Nitobe - The samurai way

Bushido: The Soul of Japan
by Inazo Nitob

The Book of Five Rings
by Miyamoto Musashi

Start Publishing LLC

Copyright 2012 by Start Publishing LLC

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First Start Publishing eBook edition October 2012

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ISBN 978-1-62793-183-0

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 learned in my childhood days were not given in schools; and not until I began to analyze the different elements 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 the 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, 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 I 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.

Inazo Nitob

Malvern, Pa., Twelfth Month, 1899

Since it was first brought into print, six years ago, this little book has had a history that was unexpected and that has been richer in results than could have been anticipated.

The Japanese reprint has passed through nine editions. The present edition is issued simultaneously, in New York and London for the use of English-speaking readers throughout the world. In the meantime, the book has been translated into Mahratti by Mr. Dev of Khandia, into German by Frulein Kaufmann of Hamburg, into Bohemian by Mr. Hora of Chicago, and into Polish by the Society of Science and Life in Lemberg. Versions in Norwegian and French are also in preparation, and a Chinese translation is in plan. Certain chapters of Bushido have also been brought before Hungarian and Russian readers in their respective languages. A detailed review, almost amounting to a commentary, has been published in Japanese. Full, scholarly notes for the help of the younger students of English, have been compiled by my friend, Mr. Sakurai, to whom I also owe much in other ways.

I have been more than gratified to feel that my little treatise has found sympathetic readers in widely separated circles, showing that the subject-matter is of interest to the world at large. Exceedingly flattering is the news (which reaches me from a trustworthy source) that President Roosevelt has done me the honour of reading the treatise and of distributing copies among his friends.

In revising the present edition, I have confined the additions chiefly to concrete examples. I regret my inability to add a chapter on Filial Piety, which is considered one of the two wheels of the chariot of Japanese ethicsLoyalty being the other. My difficulty in writing such a chapter is due rather to my ignorance of the Western sentiment in regard to this particular virtue than to ignorance of our own attitude toward it, and I cannot draw comparisons satisfying to my own mind. I hope some day to enlarge upon this and other topics. All the subjects which are touched upon in these pages are, of course, capable of further application and discussion; but I do not see my way clear to make the present volume larger than it is.

This preface would be incomplete and unjust, if I were to omit the debt I owe to my wife for her painstaking reading of the manuscript, for helpful suggestions and, above all, for her constant encouragement.

I. N.

Koishikawa, Tokyo,

January 10, 1905.

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

It argues a sad defect of information concerning the Far East, when so erudite a scholar as Dr. George Miller did not hesitate to affirm that chivalry, or any other similar institution, has never existed either among the nations of antiquity or among the modern Orientals. Such ignorance, however, is amply excusable, as the third edition of the good Doctors 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 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.