Customer Reviews

Bushido: The Spirit of the Samurai (Shambhala Library)

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Inazo Nitobe (1862-1933) was a Japanese author with a unique perspective; he was an educator and a Quaker. When queried about the basis of morality in Japan, he thought long and hard on the subject. His answer was that Bushido was the Soul of Japan, and from that idea flowed this book.

In this wonderful book, Mr. Nitobe explains Bushido to the Western observer. Using the Bible and other Western literature as examples of common points of reference, he explains 1) the origins and sources of Bushido, 2) its character and teachings, 3) its influence, and 4) its continuity and permanence.

So, if you are interested in Bushido in particular, or Japan in general, then I strongly recommend this book. Even though it was first published in 1905, it makes a wonderful introduction to the Western reader. I highly recommend this book!

Nitobe Sensei did an incredible job of putting into words concepts that are very difficult for all to understand, not only foreigners (non-Japanese.) He also did it as a Christian scholar in a non-Christian land during times of great change in Japanese society. It is a wonderful cross-cultural and cross-theological comparison between Christian and non-Christian belief systems. There's a saying about being able to explain things that are Zen. "If you can explain it, it isn't Zen," if I may paraphrase. Zen and Bushido are inextricably linked and Mr. Nitobe managed to put it into some sort of framework that we could easily understand. Not all things will make sense to the first time reader. When you read it again and again, the things that are true for you, you will clearly understand. As with many discussions of Zen and/or Bushido, it has to become a part of you to be understandable. This doesn't mean you have to pick up a sword or take up calligraphy, it means that you have to see the truth of it in yourself, no matter what you do or where you are. There are universal truths here. Even when you understand, you may not be able to put into words your understanding. That is the time when this book will become most indispensible.

Nitobe's book is an excellent read for anyone who wants a comprehensive look at the pulse of what drives the Japanese to produce and achieve in war and economics. His writing style is clean and practical rather than sophisticated or complicated. He emphasizes the virtues and concepts that make up the Bushido ethnic.

This book is a superb companion piece to Ruth Benedict's sociological analysis on Japanese culture (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, printed near or after the Second World War). I strongly encourage anyone interested in the formative aspects of Japanese thought to read this book.

This book is great for those who are unfamiliar, with the way of life of the samurai, and the population as a whole in fuedal Japan. Siting similarities with other cultures great histories, it provides a contrast which brings better understanding to the subject. I would also suggest Zen and Japanese Culture by Daisetz T.Suzuki, for an even deeper look into the culture of Japan and its roots.

No, really. Bushido is not a science and it's not easy to understand. It is made up of many parts, each designed to carefully balance each other. Justice, Courage and Loyalty are just some of the ingredients needed to be added in just the right amounts. Too much can be as bad as too little. A man worried just about Justice might forget about Benevolence and a man worried about Honor might forget about Politeness.
Bushido is not like a coat, that you can put on and take off, but a way of life. A Master Chef does not just practice his art on the weekend - and neither does a Samurai.

I picked this little gem up in Kyoto a few years back, and was glad I did. Nitobe attempts to describe to a Western mindset the essence of Bushido. He brings up many comparisons and parallels between the Japanese and Western culture, in an attempt to bridge the gap of understanding between them.

However, with all due respect to this classic, it still falls short of actually DEFINING Bushido. Several examples and anecdotes are set fourth, and scenarios involving Bushido conduct are described. However, in the end, the reader is left with a somewhat vague feeling, as if something is still missing.

This is not a book of code in a sense of providing the reader a set of rules, idioms, and behaviors to follow. If you approach this text with some pre-concevied notion of learning the ways of the warrior, you will find yourself disappointed.

To get a clearer understanding of Bushido, should you be so inclined, I would recommend the Hagakure as supplementary reading.

Quite a few studies of the samurai ethos floating about by now, but I would consider this one of the two or three must-reads in the field, along with Tsunetomo Yamamoto's book.

Despite what the copyright date says, this was written in 1905 by a renowned scholar in the field (a Japanese Christian), originally in English. Unlike Yamamoto, the author is fluent with the history of Western philosophy and approaches his subject from that angle.

Unlike other samurai books, it's not like this is a collection of advice on how to be an honorable samurai. The whole thing seems to be an attempt at a historical monograph addressed to a Western student. The author states his goals in chapter one: "My attempt is . . . 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."

It is quite elegantly written. Take this, from the first paragraph:

"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."

Fortunately, the whole thing isn't written in this vein, but it is carefully written.

One thing worth nothing: the book came out in 1905, when a newly industrializing Japan had just bonked the Russian giant over the head. As a result of this, Nitobe takes quite the high tone with the samurai tradition, never really looking at its dark side. No, it is the source of everything great in Japanese culture.

There are reports of American soldiers taking over villages in the Pacific during WWII, in which the women and children (their men having been killed), rather than submit to the dishonor of being captured in battle, hurled themselves and their infants over cliffs, to the astonishment of the American GIs.

Things like this were also a by-product of bushido, are they not?

However, if you feel that, in any meaningful discussion of a chivalric tradition, unsavory aspects such as this need to be addressed, then you won't find what you're looking for in Nitobe's book.

Bushido has become my way of life because of the author and this book.The author writes with such eloquence and descriptive style that I could only hope to oe day achieve what Dr. Nitobe has written. I beleive this book should be required reading for every young warrior because its didactic tone change my life and gave me an epifany on life. This is a book that is important to all aspects of life and gives a well rounded opinion of the contrast to western thought concerning Bushido. I fully recommend this book for all young upcoming warriors and intellects.

Japan is a story full of beautiful lies. Likewise, Inazo Nitobe's "Bushido: the Soul of Japan" is all about beautification and cultural namedropping, far from a good scholarly work on samurai warrior ethic and aesthetic. Yet it was a timely romantic attempt to reshape samurai folklore into a state folklore, at a time when Japan was reinventing itself as a culturally sanctioned nation-state in emulation of Western imperial aspirations, in the midst of the age of invented traditions, which included Victorian morality and royalty, America's Manifest Destiny, Hindu Renaissance and the Meiji Restoration of Japan itself, where young samurai wonks recycled the long-forsaken imperial divinity by painting a halo over his head.

Nitobe's "Bushido" gave birth to a samurai-faced knightly superior-man, whose existential priority was loyalty and duty, who practiced justice, decency and fairness, with high cultural sensibility as to care for mind-tuning tea ceremony, to rejoice at the seasonal view of cherry blossom and even to feel the inanimate spirit of the sword, and more important, with a heart of steel, well disciplined, well poised, to sacrifice himself for a cause larger than life, much like a Victorian gentleman who assumed the nobility of noblesse oblige.

Too beautiful to believe, this Nitobe's samurai discourse reads more like a self-ingratiating Machiavellian scheme, ingratiating himself to Japan, while ingratiating Japan to the West, particularly the Anglo-Saxon West, then bent on reinventing itself with the romantic ideals of medieval knighthood, while exercising asymmetrical violence on colonial subjects in the name of civilizing mission, with much social Darwinian preoccupation with fitness and superiority, all of which Japan and Nitobe himself, as a scholar and a colonial planner, learned and emulated - with a great degree of craftiness and craftsmanship.

Nitobe's samurai discourse was an illicit attempt, like matching a dovetail with a dog tail. He tried to match the unidimensional samurai principle with the multidimensional Western military culture and philosophy by stretching the samurai template thin and wide until it covered all aspects of Japanese tradition and society, ending up with a confusing message: that the bushido is about all the admirable things Japanese. To connect Japan and the West, his glue was the power of association, not necessarily scholarly insight, as in his comparison of the rose and the cherry blossom.

Further, his method of textual reinforcement was an excessive, almost compulsory, use of namedropping, revoking more than 140 names of Western cultural eminence, plus 20 Japanese names, including government big wigs. The overall effect is the appearance of dazzling endorsement from Western intellect, contemporary and classical, over a decontextualized, dehistoricized discourse on samurai culture and philosophy - the genesis of a modern myth of samurai's international stature and his high moral sensibility, complete with a selfless, self-immolating resolution.

In reality, samurai's moral history is one of self-deception and self-veneration, part of the larger millenniums-long history of contact and conquest, where hunter-gatherer prequel lost to soldier-farmer sequel. Their moral authority, first the emperor, later the shogunate, had never renounced its "barbarian-subduing" tradition. The worship of martial prowess, in the form of cultic veneration of bladed weapons, from archeological stone daggers to state of the art steel swords, was the core principle of a bloody-minded soldier-farmer society.

Predatory warfare was the norm well into the medieval eras; head-hunting brutality overshadowed self-immolating nobility; tricky foul play prevailed over "fair play." For the most part, beautiful samurai stories were later peace-time embellishment, through the mouths of samurai-turned storytellers. Similarly, the teachings of samurai philosophy and swordsmanship secrets were the morning-after sophistication through Zen-driven brainstorming, mind-emptying, mind-mastering, masterminding strategy.

Confucian scholars would criticize samurai as lowlifes committed to robbery - a gangsta culture in today's language, while nativist ideologues, anti-Confucian and anti-Chinese, boosted the samurai ethos under the "Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians" slogan. For them, Japan with samurai macho was a true central kingdom to replace a meek culture-centric China. The Meiji Restoration refurbished the ancient imperium, while dismantling the samurai institution altogether. In the late 19th century, however, the old samurai idiosyncrasy came back, with a new face now challenging the West, under the generic name of bushido.

The modern bushido was a culture mix of everything Japanese, from the imperial veneration to samurai's soldierly ethos to Buddhist and Confucian practices, with a singular emphasis on selfless self-immolation as Japanese spiritual tradition, which was skillfully posited against a so-called self-centric, materialistic Western civilization - a toxic pattern of binary thinking that continued to haunt the Japanese ever since, even after the defeat in World War II.

Nitobe's "Bushido," although written and published abroad, was apparently under the influence of the bushido "boom" of the time, which included not only the journal publication, but the publication of old samurai stories and the renewed interests in the old popular entertainment of samurai storytelling and theatricals. Nitobe's "Bushido" text reveals his subtextual use of the prevailing samurai narrative, when he recounts his favorite samurai saga, where the overall Victorian quality of orality disrupts to give way to some extraneous quality of Japanese storytelling orality.

Nitobe's "Bushido" was indeed a romantic attempt to raise Japan's street-level folklore narrative to the heights of Western philosophical and theological discourse. The same audacity helped the wartime intellect to further ennoble and embolden the exercise of "utopian violence," with their "world-class" theories of Japanese civilization, along with the gaga publication of samurai stories and dramas, most of which came down to us through endless remaking and recasting.

Nitobe's "Bushido," still celebrated with overt canonization and retro-publication, is a living evidence of the inner history of modern Japan, where the soul of a nation was invented more than once, on the hazy ground of semi-fiction, by reference to the past, by comparison with the West, to conform, not to history, but to the needs of the moment, with high ideals and aesthetic sophistication, but, alas, without serious soul-searching. This is a story of window shopping and window dressing, ending up yet again with a soulless nation still dreaming: We are Samurai Japan.

I picked up a copy of this book a few months ago in part because I had just been employed by a Japanese company and I felt it was in my best interest to deepen my understanding of Bushido as it is still an important part of Japanese culture and more specifically corporate culture. Inazo Nitobe's treatment of Bushido is unfortunately shallow. He innumerates a number of "virtues" that are important in Bushido but does not dig very deeply into them. After reading about half of the book I feel that I do not have a deeper understanding of some of the peculiar quirks of Japanese culture.

If one is looking to deepen their understanding of Bushido I would suggest Sir George Sansom's three volume set "A History of Japan", as it is yet the standard in Japanese historical studies. Also, "Training the Samurai Mind" is a wonderful collection of translated primary documents written by samurai who lived primarily during the Edo period. Also, Miyamoto Musashi's "Book of Five Rings" is another useful book for those interested in samurai and Bushido.

If one is simply interested in depending their understanding of Japanese culture I suggest undertaking a study of Confucianism, Buddhism, Shinto, and of course Sansom's books. Nitobe's book is unfortunately a giant waste of time.