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    Bushido: The Classic Portrait of Samurai Martial Culture
    Bushido: The Classic Portrait of Samurai Martial Culture
    Bushido: The Classic Portrait of Samurai Martial Culture
    Ebook145 pages2 hours

    Bushido: The Classic Portrait of Samurai Martial Culture

    By Inazo Nitobe

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Japanese Bushido has played a major role in shaping modern Japanese society as well as the various modern Japanese martial arts within Japan and internationally.

    Bushido: The Classic Portrait of Samurai Martial Culture written by Inazo Nitobe, one of Japan's foremost scholars, thoroughly explores each of these values and explains how they differ from their western counterparts.

    First published in 1905 as Bushido: The Soul of Japan, this samurai guide reveals the very essence of samurai warriors and Japanese culture and represents one of the most popular and authentic depictions of Japanese samurai philosophy.

    Chapters include:
    • Bushido as an Ethical System
    • Sources of Bushido
    • Honor
    • The Education and Training of a Samurai
    • Self-Control
    • The Influence of Bushido
    • The Future of Bushido
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTuttle Publishing
    Release dateJul 5, 2011
    ISBN9781462900701
    Bushido: The Classic Portrait of Samurai Martial Culture

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    Reviews for Bushido

    3.5/5

    122 ratings3 reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      The result is a very interesting book.

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

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

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

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

    Book preview

    Bushido - Inazo Nitobe

    CHAPTER I

    Bushido as an Ethical System

    Chivalry is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom; nor is it a dried-up specimen of an antique virtue preserved in the herbarium of our history. It is still a living object of power and beauty among us, and if it assumes no tangible shape or form, it none the less scents the moral atmosphere and makes us aware that we are still under its potent spell. The conditions of society which brought it forth and nourished it have long disappeared; but as those far-off stars which once were and are not, still continue to shed their rays upon us, so the light of chivalry, which was a child of feudalism, still illuminates our moral path, surviving its mother institution. It is a pleasure to me to reflect upon this subject in the language of Burke, who uttered the well-known touching eulogy over the neglected bier of its European prototype.

    It argues a sad defect of information concerning the Far East, when so erudite a scholar as Dr. George Miller did not hesitate to affirm that chivalry, or any other similar institution, has never existed either among the nations of antiquity or among the modem Orientals.² Such ignorance, however, is amply excusable, as the third edition of the good Doctor’s work appeared the same year that Commodore Perry was knocking at the portals of our exclusivism. More than a decade later, about the time that our feudalism was in the last throes of existence, Karl Marx, writing his Kapital, 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 Ethnology 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 Gemüth signifies, or who does not feel the difference between the two words verbally so closely allied as the English gentleman and the French

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