to make it known, his helmet was
ruthlessly torn off, when the sight of a juvenile face, fair and beardless, made the
astonished knight relax his hold. Helping the youth to his feet, in paternal tones he
bade the stripling go: "Off, young prince, to thy mother's side! The sword of Kumagaye
shall never be tarnished by a drop of thy blood. Haste and flee o'er yon pass before thine
enemies come in sight!" The young warrior refused to go and begged Kumagaye, for the
honour of both, to dispatch him on the spot. Above the hoary head of the veteran gleams
the cold blade, which many a time before has sundered the chords of life, but his stout
heart quails; there flashes athwart his mental eye the vision of his own boy, who this
self-same day marched to the sound of bugle to try his maiden arms; the strong hand of
the warrior quivers ; again he begs his victim to flee for his life. Finding all his
entreaties vain and hearing the approaching steps of his comrades, he exclaims: "If thou
art overtaken, thou mayst fall at a more ignoble hand than mine. O thou Infinite!
receive his soul!" In an instant the sword flashes in the air, and when it falls it is red
with adolescent blood. When the war is ended, we find our soldier returning in triumph,
but little cares he now for honour or fame; he renounces his warlike career, shaves his
head, dons a priestly garb, devotes the rest of his days to holy pilgrimage, never tuning
his back to the West where lies the Paradise whence salvation comes and whither the
sun hastes daily for his rest.
Critics may point out flaws in this story, which is casuistically vulnerable. Let it be: all
the same it shows that Tenderness, Pity, and Love were traits which adorned the most
sanguinary exploits of a samurai. It was an old maxim among them that "It becometh
not the fowler to slay the bird which takes refuge in his bosom." This in a large measure
explains why the Red Cross movement, considered so peculiarly Christian, so readily
found a firm footing among us. Decades before we heard of the Geneva Convention,
Bakin, our greatest novelist, had familiarised us with the medical treatment of a fallen
foe. In the principality of Satsuma, noted for its martial spirit and education, the
custom prevailed for young men to practise music; not the blast of trumpets or the beat
of drums, - " those clamorous harbingers of blood and death" - stirring us to imitate the
actions of a tiger, but sad and tender melodies on the biwa*[A musical instrument,
resembling the guitar.], soothing our fiery spirits, drawing our thoughts away from
scent of blood and scenes of carnage. Polybius tells us of the Constitution of Arcadia,
which required all youths under thirty to practise music, in order that this gentle art
might alleviate the rigours of the inclement region. It is to its influence that he
attributes the absence of cruelty in that part of the Arcadian mountains.
Nor was Satsuma the only place in Japan where gentleness was inculcated among the
warrior class. A Prince of Shirakawa jots down his random thoughts, and among them is
the following: " Though they come stealing to your bedside in the silent watches of the
night, drive not away, but rather cherish these - the fragrance of flowers, the sound of
distant bells, the insect hummings of a frosty night." And again, "Though they may
wound your feelings, these three you have only to forgive, the breeze that scatters your
flowers, the cloud that hides your moon, and the man who tries to pick quarrels with
you."
It was ostensibly to express, but actually to cultivate, these gentler emotions
that the writing of verses was encouraged. Our poetry has therefore a strong
undercurrent of pathos and tenderness. A well-known anecdote of a rustic samurai
illustrates the case in point. When he was told to learn versification, and "The Warbler's
Notes"*[The uguisu or warbler, sometimes called the nightingale of Japan.] was given
him for the subject of his first attempt, his fiery spirit rebelled and he flung at the feet of
his master this uncouth production, which ran
''The brave warrior keeps apart
The ear that might listen
To the warbler's song."
His master, undaunted by the crude sentiment, continued to encourage the youth,
until one day the music of his soul was awakened to respond to the sweet notes of the
uguisu, and he wrote
" Stands the warrior, mailed and strong,
To hear the uguisu's song,
Warbled sweet the trees among."
We admire and enjoy the heroic incident in Korner's short life, when, as he lay
wounded on the battle-field, he scribbled his famous Farewell to Life. Incidents of a
similar kind were not at all unusual in our warfare. Our pithy, epigrammatic poems
were particularly well suited to the improvisation of a single sentiment. Everybody of
any education was either a poet or a poetaster. Not infrequently a marching soldier
might be seen to halt, take his writing utensils from his belt, and compose an ode, - and
such papers were found afterward in the helmets or the breastplates when these were
removed from their lifeless wearers.
What Christianity has done in Europe toward rousing compassion in the midst of
belligerent horrors, love of music and letters has done in Japan. The cultivation of
tender feelings breeds considerate, regard for the sufferings of others. Modesty and
complaisance, actuated by respect for feelings for others' feelings, are at the root of
politeness.


CHAPTER VI-to CONTENTS-

POLITENESS

COURTESY and urbanity of manners have been noticed by every foreign tourist as a
marked Japanese trait. Politeness is a poor virtue, if it is actuated only by a fear of
offending good taste, whereas it should be the outward manifestation of a sympathetic
regard for the feelings of others. It also implies a due regard for the fitness of things,
therefore due respect to social positions; for these latter express no plutocratic
distinctions, but were originally distinctions for actual merit.
In its highest form, politeness almost approaches love. We may reverently say,
politeness "suffereth long, and is kind; envieth not, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up ;
doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, taketh not
account of evil." Is it any wonder that Professor Dean, in speaking of the six elements of
humanity, accords to politeness an exalted position, inasmuch as it is the ripest fruit of
social intercourse?
While thus extolling politeness, far be it from me to put it in the front rank of virtues.
If we analyse it, we shall find it correlated with other virtues of a higher order ; for what
virtue stands alone? While - or rather because - it was exalted as peculiar to the
profession of arms, and as such esteemed in a degree higher than its deserts, there came
into existence its counterfeits. Confucius himself has repeatedly taught that external
appurtenances are as little a part of propriety as sounds are of music.
When propriety was elevated to the sine qua non of social intercourse, it was only to be
expected that an elaborate system of etiquette should come into vogue to train youth in
correct social behaviour. How one must bow in accosting others, how he must walk and
sit, were taught and learned with utmost care. Table manners grew to be a science. Tea
serving and drinking were raised to ceremony. A man of education is, of course, expected
to be master of all these. Very fitly does Mr. Veblen, in his interesting book*[Theory of
the Leisure Class, N. Y., 1899, P. 46.], call decorum "a product and an exponent of the
leisure-class life."
I have heard slighting remarks made by Europeans upon our elaborate discipline of
politeness. It has been criticised as absorbing too much of our thought and in so far a
folly to observe strict obedience to it. I admit that there may be unnecessary niceties in
ceremonious etiquette, but whether it partakes as much of folly as the adherence to
ever-changing fashions of the West, is a question not very clear to my mind. Even
fashions I do not consider solely as freaks of vanity; on the contrary, I look upon these as
a ceaseless search of the human mind for the beautiful. Much less do I consider
elaborate ceremony as altogether trivial; for it denotes the result of long observation as
to the most appropriate method of achieving a certain result. If there is anything to do,
there is certainly a best way to do it, and the best way is both the most economical and
the most graceful. Mr. Spencer defines grace as the most economical manner of motion.
The tea ceremony presents certain definite ways of manipulating a bowl, a spoon, a
napkin, etc. To a novice it looks tedious. But one soon discovers that the way prescribed
is, after all, the most saving of time and labour; in other words, the most economical use
of force, - hence, according to Spencer's dictum, the most graceful.
The spiritual significance of social decorum - or, I might say, to borrow from the
vocabulary of the " Philosophy of Clothes," the spiritual discipline of which etiquette
and ceremony are mere outward garments - is out of all proportion to what their
appearance warrants us in believing. I might follow the example of Mr. Spencer and
trace in our ceremonial institutions their origins and the moral motives that gave rise to
them; but that is not what I shall endeavour to do in this book. It is the moral training
involved in strict observance of propriety, that I wish to emphasise.
I have said that etiquette was elaborated into the finest niceties, so much so that
different schools, advocating different systems, came into existence. But they all united
in the ultimate essential, and this was put by a great exponent of the best known school
of etiquette, the Ogasawara, in the following terms: "The end of all etiquette is to so
cultivate your mind that even when you are quietly seated, not the roughest ruffian can
dare make onset on your person." It means, in other words, that by constant exercise in
correct manners, one brings all the parts and faculties of his body into perfect order and
into such harmony with itself and its environment as to express the mastery of spirit
over the flesh. What a new and deep significance the French word bienseance*[
Etymologically, well-seatedness.] comes to contain.
If the promise is true that gracefulness means economy of force, then it follows as a
logical sequence that a constant practice of graceful deportment must bring with it a
reserve and storage of force. Fine manners, therefore, mean power in repose. When the
barbarian Gauls, during the sack of Rome, burst into the assembled Senate and dared
pull the beards of the venerable Fathers, we think the old gentlemen were to blame,
inasmuch as they lacked dignity and strength of manners. Is lofty spiritual attainment
really possible through etiquette? Why not? - All roads lead to Rome!
As an example of how the simplest thing can be made into an art and then become
spiritual culture, I may take Cha-no-yu; the tea ceremony. Tea-sipping as a fine art!
Why should it not be? In the children drawing pictures on the sand, or in the savage
carving on a rock, was the promise of a Raphael or a Michael Angelo. How much more is
the drinking of a beverage, which began with the transcendental contemplation of a
Hindoo anchorite, entitled to develop into a handmaid of Religion and Morality? That
calmness of mind, that serenity of temper, that composure and quietness of demeanour
which are the first essentials of Cha-no-yu, are without doubt the first conditions of right
thinking and right feeling. The scrupulous cleanliness of the little room, shut off from
sight and sound of the madding crowd, is in itself conducive to direct one's thoughts from
the world. The bare interior does not engross one's attention like the innumerable
pictures and bric-a-brac of a Western parlour; the presence of
kakemono*[Hanging scrolls, which may be either paintings or ideograms, used for
decorative purposes.] calls our attention more to grace of design than to beauty of colour.
The utmost refinement of taste is the object aimed at; whereas anything like display is
banished with religious horror. The very fact that it was invented by a contemplative
recluse, in a time when wars and the rumours of wars were incessant, is well calculated
to show that this institution was more than a pastime. Before entering the quiet
precincts of the tea-room, the company assembling to partake of the ceremony laid aside,
together with their swords, the ferocity of battle-field or the cares of government, there
to find peace and friendship.
Cha-no-yu is more than a ceremony - it is a fine art; it is poetry, with articulate
gestures for rhythms: it is a modus operandi of soul discipline. Its greatest value lies in
this last phase. Not infrequently the other phases preponderated in the mind of its
votaries but that does not prove that its essence was not of a spiritual nature.
Politeness will be a great acquisition, if it does no more than impart grace to manners;
but its function does not stop here. For propriety, springing as it does from motives of
benevolence and modesty, and actuated by tender feelings toward the sensibilities of
others, is ever a graceful expression of sympathy. Its requirement is that we should
weep with those that weep and rejoice with those that rejoice. Such didactic
requirement, when reduced into small everyday details of life, expresses itself in little
acts scarcely noticeable, or, if noticed, is, as one missionary lady of twenty years'
residence once said to me, "awfully funny." You are out in the hot, glaring sun with no
shade over you; a Japanese acquaintance passes by; you accost him, and instantly his
hat is off - well, that is perfectly natural, but the " awfully funny" performance is, that
all the while he talks with you his parasol is down and he stands in the glaring sun also.
How foolish! - Yes, exactly so, provided the motive were less than this: "You are in the
sun; I sympathise with you; I would willingly take you under my parasol if it were large
enough, or if we were familiarly acquainted; as I cannot shade you, I will share your
discomforts." Little acts of this kind, equally or more amusing, are not mere gestures or
conventionalities. They are the "bodying forth" of thoughtful feelings for the comfort of
others.
Another "awfully funny" custom is dictated by our canons of Politeness ; but many
superficial writers on Japan have dismissed it by simply attributing it to the general
topsyturvyness of the nation. Every foreigner who has observed it will confess the
awkwardness he felt in making proper reply upon the occasion. In America, when you
make a gift, you sing its praises to the recipient ; in Japan we depreciate or slander it.
The underlying idea with you is, "This is a nice gift: if it were not nice I would not dare
give it to you; for it will be an insult to give you anything but what is nice." In contrast
to this, our logic run: "You are a nice person, and no gift is nice enough for you. You will
not accept anything I can lay at your feet except as a token of my good will; so accept his,
not for its intrinsic value, but as a token. It will be an insult to your worth to call the
best gift good enough for you." Place the two ideas side by side, and we see that the
ultimate idea is one and the same. Neither is " awfully funny." The American speaks of
the material which makes the gift; the Japanese speaks of the spirit which prompts the
gift.
It is perverse reasoning to conclude, because our sense of propriety shows itself in all
the smallest ramifications of our deportment, to take the least important of them and
uphold it as the type, and pass judgment upon the principle itself. Which is more
important, to eat or to observe rules of propriety about eating? A Chinese sage answers,
"If you take a case where the eating is all-important, and the observing the rules of
propriety is of little importance, and compare them together, why not merely say that
the eating is of the more importance?" "Metal is heavier than feathers," but does that
saying have reference to a single clasp of metal and a waggon-load of feathers? Take a
piece of wood a foot thick and raise it above the pinnacle of a temple, none would call it
taller than the temple. To the question, " Which is the more important, to tell the truth
or to be polite?" the Japanese are said to give an answer diametrically opposite to what
the American will say, - but I forbear any comment until I come to speak of veracity and
sincerity.


CHAPTER VII -to CONTENTS-

VERACITY AND SINCERITY

WITHOUT veracity and sincerity, politeness is a farce and a show. " Propriety carried
beyond right bounds," says Masamune, "becomes a lie." An ancient poet has outdone
Polonius in the advice he gives: "To thyself be faithful: if in thy heart thou strayest not
from truth, without prayer of thine the Gods will keep thee whole." The apotheosis of
Sincerity to which Confucius gives expression in the Doctrine of the Mean, attributes to
it transcendental powers, almost identifying them with the Divine. "Sincerity is the end
and the beginning of all things ; without Sincerity there would be nothing." He then
dwells with eloquence on its far-reaching and long-enduring nature, its power to
produce changes without movement and by its mere presence to accomplish its purpose
without effort. From the Chinese ideogram for Sincerity, which is a combination of
"Word" and "Perfect," one is tempted to draw a parallel between it and the Neo-Platonic
doctrine of Logos - to such height does the sage soar in his unwonted mystic flight.
Lying or equivocation were deemed equally cowardly. The bushi held that his high
social position demanded a loftier standard of veracity than that of the tradesman and
peasant. Bushi no ichi-gon - the word of a samurai, or in exact German equivalent,
Ritterwort - was sufficient guaranty for the truthfulness of an assertion. His word
carried such weight with it that promises were generally made and fulfilled without a
written pledge, which would have been deemed quite beneath his dignity. Many
thrilling anecdotes were told of those who atoned by death for ni-gon, a double tongue.
The regard for veracity was so high that, unlike the generality of Christians who
persistently violate the plain commands of the Teacher not to swear, the best of samurai
looked upon an oath as derogatory to their honour. I am well aware that they did swear
by different deities or upon their swords; but never has swearing degenerated into
wanton form and irreverent interjection. To emphasise our words a practice was
sometimes resorted to of literally sealing with blood. For the explanation of such a
practice, I need only refer my readers to Goethe's Faust.
A recent American writer is responsible for this statement, that if you ask an ordinary
Japanese which is better, to tell a falsehood or be impolite, he will not hesitate to answer,
"To tell a falsehood!" Dr. Peery*[Peery, The Gist of Japan, p. 86.] is partly right and
partly wrong; right in that an ordinary Japanese, even a samurai, may answer in the
way ascribed to him, but wrong in attributing too much weight to the term he translates
" falsehood." This word (in Japanese, uso) is employed to denote anything which is not a
truth (makotto) or fact (honto). Lowell tells us that Wordsworth could not distinguish
between truth and fact, and an ordinary Japanese is in this respect as good as
Wordsworth. Ask a Japanese, or even an American of any refinement, to tell you
whether he dislikes you or whether he is sick at his stomach, and he will not hesitate
long to tell falsehoods and answer "I like you much," or, "I am quite well, thank you." To
sacrifice truth merely for the sake of politeness was regarded as an "empty form"
(kyo-rei) and " deception by sweet words."
I own I am speaking now of the Bushido idea of veracity: but it may not be amiss to
devote a few words to our commercial integrity, of which I have heard much complaint
in foreign books and journals. A loose business morality has indeed been the worst blot
on our national reputation; but before abusing it or hastily condemning the whole race
for it, let us calmly study it and we shall be regarded with consolation for the future.
Of all the great occupations of life, none was farther removed from the profession of
arms than commerce. The merchant was placed lowest in the category of vocations, - the
knight, the tiller of the soil, the mechanic, the merchant. The samurai derived his
income from land and could even indulge, if he had a mind to, in amateur farming; but
the counter and abacus were abhorred. We know the wisdom of this social arrangement.
Montesquieu has made it clear that the debarring of the nobility from mercantile
pursuits was an admirable social policy, in that it prevented wealth from accumulating
in the hands of the powerful. The separation of power and riches kept the distribution of
the latter more nearly equable. Professor Dill, the author of Roman Society in the Last
Century of the Western Empire, has brought afresh to our mind that one cause of the
decadence of the Roman Empire, was the permission given to the nobility to engage in
trade, and the consequent monopoly of wealth and power by a minority of the senatorial
families.
Commerce, therefore, in feudal Japan did not reach that degree of development which
it would have attained under freer conditions. The obloquy attached to the calling
naturally brought within its pale such as cared little for social repute. "Call one a thief
and he bill steal." Put a stigma on a calling and its followers adjust their morals to it, for
it is natural that "the normal conscience," as Hugh Black says, '' rises to the demands
made on it, and easily falls to the limit of the standard expected from it." It is
unnecessary to add that no business, commercial or otherwise, can be transacted
without a code of morals. Our merchants of the feudal period had one among themselves,
without which they could never have developed, as they did in embryo, such
fundamental mercantile institutions as the guild, the bank, the bourse, insurance,
checks, bills of exchange, etc; but in their relations with people outside their vocation,
the tradesmen lived too true to the reputation of their order.
This being the case, when the country was opened to foreign trade, only the most
adventurous and unscrupulous rushed to the ports, while the respectable business
houses declined for some time the repeated requests of the authorities to establish
branch houses. Was Bushido powerless to stay the current of commercial dishonour? Let
us see.
Those who are well acquainted with our history will remember that only a few years
after our treaty ports were opened to foreign trade, feudalism was abolished, and when
with it the samurai's fiefs were taken and bonds issued to them in compensation, they
were given liberty to invest them in mercantile transactions. Now you may ask, "Why
could they not bring their much boasted veracity into their new business relations and
so reform the old abuses?" Those who had eyes to see could not weep enough, those who
had hearts to feel could not sympathise enough, with the fate of many a noble and
honest samurai who signally and irrevocably failed in his new and unfamiliar field of
trade and industry, through sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful plebeian
rival. When we know that eighty per cent. of the business houses fail in so industrial a
country as America, is it any wonder that scarcely one among a hundred samurai who
went into trade could succeed in his new vocation? It will be long before it will be
recognised how many fortunes were wrecked in the attempt to apply Bushido ethics to
business methods ; but it was soon patent to every observing mind that the ways of
wealth were not the ways of honour. In what respects, then, were they different?
Of the three incentives to veracity that Lecky enumerates, viz., the industrial, the
political, and the philosophical, the first was altogether lacking in Bushido. As to the
second, it could develop little in a political community under a feudal system. It is in its
philosophical and, as Lecky says, in its highest aspect, that honesty attained elevated
rank in our catalogue of virtues. With all my sincere regard for the high commercial
integrity of the Anglo-Saxon race, when I ask for the ultimate ground, I am told that
"honesty is the best policy," - that it pays to be honest. Is not this virtue, then, its own
reward? If it is followed because it brings in more cash than falsehood, I am afraid
Bushido would rather indulge in lies !
If Bushido rejects a doctrine of quid pro quo rewards, the shrewder tradesman will
readily accept it. Lecky has very truly remarked that veracity owes its growth largely to
commerce and manufacture; as Nietzsche puts it, honesty is the youngest of the virtues
- in other wards, it is the foster-child of modern industry. Without this mother, veracity
was like a blue-blood orphan whom only the most cultivated mind could adopt and
nourish. Such minds were general among the samurai, but, for want of a more
democratic and utilitarian foster-mother, the tender child failed to thrive. Industries
advancing, veracity will prove an easy, nay, a profitable virtue to practise. Just think -
as late as November, 1880, Bismarck sent a circular to the professional consuls of the
German Empire, warning them of " a lamentable lack of reliability with regard to
German shipments inter alia, apparent both as to quality and quantity." Nowadays we
hear comparatively little of German carelessness and dishonesty in trade. In twenty
years her merchants have learned that in the end honesty pays. Already our merchants
have found that out. For the rest I recommend the reader to two recent writers for
well-weighed judgment on this point*[Knapp, Feudal and Modern Japan, Vo1. I., ch. iv.;
Ransome, Japan in Transition, ch. viii.] It is interesting to remark in this connection
that integrity and honour were the surest guaranties which even a merchant debtor
could present in the form of promissory notes. It was quite a usual thing to insert such
clauses as these: " In default of the repayment of the sum lent to me, I shall say nothing.
against being ridiculed in public" ; or, "In case I fail to pay you back, you may call me a
fool," and the like.
Often have I wondered whether the veracity of Bushido had any motive higher than
courage. In the absence of any positive commandment against bearing false witness,
lying was not condemned as sin, but simply denounced as weakness, and, as such,
highly dishonourable. As a matter of fact, the idea of honesty is so intimately blended,
and its Latin and its German etymology so identified with honour, that it is high time I
should pause a few moments for the consideration of this feature of the Precepts of
Knighthood.

CHAPTER VIII-to CONTENTS-

HONOUR

THE sense of honour, implying a vivid consciousness of personal dignity and worth,
could not fail to characterise the samurai, born and bred to value the duties and
privileges of their profession. Though the word ordinarily given nowadays as the
translation of honour was not used freely, yet the idea was conveyed by such terms as na
(name) men-moku (countenance), guai-bun (outside hearing), reminding us respectively
of the biblical use of "name," of the evolution of the term "personality" from the Greek
mask, and of "fame." A good name - one's reputation, ''the immortal part of one's self,
what remains being bestial " - assumed as a matter of course, any infringement upon its
integrity was felt as shame, and the sense of shame (Ren-chi-shin) was one of the
earliest to be cherished in juvenile education. "You will be laughed at," "It will disgrace
you," "Are you not ashamed?" were the last appeal to correct behaviour on the part of a
youthful delinquent. Such a recourse to his honour touched the most sensitive spot in
the child's heart, as though it had been nursed on honour while he was in his mother's
womb; for most truly is honour a pre-natal influence, being closely bound up with strong
family consciousness. "In losing the solidarity of families," says Balzac, "society has lost
the fundamental force which Montesquieu named Honour." Indeed, the sense of shame
seems to me to be the earliest indication of the moral consciousness of the race. The first
and worst punishment which befell humanity in consequence of tasting "the fruit of that
forbidden tree" was, to my mind, not the sorrow of child-birth, nor the thorns and
thistles, but the awakening of the sense of shame. Few incidents in history excel in
pathos the scene of the first mother plying, with heaving breast and tremulous fingers,
her crude needle on the few fig leaves which her dejected husband plucked for her. This
first fruit of disobedience clings to us with a tenacity that nothing else does. All the
sartorial ingenuity of mankind has not yet succeeded in sewing an apron that will
efficaciously hide our sense of shame. That samurai was right who refused to
compromise his character by a slight humiliation in his youth; "because," he said,
"dishonour is like a scar on a tree, which time, instead of effacing, only helps to enlarge."
Mencius had taught centuries before, in almost the identical phrase, what Carlyle has
latterly expressed, - namely, that " Shame is the soil of all Virtue, of good manners and
good morals."
The fear of disgrace was so great that if our literature lacks such eloquence as
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Norfolk, it nevertheless hung like Damocles' sword
over the head of every samurai and often assumed a morbid character. In the name of
honour, deeds were perpetrated which can find no justification in the code of Bushido.
At the slightest, nay - imaginary insult - the quick-tempered braggart took offence,
resorted to the use of the sword, and many an unnecessary strife was raised and many
an innocent life lost. The story of a well-meaning citizen who called the attention of a
bushi to a flea jumping on his back, and who was forthwith cut in two, for the simple
and questionable reason, that inasmuch as fleas are parasites which feed on animals, it
was an unpardonable insult to identify a noble warrior with a beast - I say, stories like
these are too frivolous to believe. Yet, the circulation of such stories implies three
things: (1) that they were invented to overawe common people; (2) that abuses were
really made of the samurai's profession of honour; and (3) that a very strong sense of
shame was developed among them. It is plainly unfair to take an abnormal case to cast
blame upon the precepts, any more than to judge of the true teachings of Christ from
the fruits of religious fanaticism and extravagance, - inquisitions and hypocrisy. But, as
in religious monomania there is something touchingly noble as compared with the
delirium tremens of a drunkard, so in that extreme sensitiveness of the samurai about
their honour do we not recognise the substratum of a genuine virtue?
The morbid excess into which the delicate code of honour was inclined to run was
strongly counterbalanced by preaching magnanimity and patience. To take offence at
slight provocation was ridiculed as "short-tempered." The popular adage said: "To bear
what you think you cannot bear is really to bear." The great Iyeyasu left to posterity a
few maxims, among which are the following: - "The life of man is like going a long
distance with a heavy load upon the shoulders. Haste not. . . . Reproach none, but be
forever watchful of thine own short-comings. . . . Forbearance is the basis of length of
days." He proved in his life what he preached. A literary wit put a characteristic
epigram into the mouths of three well-known personages in our history: to Nobunaga he
attributed, "I will kill her, if the nightingale sings not in time"; to Hideyoshi, "I will
force her to sing for me"; and to Iyeyasu, "I will wait till she opens her lips."
Patience and long-suffering were also highly commended by Mencius. In one place he
writes to this effect: "Though you denude yourself and insult me, what is that to me?
You cannot defile my soul by your outrage." Elsewhere he teaches that anger at a petty
offence is unworthy a superior man, but indignation for a great cause is righteous
wrath.
To what height of unmartial and unresisting meekness Bushido could reach in some of
its votaries, may be seen in their utterances. Take, for instance, this saying of Ogawa: "
When others speak all manner of evil things against thee, return not evil for evil, but
rather reflect that thou wast not more faithful in the discharge of thy duties." Take
another of Kumazawa : - " When others blame thee, blame them not; when others are
angry at thee, return not anger. Joy cometh only as Passion and Desire part." Still
another instance I may cite from Saigo, upon whose overhanging brows "Shame is
ashamed to sit": - "The Way is the way of Heaven and Earth; Man's place is to follow it;
therefore make it the object of thy life to reverence Heaven. Heaven loves me and others
with equal love ; therefore with the love wherewith thou lovest thyself, love others.
Make not Man thy partner but Heaven, and making Heaven thy partner do thy best.
Never condemn others; but see to it that thou comest not short of thine own mark."
Some of these sayings remind us of Christian expostulations, and show us how far in
practical morality natural religion can approach the revealed. Not only did these
sayings remain as utterances, but they were really embodied in acts.
It must be admitted that very few attained this sublime height of magnanimity,
patience and forgiveness. It was a great pity that nothing clear and general was
expressed as to what constitutes honour, only a few enlightened minds being aware that
it "from no condition rises," but that it lies in each acting well his part; for nothing was
easier than for youths to forget in the heat of action what they had learned in Mencius
in their calmer moments. Said this sage: "'T is in every man's mind to love honour; but
little doth he dream that what is truly honourable lies within himself and not elsewhere.
The honour which men confer is not good honour. Those whom Chao the Great ennobles,
he can make mean again." For the most part, an insult was quickly resented and repaid
by death, as we shall see later, while honour - too often nothing higher than vainglory or
worldly approbation - was prized as the summum bonum of earthly existence. Fame,
and not wealth or knowledge, was the goal toward which youths had to strive. Many a
lad swore within himself as he crossed the threshold of his paternal home, that he
would not recross it until he had made a name in the world; and many an ambitious
mother refused to see her sons again unless they could "return home," as the expression
is, " caparisoned in brocade." To shun shame or win a name, samurai boys would submit
to any privations and undergo severest ordeals of bodily or mental suffering. They knew
that honour won in youth grows with age. In the memorable seige of Osaka, a young son
of Iyeyasu, in spite of his earnest entreaties to be put in the vanguard, was placed at the
rear of the army. When the castle fell, he was so chagrined and wept so bitterly that an
old councillor tried to console him with all the resources at his command; "Take comfort,
Sire," said he, "at the thought of the long future before you. In the many years that you
may live, there will come divers occasions to distinguish yourself." The boy fixed his
indignant gaze upon the man and said - " How foolishly you talk! Can ever my
fourteenth year come round again?" Life itself was thought cheap if honour and fame
could be attained therewith: hence, whenever a cause presented itself which was
considered dearer than life, with utmost serenity and celerity was life laid down.
Of the causes in comparison with which no life was too dear to sacrifice, was the duty
of loyalty, which was the key-stone making feudal virtues a symmetrical arch.


CHAPTER IX-to CONTENTS-

THE DUTY OF LOYALTY

FEUDAL morality shares other virtues in common with other systems of ethics, with
other classes of people, but this virtue-homage and fealty to a superior - is its distinctive
feature. I am aware that personal fidelity is a moral adhesion existing among all sorts
and conditions of men, - a gang of pickpockets owe allegiance to a Fagin; but it is only in
the code of chivalrous honour that loyalty assumes paramount importance.
In spite of Hegel's criticism [Philosophy of History (Eng. trans. by Sibree), Pt. IV., see.
ii., ch. i.] that the fidelity of feudal vassals, being an obligation to an individual and not
to a commonwealth, is a bond established on totally unjust principles, a great
compatriot of his made it his boast that personal loyalty was a German virtue. Bismarck
had good reasons to do so, not because the Treue he boasts of was the monopoly of his
Fatherland or of any single nation or race, but because this favoured fruit of chivalry
lingers latest among the people where feudalism has lasted longest. In America, where
"everybody is as good as anybody else," and, as the Irishman added, "better too," such
exalted ideas of loyalty as we feel for our sovereign may be deemed "excellent within
certain bounds," but preposterous as encouraged among us. Montesquieu complained
long ago that right on one side of the Pyrenees was wrong on the other, and the recent
Dreyfus trial proved the truth of his remark, save that the Pyrenees were not the sole
boundary beyond which French justice finds no accord. Similarly, loyalty as we conceive
it may find few admirers elsewhere, not because our conception is wrong, but because it
is, I am afraid, forgotten, and also because we carry it to a degree not reached in any
other country. Griffs*[Religions of Japan.] was quite right in stating that whereas in
China Confucian ethics made obedience to parents the primary human duty, in Japan
precedence was given to loyalty. At the risk of shocking some of my good readers, I will
relate of one "who could endure to follow a fall'n lord" and who thus, as Shakespeare
assures, "earned a place i' the story."
The story is of one of the greatest characters of our history, Michizane, who, falling a
victim to jealousy and calumny, is exiled from the capital. Not content with this, his
unrelenting enemies are now bent upon the extinction of his family. Strict search for his
son - not yet grown - reveals the fact of his being secreted in a village school kept by one
Genzo, a former vassal of Michizane. When orders are dispatched to the schoolmaster to
deliver the head of the juvenile offender on a certain day, his first idea is to find a
suitable substitute for it. He ponders over his school-list, scrutinises with careful eyes
all the boys, as they stroll into the class-room, but none among the children born of the
soil bears the least resemblance to his protege. His despair, however, is but for a
moment; for, behold, a new scholar is announced - a comely boy of the same age as his
master's son escorted by a mother of noble mien.
No less conscious of the resemblance between infant lord and infant retainer, were the
mother and the boy himself. In the privacy of home both had laid themselves upon the
altar; the one his life - the other her heart, yet without sign to the outer world.
unwitting of what had passed between them, it is the teacher from whom comes the
suggestion.
Here, then, is the scapegoat! - The rest of the narrative may be briefly told. - On the
day appointed, arrives the officer commissioned to identify and receive the head of the
youth. Will he be deceived by the false head? The poor Genzo's hand is on the hilt of the
sword, ready to strike a blow either at the man or at himself, should the examination
defeat his scheme. The officer takes up the gruesome object before him, goes calmly over
each feature, and in a deliberate, business-like tone, pronounce it genuine. - That
evening in a lonely home awaits the mother we saw in the school. Does she know the
fate of her child? It is not for his return that she watches with eagerness for the opening
of the wicket. Her father-in-law has been for a long time a recipient of Michizane's
bounties, but since his banishment, circumstances have forced her husband to follow
the service of the enemy of his family's benefactor. He himself could not be untrue to his
own cruel master; but his son could serve the cause of the grandsire's lord. As one
acquainted with the exile's family, it was he who had been entrusted with the task of
identifying the boy's head. Now the day's - yea, the life's - hard work is done, he returns
home and as he crosses its threshold, he accosts his wife, saying: "Rejoice, my wife, our
darling son has proved of service to his lord!"
"What an atrocious story!" I hear my readers exclaim. " Parents deliberately sacrificing
their own innocent child to save the life of another man's!" But this child was a
conscious and willing victim: it is a story of vicarious death - as significant as, and not
more revolting than, the story of Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac. In both cases
was obedience to the call of duty, utter submission to the command of a higher voice,
whether given by a visible or an invisible angel, or heard by an outward or an inward
ear; - but I abstain from preaching.
The individualism of the West, which recognises separate interests for father and son,
husband and wife, necessarily brings into strong relief the duties owed by one to the
other; but Bushido held that the interest of the family and of the members thereof is
intact, - one and inseparable. This interest it bound up with affection - natural,
instinctive, irresistible; hence, if we die for one we love with natural love (which animals
themselves possess), what is that? "For if ye love them that love you, what reward have
ye? Do not even the publicans the same?"
In his great history, Sanyo relates in touching language the heart struggle of
Shigemori concerning his father's rebellious conduct. "If I be loyal, my father must be
undone; if I obey my father, my duty to my sovereign must go amiss." Poor Shigemori!
We see him afterward praying with all his sod that kind Heaven may visit him with
death, that he may be released from this world where it is hard for purity and
righteousness to dwell.
Many a Shigemori has his heart torn by the conflict between duty and affection. Indeed,
neither Shakespeare nor the Old Testament itself contains an adequate rendering of ko,
our conception of filial piety, and yet in such conflicts Bushido never wavered in its
choice of loyalty. Women, too, encouraged their offspring to sacrifice all for the king.
Even as resolute as Widow Windham and her illustrious consort, the samurai matron
stood ready to give up her boys for the-cause of loyalty.
Since Bushido, like Aristotle and some modern sociologists, conceived the state as
antedating the individual, - the latter being born into the former as part and parcel
thereof, - he must live and die for it or for the incumbent of its legitimate authority.
Readers of Crito will remember the argument with which Socrates represents the laws
of the city as pleading with him on the subject of his escape. Among others he makes
them (the laws or the state) say: "Since you were begotten and nurtured and educated
under us, dare you once to say you are not our offspring and servant, you and your
fathers before you?" These are words which do not impress us as any thing
extraordinary; for the same thing has long been on the lips of Bushido, with this
modification, that the laws and the state were represented with us by a personal being.
Loyalty is an ethical outcome of this political theory.
I am not entirely ignorant of Mr. Spencer's view according to which political obedience
? loyalty - is accredited with only a transitional function*[Principles of Ethics, Vol. I., pt.
ii., ch. X.] It may be so. Sufficient undo the day is the virtue thereof. We may
complacently repeat it, especially as we believe that day to be a long space of time,
during which, so our national anthem says, "tiny pebbles grow into mighty rocks draped
with moss."
We may remember at this juncture that even among so democratic a people as the
English, "the sentiment of personal fidelity to a man and his posterity which their
Germanic ancestors felt for their chiefs, has," as Monsieur Boutmy recently said, "only
passed more or less into their profound loyalty to the race and blood of their princes, as
evidenced in their extraordinary attachment to the dynasty."
Political subordination, Mr. Spencer predicts, will give place to loyalty, to the dictates
of conscience. Suppose his induction is realized - will loyalty and its concomitant
instinct of reverence disappear forever? We transfer our allegiance from one master to
another, without being unfaithful to either: from being subjects of a ruler that wields
the temporal sceptre we become servants of the monarch who sits enthroned in the
penetralia of our hearts. A few years ago a very stupid controversy, started by the
misguided disciples of Spencer, made havoc among the reading class of Japan. In their
zeal to uphold the claim of the throne to undivided loyalty, they charged Christians with
treasonable propensity in that they avow fidelity to their Lord and Master. They
arrayed forth sophistical arguments without the wit of Sophists, and scholastic
tortuosities minus the niceties of the Schoolmen. Little did they know that we can, in a
sense, "serve two masters without holding to the one or despising the other," " rendering
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." Did
not Socrates, all the while he unflinchingly refused to concede one iota of loyalty to his
daemon, obey with equal fidelity and equanimity the command of his earthly master,
the State? His conscience he followed, alive; his country he served, dying. Alack the day
when a state grows so powerful as to demand of its citizens the dictates of their
conscience !
Bushido did not require us to make our conscience the slave of any lord or king.
Thomas Mowbray was a veritable spokesman for us when he said:

"Myself I throw, dread sovereign, at thy foot.
My life thou shall command, but not my shame.
The one my duty owes; but my fair name,
Despite of death, that lives upon my grave,
To dark dishonour's use, thou shall not have."

A man who sacrificed his own conscience to the capricious will or freak or fancy of a
sovereign was accorded a low place in the estimate of the Precepts. Such an one was
despised as nei-shin, a cringeling, who makes court by unscrupulous fawning, or as
cho-shin, a favourite who steals his master's affections by means of servile compliance;
these two species of subjects corresponding exactly to those which Iago describes, - the
one, a duteous and knee-crooking knave, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
wearing out his time much like his master's ass; the other trimming in forms and
visages of duty, keeping yet his heart attending on himself. When a subject differed from
his master, the loyal path for him to pursue was to use every available means to
persuade him of his error, as Kent did to King Lear. Failing in this, let the master deal
with him as he wills. In cases of this kind, it was quite a usual course for the samurai to
make the last appeal to the intelligence and conscience of his lord by demonstrating the
sincerity of his words with the shedding of his own blood.
Life being regarded as the means whereby to serve his master, and its ideal being set
upon honour, the whole education and training of a samurai were conducted accordingly.

CHAPTER X-to CONTENTS-

THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING OF A SAMURAI

THE first point to observe in knightly pedagogics was to build up character, leaving in
the shade the subtler faculties of prudence, intelligence and dialectics. We have seen the
important part aesthetic accomplishments played in his education. Indispensable as
they were to a man of culture, they were accessories rather than essentials of samurai
training. Intellectual superiority was, of course, esteemed ; but the word Chi, which was
employed to denote intellectuality, meant wisdom in the first instance and gave
knowledge only a very subordinate place. The tripod which supported the framework of
Bushido was said to be Chi, Jin, Yu, respectively, Wisdom, Benevolence, and Courage. A
samurai was essentially a man of action. Science was without the pale of his activity. He
took advantage of it in so far as it concerned his profession of arms. Religion and
theology were relegated to the priests ; he concerned himself with them in so far as they
helped to nourish courage. Like an English poet the samurai believed " 't is not the
creed that saves the man; but it is the man that justifies the creed." Philosophy and
literature formed the chief part of his intellectual training ; but even in the pursuit of
these, it was not objective truth that he strove after, - literature was pursued mainly as
a pastime, and philosophy as a practical aid in the formation of character, if not for the
exposition of some military or political problem.
From what has been said, it will not be surprising to note that the curriculum of
studies, according to the pedagogics of Bushido, consisted mainly of the following: -
fencing, archery, jiujutsu*[The same word as that misspelled jiu-jitsu in common
English parlance. It is the gentle art. It "uses no weapon." (W. I. G.)] or yawara,
horsemanship, the use of the spear, tactics, caligraphy, ethics, literature, and history. Of
these, jiujutsu and caligraphy may require a few words of explanation. Great stress was
laid on good writing, probably because our logograms, partaking as they do of the
nature of pictures, possess artistic vane, and also because chirography was accepted as
indicative of one's personal character. Jiujutsu may be briefly defined as an application
of anatomical knowledge to the purpose of offence or defence. It differs from wrestling,
in that it does not depend upon muscular strength. It differs from other forms of attack
in that it use no weapons. Its feat consists in clutching or striking such part of the
enemy's body as will make him numb and incapable of resistance. Its object is not to kill,
but to incapacitate one for action for the time being.
A subject of study which one would expect to find in military education and which is
rather conspicuous by its absence in the Bushido course of instruction, is mathematics.
This, however, can be readily explained in part by the fact that feudal warfare was not
carried on with scientific precision. Not only that, but the whole training of the samurai
was unfavourable to fostering numerical notions.
Chivalry is uneconomical: it boasts of penury. It says with Ventidius that "ambition,
the soldier's virtue, rather makes choice of loss, than gain which darkens him." Don
Quixote takes more pride in his rusty spear and skin-and-bone horse than in gold and
lands, and a samurai is in hearty sympathy with his exaggerated confrere of La Mancha.
He disdains money itself, - the art of making or hoarding it. It was to him veritably
filthy lucre. The hackneyed expression to describe the decadence of an age was "that the
civilians loved money and the soldiers feared death." Niggardliness of gold and of life
excited as much disapprobation as their lavish use was panegyrised. " Less than all
things," says a current precept, " men must grudge money: it is by riches that wisdom is
hindered." Hence children were brought up with utter disregard of economy. It was
considered bad taste to speak of it, and ignorance of the vane of different coins was a
token of good breeding. Knowledge of numbers was indispensable in the mustering of
forces as well as in distribution of benefices and fiefs; but the counting of money was left
to meaner hands. In many feudatories, public finance was administered by a lower kind
of samurai or by priests. Every thinking bushi knew well enough that money formed the
sinews of war; but he did not think of raising the appreciation of money to a virtue. It is
true that thrift was enjoined by Bushido, but not for economical reasons so much as for
the exercise of abstinence. Luxury was thought the greatest menace to manhood and
severest simplicity of living was required of the warrior class, sumptuary laws being
enforced in many of the clans.
We read that in ancient Rome the farmers of revenue and other financial agents were
gradually raised to the rank of knights, the State thereby showing its appreciation of
their service and of the importance of money itself. How closely this is connected with
the luxury and avarice of the Romans may be imagined. Not so with the Precepts of
Knighthood. It persisted in systematically regarding finance as something low - low as
compared with moral and intellectual vocations.
Money and the love of it being thus diligently ignored, Bushido itself could long remain
free from a thousand and one evils of which money is the root. This is sufficient reason
for the fact that our public men have long been free from corruption; but alas! how fast
plutocracy is making its way in our time and generation.
The mental discipline which would nowadays be chiefly aided by the study of
mathematics, was supplied by literary exegesis and deontological discussions. Very few
abstract subjects troubled the mind of the young, the chief aim of their education being,
as I have said, decision of character. People whose minds were simply stored with
information found no great admirers. Of the three services of studies that Bacon gives, -
for delight, ornament, and ability, - Bushido had decided preference for the last, where
their use was "in judgment and the disposition of business." Whether it was for the
disposition of public business or for the exercise of self-control, it was with a practical
end in view that education was conducted. " Learning without thought," said Confucius,
"is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous. "
When character and not intelligence, when the soul and not the head, is chosen by a
teacher for the material to work upon and to develop, his vocation partakes of a sacred
character. "It is the parent who has borne me: it is the teacher who makes me man."
With this idea, therefore, the esteem in which one's preceptor was held was very high. A
man to evoke such confidence and respect from the young, must necessarily be endowed
with superior personality, without lacking erudition. He was a father to the fatherless,
and an adviser to the erring. "Thy father and thy mother." - so runs our maxim - " are
like heaven and earth; thy teacher and thy lord are like the sun and moon."
The present system of paying for every sort of service was not in vogue among the
adherents of Bushido. It believed in a service which can be rendered only without
money and without price. Spiritual service, be it of priest or teacher, was not to be
repaid in gold or silver, not because it was valueless but because it was invaluable. Here
the non-arithmetical honour - instinct of Bushido taught a truer lesson than modern
Political Economy ; for wages and salaries can be paid only for services whose results
are definite, tangible, and measurable, whereas the best service done in education, -
namely, in soul development (and this includes the services of a pastor), is not definite,
tangible, or measurable. Being immeasurable, money, the ostensible measure of value,
is of inadequate use. Usage sanctioned that pupils brought to their teachers money or
goods at different seasons of the year ; but these were not payments but offerings, which
indeed were welcome to the recipients as they were usually men of stern calibre,
boasting of honourable penury, too dignified to work with their hands and too proud to
beg. They were grave personifications of high spirits undaunted by adversity. They were
an embodiment of what was considered as an end of all learning, and were this a living
example of that discipline of disciplines, self-control, which was universally required of
samurai.

CHAPTER XI-to CONTENTS-

SELF-CONTROL

THE discipline of fortitude on the one hand, inculcating endurance without a groan, and
the teaching of politeness on the other, requiring us not to mar the pleasure or serenity
of another by expressions of our own sorrow or pain, combined to engender a stocial turn
of mind, and eventually to confirm it into a national trait of apparent stoicism. I say
apparent stoicism, because I do not believe that true stoicism can ever become the
characteristic of a whole nation, and also because some of our national manners and
customs may seem to a foreign observer hard-hearted. Yet we are really as susceptible
to tender emotion as any race under the sky.
I am inclined to think that in one sense we have to feel more than others - yes, doubly
more - since the very attempt to restrain natural promptings entails suffering. Imagine
boys - and girls, too - brought up not to resort to the shedding of a tear or the uttering of
a groan for the relief of their feelings, - and there is a physiological problem whether
such effort steels their nerves or makes them more sensitive.
It was considered unmanly for a samurai to betray his emotions on his face. "He shows
no sign of joy or anger," was a Phrase used, in describing a great character. The most
natural affections were kept under control. A father could embrace his son only at the
expense of his dignity; a husband would not kiss his wife, - no, not in the presence of
other people, whatever he might do in private! There may be some truth in the remark
of a witty youth when he said, "American husbands kiss their wives in public and beat
them in private; Japanese husbands beat theirs in public and kiss them in private."
Calmness of behaviour, composure of mind, should not be disturbed by passion of any
kind. I remember when, during the late war with China, a regiment left a certain town,
a large concourse of people flocked to the station to bid farewell to the general and his
army. On this occasion an American resident resorted to the place, expecting to witness
loud demonstrations, as the nation itself was highly excited and there were fathers,
mothers, wives, and sweethearts of the soldiers in the crowd. The American was
strangely disappointed; for as the whistle blew and the train began to move, the hats of
thousands of people were silently taken off and their heads bowed in reverential
farewell; no waving of handkerchiefs, no word uttered, but deep silence in which only an
attentive ear could catch a few broken sobs. In domestic life, too, I know of a father who
spent whole nights listening to the breathing of a sick child, standing behind the door
that he might not be caught in such an act of parental weakness! I know of a mother
who, in her last moments, refrained from sending for her son, that he might not be
disturbed in his studies. Our history and everyday life are replete with examples of
heroic matrons who can well bear comparison with some of the most touching pages of
Plutarch. Among our Peasantry an Ian Maclaren would be sure to find many a Marget
Hove.
It is the same discipline of self-restraint which is accountable for the absence of more
frequent revivals in the Christian churches of Japan. When a man or woman feels his or
her sold stirred, the first instinct is quietly to suppress the manifestation of it. In rare
instances is the tongue set free by an irresistible spirit, when we have eloquence of
sincerity and fervour. It is putting a premium upon a breach of the third commandment
to encourage speaking lightly of spiritual experience. It is truly jarring to Japanese ears
to hear the most sacred words, the most secret heart experiences, thrown out in
promiscuous audiences. ''Dost thou feel the soil of thy soul stirred with tender thoughts?
It is time for seeds to sprout. Disturb it not with speech ; but let it work alone in
quietness and secrecy, " - writes a young samurai in his diary.
To give in so many articulate words one's inmost thoughts and feelings - notably the
religious - is taken among us as an unmistakable sign that they are neither very
profound nor very sincere. "Only a pomegranate is he" - so runs a popular saying "who,
when he gapes his mouth, displays the contents of his heart."
It is not altogether perverseness of oriental minds that the instant our emotions are
moved, we try to guard our lips in order to hide them. Speech is very often with us, as
the Frenchman defines it, '' the art of concealing thought."
Call upon a Japanese friend in time of deepest affliction and he will invariably receive
you laughing, with red eyes or moist cheeks. At first you may think him hysterical.
Press him for explanation and you will get a few broken commonplaces - " Human life
has sorrow"; "They who meet must part"; "He that is born must die"; It is foolish to
count the years of a child that is gone, but a woman's heart will indulge in follies"; and
the like. So the noble words of a noble Hohenzollern - " Lerne zu leiden ohne klagen " -
had found many responsive minds among us long before they were uttered.
Indeed, the Japanese have recourse to risibility whenever the frailties of human
nature are put to severest test. I think we possess a better reason than Democritus
himself for our Abderian tendency, for laughter with us oftenest veils an effort to regain
balance of temper when disturbed by any untoward circumstance. It is a counterpoise of
sorrow or rage.
The suppression of feelings being thus steadily insisted upon, they find their
safety-valve in poetical aphorisms. A poet of the tenth century writes " In Japan and
China as well, humanity, when moved by sorrow, tells its bitter grief in verse." A mother
who tries to console her broken heart by fancying her departed child absent on his
wonted chase after the dragon-fly hums,
" How far to-day in chase, I wonder,
Has gone my hunter of the dragon-fly! "
I refrain from quoting other examples, for I know I could do only scant justice to the
pearly gems of our literature, were I to render into a foreign tongue the thoughts which
were wrung drop by drop from bleeding hearts and threaded into beads of rarest value. I
hope I have in a measure shown that inner working of our minds which often presents
an appearance of callousness or of an hysterical mixture of laughter and dejection, and
whose sanity is sometimes called in question.
It has also been suggested that our endurance of pain and indifference to death are due
to less sensitive nerves. This is plausible as far as it goes. The next question is, - Why
are our nerves less tightly strung? It may be our climate is not so stimulating as the
American. It may be our monarchical form of government does not excite us so much as
the Republic does the Frenchman. It may be that we do not read Sartor Resartus so
zealously as the Englishman. Personally, I believe it was our very excitability and
sensitiveness which made it a necessity to recognise and enforce constant
self-repression ; but whatever may be the explanation, without taking into account long
years of discipline in self-control, none can be correct.
Discipline in self-control can easily go too far. It can well repress the genial current of
the soul. It can force pliant natures into distortions and monstrosities. It can beget
bigotry, breed hypocrisy, or hebetate affections. Be a virtue never so noble, it has its
counterpart and counterfeit. We must recognise in each virtue its own positive
excellence and follow its positive ideal, and the ideal of self-restraint is to keep the mind
level - as our expression is - or, to borrow a Greek term, attain the state of euthymia,
which Democritus called the highest good.
The acme and pitch of self-control is reached and best illustrated in the first of the two
institutions which we shall now bring to view, namely, the institutions of suicide and
redress.

CHAPTER XII-to CONTENTS-

THE INSTITUTIONS OF SUICIDE AND REDRESS

OF these two institutions (the former known as hara-kiri and the latter as kataki-uchi),
many foreign writers have treated more or less fully.
To begin with suicide, let me state that I confine my observations only to seppuku or
kappuku, popularly known as hara-kiri which means self-immolation by
disembowelment. "Ripping the abdomen? How absurd!"-so cry those to whom the name
is new. Absurdly odd as it may sound at first to foreign ears, it cannot be so very foreign
to students of Shakespeare, who puts these words in Brutus's mouth - "Thy [Caesar's]
spirit walks abroad and turns our swords into our proper entrails." Listen to a modern
English poet who, in his Light of Asia, speaks of a sword piercing the bowels of a queen;
- none blames him for bad English or breach of modesty. Or, to take still another
example, look at Guercino's painting of Cato's death in the Palazzo Rossa, in Genoa.
Whoever has read the swan-song which Addison makes Cato sing, will not jeer at the
sword half-buried in his abdomen. In our minds this mode of death is associated with
instances of noblest deeds and of most touching pathos, so that nothing repugnant,
much less ludicrous, mars our conception of it. So wonderful is the transforming power
of virtue, of greatness of tenderness, that the vilest form of death assumes a sublimity
and becomes a symbol of new life, or else - the sign which Constantine beheld would not
conquer the world!
Not for extraneous associations only does seppuku lose in our mind any taint of
absurdity; for the choice of this particular part of the body to operate upon, was based
on an old anatomical belief as to the seat of the soul and of the affections. When Moses
wrote of Joseph's "bowels yearning upon his brother," or David prayed the Lord not to
forget his bowels, or when Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other inspired men of old spoke of the
"sounding " or the " troubling" of bowels, they all and each endorsed the belief prevalent
among the Japanese that in the abdomen was enshrined the soul. The Semites
habitually spoke of the liver and kidneys and surrounding fat as the seat of emotion and
of life. The term "hara" was more comprehensive than the Greek phren or thumos, and
the Japanese and Hellenese alike thought the spirit of man to dwell somewhere in that
region. Such a notion is by no means confined to the peoples of antiquity. The French, in
spite of the theory propounded by one of their most distinguished philosophers,
Descartes, that the soul is located in the pineal gland, still insist in using the term
venire in a sense which, if anatomically too vague, is nevertheless physiologically
significant. Similarly, entrailles stands in their language for affection and compassion.
Nor is such a belief mere superstition, being more scientific than the general idea of
making the heart the centre of the feelings. Without asking a friar, the Japanese knew
better than Romeo "in what vile part of this anatomy one's name did lodge." Modern
neurologists speak of the abdominal and pelvic brains, denoting thereby sympathetic
nerve centres in those parts which are strongly affected by any psychical action. This
view of mental physiology once admitted, the syllogism of seppuku is easy to construct.
"I will open the seat of my soul and show you how it fares with it. See for yourself
whether it is polluted or clean. "
I do not wish to be understood as asserting religious or even moral justification of
suicide, but the high estimate placed upon honour was ample excuse with many for
taking one's own life. How many acquiesced in the sentiment expressed by Garth,
"When honour's lost, 't is a relief to die;
Death's but a sure retreat from infamy,"
and have smilingly surrendered their souls to oblivion! Death involving a question of
honour, was accepted in Bushido as a key to the solution of many complex problems, so
that to an ambitious samurai a natural departure from life seemed a rather tame affair
and a consummation not devoutly to be wished for. I dare say that many good
Christians, if only they are honest enough, will confess the fascination of, if not positive
admiration for, the sublime composure with which Cato, Brutus, Petronius, and a host
of other ancient worthies terminated their own earthly existence. Is it too bold to hint
that the death of the first of the philosophers was partly suicidal? When we are told so
minutely by his pupils how their master willingly submitted to the mandate of the state
which he knew was morally mistaken - in spite of the possibilities of escape, and how he
took the cup of hemlock in his own hand, even offering libation from its deadly contents,
do we not discern, in his whole proceeding and demeanour, an act of self-immolation?
No physical compulsion here, as in ordinary cases of execution. True, the verdict of the
judges was compulsory: it said, "Thou shalt die, - and that by thine own hand." If suicide
meant no more than dying by one's own hand, Socrates was a clear case of suicide. But
nobody would charge him with the crime; Plato, who was averse to it, would not call his
master a suicide.
Now my readers will understand that seppuku was not a mere suicidal process. It was
an institution, legal and ceremonial. An invention of the middle ages, it was a process by
which warriors could expiate their crimes, apologise for errors, escape from disgrace,
redeem their friends, or prove their sincerity. When enforced as a legal punishment, it
was practised with due Ceremony. It was a refinement of self-destruction, and none
could perform it without the utmost coolness of temper and composure of demeanour,
and for these reasons it was particularly befitting the profession of bushi.
Antiquarian curiosity, if nothing else, would tempt me to give here a description of this
obsolete ceremony; but seeing that such a description was made by a far abler writer,
whose book is not much read nowadays, I am tempted to make a somewhat lengthy
quotation. Mitford, in his Tales of Old Japan, after giving a translation of a treatise on
seppuku from a rare Japanese manuscript, goes on to describe an instance of such an
execution of which he was an eye-witness:

"We (seven foreign representatives) were invited to follow the Japanese witnesses into
the hondo or main hall of the temple, where the ceremony was to be performed. It was
an imposing scene. A large hall with a high roof supported by dark pillars of wood. From
the ceiling hung a profusion of those huge gilt lamps and ornaments peculiar to
Buddhist temples. In front of the high altar, where the floor, covered with beautiful
white mats, is raised some three or four aches from the ground, was laid a rug of scarlet
felt. Tall candles placed at regular intervals gave out a dim mysterious light, just
sufficient to let all the proceedings be seen. The seven Japanese took their places on the
left of the raised floor, the seven foreigners on the right. No other person was present.
" After the interval of a few minutes of anxious suspense, Taki Zenzaburo, a stalwart
man thirty-two years of age, with a noble air, walked into the hall attired in his dress of
ceremony, with the peculiar hempen-cloth wings which are worn on great occasions. He
was accompanied by a kaishaku and three officers, who wore the jimbaori or war
surcoat with gold tissue facings. The word kaishaku, it should be observed, is one to
which our word executioner is no equivalent term. The office is that of a gentleman; in
many cases it is performed by a kinsman or friend of the condemned, and the relation
between them is rather that of principal and second than that of victim and executioner.
In this instance, the kaiskaku was a pupil of Taki Zenzaburo, and was selected by
friends of the latter from among their own number for his skill in swordsmanship.
" With the kaishaku on his left hand, Taki Zenzaburo advanced slowly toward the
Japanese witnesses, and the two bowed before them, then drawing near to the
foreigners they saluted us in the same way, perhaps even with more deference; in each
case the salutation was ceremoniously returned. Slowly and with great dignity the
condemned man mounted on to the raised door, prostrated himself before the high altar
twice, and seated*[ Seated himself-that is, in the Japanese fashion, his knees and toes
touching the ground and his body resting on his heels. In this position, which is one of
respect, he remained until his death.] himself on the felt carpet with his back to the
high altar, the kaishaku crouching on his left-hand side. One of the three attendant
officers then came forward, bearing a stand of the kind used in the temple for offerings,
on which, wrapped in paper, lay the wakizashi, the short sword or dirk of the Japanese,
nine inches and a half in length, with a point and an edge as sharp as a razor's. This he
handed, prostrating himself, to the condemned man, who received it reverently raising
it to his head with both hands, and placed it in front of himself.
" After another profound obeisance, Taki Zenzaburo, in a voice which betrayed just so
much emotion and hesitation as might be expected from a man who is making a painful
confession, but with no sign of either in his face or manner, spoke as follows :-
"'I, and I alone, unwarrantably gave the order to fire on the foreigners at Kobe, and
again as they tried to escape. For this crime I disembowel myself, and I beg you who are
present to do me the honour of witnessing the act.'
" Bowing once more, the speaker allowed his upper garments to slip down to his girdle,
and remained naked to the waist. Carefully, according to custom, he tucked his sleeves
under his knees to prevent himself from falling backward; for a noble Japanese
gentleman should die falling forwards. Deliberately, with a steady hand he took the dirk
that lay before him; he looked at it wistfully, almost affectionately ; for a moment he
seemed to collect his thoughts for the last time, and then stabbing himself deeply below
the waist in the left-hand side, he drew the dirk slowly across to his right side, and
turning it in the wound, gave a slight cut upwards. During this sickeningly painful
operation he never moved a muscle of his face. When he drew out the dirk, he leaned
forward and stretched out his neck; an expression of pain for the first time crossed his
face, but he uttered no sound. At that moment the kaishaku, who, still crouching by his
side, had been keenly watching his every movement, sprang to his feet, poised his sword
for a second in the air; there was a flash, a heavy, ugly thud, a crashing fall; with one
blow the head had been severed from the body.
"A dead silence followed, broken only by the hideous noise of the blood throbbing out of
the inert heap before us, which but a moment before had been a brave and chivalrous
man. It was horrible.
" The kaishaku made a low bow, wiped his sword with a piece of paper which he had
ready for the purpose, and retired from the raised floor; and the stained dirk was
solemnly borne away, a bloody proof of the execution.
" The two representatives of the Mikado then left their places. and crossing over to
where the foreign witnesses sat, called to us to witness that the sentence of death upon
Taki Zenzaburo had been faithfully carried out. The ceremony being at an end, we left
the temple."

I might multiply any number of descriptions of seppuku from literature or from the
relations of eye-witnesses; but one more instance will suffice.
Two brothers, Sakon and Naiki, respectively twenty-four and seventeen years of age,
made an effort to kill Iyeyasu in order to avenge their father's wrongs; but before they
could enter the camp they were made prisoners. The old general admired the pluck of
the youths who dared an attempt on his life and ordered that they should be allowed to
die an honourable death. Their little brother Hachimaro, a mere infant of eight
summers, was condemned to a similar fate, as the sentence was pronounced on all the
male members of the family, and the three were taken to a monastery where it was to
be executed. A physician who was present on the occasion has left us a diary, from which
the following scene is translated :

"When they were all seated in a row for final despatch, Sakon turned to the youngest
and said - 'Go thou first, for I wish to be sure that thou doest it aright.' Upon the little
one's replying that, as he had never seen seppuku performed, he would like to see his
brothers do it and then he could follow them, the older brothers smiled between their
tears: - Well said, little fellow! So canst thou well boast of being our father's child.' When
they had placed him between them, Sakon thrust the dagger into the left side of his
abdomen and said - 'Look brother! Dost understand now? Only, don't push the dagger
too far, lest thou fall back. Lean forward, rather, and keep thy knees well composed.'
Naiki did likewise and said to the boy - ' Keep thine eyes open or else thou mayst look
like a dying woman. If thy dagger feels anything within and thy strength fails, take
courage and double thy effort to cut across.' The child looked from one to the other, and,
when both had expired, he calmly half denuded himself and followed the example set
him on either hand."

The glorification of seppuku offered, naturally enough, no small temptation to its
unwarranted committal. For causes entirely incompatible with reason, or for reasons
entirely undeserving of death , hot-headed youths rushed into it as insects fly into fire;
mixed and dubious motives drove more samurai to this deed than nuns into convent
gates. Life was cheap - cheap as reckoned by the popular standard of honour. The
saddest feature was that honour, which was always in the agio, so to speak, was not
always solid gold, but alloyed with baser metals. No one circle in the Inferno will boast
of greater density of Japanese population than the seventh, to which Dante consigns all
victims of self-destruction!
And yet, for a true samurai to hasten death or to court it, was alike cowardice. A
typical fighter, when he lost battle after battle and was pursued from plain to hill and
from bush to cavern, found himself hungry and alone in the dark hollow of a tree, his
sword blunt with use, his bow broken and arrows exhausted - did not the noblest of the
Romans fail upon his own sword in Philippi under like circumstances? - deemed it
cowardly to die, but, with a fortitude approaching a Christian martyr's, cheered himself
with an impromptu verse :

"Come! evermore come,
Ye dread sorrows and pains!
And heap on my burden'd back;
That I not one test may lack
Of what strength in me remains!"

This, then, was the Bushido teaching - Bear and face all calamities and adversities
with patience and a pure conscience; for, as Mencius*[ I use Dr. Legge's translation
verbatim.] taught, "When Heaven is about to confer a great office on anyone, it first
exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with toil" it exposes his
body to hunger and subjects him to extreme poverty; and it confounds his undertakings.
In all these ways it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his
incompetencies." True honour lies in fulfilling Heaven's decree and no death incurred in
so doing is ignominious, whereas, death to avoid what Heaven has in store is cowardly
indeed! In that quaint book of Sir Thomas Browne's, Religio Medici, there is an exact
English equivalent for what is repeatedly taught in our Precepts. Let me quote it: "It is
a brave act of valour to contemn death, but where life is more terrible than death, it is
then the truest valour to dare to live." A renowned priest of the seventeenth century
satirically observed - ''Talk as he may, a samurai who ne'er has died is apt in decisive
moments to flee or hide." Again - "Him who once has died in the bottom of his breast, no
spears of Sanada nor all the arrows of Tametomo can pierce." How near we come to the
portals of the temple whose Builder taught "He that loseth his life for my sake shall find
it"! These are but a few of the numerous examples that tend to confirm the moral
identity of the human species, notwithstanding an attempt so assiduously made to
render the distinction between Christian and Pagan as great as possible.
We have thus seen that the Bushido institution of suicide was neither so irrational nor
barbarous as its abuse strikes us at first sight. We will now see whether its sister
institution of Redress - or call it Revenge, if you will - has its mitigating features. I hope
I can dispose of this question in a few words, since a similar institution, or call it custom,
if that suits you better, prevailed among all peoples and has not yet become entirely
obsolete, as attested by the continuance of duelling and lynching. Why, has not an
American captain recently challenged Esterhazy, that the wrongs of Dreyfus be
avenged? Among a savage tribe which has no marriage, adultery is not a sin, and only
the jealousy of a lover protects a woman from abuse; so in a time which has no criminal
court, murder is not a crime, and only the vigilant vengeance of the victim's people
preserves social order. "What is the most beautiful thing on earth?" said Osiris to Horus.
The reply was, "To avenge a parent's wrongs," - to which a Japanese would have added
"and a master's."
In revenge there is something which satisfies one's sense of justice. The avenger
reasons: - "My good father did not deserve death. He who killed him did great evil. My
father, if he were alive, would not tolerate a deed like this. Heaven itself hates
wrongdoing. It is the will of my father; it is the will of Heaven that the evil-doer cease
from his work. He must perish by my hand; because he shed my father's blood, I, who
am his flesh and blood, must shed the murderer's. The same Heaven shall not shelter
him and me." The ratiocination is simple and childish (though we know Hamlet did not
reason much more deeply) ; nevertheless it shows an innate sense of exact balance and
equal justice. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Our sense of revenge is as exact as
our mathematical faculty, and until both terms of the equation are satisfied we cannot
get over the sense of something left undone.
In Judaism, which believed in a jealous God, or in Greek mythology, which provided a
Nemesis, vengeance may be left to superhuman agencies; but common sense furnished
Bushido with the institution of redress as a kind of ethical court of equity, where people
could take cases not to be judged in accordance with ordinary law. The master of the
forty-seven Ronins was condemned to death ; he had no court of higher instance to
appeal to; his faithful retainers addressed themselves to vengeance, the only Supreme
Court existing; they in their turn were condemned by common law, - but the popular
instinct passed a different judgment, and hence their memory is still kept as green and
fragrant as are their graves at Sengakuji to this day.
Though Lao-tse taught to recompense injury with kindness, the voice of Confucius was
very much louder, which taught that injury must be recompensed with justice; - and yet
revenge was justified only when it was undertaken in behalf of our superiors and
benefactors. One's own wrongs, including injuries done to wife and children, were to be
bone and forgiven. A samurai could therefore fully sympathise with Hannibal's oath to
avenge his country's wrongs, but he scorns James Hamilton for wearing in his girdle a
handful of earth from his wife's grave, as an eternal incentive to avenge her wrongs on
the Regent Hurray.
Both of these institutions of suicide and redress lost their raison d'etre at the
promulgation of the Criminal Code. No more do we hear of romantic adventures of a fair
maiden as she tracks in disguise the murderer of her parent. No more can we witness
tragedies of family vendetta enacted. The knight errantry of Miyamoto Musashi is now
a tale of the past. The well-ordered police spies out the criminal for the injured party
and the law metes out justice. The whole state and society will see that wrong is righted.
The sense of justice satisfied, there is no need of kataki-uchi. If this had meant that
"hunger of the heart which feeds upon the hope of glutting that hunger with the life
blood of the victim," as a New England divine has described it, a few paragraphs in the
Criminal Code would not so entirely have made an end of it.
As to seppuku, though it too has no existence de jure, we still hear of it from time to
time, and shall continue to hear, I am afraid, as long as the past is remembered. Many
painless and time-saving methods of self-immolation will come in vogue, as its votaries
are increasing with fearful rapidity throughout the world; but Professor Morselli will
have to concede to seppuku an aristocratic position among them. He maintains that
"when suicide is accomplished by very painful means or at the cost of prolonged agony,
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it may be assigned as the act of a mind disordered
by fanaticism, by madness, or by morbid excitement."*[ Morselli, Suicide, p. 314] But a
normal seppuku does not savour of fanaticism, or madness or excitement, utmost sang
froid being necessary to its successful accomplishment. Of the two kinds into which Dr.
Strahan*[Suicide and Insanity.] divides suicide, the Rational or Quasi, and the
Irrational or True, seppuku is the best example of the former type.
From these bloody institutions, as well as from the general tenor of Bushido, it is easy
to infer that the sword played an important part in social discipline and life. The saying
passed as an axiom which called the sword the soul of the samurai.


CHAPTER XIII-to CONTENTS-

THE SWORD, THE SOUL OF THE SAMURAI

BUSHIDO made the sword its emblem of power and prowess. When Mahomet
proclaimed that "the sword is the key of Heaven and of Hell," he only echoed a Japanese
sentiment. Very early the samurai boy learned to wield it. It was a momentous occasion
for him when at the age of five he was apparelled in the paraphernalia of samurai
costume, placed upon a go-board*[The game of go is sometimes called Japanese
checkers, but is much more intricate than the English game. The go-board contains 361
squares and is supposed to represent a battle-field - the object of the game being to
occupy as much space as possible.] and initiated into the rights of the military
profession, by having thrust into his girdle a real sword instead of the toy dirk with
which he had been playing. After this first ceremony of adoptio per arma, he was no
more to be seen outside his father's gates without this badge of his status, even though
it was usually substituted for everyday wear by a gilded wooden dirk. Not many years
pass before he wears constantly the genuine steel, though blunt, and then the sham
arms are thrown aside and with enjoyment keener than his newly acquired blades, he
marches out to try their edge on wood and stone. When he reaches man's estate, at the
age of fifteen, being given independence of action, he can now pride himself upon the
possession of arms sharp enough for any work. The very possession of the dangerous
instrument imparts to him a feeling and an air of self-respect and responsibility. "He
beareth not the sword in vain." What he carries in his belt is a symbol of what he carries
in his mind and heart, - loyalty and honour. The two swords, the longer and the shorter,
- called respectively daito and shoto or katana and wakizashi, - never leave his side.
When at home, they grace the most conspicuous place in the study or parlour; by night
they guard his pillow within easy reach of his hand. Constant companions, they are
beloved, and proper names of endearment given hem. Being venerated, they are
well-nigh worshipped. The Father of History has recorded as a curious piece of
information that the Scythians sacrificed to an iron scimitar. Many a temple and many
a family in Japan hoards a sword as an object of adoration. Even the commonest dirk
has due respect paid to it. Any insult to it is tantamount to personal affront. Woe to him
who carelessly steps over a weapon lying on the floor!
So precious an object cannot long escape the notice and the skill of artists nor the
vanity of its owner, especially in times of peace, when it is won with no more use than a
crosier by a bishop or a sceptre by a king. Sharkskin and finest silk for hilt, silver and
gold for guard, lacquer of varied hues for scabbard, robbed the deadliest weapon of half
its terror; but these appurtenances are playthings compared with the blade itself.
The swordsmith was not a mere artisan but an inspired artist and his workshop a
sanctuary. Daily he commenced his craft with prayer and purification, or, as the phrase
was, "he committed his soul and spirit into the forging and tempering of the steel."
Every swing of the sledge, every plunge into water, every friction on the grindstone, was
a religious act of no slight import. Was it the spirit of the master or of his tutelary god
that cast a formidable spell over our sword? Perfect as a work of art, setting at defiance
its Toledo and Damascus rivals, there was more than art could impart. Its cold blade,
collecting on its surface the moment it is drawn the vapour of the atmosphere; its
immaculate texture, dashing light of bluish hue; its matchless edge, upon which
histories and possibilities hang; the curve of its back, uniting exquisite grace with
utmost strength ; - all these thrill us with mixed feelings of power and beauty, of awe
and terror. Harmless were its mission, if it only remained a thing of beauty and joy! But,
ever within reach of the hand, it presented no small temptation for abuse. Too often did
the blade flash forth from its peaceful sheath. The abuse sometimes went so far as to try
the acquired steel on some harmless creature's neck.
The question that concerns us most is, however, - Did Bushido justify the promiscuous
use of the weapon? The answer is unequivocally, no! As it laid great stress on its proper
use, so did it denounce and abhor its misuse. A dastard or a braggart was he who
brandished his weapon on undeserved occasions. A self-possessed man knows the right
time to use it, and such times come but rarely. Let us listen to the late Count Katsu, who
passed through one of the most turbulent times of our history, when assassinations,
suicides, and other sanguinary practices were the order of the day. Endowed as he once
was with almost dictatorial powers, chosen repeatedly as an object of assassination, he
never tarnished his sword with blood. In relating some of his reminiscences to a friend
he says, in a quaint, plebeian way peculiar to him: "I have a great dislike for killing
people and so I haven't killed one single man. I have released those whose heads should
have been chopped off. A friend said to me one day, 'You don't kill enough. Don't you eat
pepper and egg-plants?' Well, some people are no betters! But you see that fellow was
slain himself. My escape may be due to my dislike of killing. I had the hilt of my sword
so tightly fastened to the scabbard that it was hard to draw the blade. I made tip my
mind that though they cut me, I would not cut. Yes, yes! some people are truly like fleas
and mosquitoes and they bite - but what does their biting amount to? It itches a little,
that's all; it won't endanger life." These are the words of one whose Bushido training
was tried in the fiery furnace of adversity and triumph. The popular apothegm - "To be
beaten is to conquer," meaning true conquest consists in not opposing a riotous foe; and
"The best won victory is that obtained without shedding of blood," and others of similar
import - will show that after all the ultimate ideal of knighthood was peace.
It was a great pity that this high ideal was left exclusively to priests and moralists to
preach, while the samurai went on practising and extolling martial traits. In this they
went so far as to tinge the ideals of womanhood with Amazonian character. Here we
may profitably devote a few paragraphs to the subject of the training and position of
woman.

CHAPTER XIV-to CONTENTS-

THE TRAINING AND POSITION OF WOMAN

THE female half of our species has sometimes been called the paragon of paradoxes,
because the intuitive working of its mind is beyond the comprehension of men's
" arithemetical understanding." The Chinese ideogram denoting ''the mysterious," "the
unknowable," consists of two parts, one meaning "young" and the other " woman,"
because the physical charms and delicate thoughts of the fair sex are above the coarse
mental calibre of our sex to explain.
In the Bushido ideal of woman, however, there is little mystery and only a seeming
paradox. I have said that it was Amazonian, but that is only half the truth.
Ideographically the Chinese represent wife by a woman holding a broom - certainly not
to brandish it offensively or defensively against her conjugal ally, neither for witchcraft,
but for the more harmless uses for which the besom was first invented - the idea
involved being thus not less homely than the etymological derivation of the English wife
(weaver) and daughter (duhitar, milkmaid). Without confining the sphere of woman's
activity to Kiuhe, Kirche, Kinder, as the present German Kaiser is said to do, the
Bushido ideal of womanhood was pre-eminently domestic. These seeming
contradictions - domesticity and Amazonian traits - are not inconsistent with the
Precepts of Knighthood, as we shall see.
Bushido being a teaching primarily intended for, the masculine sex, the virtues it
prized in woman were naturally far from being distinctly feminine. Winckelmann
remarks that " the supreme beauty of Greek art is rather male than female," and Lecky
adds that it was true in the moral conception of the Greeks as in their art. Bushido
similarly praised those women most "who emancipated themselves from the frailty of
their sex and displayed an heroic fortitude worthy of the strongest and the bravest of
men."*[Lecky, History of European Morals, ii., p. 383.] Young girls, therefore, were
trained to repress their feelings, to indurate their nerves, to manipulate
weapons, - especially the long-handled sword called nagi-nata, so as to be able to hold
their own against unexpected odds. Yet the primary motive for exercise of this martial
character was not for use in the field; it was twofold-personal and domestic. Woman
owing no suzerain of her own, formed her own body-guard. With her weapon she
guarded her personal sanctity with as much zeal as her husband did his master's. The
domestic utility of her warlike training was in the education of her sons, as we shall see
later.
Fencing and similar exercises, if rarely of practical use, were a wholesome
counterbalance to the otherwise sedentary habits of women. But these exercises were
not followed only for hygienic purposes. They could be turned into use in times of need.
Girls, when they reached womanhood, were presented with dirks (kai-ken, pocket
poniards), which might be directed to the bosom of their assailants, or, if advisable, to
their own. The latter was very often the case; and yet I will not judge them severely.
Even the Christian conscience with its horror of self-immolation, will not be harsh with
them, seeing Pelagia and Dominina, two suicides, were canonised for their purity and
piety. When a Japanese Virginia saw her chastity menaced, she did not wait for her
father's dagger. Her own weapon lay always in her bosom. It was a disgrace to her not to
know the proper way in which she had to perpetrate self-destruction. For example, little
as she was taught in anatomy, she must know the exact spot to cut in her throat; she
must know how to tie her lower limbs together with a belt so that, whatever the agonies
of death might be, her corpse be found in utmost modesty with the limbs properly
composed. Is not a caution like this worthy of the Christian Perpetua or the Vestal
Cornelia? I would not put such an abrupt interrogation were it not for a misconception,
based on our bathing customs and other trifles, that chastity is unknown among
us.*[ For a very sensible explanation of nudity and bathing see Finck's Logos Time in
Japan, pp. 286297.] On the contrary, chastity was a pre-eminent virtue of the samurai
woman, held above life itself. A young woman, taken prisoner, seeing herself in danger
of violence at the hands of the rough soldiery, says she will obey their pleasure, provided
she be first allowed to write a line to her sisters, whom war has dispersed in every
direction. When the epistle is finished, off she runs to the nearest well and saves her
honour by drowning. The letter she leaves behind ends with these verses:

"For fear lest clouds may dim her light,
Should she but graze this nether sphere,
The young moon poised above the height
Doth hastily betake to night."

It would be unfair to give my readers an idea that masculinity alone was our highest
ideal for woman. Far from it! Accomplishments and the gentler graces of life were
required of them. Music, dancing, and literature were not neglected. Some of the finest
verses in our literature were expressions of feminine sentiments ; in fact, woman played
an important role in the history of Japanese belles-lettres. Dancing was taught (I am
speaking of samurai girls and not of geisha) only to smooth the angularity of their
movements. Music was to regale the weary hours of their fathers and husbands; hence
it was not for the technique, the art as such, that music was learned; for the ultimate
object was purification of heart, since it was said that no harmony of sound is attainable
without the player's heart being in harmony with itself. Here again we see the same
idea prevailing which we notice in the training of youths - that accomplishments were
ever kept subservient to moral worth. Just enough of music and dancing to add grace
and brightness to life, but never to foster vanity and extravagance. I sympathise with
the Persian Prince, who, when taken into a ball-room in London and asked to take part
in the merriment, bluntly remarked that in his country they provided a particular set of
girls to do that kind of business for them.
The accomplishments of our women were not acquired for show or social ascendancy.
They were a home diversion; and if they shone in social parties, it was as the attributes
of a hostess, - in other words, as a part of the household contrivance for hospitality.
Domesticity guided their education. It may be said that the accomplishments of the
women of old Japan, be they martial or pacific in character, were mainly intended for
the home; and, however far they might roam, they never lost sight of the hearth as the
centre. It was to maintain its honour and integrity that they slaved, drudged, and gave
up their lives. Night and day, in tones at once firm and tender, brave and plaintive, they
sang to their little nests. As daughter, woman sacrificed herself for her father, as wife
for her husband, and as mother for her son. Thus from earliest youth she was taught to
deny herself. Her life was not one of independence, but of dependent service. Man's
helpmeet, if her presence is helpful she stays on the stage with him: if it hinders his
work, she retires behind the curtain. Not infrequently does it happen that a youth
becomes enamoured of a maiden who returns his love with equal ardour, but, when she
realises his interest in her makes him forgetful of his duties, disfigures her person that
her attractions may cease. Adzuma, the ideal wife in the minds of samurai girls, finds
herself loved by a man who is conspiring against her husband. Upon pretence of joining
in the guilty plot, she manages in the dark to take her husband's place, and the sword of
the lover-assassin descends upon her own devoted head. The following epistle written
by the wife of a young daimio, before taking her own life, needs no comment:

'"I have heard that no accident or chance ever mars the march of events here below,
and that all is in accordance with a plan. To take shelter under a common bough or a
drink of the same river, is alike ordained from ages prior to our birth. Since we were
joined in ties of eternal wedlock, now two short years ago, my heart hath followed thee,
even as its shadow followeth an object, inseparably bound heart to heart, loving and
being loved. Learning but recently, however, that the coming battle is to be the last of
thy labour and life, take the farewell greeting of thy loving partner. I have heard that
Kowu, the mighty warrior of ancient China, lost a battle, loth to part with his favorite
Gu. Yoshinaka, too, brave as he was, brought disaster prompt farewell whom earth no
should I detain to his cause, too weak to bid to his wife. Why should I, to longer offers
hope or joy - Why thee or thy thoughts by living? Why should I not, rather, await thee on
the road which all mortal kind must sometime tread? Never, prithee, never, forget the
many benefits which our good master Hideyori hath heaped upon thee. The gratitude
we owe him is as deep as the sea and as high as the hills."

Woman's surrender of herself to the good of her husband, home, and family, was as
willing and honourable as the man's self-surrender to the good of his lord and country.
Self - renunciation, without which no life-enigma can be solved, was the key-note of the
loyalty of man as well as of the domesticity of woman. She was no more the slave of man
than was her husband of his liege-lord, and the part she played was recognised as naijo,
"the inner help." In the ascending scale of service stood woman, who annihilated herself
for man, that he might annihilate himself for the master, that he in turn might obey
Heaven. I know the weakness of this teaching and that the superiority of Christianity is
nowhere more manifested than here, in that it requires of each and every living soul
direct responsibility to its Creator. Nevertheless, as far as the doctrine of service - the
serving of a cause higher than one's own self, even at the sacrifice of one's individuality;
I say the doctrine of service, which is the greatest that Christ preached and was the
sacred key-note of His mission - so far as that is concerned, Bushido was based on
eternal truth.
My readers will not accuse me of undue prejudice in favour of slavish surrender of
volition. I accept in a large measure the view advanced and defended with breadth of
learning and profundity of thought by Hegel, that history is the unfolding and
realisation of freedom. The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushido
was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, that it was required not only
of woman but of man. Hence, until the influence of its precepts is entirely done away
with, our society will not realise the view rashly expressed by an American exponent of
woman's rights, who exclaimed, "May all the daughters of Japan rise in revolt against
ancient customs!" Can such a revolt succeed? Will it improve the female status? Will the
rights they gain by such a summary process repay the loss of that sweetness of
disposition, that gentleness of manner, which are their present heritage? Was not the
loss of domesticity on the part of Roman matrons followed by moral corruption too gross
to mention? Can the American reformer assure us that a revolt of our daughters is the
true course for their historical development to take? These are grave questions.
Changes must and will come without revolts! In the meantime let us see whether the
status of the fair sex under the Bushido regimen was really so bad as to justify a revolt.
We hear much of the outward respect European knights paid to " God and the ladies," -
the incongruity of the two terms making Gibbon blush; we are also told by Hallam that
the morality of chivalry was coarse, that gallantry implied illicit love. The effect of
chivalry on the weaker vessel was food for reflection on the part of philosophers, M.
Guizot contending that feudalism and chivalry wrought wholesome influences, while Mr.
Spencer tells us that in a militant society (and what is feudal society if not militant?)
the position of woman is necessarily low, improving only as society becomes more
industrial. Now is M. Guizot's theory true of Japan, or is Mr. Spencer's? In reply I might
aver that both are right. The military class in Japan was restricted to the samurai,
comprising nearly two million souls. Above them were the military nobles, the daimio,
and the court nobles, the kuge - these higher, sybaritical nobles being fighters only in
name. Below them were masses of the common people - mechanics, tradesmen, and
peasants - whose life was devoted to arts of peace. Thus what Herbert Spencer gives as
the characteristics of a militant type of society may be said to have been exclusively
confined to the samurai class, while those of the industrial type were applicable to the
classes above and below it. This is well illustrated by the position of woman; for in no
class did she experience less freedom than among the samurai. Strange to say, the lower
the social class - as, for instance, among small artisans - the more equal was the position
of husband and wife. Among the higher nobility, too, the difference ill the relations of
the sexes was less marked, chiefly because there were few occasions to bring the
differences of sex into prominence, the leisurely nobleman having become literally
effeminate. Thus Spencer's dictum was fully exemplified in Old Japan. As to Guizot's,
those who read his presentation of a feudal community will remember that he had the
higher nobility especially under consideration, so that his generalisation applies to the
daimio and the kuge.
I shall be guilty of gross injustice to historical truth if my words give one a very low
opinion of the status of woman under Bushido. I do not hesitate to state that she was
not treated as man's equal; but, until we learn to discriminate between differences and
inequalities, there will always be misunderstandings upon this subject.
When we think in how few respects men are equal among themselves, e.g., before law
courts or voting polls, it seems idle to trouble ourselves with a discussion on the equality
of sexes. When the American Declaration of Independence said that all men were
created equal, it had no reference to their mental or physical gifts ; it simply repeated
what Ulpian long ago announced, that before the law all men are equal. Legal rights
were in this case the measure of their equality. Were the law the only scale by which to
measure the position of woman in a community, it would be as easy to tell where she
stands as to give her avoirdupois in pounds and ounces. But the question is: Is there a
correct standard in comparing the relative social position of the sexes? Is it right, is it
enough, to compare woman's status to man's, as the value of silver is compared with
that of gold, and give the ratio numerically? Such a method of calculation excludes from
consideration the most important kind of value which a human being possesses, namely,
the intrinsic. In view of the manifold variety of requisites for making each sex fulfil its
earthly mission, the standard to be adopted in measuring its relative position must be of
a composite character; or to borrow from economic language, it must be a multiple
standard. Bushido had a standard of its own and it was binomial. It tried to gauge the
value of woman on the battle-field and by the hearth. There she counted for very little;
here for all. The treatment accorded her corresponded to this double measurement: - as
a social-political unit not much, while as wife and mother she received highest respect
and deepest affection. Why, among so military a nation as the Romans, were their
matrons so highly venerated? Was it not because they were matrona, mothers? Not as
fighters or lawgivers, but as their mothers did men bow before them. So with us. While
fathers and husbands were absent in field or camp, the government of the household
was left entirely in the hands of mothers and wives. The education of the young, even
their defence, was entrusted to them. The warlike exercises of women; of which I have
spoken, were primarily to enable them intelligently to direct and follow the education of
their children.
I have noticed a rather superficial notion prevailing among half-informed foreigners,
that because the common Japanese expression for one's wife is ''my rustic wife" and the
like, she is despised and held in little esteem. When it is told that such phrases as "my
foolish father," "my swinish son," "my awkward self," etc., are in current use, is not the
answer clear enough?
To me it seems that our idea of marital union goes in some ways farther than the so
called Christian. "Man and woman shall be one flesh." The individualism of the
Anglo-Saxon cannot let go of the idea that husband and wife are two persons; - hence
when they disagree, their separate rights are recognised, and when they agree, they
exhaust their vocabulary in all sorts of silly pet-names and nonsensical blandishments.
It sounds highly irrational to our ears, when a husband or wife speaks to a third party of
his or her other half-better or worse-as being lovely, bright, kind, and what not. Is it
good taste to speak of one's self as "my bright self," "my lovely disposition," and so forth?
We think praising one's own wife is praising a part of one's own self, and self-praise is
regarded, to say the least, as bad taste among us, - and I hope, among Christian nations
too! I have diverged at some length because the polite debasement of one's consort was a
usage most in vogue among the samurai.
The Teutonic races beginning their tribal life with a superstitious awe of the fair sex
(though this is really wearing off in Germany !), and the Americans beginning their
social life under the painful consciousness of the numerical insufficiency of women*[I
refer to those days when girls were imported from England and given in marriage for so
many pounds of tobacco, etc.] (who, now increasing, are, I am afraid, fast losing the
prestige their colonial mothers enjoyed), the respect man pays to woman has in Western
civilisation become the chief standard of morality. But in the martial ethics of Bushido,
the main water-shed dividing the good and the bad was sought elsewhere. It was
located along the line of duty which bound man to his own divine soul and then to other
souls in the five relations I have mentioned in the early part of this paper. Of these, we
have brought to our reader's notice loyalty, the relation between one man as vassal and
another as lord. Upon the rest, I have only dwelt incidentally as occasion presented
itself; because they were not peculiar to Bushido. Being founded on natural affections,
they could but be common to all mankind, though in some particulars they may have
been accentuated by conditions which its teachings induced. In this connection there
comes before me the peculiar strength and tenderness of friendship between man and
man, which often added to the bond of brotherhood a romantic attachment doubtless
intensified by the separation of the sexes in youth, - a separation which denied to
affection the natural channel open to it in Western chivalry or in the free intercourse of
Anglo-Saxon lands. I might fill pages with Japanese versions of the story of Danon and
Pythias or Achilles and Patroclos, or tell in Bushido parlance of ties as sympathetic as
those which bound David and Jonathan.
It is not surprising, however, that the virtues and teachings unique in the Precepts of
Knighthood did not remain circumscribed to the military class. This makes us hasten to
the consideration of the influence of Bushido on the nation at large.


CHAPTER XV-to CONTENTS-

THE INFLUENCE OF BUSHIDO

THUS far we have brought into view only a few of the more prominent peaks which rise
above the range of knightly virtues, in themselves so much more elevated then the
general level of our national life. As the sun in its rising first tips the highest peaks with
russet hue, and then gradually casts its rays on the valley below, so the ethical system
which first enlightened the military order drew in course of time followers from
amongst the masses. Democracy raises up a natural prince for its leader, and
aristocracy infuses a princely spirit among the people. Virtues are no less contagious
than vices. "There needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, so rapid is the
contagion," says Emerson. No social class or caste can resist the diffusive power of
moral influence.
Prate as we hay of the triumphant march of Anglo-Saxon liberty, rarely has it received
impetus from the masses. Was it not rather the work of the squires and gentlemen? Very
truly does M. Taine say, "These three syllables, as used across the channel, summarise
the history of English society." Democracy may make self-confident retorts to such a
statement and fling back the question - "When Adam delved and Eve span, where then
was the gentleman?" All the more pity that a gentleman was not present in Eden! The
first parents missed him sorely and paid a high price for his absence. Had he been there,
not only would the garden have been more tastefully dressed, but they would have
learned without painful experience that disobedience to Jehovah was disloyalty and
dishonour, treason and rebellion.
What Japan was she owed to the samurai. They were not only the flower of the nation,
but its root as well. All the gracious gifts of Heaven Rowed through them. Though they
kept themselves socially aloof from the populace, they set a moral standard for them
and guided them by their example. I admit Bushido had its esoteric and exoteric
teachings ; these were eudemonic, looking after the welfare and happiness of the
commonalty; those were aretaic, emphasising the practice of virtues for their own sake.
In the most chivalrous days of Europe, knights formed numerically but a small fraction
of the population, but, as Emerson says, -" In English literature half the drama and all
the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure (gentleman)."
Write in place of Sidney and Scott, Chikamatsu and Bakin, and you have in a nutshell
the main features of the literary history of Japan.
The innumerable avenues of popular amusement and instruction - the theatres, the
story-tellers' booths, the preacher's dais, the musical recitations, the novels, - have
taken for their chief theme the stories of the samurai. The peasants around the open are
in their huts never tire of repeating the achievements of Yoshitsune and his faithful
retainer Benkei, or of the two brave Soga brothers; the dusky urchins listen with gaping
mouths until the last stick burns out and the fire dies in its embers, still leaving their
hearts aglow with tale that is told. The clerks and the shop boys, after their day's work
is over and the amado*[Outside shutters.] of the store are closed, gather together to
relate the story of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi far into the night, until slumber overtakes
their weary eyes and transports them from the drudgery of the counter to the exploits of
the field. The very babe just beginning to toddle is taught to lisp the adventures of
Momotaro, the daring conqueror of ogreland. Even girls are so imbued with the love of
knightly deeds and virtues that, like Desdemona, they would seriously incline to devour
with greedy ear the romance of the samurai.
The samurai grew to be the beau ideal of the whole race. "As among flowers the cherry
is queen, so among men the samurai is lord," so sang the populace. Debarred from
commercial pursuits, the military class itself did not aid commerce; but there was no
channel of human activity, no avenue of thought, which did not receive in some measure
an impetus from Bushido. Intellectua1 and moral Japan was directly or indirectly the
work of Knighthood.
Mr. Mallock, in his exceedingly suggestive book, Aristocracy and Evolution, has
eloquently told us that "social evolution, in so far as it is other than biological, may be
defined as the unintended result of the intentions of great men" ; further, that historical
progress is produced by a struggle "not among the community generally, to live, but a
struggle amongst a small section of the community to lead, to direct, to employ, the
majority in the best way." Whatever may be said about the soundness of his argument,
these statements are amply verified in the part played by bushi in the social progress,
so far as it went, of our Empire.
How the spirit of Bushido permeated all social classes is also shown in the
development of a certain order of men, known as otoko-date, the natural leaders of
democracy. Staunch fellows were they, every inch of them strong with the strength of
massive manhood. At once the spokesmen and the guardians of popular rights, they had
each a following of hundreds and thousands of souls who proffered, in the same fashion
that samurai did to daimio, the willing service of "limb and life, of body, chattels, and
earthly honour." Backed by a vast multitude of rash and impetuous working men, these
born " bosses " formed a formidable check to the rampancy of the two-sworded order.
In manifold ways has Bushido filtered down from the social class where it originated,
and acted as leaven among the masses, furnishing a moral standard for the whole
people. The Precepts of Knighthood, begun at first as the glory of the elite, became in
time an aspiration and inspiration to the nation at large; and though the populace could
not attain the moral height of those loftier souls, yet Yamato Damachii, the Soul of
Japan, ultimately came to express the Volksgeist of the Island Realm. If religion is no
more than " Morality touched by emotion," as Matthew Arnold defines it, few ethical
systems are better entitled to the rank of religion than Bushido. Motoori has put the
mute utterance of the nation into words when he sings:

" Isles of blest Japan!
Should your Yamato spirit
Strangers seek to scan,
Say - scenting morn's sunlit air,
Blows the cherry wild and fair! "

Yes, the sakura*[Cerasus pseudo-cerasus, Lindley.] has for ages been the favourite of
our people and the emblem of our character. Mark particularly the terms of definition
which the poet uses, the words the wild cherry flower scenting the morning sun.
The Yamato spirit is not a tame, tender plant, but a wild - in the sense of natural ?
growth; it is indigenous to the soil; its accidental qualities it may share with the flowers
of other lands, but in its essence it remains the original, spontaneous outgrowth of our
clime. But its nativity is not its sole claim to our affection. The refinement and grace of
its beauty appeal to our aesthetic sense as no other flower can. We cannot share the
admiration of the Europeans for their roses, which lack the simplicity of our flower.
Then, too, the thorns that are hidden beneath the sweetness of the rose, the tenacity
with which she clings to life, as though loth or afraid to die rather than drop untimely,
preferring to rot on her stem; her showy colours and heavy odours - all these are traits
so unlike our flower, which carries no dagger or poison tinder its beauty, which is ever
ready to depart life at the call of nature, whose colours are never gorgeous, and whose
light fragrance never palls. Beauty of colour and of form is limited in its showing; it is a
fixed quality of existence, whereas fragrance is volatile, ethereal as the breathing of life.
So in all religious ceremonies frankincense and myrrh play a prominent part. There is
something spirituelle in redolence. When the delicious perfume of the sakura quickens
the morning air, as the sun in its course rises to illumine first the isles of the Far East,
few sensations are more serenely exhilarating than to inhale, as it were, the very breath
of beauteous day.
When the Creator Himself is pictured as making new resolutions in His heart upon
smelling a sweet savour (Gen. viii. 21), is it any wonder that the sweet-smelling season
of the cherry blossom should call forth the whole nation from their little habitations?
Blame them not, if for a time their limbs forget their toil and moil and their hearts their
pangs and sorrows. Their brief pleasure ended, they return to their daily task with new
strength and new resolutions. Thus in ways more than one is the sakura the flower of
the nation.
Is, then, this flower, so sweet and evanescent, blow whithersoever the wind listeth, and,
shedding a puff of perfume, ready to vanish forever, is this flower the type of the Yamato
spirit? Is the sod of Japan so frailly mortal?

CHAPTER XVI-to CONTENTS-

IS BUSHIDO STILL ALIVE?


HAS Western civilisation, in its march through our land, already wiped out every
trace of its ancient discipline?
It were a sad thing if a nation's soul could die so fast. That were a poor soul that could
succumb so easily to extraneous influences.
The aggregate of psychological elements which constitute a national character is as
tenacious as the "irreducible elements of species, of the fins of the fish, of the beak of the
bird, of the tooth of the carnivorous animal." In his recent book, full of shallow
asseverations and brilliant generalisations, M. LeBon*[The Psychology of Peoples, p.
33.] says: "The discoveries due to the intelligence are the common patrimony of
humanity; qualities or defects of character constitute the exclusive patrimony of each
people: they are the arm rock which the waters must wash day by day for centuries,
before they can wear away even its external asperities." These are strong words and
would be highly worth pondering over, provided there were qualities and defects of
character which constitute the exclusive patrimony of each people. Schematising
theories of this sort had been advanced long before LeBon began to write his book, and
they were exploded long ago by Theodor Waitz and Hugh Hurray. In studying the
various virtues instilled by Bushido, we have drawn upon European sources for
comparison and illustrations, and we have seen that no one quality of character was its
exclusive patrimony. It is true the aggregate of moral qualities presents a quite unique
aspect. It is this aggregate which Emerson names a "compound result into which every
great force enters as an ingredient." But, instead of making it, as LeBon does, an
exclusive patrimony of a race or people, the Concord philosopher calls it " an element
which unites the most forcible persons of every country ; makes them intelligible and
agreeable to each othe; and is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an
individual lack the Masonic sign."
The character which Bushido stamped on our nation and on the samurai in particular,
cannot be said to form "an irreducible element of species," but nevertheless as to the
vitality which it retains there is no doubt. Were Bushido a mere physical force, the
momentum it has gained in the last seven hundred years could not stop so abruptly.
Were it transmitted only by heredity, its influence must be immensely widespread. Just
think, as M. Cheysson, a French economist, has calculated, that, supposing there be
three generations in a century, " each of us would have in his veins the blood of at least
twenty millions of the people living in the year 1000 A.D." The merest peasant that
grubs the soil, "bowed by the weight of centuries," has in his veins the blood of ages, and
is thus brother to us as much as "to the ox."
An unconscious and irresistible power, Bushido has been moving the nation and
individuals. It was art honest confession of the race when Yoshida Shoin, one of the
most brilliant pioneers of Modern Japan, wrote on the eve of his execution the following
stanza :

"Full well I knew this course must end in death;
It was Yamato spirit urged me on
To dare whate'er betide.''

Unformulated, Bushido was and still is the animating spirit, the motor force of our
country.
Mr. Ransome says that "there are three distinct Japans in existence side by side today,
- the old, which has not wholly died out ; the new, hardly yet born except in spirit; and
the transition, passing now through its most critical throes." While this is very true in
most respects, and particularly as regards tangible and concrete institutions, the
statement, as applied to fundamental ethical notions, requires some modification; for
Bushido, the maker and product of Old Japan, is still the guiding principle of the
transition and will prove the formative force of the new era.
The great statesmen who steered the ship of our state through the hurricane of the
Restoration and the whirlpool of national rejuvenation, were men who knew no other
moral teaching than the Precepts of Knighthood. Some writers*[Speer: Mission and
Politics in Asia, Lecture IV., pp. 189-192; Dennis: Christian Missions and Social
Progress, vo1. i., p. 32, vol. ii., 70, etc.] have lately tried to prove that the Christian
missionaries contributed an appreciable quota to the making of New Japan. I would fain
render honour to whom honour is due; but this honour can as yet hardly be accorded to
the good missionaries. More fitting it will be to their profession to stick to the scriptural
injunction of preferring one another in honour, than to advance a claim in which they
have no proofs to back them. For myself, I believe that Christian missionaries are doing
great things for Japan - in the domain of education, and especially of moral education: -
only, the mysterious though not the less certain working of the Spirit is still hidden in
divine secrecy. Whatever they do is still of indirect effect. No, as yet Christian missions
have effected but little visible in nodding the character of New Japan. No, it was
Bushido, pure and simple, that urged us on for weal or woe. Open the biographies of the
makers of Modern Japan - of Sakuma, of Saigo, of Okubo, of Kido, not to mention the
reminiscences of living men such as Ito, Okuma, Itagaki, etc., - and you will find that it
was tinder the impetus of samuraihood that they thought and wrought. When Mr.
Henry Norman declared, after his study and observation of the Far East, that the only
respect in which Japan differed from other oriental despotisms lay in "the ruling
influence among her people of the strictest, loftiest, and the most punctilious codes of
honour that man has ever devised," he touched the mainspring which has made New
Japan what she is, and which will make her what she is destined to be.*[The Far East, p.
375.]
The transformation of Japan is a fact patent to the whole world. Into a work of such
magnitude various motives naturally entered; but if one were to name the principal, one
would not hesitate to name Bushido. When we opened the whole country to foreign
trade, when we introduced the latest improvements in every department of life, when
we began to study Western politics and sciences, our guiding motive was not the
development of our physical resources and the increase of wealth; much less was it a
blind imitation of Western customs.
A close observer of oriental institutions and peoples has written :

" We are told every day how Europe has influenced Japan, and forget that the
change in those islands was entirely self-generated, that Europeans did not
teach Japan, but that Japan of herself chose to learn from Europe methods of
organisation, civil and military, which have so far proved successful. She
imported European mechanical science, as the Turks years before imported
European artillery. That is not exactly influence," continues Mr. Townsend,
"unless, indeed, England is influenced by purchasing tea in China. Where is
the European apostle," asks our author, "or philosopher or statesman or
agitator, who has re-made Japan? " *[Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, p.
28.]
Mr. Townsend has well perceived that the spring of action which brought about the
changes in Japan lay entirely within our own selves; and if he had only probed into our
psychology, his keen powers of observation would easily have convinced him that this
spring was no other, than Bushido. The sense of honour which cannot bear being looked
down upon as an inferior power, - that was the strongest of motives. Pecuniary or
industrial considerations were awakened later in the process of transformation.
The influence of Bushido is still so palpable that he who runs may read. A glimpse into
Japanese life will make it manifest. Read Hearn, the most eloquent and truthful
interpreter of the Japanese mind, and you see the working of that mind to be an
example of the working of Bushido. The universal politeness of the people, which is the
legacy of knightly ways, is too well known to be repeated anew. The physical endurance,
fortitude, and bravery that "the little Jap" possesses, were sufficiently proved in the
Chino-Japanese war.*[Among other works on the subject, read Eastlake and Yamada on
Heroic Japan, and Diosy on The New Far East.] "Is there any nation more loyal and
patriotic? " is a question asked by many; and for the proud answer, "There is not," we
must thank the Precepts of Knighthood.
On the other hand, it is fair to recognise that for the very faults and defects of our
character, Bushido is largely responsible. Our lack of abstruse philosophy - while some of
our young men have already gained international reputation in scientific researches,
not one has achieved anything in philosophical lines - is traceable to the neglect of
metaphysical training under Bushido's regimen of education. Our sense of honour is
responsible for our exaggerated sensitiveness and touchiness; and if there is the conceit
in us with which some foreigners charge us, that, too, is a pathological outcome of
honour.
Have you seen in your tour of Japan many a young man with unkempt hair, dressed in
shabbiest garb, carrying in his hand a large cane or a book, stalking about the streets
with an air of utter indifference to mundane things? He is the shosei (student), to whom
the earth is too small and the heavens are not high enough. He has his own theories of
the universe and of life. He dwells in castles of air and feeds on ethereal words of
wisdom. In his eyes beams the fire of ambition; his mind is athirst for knowledge.
Penury is only a stimulus to drive him onward ; worldly goods are in his sight shackles
to his character. He is the repository of loyalty and patriotism. He is the self-imposed
guardian of national honour. With all his virtues and his faults, he is the last fragment
of Bushido.
Deep-rooted and powerful as is still the effect of Bushido, I have said that it is an
unconscious and mute influence. The heart of the people responds, without knowing a
reason why, to any appeal made to what it has inherited, and hence the same moral idea
expressed in a newly translated term and in an old Bushido term, has a vastly different
degree of efficacy. A backsliding Christian, whom no pastoral persuasion could help from
downward tendency, was reverted from his course by an appeal made to his loyalty, the
fidelity he once swore to his Master. The word "Loyalty" revived all the noble sentiments
that were permitted to grow lukewarm. A party of unruly youths engaged in a
long-continued " students' strike" in a college, on account of their dissatisfaction with a
certain teacher, disbanded at two simple questions put by the Director, - "Is your
professor a worthy character? If so, you ought to respect him and keep him in the school.
Is he weak? If so, it is not manly to push a falling man." The scientific incapacity of the
professor, which was the beginning of the trouble, dwindled into insignificance in
comparison with the moral issues hinted at. By arousing the sentiments nurtured by
Bushido, moral renovation of great magnitude can be accomplished.
One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the missionaries are entirely.
ignorant of our history - "What do we care for heathen records?" some say - and
consequently estrange their religion from the habits of thought we and our forefathers
have been accustomed to for centuries past. Mocking a nation's history? - as though the
career of any people - even of the lowest African savages possessing no record - were not
a page in the general history of mankind, written by the hand of God Himself. The very
lost races are a palimpsest to be deciphered by a seeing eye. To a philosophic and pious
mind the races themselves are marks of Divine chirography clearly traced in black and
white as on their skin; and if this simile holds good, the yellow race forms a precious
page inscribed in hieroglyphics of gold! Ignoring the past career of a people,
missionaries claim that Christianity is a new religion, whereas, to my mind, it is an "old,
old story," which, if presented in intelligible words, - that is to say, if expressed in the
vocabulary familiar in the moral development of a people, - will find easy lodgment in
their hearts, irrespective of race or nationality. Christianity in its American or English
form - with more of Anglo-Saxon freaks and fancies than grace and purity of its Founder
- is a poor scion to graft on Bushido stock. Should the propagator of the new faith uproot
the entire stock, root, and branches, and plant the seeds of the Gospel on the ravaged
soil? Such a heroic process may be possible - in Hawaii, where, it is alleged, the Church
militant had complete success in amassing spoils of wealth itself, and in annihilating
the aboriginal race; such a process is most decidedly impossible in Japan - nay, it is a
process which Jesus Himself would never have adopted in founding His kingdom on
earth.
It behooves us to take more to heart the following words of a saintly man, devout
Christian, and profound scholar :

"Men have divided the world into heathen and Christian, without considering how
much good may have been hidden in the one or how much evil may have been mingled
with the other. They have compared the best part of themselves with the worst of their
neighbours, the ideal of Christianity with the corruption of Greece or of the East. They
have not aimed at impartiality, but have been contented to accumulate all that could be
said in praise of their own, and in dispraise of other forms of religion." *[Jowett,
Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, ii.]

But, whatever may be the error committed by individuals, there is little doubt that the
fundamental principle of the religion they profess is a power which we must take into
account in reckoning the future of Bushido, whose days seem to be already numbered.
Ominous signs are in the air that betoken its future. Not only signs, but redoubtable
forces are at work to threaten it.


CHAPTER XVII-to CONTENTS-

THE FUTURE OF BUSHIDO

FEW historical comparisons can be more judiciously made than between the Chivalry of
Europe and the Bushido of Japan, and, if history repeats itself, it certainly will do with
the fate of the latter what it did with that of the former. The particular and local causes
for the decay of chivalry which St. Palaye gives, have, of course, little application to
Japanese conditions; but the larger and more general causes that helped to undermine
knighthood and chivalry in and after the Middle Ages are as surely working for the
decline of Bushido.
One remarkable difference between the experience of Europe and of Japan is, that
whereas in Europe, when chivalry was weaned from feudalism and was adopted by the
Church, it obtained a fresh lease of life, in Japan no religion was large enough to
nourish it; hence, when the mother institution, feudalism, was gone, Bushido, left an
orphan, had to shift for itself. The present elaborate military organisation might take it
under its patronage, but we know that modem warfare can afford little room for its
continuous growth. Shintoism, which fostered it in its infancy, is itself superannuated.
The hoary sages of ancient China are being supplanted by the intellectual parvenu of
type of Bentham and Mill. Moral theories of a comfortable kind, nattering to the
Chauvinistic tendencies of the time, and therefore thought well adapted to the need of
this day, have been invented and propounded; but as yet we hear only their shrill voices
echoing through the columns of yellow journalism.
Principalities and powers are arrayed against the Precepts of Knighthood. Already, as
Veblen says, "the decay of the ceremonial code - or, as it is otherwise called, the
vulgarisation of life - among the industrial classes proper, has become one of the chief
enormities of latter - day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of delicate sensibilities."
The irresistible tide of triumphant democracy, which can tolerate no form or shape of
trust, - and Bushido was a trust organised by those who monopolised reserve capital of
intellect and culture, fixing the grades and value of moral qualities, - is alone powerful
enough to engulf the remnant of Bushido. The present societary forces are antagonistic
to petty class spirit, and chivalry is, as Freeman severely criticises, a class spirit.
Modern society, if it pretends to any unity, cannot admit "purely personal obligations
devised in the interests of an exclusive class."*[Norman Conquest, vo1. Y., P. 482.] Add
to this the progress of popular instruction, of industrial arts and habits, of wealth and
city-life, - then we can easily see that neither the keenest cuts of samurai sword nor the
sharpest shafts shot from Bushido's boldest bows can aught avail. The state built upon
the rock of Honour and fortified by the same - shall we call it the Ehrenstaat, or, after
the manner of Carlyle, the Heroarchy? - is fast falling into the hands of quibbling
lawyers and gibbering politicians armed with logic-chopping engines of war. The words
which a great thinker used in speaking of Theresa and Antigone may aptly be repeated
of the samurai, that "the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever
gone."
Alas for knightly virtues! alas for samurai pride! Morality ushered into the world with
the sound of bugles and drums, is destined to fade away as "the captains and the kings
depart. "
If history can teach us anything, the state built on martial virtues - be it a city like
Sparta or an Empire like Rome - can never make on earth a "continuing city." Universal
and natural as is the fighting instinct in man, fruitful as it has proved to be of noble
sentiments and manly virtues, it does not comprehend the whole man. Beneath the
instinct to fight there lurks a diviner instinct - to love. We have seen that Shintoism,
Mencius, and Wan Yang Ming, have all clearly taught it ; but Bushido and all other
militant types of ethics, engrossed doubtless, with questions of immediate practical
need, too often forgot duly to emphasise this fact. Life has grown larger in these latter
times. Callings nobler and broader than a warrior's claim our attention to-day. With an
enlarged view of life, with the growth of democracy, with better knowledge of other
peoples and nations, the Confucian idea of benevolence - dare I also add the Buddhist
idea of pity? - will expand into the Christian conception of love. Men have become more
than subjects, having grown to the estate of citizens, nay, they are more than citizens -
being men. Though war clouds hang heavy upon our horizon, we will believe that the
wings of the angel of peace can disperse them. The history of the world confirms the
prophecy that "the meek shall inherit the earth." A nation that sells its birthright of
peace, and backslides from the front rank of industrialism into the file of fillibusterism,
makes a poor bargain indeed !
When the conditions of society are so changed that they have become not only adverse
but hostile to Bushido, it is time for it to prepare for an honourable burial. It is just as
difficult to point out when chivalry dies, as to determine the exact time of its inception.
Dr. Miller says that chivalry was formally abolished in the year 1559, when Henry II. of
France was slain in a tournament. With us, the edict formally abolishing feudalism in
1870 was the signal to toll the knell of Bushido. The edict, issued five years later,
prohibiting the wearing of swords, rang out the old, "the unbought grace of life, the
cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise," it rang in
the new age of "sophisters, economists, and calculators."
It has been said that Japan won her late war with China by means of Murata guns and
Krupp cannon; it has been said the victory was the work of a modern school-system; but
these are less than half-truths. Does ever a piano, be it of the choicest workmanship of
Ehrbar or Steinway burst forth into the Rhapsodies of Liszt or the Sonatas of Beethoven,
without a master's hand? Or, if guns win battles, why did not Louis Napoleon beat the
Prussians with his Mitrailleuse, or the Spaniards with their Mausers the Filipinos,
whose arms were no better than the old-fashioned Remingtons? Needless to repeat what
has grown a trite saying, - that it is the spirit that quickeneth, without which the best of
implements profiteth but little. The most improved guns and cannon do not shoot of
their own accord; the most modern educational system does not make a coward a hero.
No! What won the battles on the Yalu, in Corea and Manchuria, were the ghosts of our
fathers, guiding our hands and beating in our hearts. They are not dead, those ghosts,
the spirits of our warlike ancestors. To those who have eyes to see, they are clearly
visible. Scratch a Japanese of the most advanced ideas, and he will show a samurai. The
great inheritance of honour, of valour, and of all martial virtues is, as Professor Cramb
very fitly expresses it, "but ours on trust, the fief inalienable of the dead and of the
generations to come," and the summons of the present is to guard this heritage, nor to
bate one jot of the ancient spirit; the summons of the future will be so to widen its scope
as to apply it in all walks and relations of life.
It has been predicted - and predictions have been corroborated by the events of the last
half-century - that the moral system of Feudal Japan, like its castles and its art mouries,
will crumble into dust, and new ethics rise phoenix-like to lead New Japan in her path
of progress. Desirable and probable as the fulfilment of such a prophecy is, we must not
forget that a phoenix rises only from its own ashes, and that it is not a bird of passage,
neither does it fly on pinions borrowed from other birds. "The Kingdom of God is within
you." It does not come rolling down the mountains, however lofty; it does not come
sailing across the seas, however broad. "God has granted," says the Koran, " to every
people a prophet in its own tongue." The seeds of the Kingdom, as vouched for and
apprehended by the Japanese mind, blossomed in Bushido. Now its days are closing -
sad to say, before its full fruition - and we turn in every direction for other sources of
sweetness and light, of strength and comfort, but among them there is as yet nothing
found to take its place. The profit-and-loss philosophy of utilitarians and materialists
finds favour among logic-choppers with half a soul. The only other ethical system which
is powerful enough to cope with utilitarianism and materialism is Christianity, in
comparison with which Bushido, it must be confessed, is like "a dimly burning wick"
which the Messiah was proclaimed not to quench, but to fan into a name. Like His
Hebrew precursors, the prophets - notably Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Habakkuk -
Bushido laid particular stress on the moral conduct of rulers and public men and of
nations, whereas the ethics of Christ, which deal almost solely with individuals and His
personal followers, will find more and more practical application as individualism, in its
capacity of a moral factor, grows in potency. The domineering, self-assertive, so-called
master-morality of Nietsche, itself akin in some respects to Bushido, is, if I am not
greatly mistaken, a passing phase or temporary reaction against what he terms, by
morbid distortion, the humble, self-denying slave-morality of the Nazarene.
Christianity and materialism (including utilitarianism) - or will the future reduce
them to still more archaic forms of Hebraism and Hellenism? - will divide the world
between them. Lesser systems of morals will ally themselves to either side for their
preservation. On which side will Bushido enlist? Having no set dogma or formula to
defend, it can afford to disappear as an entity; like the cherry blossom it is willing to die
at the first gust of the morning breeze. But a total extinction will never be its lot. Who
can say that stoicism is dead? It is dead as a system; but it is alive as a virtue: its
energy and vitality are still felt through many channels of life - in the philosophy of
Western nations, in the jurisprudence of all the civilised world. Nay, wherever man
struggles to raise himself above himself, wherever his spirit masters his flesh by his
own exertions, there we see the immortal discipline of Zeno at work.
Bushido as an independent code of ethics may vanish, but its power will not perish
from the earth ; its schools of martial prowess or civic honour may be demolished, but its
light and its glory will long survive their ruins. Like its symbolic flower, after it is blown
to the four winds, it will still bless mankind with the perfume with which it will enrich
life. Ages after, when its customaries will have been buried and its very name forgotten,
its odours will come floating in the air as from a far-off, unseen hill, "the way-side gaze
beyond"; - then in the beautiful language of the Quaker poet,
"The traveller owns the grateful sense
Of sweetness near, he knows not whence.
And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air."

END -to CONTENTS-


[The second edition,digitalised January the 17th,2001 by TERESA CORP.
Copyright all right reserved by TERESA CORP.Tokio Japan. Mail : info@teresa.co.jp]