Bushido: Lessons for the West

K R Bolton Review

Bushido: The Code of the Samurai

By Inazo Nitobe, first ed. 1899. Reprinted 2006 by Sweetwater Press, USA. Despite the time lapse between the republication of this book

Bushido

, and its last publication in 1905 in its tenth edition, the English prose has remained immensely readable for the contemporary audience. Inanzo Nitobe was during his day one of Japan’s leading scholars and one of the best known in the Western world, having married an American Quaker. While it might seem a paradox that a man of peace such as Nitobe would write about a martial way of life, this is more due to the misunderstanding by the Westerner of what Bushido is, clouded by Japan’s role as an adversary during World War II, whilst shortly before Japan had been considered an ally of the English-speaking world

. For the ethos of Bushido is far deeper than merely a ‘soldiers creed’. It is the Japanese equivalent to the Medieval Knightly ethos at its point of highest mystical idealism. Like the Western chivalrous ideal, the Bushido ideal might not have always been upheld at its most sublime, but Bushido is analogous to the knightly ethos of the West and the chivalric codes of other cultures in their prime.

Bushido

the book will therefore be of interest to the ‘perennial traditionalist’ and to the cultural morphologist. The chivalric ethos of Medieval Japan, like the chivalric ethos among the Christian Crusaders and their Islamic adversaries, is another example of a similarity of outlook common to certain castes (as distinct form their debased forms as ‘classes’) at the cycles of their particular cultures when those cultures are still a reflection of the metaphysical and have not succumbed to the materialistic. It is what the Hindu

ksyatraya

call

dharma

, the cosmic duty of the warrior, and this Hindu equivalent is described in the

Bagavadh Gita

.

As for Bushido, the word literally translates as ‘Way of the Warrior’, the code of life developed among the Samurai. With Nitobe’s cogent description of the inner meaning of this to the West, one is also reminded of the cogency by which Yukio Mishima described the Samurai doctrine of

Hagakure

, although Nitobe the scholar is not possessed of the angst of Mishima the alienated militarist in post-World War II Japan.

Nitobe himself was born into the Samurai caste in 1862. Although his grandfather and father were rice farmers, both practiced the martial arts, which were imparted to Nitobe as a youngster

. Educated in Japan, Germany and the USA, Nitobe became an international scholar of note, garnering five doctorates. Nitobe converted to

1

Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902.

2

The warrior caste in Hindu society.

3

Cosmic duty; also reflecting one’s place in the divine social order, an attitude with analogues in both Vedic India and the guilds of Medieval Europe, for example.

4

A dialogue between Arjuna the Divine Archer and Lord Krsna on the eve of battle, regarding the divine duty of the warrior.

5

Yukio Mishima on Hagakure: the Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan