It is a work that was published in 1900 and has influenced several generations (Generic photo).
The Last Samurai, a great Hollywood epic, tells the story of Katsumoto, a rebellious samurai who dedicates his life to fighting forces he believes are corrupting traditional values in Japan.
As seen through the eyes of United States Army Captain Nathan Algren (who is hired by the Imperial Army of Japan to help fight the rebels, but is held captive by them), Katsumoto and his group of samurai rebels personify the honorable warrior: fearless, dedicated to his duty, hardworking and disciplined, but also polite and benevolent to his captive.
After witnessing the nobility of the samurai, Algren changes allegiance to aid Katsumoto on his fateful mission.
From Hollywood blockbusters to Japanese television dramas, the samurai has been portrayed over the years as a model of physical excellence and moral rectitude, for whom honor and loyalty are more valuable than life itself.
This image of the samurai, although not historically accurate, is deeply rooted in popular imagination due in large part to a small book written in English by Inazo Nitobe, a early 20th century.
“Bushido: The Soul of Japan,” which was first published in 1900 and became an international bestseller at the time, has just been republished as part of the series. Great Ideas from Penguin publishing house.
Although it is one of the countless books written on bushido (“The Way of the Warrior”), Nitobe’s book remains the most influential source for those seeking to understand a value system that continues to permeate many facets of Japanese society today.
Be nice
Through his book, Nitobe, a converted agricultural economist, educator, diplomat, and Quaker who was undersecretary general of the League of Nations between 1919 and 1929, tried to explain to Westerners (including his American Quaker wife, Mary) the moral values that underpin Japanese culture.
Representation of a samurai dating from 1860.
Nitobe attributed these values to bushido, which he defined as the code of moral principles of the samurai.
BushidoAccording to the author, he instructed the samurai to have a strong sense of integrity and courage to execute that justice. He preached benevolence and courtesy, truthfulness, honor, and loyalty to a higher authority.
“Sense of honor, which implies a vivid awareness of personal dignity and worth, could not fail to characterize the samurai … “Nitobe wrote.
The reality was somewhat different and historians have criticized Nitobe’s description of the samurai as very romanticized.
“Samurai and daimyo (feudal lords) didn’t really live a life of honor and loyalty,” says Sven Saaler, professor of modern Japanese history at Sophia University in Tokyo. “If the opportunity arose, they would also kill their master and take his place.”
The context
In his seminal work, Nitobe, who came from a family of samurai, also stated that the values of the samurai were shared by everyone in Japan: “(The) spirit of the bushido it permeated all social classes, “he wrote.
“Chivalry is a flower, no less indigenous to the land of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom,” Nitobe wrote.
Contrary to Nitobe’s claim, in the Edo period (1603-1868), the samurai were vilified by abuse your privileges in a time when his martial skills had become obsolete due to two centuries of social stability.
However, Nitobe’s goal in writing his book was not to provide a historically accurate account of samurai, but to show the world that Japan had a similar value system to Christian morality.
Nitobe made constant references to European philosophy and literature and compared the bushido with the gallantry of the european gentlemen.
“Chivalry is a flower, no less indigenous to the land of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom,” Nitobe wrote.
According to Saaler, Nitobe sought countering racism and fears in the West facing the “yellow danger” shaping the image of the samurai and, by extension, the Japanese, not only as brave but also as chivalrous.
Only four years before the publication of his book, Japan had emerged victorious in its war against China from 1894 to 1895. That military success, which stunned western powers of the time, it was quickly followed by Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905.
The rise of a nation
Nitobe’s book aimed to counter fears that Japan would one day become a threat to Europe and “build a very positive image of Japan as a militarily strong but civilized country that behaved in a civilized way in war,” he explains. Saaler.
In many film and television productions the samurai is noted for his heroism and righteousness.
According to Eri Hotta, historian and author of Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, the book was also “an attempt to place Japan in equal conditions with the best of the Western powers so that he could claim the right to own colonies. “
The international acclaim his book received suggests that Nitobe achieved his goal of documenting Japanese values and thus enhancing the country’s image in the West.
And it appeared at a time when interest in Japan was growing: after its military victories over China and Russia, the work found an avid audience among Western readers who were impressed and perplexed by it. amazing rise of japan.
For Western readers, courage, moral rectitude, and other values of the bushido described in Nitobe’s book provided a compelling explanation of how a small, and hitherto unknown country, could defeat your much bigger neighbors and apparently more powerful.
The impact on the US
“Nitobe’s book offered a way to explain the source of Japan’s growing power,” says Lance Gatling, author of The KanO Chronicles, book (to be published soon) about Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo.
Image of a samurai in her armor, in Japan, in 1882.
“It was one of the first Western books on Japanese culture and it sold very much“.
Gatling found a copy of Bushido in the Arkansas Public Library, in the United States, which had been printed in 1904, just four years after its initial publication.
The appeal of bushido as a moral code it even caught the attention of the then President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who was an enthusiastic judo practitioner.
In a letter to the diplomat and politician Kentaro Kaneko, dated April 13, 1904, Roosevelt wrote: “I was very impressed the small volume about Bushido. I have learned not a little from what I have read about the fine samurai spirit. “
Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, wrote that one of the goals of the Boy Scouts’ plan was “to revive some of the standards of the gentlemen of yesteryear, which contributed as much to the moral tone of our race as … Bushido … has done and continues to do so for Japan.”
Inaccurate
In contrast to the enthusiastic reception it received abroad, the work was widely criticizeda in Japan for being inaccurate, according to Oleg Benesch, author of the book Inventing the Way of the Samurai.
Nitobe’s work helped idealize the image of the samurai outside of Japan.
However, his international success was celebrated in Japan, and by planting the idea that Japan’s moral rectitude gave it the right to join the privileged group of western colonial nations, Nitobe’s book “made the Japanese believe that everyone was heir to higher values and that they had to make sure you correct the wrong, “Hotta said.
“It was important to Japan’s self-image.”
After World War II, the bushido, which was associated with Japan’s militarism, became “a target of popular resentment” within Japan, Benesch wrote.
More recently, the bushido has experienced renewed interest, and Nitobe’s book gained international recognition again in the 1980s, as the world sought to understand the source of the rapid economic advances and technology of modern Japan.
Lee Teng-hui, the recently deceased former President of Taiwan, reminded Japanese audiences of the book’s importance in a 2006 memoir, detailing how the book influenced his own life and thinking.
However, aside from those intermittent bursts of interest, Nitobe and his former best-seller are not all that household names in Japan.
Even those who remember Nitobe most often identify him as the face of the 5,000 yen bill that circulated between 1984 and 2004.
Confucianism
Many of the values he identified as the teachings of the bushido: courtesy towards others, great respect for personal honor, self-control and loyalty to a higher authority remain central to the Japanese view of good behavior.
They call the Japanese soccer team: “Blue Samurai”.
He bushido It is widely relied upon in sports, with the Japanese national baseball team nicknamed “Samurai Japan” and the men’s national soccer team called “Samurai Blue.”
But the prevalence of bushido in Japanese society it is a reflection of the continued influence of Confucianism rather than Nitobe’s book, according to Yukiko Yuasa, an assistant professor at Teikyō Heisei University in Tokyo.
“Many of the teachings in Nitobe’s book are part of Japanese behavior, so people don’t have to read the book to learn about those values,” he says.
However, Nitobe’s book continues to inform the world of the values that remain fundamental to Japanese society.
Therefore, “Bushido: The Soul of Japan” can be expected to help the world understand Japanese culture for many years to come.
This article was originally published in English on The Collection of the BBC and you can read it here
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