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Bushido, the
Soul of Japan
By

Inazo Nitobé

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1
Contents
Bushido, the Soul of Japan .................................................... 1
Contents .................................................................................... 2
PREFACE ..................................................................................... 4
PREFACE TO THE TENTH AND REVISED EDITION ...............7
BUSHIDO AS AN ETHICAL SYSTEM. ....................................... 9
SOURCES OF BUSHIDO, ........................................................... 14
RECTITUDE OR JUSTICE, ........................................................ 21

2
 TO MY BELOVED UNCLE
TOKITOSHI OTA
WHO TAUGHT ME TO REVERE THE PAST
AND
TO ADMIRE THE DEEDS OF THE SAMURAI
I DEDICATE
THIS LITTLE BOOK

—"That wayOver 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 twoSeen from the unbroken desert
either side?And then (to bring in fresh philosophy)What if the
breaks themselves should prove at lastThe most consummate of
contrivancesTo 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.

3
 PREFACE
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,[1] the moral ideas of present Japan are a sealed volume.
[1]
Pronounced Boó-shee-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.
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

4
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 towards
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 maybe 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 and for

5
the characteristically Japanese design made by her for the cover of
this book.
INAZO NITOBE.
Malvern, Pa., Twelfth Month, 1899.

6
 PREFACE
TO THE TENTH AND REVISED
EDITION
Since its first publication in Philadelphia, more than six years ago,
this little book has had an unexpected history. The Japanese
reprint has passed through eight editions, the present thus being
its tenth appearance in the English language. Simultaneously with
this will be issued an American and English edition, through the
publishing-house of Messrs. George H. Putnam's Sons, of New
York.
In the meantime, Bushido has been translated into Mahratti by
Mr. Dev of Khandesh, into German by Fräulein Kaufmann of
Hamburg, into Bohemian by Mr. Hora of Chicago, into Polish by
the Society of Science and Life in Lemberg,—although this Polish
edition has been censured by the Russian Government. It is now
being rendered into Norwegian and into French. A Chinese
translation is under contemplation. A Russian officer, now a
prisoner in Japan, has a manuscript in Russian ready for the
press. A part of the volume has been brought before the
Hungarian public and a detailed review, almost amounting to a
commentary, has been published in Japanese. Full scholarly notes
for the help of younger students have been compiled by my friend
Mr. H. Sakurai, to whom I also owe much for his aid in other
ways.

7
I have been more than gratified to feel that my humble work has
found sympathetic readers in widely separated circles, showing
that the subject matter is of some interest to the world at large.
Exceedingly flattering is the news that has reached me from
official sources, that President Roosevelt has done it undeserved
honor by reading it and distributing several dozens of copies
among his friends.
In making emendations and additions for the present edition, I
have largely confined them to concrete examples. I still continue
to regret, as I indeed have never ceased to do, my inability to add
a chapter on Filial Piety, which is considered one of the two
wheels of the chariot of Japanese ethics—Loyalty being the other.
My inability is due rather to my ignorance of the Western
sentiment in regard to this particular virtue, than to ignorance of
our own attitude towards it, and I cannot draw comparisons
satisfying to my own mind. I hope one day to enlarge upon this
and other topics at some length. All the subjects that are touched
upon in these pages are capable of further amplification and
discussion; but I do not now see my way clear to make this 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 reading of the proof-sheets, for
helpful suggestions, and, above all, for her constant
encouragement.
I.N.
Kyoto,
Fifth Month twenty-second, 1905.

8
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, 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.[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, 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

9
would likewise invite the Western historical and ethical student to
the study of chivalry in the Japan of the present.
[2]
History Philosophically Illustrated, (3rd Ed. 1853), Vol. II, p. 2.
Enticing as is a 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

10
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 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 (Buké 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 fountain head." 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 ascendency of Yoritomo, late in the twelfth century. As,
however, in England, we find the social elements of feudalism far

11
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 comitati, 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-ké 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 honor and great privileges, and
correspondingly great responsibilities, they soon felt the need of a
common standard of behavior, especially as they were always on a
belligerent footing and belonged to different clans. Just as
physicians limit competition among themselves by professional
courtesy, just as lawyers sit in courts of honor in cases of violated
etiquette, so must also warriors possess some resort for final
judgment on their misdemeanors.
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

12
military and civic virtues? We smile (as if we had outgrown it!) 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? This desire of Tom's 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."[3] "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 interests had operated alone, without higher moral
support, how far short of chivalry would the ideal of knighthood
have 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

13
 SOURCES OF BUSHIDO,
of which 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 Dhyâna, which
"represents human effort to reach through meditation zones of
thought beyond the range of verbal expression."[4] Its method is
contemplation, and its purport, as 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."
[3]
Ruskin was one of the most gentle-hearted and peace loving men
that ever lived. Yet he believed in war with all the fervor of a
worshiper 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

14
war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war
and expired in peace."
[4]
Lafcadio Hearn, Exotics and Retrospectives, p. 84.
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 God-like 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 worshiped 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-

15
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 more 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 Culturstaat—he is the
bodily representative of Heaven on earth, blending in his person
its power and its mercy. If what M. Boutmy[5] 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.
[5]
The English People, p. 188.
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."[6] 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 framework of national instinct and race
feelings, Shintoism never pretends to a systematic philosophy or a
rational theology. This religion—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

16
scarcely any credenda, furnishing them at the same time with
agenda of a straightforward and simple type.
[6]
"Feudal and Modern Japan" Vol. I, p. 183.
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 recognized 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

17
learning to an ill-smelling vegetable that must be boiled and
boiled before it is fit for use. A man who has read a little smells a
little pedantic, and a man who has read much 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 learner 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 as 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
found 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 recognize 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[7] of his says—"The lord of
heaven and earth, of all living beings, dwelling in the heart of

18
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.
[7]
Miwa Shissai.
Thus, whatever the sources, the essential principles which
Bushido imbibed from them 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

19
age, formed from these gleanings anew and unique type of
manhood. An acute French savant, M. de la Mazelière, 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 civilizations 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 plains; 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
Mazelière writes, let us now address ourselves. I shall begin with

20
 RECTITUDE OR JUSTICE,
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 learning 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 gentle accomplishments, the epithet

21
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 Valor, another
martial virtue. But before proceeding to speak of Valor, 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 expected 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 some other 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

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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
harbored under its wings every sort of sophistry and hypocrisy. It
might easily—have been turned into a nest of cowardice, if
Bushido had not a keen and correct sense of

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