Death, Honor, and Loyality: The Bushidō Ideal

Author(s): G. Cameron Hurst III

Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 40, No. 4, Understanding Japanese Values (Oct., 1990),
pp. 511-527
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
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G. Cameron Hurst III Death, honor, and loyality: The bushido ideal

I was traveling in Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong when the Showa Emperor
passed away, and I must admit (as an American historian of Japan trained in
what might be called the "Reischauer era"), I was somewhat surprised at the
vitriolic reaction of so many people, in both the East and the West, toward
any signs of Japanese sympathy for this man, who many still regard as ulti-
mately responsible for Japan's war crimes. A full-page advertisement in the
New York Times on February 16th by the Committee on the Case Against
Hirohito, for example, referred to him as the "other Hitler" and called for his
condemnation in a court of world opinion.'
The emotional reaction to the emperor's death and funeral protocol, as
well as discussions with many who were not Japan specialists, impressed upon
me once again the widespread belief that the behavior of Japanese forces in
World War II was conditioned by adherence to the old samurai code of ethics
called bushidoa, which emphasized unflinching loyalty to the emperor, even
to the point of willingly sacrificing one's life, by suicide if necessary. Bushid6
in many Western minds, as represented, for example, in Baron Russell's The
Knights of Bushido, is intimately linked to the rise of Japanese imperialism,
kamikazeb attacks, suicide charges, and prisoner-of-war atrocities.2 That this
is a historical perversion-that even if there was a modern bushido that func-
tioned as a normative ethical code for Japanese troops, it might in fact be a
modern creation, with no real link to any Japanese traditional set of ethics,
real or imagined-is seldom considered.
I hope to do two things in this article. First, I want to discuss the concept of
bushido and the term itself, for both the Western and Japanese understand-
ings of this term and the associated set of moral values have been terribly
distorted in the written record in both countries and as well by the events of
modern history. Then I want to examine the often linked concepts of loyalty,
honor, and death in medieval and early modern Japan to see if in fact there is
any consistent view of them, specifically a view to which the label bushido can
be attached.
NITOBEINAZO AND BUSHIDO

One wonders whether the modern Japanese themselves, let alone those of us
in the West, would ever have heard of bushid6 had it not been for the efforts
of Nitobe Inazo (1862-1933). In almost every way imaginable, Nitobe was the
least qualified Japanese of his age to have been informing anyone of Japan's
history and culture. The Christian son of a late Tokugawa samurai from
Morioka who was educated largely in English at special schools early in the
Meiji era, Nitobe was one of the "Generation of Masters of English"3 who

G. Cameron Hurst III is professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Direc-
tor of the Centerfor East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas.
Philosophy East & West, volume 40, no. 4 (October 1990). ? by University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

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512 Hurst

could communicate with foreigners to a degree that even the most ardent
exponents of kokusaikac ("internationalization") today would envy. Here
was a man far more familiar with the themes and metaphors of classical West-
ern literature than those of his native Japan, far more certain of the dates and
events in Western than in Japanese history, who nonetheless set out to present
to the West a view of the ethics of premodern Japan that has been accepted
rather uncritically ever since. Indeed, Nitobe's Bushido: The Soul of Japan
became not only an international bestseller, but served as the cornerstone for
the construction of an edifice of ultranationalism that led Japan down the path
to a war she could not win.
Nitobe was born in 1862 during the turbulence of the bakumatsudera, but
almost immediately embarked upon an educational career that in a sense iso-
lated him from the main events of the age. He began the study of English at
age nine and, after several years of study in Tokyo, went off at fifteen to
school in Hokkaido, where he became a Christian and studied primarily agri-
cultural economics, in English, from Americans.4 Hokkaido was only just
becoming a real part of Japan, so Nitobe was essentially isolated spatially,
culturally, religiously, and even linguistically from the currents of Meiji
Japan. In the words of one observer, Nitobe was "the most de-orientalized
Japanese I have ever met."5 Yet at the same time, as one who had consciously
embarked on a course of personal "civilization and enlightenment," Nitobe
was a quintessentially Meiji man.
One need not dwell extensively on the problems this background created
for Nitobe's writings on Japan. To put it bluntly, he had a very shallow under-
standing of Japanese history and literature, as the numerous errors in his
Japanese and English writings demonstrate, and indeed as he himself ad-
mitted to Japanese-but not to foreign-audiences.6 He simply had little
training in these disciplines, and had not read virtually any classical texts.7
Although Nitobe achieved his goal of becoming a "bridge" between Japan
and the West, the foundation of that bridge was shaky at best. His extreme
erudition in English, his exemplary character, his marriage to an American
Quaker lady, his devout Christianity-these traits combined to convince
Westerners, even people like President Theodore Roosevelt, to accept his
pronouncements at face value.8 Yet Roosevelt's endorsement of Bushido as
a way to learn about Japan did not make the book any more accurate. Nitobe
is acclaimed for his contributions to mutual understanding between the
United States and Japan (the Japanese government put his portrait on the
5,000 yen note in 1984), but his writings in fact advanced this cause little be-
cause of their inaccuracies.
No work of Nitobe's has been more highly acclaimed than his 1899
"classic," Bushid6,9 yet it is perhaps the most misleading of all his writings.
Nitobe was not even aware when he wrote the book that the term bushid6
existed: he thought he was coining a new word, and he expressed some sur-

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513

prise several years later when a Japanese pointed out to him that the word
actually existed in Tokugawa times!10Thus Nitobe's contemporary, Basil Hall
Chamberlain-who was virtually the only one with courage enough to chal-
lenge him at the time-was not incorrect when he referred to the excitement
over Nitobe's bushido as the "invention of a new religion."
Nitobe's book and the concept of bushido captured the minds of many
Japanese during the outburst of nationalism that accompanied the nation's
victories in the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars. Bushido was suddenly every-
where. Nakariya Kaiten wrote, also in English, of bushid6 as the "religion" of
Japan. Takagi Takeshi wrote comparing bushido and chivalry, summing up
bushido in twenty doctrines." The well-known philosophy scholar Inoue Te-
tsujiro even collected together Edo period works in the Bushid6 soshoe, whose
avowed purpose was to develop Japan's national defense capabilities by incul-
cating this spirit in them.12 Through such efforts, Nitobe's bushido was ulti-
mately linked by ultranationalists to the movement for "national purity"
(kokusui shugif).
Nitobe's fellow Christian Uchimura Kanzo even went so far as to imagine
that "Bushido is the finest product of Japan .... Christianity grafted upon
Bushido will be the finest product of the world. It will save, not only Japan,
but the whole world."'3 Ienaga Saburo's analysis of Uchimura's remark could
apply to Nitobe as well, and he echoes my own feeling about the whole fuss
made over bushid6 in Meiji times: "What Uchimura thought was bushido was
merely an illusion created by projecting Puritanism, which he had learned
from the West, on Japan."14
Let me summarize my conclusions concerning the image of Japanese
samurai ethics engendered by Nitobe's work and that of others who built
upon it. I do not argue that the moral values Nitobe discusses in Bushido-
loyalty, veracity, honor, and so forth-were not present in the Japanese peo-
ple in Meiji or pre-Meiji times, or is not today for that matter. Rather my
objection to Nitobe is simply that to imagine that there was a normative sys-
tem of ethical thought, a "code" of behavior that was first universal among
the samurai and then in fact became the "soul" of all Japanese citizens, and
that this body of ethical thought was called bushido, whose tenets could be
recited as readily as the Ten Commandments, or the Boy Scout Motto, is
simply inaccurate. I tend to agree with the anonymous American reviewer of
the book in 1900, who wrote that "To our mind the whole thesis is singularly
destitute of historical support."15
Yet the lesson gleaned by many Westerners from Nitobe's book is that
premodern Japanese samurai behaved according to a strict and explicit code
of ethics called bushido, whose values were generally seven in number, fol-
lowing roughly the chapters in Nitobe's volume: justice, courage, benev-
olence, politeness, veracity, honor, and loyalty.16 These values were then in-
culcated in the Japanese populace at large, becoming the "soul" of the peo-

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514 Hurst

pie. Many in the West seem to believe that these same ethical principles were
then directly transmitted to the citizenry of Meiji Japan; and when Japan
began to "advance" into Asia in the name of the emperor, it was again
the surviving feudal ethical code which shaped Japanese behavior. In fact,
some even argue that the ethics of bushido still motivate Japanese today. The
marketing of the English translation of Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five
Rings several years ago was based essentially on the premise that the modern
Japanese businessman is merely a samurai in Brooks Brothers clothing!17
Unfortunately, there are few serious academic works on the samurai in
history and the nature of bushido. Most are of a popular nature, or written by
nonspecialists, or present the limited, personal view of a single author from
which readers form impressions of an entire class. The following description
of the samurai is fairly representative of what I come across all the time.

A samurai devotes his entire life to a single moment of perfect honor and
loyalty. He is a warrior who kills in ancient ways shrouded in mystery and
mysticism but who, ultimately, turns the sword on himself. He is a scholar
and priest who searches the meditations of selflessness for the knowledge to
kill with inner peace-and die with inner calm. He is a man with only one
lord-a servant who must kill himself when his master dies. Then, and only
then, is he the perfection of mind and body-the triumph of honor over
mortality.18
The samurai is thus depicted as some sort of spiritual killing machine,
absorbed in loyalty and death, the death not only of others, whom he dis-
patches with equanimity for his master, but also of himself-which he is
honor-bound to bring about when his lord dies. And of course it is bushido
which guides this behavior. How are we to deal with this image?

BUSHIDO IN HISTORY

Actually, the term bushido appears in modern English publications, most

notably martial-arts magazines, more often than it did in premodern Japanese
texts. Even though unfamiliar with Tokugawa works, Nitobe imagined the
term to have been his own. He was not totally wrong. In fact, it is only in the
sengokug era that the term appears. Furukawa Tesshi finds it first in several
sixteenth-century works, but considers the Koyo gunkanh (not actually com-
piled until the early seventeenth century) to be the first text to articulate
something called bushido as a behavioral pattern.19 And only in the subse-
quent Edo period does it gain some currency, although even then it is not
widely used: works like Yamamoto Tsunetomo's Hagakurei and Daidoji
Yuzan's Budo shoshinshui which use the word are relatively rare. Indeed,
Furukawa finds that in the sixty volumes included in Inoue's Bushid6 sosho
(Collected Works of Bushido), only ten of the volumes even use the term,
and of those, only four use it with any frequency.20
Far more common in the Edo period were terms like shik6k, bud6', and

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515

bushi no michim. Throughout medieval Japan there were a number of house

laws (kaho6), house precepts (kakuno), and other documents espousing a
variety of moral values among samurai; but it was really during the Tokugawa
or Edo period (1600-1868), when samurai literacy became almost universal,
that works addressing the morality of the ruling samurai class circulated
widely. Some were abstruse tomes of moral philosophy, some were manuals
of behavior for the warriors of a certain domain. They were written largely
from a Neo-Confucian point of view, although there were, of course, a num-
ber of heterodox schools which held differing perspectives from that of the
orthodox school supported by the Tokugawa family.
But within the broad range of Tokugawa intellectual discourse, which to-
day appears to us in most studies as distinct "schools" of thought, it would be
a mistake to assume that there was one school called "Bushido" with a capital
B which saw itself distinct from the orthodox Neo-Confucian School, the
Wang Yang-ming School, and so forth. A Tokugawa samurai did not make a
conscious choice to enter an academy whose title was something like "Hall of
Bushid6 Study," and when he was asked in casual conversation what set of
beliefs he espoused, he would not have immediately replied "Why, Bushid6
of course."
The questions for us today, then, interested as we are iti Japanese moral-
ity in the premodern period, are: was there in fact no universal "code" of
behavior for the samurai class, whatever you wish to call it? Was there
something called bushido, and if so, what was it? Was it a "religion of the
samurai," to use a term employed by people from Nakariya Kaiten in the
Meiji era to Professor Bloomberg today?21
The few Tokugawa works which explicitly use the term bushido turn out, in
fact, to be a very narrow stream of thought essentially out of touch with the
broader spectrum of Confucian ideas to which most of the samurai class
adhered. There was no well-articulated series of six or seven values; the pri-
mary emphasis in the Hagakure, Budo shoshinshu, and similar writings is
an excessive attachment to the ideals of the late sixteenth century, focusing
especially on loyalty, duty, and courage.22 They also idealize a reckless
death offered up in the lord's name: as Tsunetomo put it "The way of the
samurai is found in death," or, even more bluntly, "simply become insane
and die as though mad (shiniguruiP)."23
This formulation of a "way" of the warrior was seen by mainline Confucian
moralists as an essentially outdated feudal ideology, what Ogyu Sorai called
an "evil custom from the sengoku era."24 Saito Setsudo, in his Shido yoronq,
saw these ideas as incomplete, out of touch with the "Way of the Sages" as
enunciated by Mencius, and in need of alteration. While Sorai, Setsudo, and
other scholars were equally concerned with good Confucian moral principles
like loyalty, honor, and duty, they disagreed with people like Tsunetomo over
the meaning and application of these values. And they certainly disagreed

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516 Hurst

over the idea of a reckless, irrational death. They had their own ideas of
the proper "way" of the samurai, but then it was not the bushid6 of the
Hagakure.
THE VALUE OF LOYALITY

In my courses, I always ask students for their impressions of Japan and the
Japanese. Without question, the most frequently mentioned characteristic of
the Japanese is their "loyalty." This loyalty goes beyond mere conditioned
behavior in the minds of many students, who seem to have the impression
that the Japanese are almost "genetically" loyal: it is somehow implanted in
their chromosomal makeup to be loyal. The two most commonly cited exam-
ples of loyalty are that of the samurai to his lord, based upon the bushido
code, and the loyalty of the contemporary Japanese worker to his company.
The latter impression can be regarded as a victory for the Foreign Ministry's
public relations campaign, but both instances present us with problems.
Are the Japanese "genetically" loyal, any more so than other peoples?
To whom and to what? Why? In fact, are not most of the Japanese ethical
statements-whether taken from Nitobe's Bushido, the Buke shohattor, or
the various slogans espoused by Japanese firms-similar to those statements
found in such Western sources as the Ten Commandments, Samuel Smiles,
Poor Richard's Almanac, and the Boy Scout Motto? In fact, it occurs to me
that the "trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient,
cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent" moral standards of the Boy
Scouts are fully consistent with Nitobe's ethics, suggesting that full applica-
tion of them would have made one a damn fine Tokugawa samurai. In one
sense, Nitobe was correct, insofar as what he tried to do in his work was
suggest that medieval European chivalry and Japanese bushid6 were not so
different after all. Thus Nitobe's cluster of ethical principles is inclusive
enough to be almost universal, making it at the same time not too useful in
assessing samurai behavior. In fact, the values he lays out in his book are no
more than those found in almost any Confucian work, and there is no reason
to lump them together as something called bushido.
What about loyalty as a part of a samurai code of ethics, whatever we
wish to call it? Clearly, from as early in Japanese history as the period when
Chinese writing and its corresponding philosophy entered Japan, loyalty was
regarded as perhaps the prime virtue that a Japanese, soldier or otherwise,
could possess. The theme of loyalty runs throughout Prince Shotoku's Seven-
teen Article Constitution of 603. Loyalty is indispensable to state-building, and
the entire Japanese structure of legitimacy-the official histories which
enshrined the imperial mythology, the Ise Shrine, the imperial regalia, the
biological basis of kingship, the rituals of reenactment-was originally de-
signed to achieve acquiescence to this absolutist rule, that is, to inculcate
loyalty in the Japanese.

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517

Long before there were samurai in Japan, one encounters the first
idealized loyalist in Yorozu, the "Emperor's Shield."25 But Yorozu's story is
unusual in the history of samurai and bushido, since it espouses loyalty of a
specific imperial nature, something one finds again in the Taiheikiswith Kusu-
noki Masashige's unflinching loyalty to Emperor Go-Daigo.
In fact, it has nothing to do with something called bushid6 and everything
to do with a basic acceptance of the Confucian principle of the loyalty of
subject to sovereign that a Masashige-despite his abrupt end and largely
failed career-should be revered by Japanese as a paragon of ethical behavior,
and that Ashikaga Takauji, a man of foresight and vision who established a
warrior polity that endured for two and a half centuries, should be considered
one of Japan's "three great villains."26
In fact, one of the most troubling problems of the premodern era is the
apparent discrepancy between the numerous house laws and codes exhorting
the samurai to practice loyalty and the all-too-common incidents of disloyalty
which racked medieval Japanese warrior life. It would not be an exaggeration
to say that most crucial battles in medieval Japan were decided by the
defection-that is, the disloyalty-of one or more of the major vassals of the
losing general. In other words, Takauji, twice disloyal for having first turned
against his feudal lord and then his sovereign, was far closer to the prototype
of the medieval Japanese warrior than was Masashige. Ironically, this be-
havior explains the great lengths to which moralists in premodern and modern
times have gone to praise Masashige and vilify Takauji.
In fact, there is no discrepancy between these two things at all. We have
simply misinterpreted the data. That is, we often read both premodern and
modern exhortations to loyalty as representations of what is rather than what
ought to be. This is a classic mistake of assuming that a system of normative
ethics describes an actual field of behavior. Thus, my students want to assume
that contemporary Japanese workers are somehow "genetically" loyal to Mi-
tsubishi, not realizing that the modern Japanese company system was con-
sciously established in the late 1910s precisely because Japanese workers were
not loyal but in fact changed employers at will to suit their own economic
interests.
In a somewhat similar vein, we often fall into the same trap when con-
fronted with examples of the apparent willingness with which the Japanese
endured wartime sacrifices for emperor and nation-the banzai charge and
the kamikaze attack-in World War II. Wishing to ascribe this willingness
to some innate ethical imperative, we easily forget the great lengths to which
the imperial state had to go, legally and ideologically, to create the idealized
tennoseit ("emperor system"), in which the emperor functioned effectively
as the supreme focus of patriotic loyalty.
It was little different in medieval times as well. Sakaiya Ta'ichi, in a recent
essay entitled "Debunking the Myth of Loyalty," designed to illustrate

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518 Hurst

how much Westerners had overvalued what I have been calling the "genetic
loyalty" of the Japanese, compared the sengoku warrior to a modern
baseball player.27 He claims that the samurai was essentially playing "for
the team." "If a baseball player is traded to another team, he is expected to
give his all to his new team and to give no thought to 'yesterday's friend."'
Similarly, Sakaiya claims, "the samurai was not bound by any ethical pre-
mise that one cannot serve two masters." In fact, he did it all the time.
Sakaiya may be overstating his point. The ideals of the age did expect that
a warrior would serve but one master, but feudal loyalty had lost much of
the psychological implications of earlier times. The lord-vassal bond of Heian
and Kamakura warriors is often characterized as involving deep personal com-
mitment, even extending over generations. Although material considerations
were not unimportant-essentially trading military service for economic re-
ward-many Japanese scholars have emphasized the "human-heartedness"
(the much revered bushi no nasakeu) of the bond and deny that warrior and
master were linked "contractually." Personally, I regard the war tales upon
which much of this speculation is based with great suspicion, and feel that
such scholars emphasize the unqualified nature of the feudal bond of loyalty
far out of proportion to what actually occurred. The difficulty encountered by
the Hojo regents in institutionalizing the loyalty of early Kamakura vassals,
for example, supports this view.
But be that as it may, at least by sengoku times, there was no doubt that
the one-dimensional kind of emotion-laden loyalty, even if exaggerated in
medieval tales, was no longer operative. Loyalty was a highly personal and
contractual arrangement between samurai and lord, conditional on both par-
ties fulfilling their mutual obligations. With Japan divided into several hun-
dred heavily armed independent domains, each lord was concerned with
surrounding himself with skilled strategists and fighters. Effective adminis-
tration of the domain demanded that he establish codes to regulate the behav-
ior of warrior and peasant alike. That in those codes a lord would strongly
emphasize the loyalty that his samurai owed him is hardly surprising. The first
of Takeda Nobushige's ninety-nine house rules warns the retainer never to be
treacherous to his master. But, as Sakaiya reminds us, "however a certain
quality is considered desirable is no guarantee that it actually prevails."28
In fact the converse may be true. That is, the frequency with which warrior
codes stress the virtue of loyalty is due precisely to the fact that it did not
obtain in the violent "world without a center." Great generals of the sixteenth
century in fact, in a manner not unlike that in which a George Steinbrenner
goes about acquiring the best baseball players available, tried to hire away
skilled archers, swordsmen, and military strategists from each other all the
time. Loyalty was thus purchased, and exhortations to loyalty to the contrary,
samurai frequently changed masters to improve their immediate and future
circumstances. In an age, however, which apparently produced more char-

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519

ismatic individuals than Japan had even seen before (or has since, for that
matter), it is hardly surprising that some samurai might develop extremely
deep, emotion-laden ties with their lords. That is the kind of loyalty Tsune-
tomo aspires to in the Hagakure.
But the situation had changed entirely (and for the worse) with the "cen-
tralized feudalism" of Tokugawa times, in which the bakufu set certain legal
limits on daimyo control over their domains and their samurai. With the ex-
ception of many roninv ("masterless samurai") created by bakufu action,
samurai were unable to market their talents around from domain to domain,
seeking advantage, charisma, or both, but were born into a rigidly stratified
society with little chance for mobility. They and their descendants were, for
two and a half centuries, hereditary retainers of the lord of the House of
XorY.
Their status was hereditarily determined and a material stipend set, not
unlike the salary set for federal bureaucrats today. In fact, rather than think
of the Tokugawa samurai as a warrior, it might be more appropriate to think
of him as a government employee, a GS-12, for example. Consequently, Toku-
gawa samurai loyalty was unconditional and often highly impersonal. The
emotional nature of the bond of loyalty could thus be very weak for many
warriors, who might have little or no personal association with their theoreti-
cal lord. However incompetent or remote from them, the lord was the lord
and they were stuck with him. Under such circumstances, frequent moral ex-
hortations to the obligations of loyal service were all the more necessary.
The anomalies in the nature of Tokugawa loyalty, as well as a number of
other contradictions in the sociopolitical system, ultimately led to a "trans-
muted form" of loyalty, what Albert Craig has termed "han nationalism," in
which loyalty was effectively transferred from the person of the lord to the
domain itself.29

SHINIGURUI, CRAZY FOR DEATH

Let us turn now to samurai ideals concerning death, remembering our warrior
who is able to "kill with inner peace-and die with inner calm." I am re-
minded of the television miniseries made of James Clavell's Shogun, and
especially of the protest by Japanese-American citizens against the portrayal
of Japanese as bloodthirsty and eager to die. In fact, in a discussion on our
campus the week it aired, I remember making a similar criticism. I noted that
all the Japanese in the film were apparently "dying to die," since they reached
for their swords to commit seppukuw (ritual suicide by disembowelment) at a
moment's notice.
This connection with death is another part of the image we have of the
samurai. If it is not part of Nitobe's formulation of bushido, it is basic to that
found in the Hagakure: "The way of the samurai is found in death." There
are two types of death involved here. Perhaps primary in our minds is the idea

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520 Hurst

that the samurai commits suicide readily, either to atone for a crime, to follow
his lord in death, or to accept responsibility for some error. Secondly, we tend
to think of him as conditioned to cutting down others, especially rude
peasants, with equanimity. This is, I suppose, an idea which sprang from an
awareness of the concept of kirisute gomenx, literally "exemption to cut down
and cast aside" a member of the lower orders who failed to show a samurai
proper respect. Both of these aspects of the samurai connection with death
figured prominently in Shogun.
Seppuku has a long history in Japan, dating at least to the late Heian
period. But it was not exactly a widespread custom, and was limited primarily
to situations in which a warrior faced certain death at the hands of his en-
emies. Since torture was expected in premodern Japan, suicide, either by
throwing oneself headlong off one's horse with the point of one's sword in
one's mouth, or, increasingly, by disembowelment, was considered prefer-
able to capture. Over time, seppuku came to be associated with honorable
death. The stomach was considered the seat of one's emotions, so that cut-
ting the belly and exposing one's entrails was a means of demonstrating the
purity of a samurai's honor.
And while war tales are fond of glorifying the practice-one is reminded of
the Taiheiki story of virtually the entire Hojo clan committing seppuku at the
fall of Kamakura-few warriors actually took their own lives except under
circumstances of imminent defeat and death at the hands of the enemy.
Yoshitsune and Nobunaga are two prime examples of suicide under such con-
ditions.
There were other forms of seppuku as well. Occasionally a warrior might
take his own life in order to remonstrate with his lord, a form of suicide known
as kanshiY.The sengoku period does record a number of instances of junshiz,
the practice of following one's lord in death. It was theoretically limited to a
few especially close retainers, but there are records of twenty or thirty samurai
committing junshi upon their lord's demise. But most were content to live on,
or Japan would soon have been bereft of warriors had all the zealots like
Tsunetomo been "allowed" to follow their lords in death.
Given the reality of Pax Tokugawa, what Professor Reischauer has referred
to as the longest period of protracted peace in history, the "classic" works like
the Hagakure, which emphasize loyalty to the lord to the point of death, and
in fact which stress the eager sacrifice of one's life for one's feudal lord, appear
terribly anachronistic. The idea that a samurai ought either rashly to throw
away his life for his lord, or that he ought to follow his lord in death by ritual
suicide (tsuifukuaa) struck mainline warrior moralists as-in Sorai's words-
"an evil custom of the sengoku age."
In fact, the Hagakure's pronouncements about the readiness of a vassal like
himself to rush headlong into battle for his lord, with no calculation of profit
and loss, or concern for personal safety or family security, was anachronistic

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521

in the extreme; but it serves to demonstrate what may be the central Toku-
gawa intellectual dilemma. Prompted by the refusal of his lord, Nabeshima
Motoshige, to allow Tsunetomo to follow him in death in 1700, Tsunetomo
retired from the world in utter despair and, from 1710 to 1716, recounted the
text which appears as the Hagakure to Tashiro Tsuramoto.
Tsunetomo was a throwback in many ways. First, he wished to commit
junshi, an action which had been expressly forbidden by both bakufu and
Nabeshima han legislation-samurai law, it should be noted, written by and
for the warrior class. Thus his ideals linking loyalty and death were not shared
by the dominant group within the warrior class. Second, he urged a kind of
rash action on behalf of one's lord which was virtually unimaginable to most
warriors. That is, the last major military campaign-the Shimabara
Rebellion-had concluded over sixty years previously, and Tokugawa peace
was so firmly established by the Genroku period (1688-1700) in which
Tsunetomo lived that many social commentators decried the decline of the
warrior class, and their attendant martial training.30
There were simply no longer any arenas where would-be zealots like
Tsunetomo, a weekend warrior who never engaged in combat, could demon-
strate either his military prowess, his loyalty, or his courage. Furukawa ex-
presses great admiration for Tsunetomo's words: "The intensity and pro-
fundity of passion that strike us as we read these expressions in the original
Japanese are past all translation and leave us in sheer wonder and admiration.
What a single-hearted loyalty."31 Personally, I read Tsunetomo somewhat
more cynically. I am suspicious both of the degree of Tsunetomo's disappoint-
ment at being denied the right of tsuifuku and of his many passionate expres-
sions of loyalty. I believe that Tsunetomo was truly attached to Motoshige
and was devastated by his death; but I suspect that in his remorse he was
whipped into a high degree of emotion, which young Tashiro recorded, by
the realization that he was unable to be the kind of "real" samurai of the
sengoku era whom he admired so much. But if he could not live like one,
perhaps through a noble seppuku he could have died like one. Tsunetomo
was a GS-12 who longed to be something more.
And that brings us to the dilemma I alluded to before. That is, what is
the role of the warrior in an age of peace? From at least the time of Yamaga
Sok6 (1622-1685), writers had wrestled with the problem; but the adoption
of Neo-Confucianism as the official "civil religion" of the bakufu inevitably
led scholars to cast the warrior as a Japanese version of the Chinese gentry.
Thus for Soko, just as the sage (in the Confucian conception) had a "mien of
moral superiority,"32 the samurai internalized the Confucian virtues and
served as a sort of moral exemplar for the farmer, artisan, and merchant,
"who have no leisure from their occupations, and so they cannot constantly
act in accord with (fundamental moral obligations) and fully exemplify the
Way. "33

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522 Hurst

Clearly, Soko and other Confucian samurai moralists agreed with Tsune-
tomo that the samurai owed unflinching loyalty to his lord, but recklessly
throwing away one's life and contemplating ritual suicide to follow the lord in
death were considered totally in opposition to the values of the "Way" which
they talked about incessantly. And that Way was the way of the sages, the
way of Confucius and Mencius, or one of several reformulations of Confucian
thought-not a call to reckless action, which in fact some followers of the
Wang Yang-ming school advocated.
One can in fact distinguish between the "way" for most samurai-and let
us call that by Soko's term, shido, since it is actually inaccurate to link his
thought casually to bushido, as we tend to do, following the discussion in
Tsunoda's The Japanese Tradition-and the view of bushido as expressed in
the Hagakure. The former tended to emphasize results while the latter was
more concerned with motive. In essence, what we can say is that Tsunetomo
is far more concerned that a warrior live so as to transcend any real attach-
ment to this life, to take life as though one might die at any moment. Then he
can react to the situation immediately, rushing crazily into death (shinigurui,
in his terms) in the service of his lord without any calculations of an emotional
sort clouding his mind. Purity of motive, sincerity in the extreme, seems to be
what Tsunetomo is after. And as Ivan Morris so poignantly reminds us in his
work on Japan's veneration of failed heroes, this is perhaps the supreme vir-
tue for which the Yorozus, Yoshitsunes, and Masashiges are admired.
I should also note here that seppuku was essentially a form of punishment
under Tokugawa law. A daimyo suspected of disloyalty to the shogun could
be forced to commit suicide, for example, as could a lesser samurai for break-
ing the law. It was far more likely to be a sentence imposed upon one rather
than a willful act to demonstrate one's nobility, honor, or loyalty, although
there were of course such instances.
Furthermore, if warriors were not always "dying to die" for the slightest
mishap, they were also not likely to dispatch hapless peasants on the road
without so much as a by-your-leave. Search as they do in the literature for
actual cases of kirisute gomen, Japanese historians have managed to find only
a few. While there were times when criminals (or at least the dead bodies of
criminals) were used to test the blade of a sword in semiscientific experi-
mentation, and while ambush, bushwhacking, and duels of honor ending in
death and/or dismemberment were not unknown, not all samurai of Toku-
gawa times were the bloodthirsty killers some films and popular literature
would have us believe.
But was the samurai of Tokugawa times, or any period of premodern
Japanese history for that matter, really like the type of character that has
been portrayed in popular literature? Was uncalculated purity of motive and
unconditional loyalty universal among samurai? Or is this simply the con-
clusion reached by nonspecialists who have been "introduced" to Japan by

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523

"bridges" like Nitobe and the selective translation of interesting, but not
necessarily representative, works like the Hagakure? Let me close with a
brief look at one celebrated incident of Tokugawa history to demonstrate
the diversity of opinion on the ethics of the samurai. This is the famous Ako
Incident, or "Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin".
LEGAL IMPLICATIONSOF THE AKO INCIDENT

The story is well known and need not detain us here.34 The daimyo of Ako
domain, Lord Asano, was charged with the arrangements at Edo Castle, to
receive the emissaries of the emperor from Kyoto. For whatever reason, the
Master of Ceremonies, Lord Kira, refused to inform Asano of the proper pro-
tocol, and was attacked by his younger colleague within the shogun's castle.
The two sword wounds proved not to be fatal, but this breach of shogunal law
could not be overlooked; and Asano was ordered to commit seppuku on the
very next day, the fifteenth day of the third month of Genroku 14 (1701).
The problem comes with the subsequent behavior of the samurai of the
domain. Several strategies-from immediately committing suicide them-
selves (which, as I have noted above, was strictly forbidden by shogunal law)
to attacking and killing Kira in revenge-were considered. Unfortunately,
action was somewhat preempted by an extensive bakufu investigation that
dragged on for a year and four months, during which time the Ako samurai
were neither no longer fully retainers of the domain-whose status was
being considered-nor full-fledged ronin either. But at length the expected
decision declared Asano's domain confiscated, and the warriors became
ronin. Having already parted from their families, they now went their sepa-
rate ways.
The primary drama in the many stories, plays, and films based upon the
event ensues following a pact between the samurai to take revenge against
Lord Kira: to deflect suspicion by both Kira, who naturally anticipated a ven-
detta, and the bakufu, the warriors, led by Oishi Kuranosuke, go about their
business in a variety of occupations or-like Kuranosuke-give themselves
up to drink and debauchery. Exaggeration and hyperbole, all of it very poi-
gnantly presented, abound in the fictionalized versions. But ultimately, on the
night of the fourteenth day of the twelfth month of 1702, a year and nine
months to the day after the initial incident, the remaining forty-seven loyal
retainers broke into Kira's Edo mansion and killed him in revenge.
Forty-six of them then took his severed head to Sengakuji temple, the site
of Lord Asano's grave, where they surrendered to the Abbot of the temple,
having decided to abide by the verdict of the bakufu. Their sentence came
down over a month later, on the fourth day of the second month of 1703,
when they were ordered-perhaps allowed is the proper term-to commit
suicide, which they did. The temple today attracts the considerable traffic of
curious and respectful tourists, Japanese and foreigners alike.

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524 Hurst

But public opinion as to both the actions of the Ako retainers and the
subsequent actions of the authorities was mixed, suggesting that in fact there
was not a uniform set of ethical precepts to which even all samurai, much less
all Japanese, subscribed.
Several laws were violated by the Ako side. Lord Asano himself broke the
prohibition against drawing one's weapon within the shogun's castle. The re-
tainers then broke the law by failing to report their intention to avenge the
death of their lord to the authorities. (Private vendettas could be officially
sanctioned if the case was an appropriate one and it was reported to the of-
ficials, who could grant permission to proceed. Such action, needless to say,
would seriously hinder the efforts of those seeking revenge, since their in-
tended victim would either flee into hiding or constantly surround himself
with armed guards.)
On the other hand, public opinion in Edo seems to have been overwhelm-
ingly in favor of the so-called "loyal retainers" (gishiab). In the first place,
Lord Kira's actions toward Asano-surely highly distorted in fictional
accounts, which perhaps reflect popular perceptions at the time-were seen
as inappropriate. And there can be no doubt that the sentiments of most
Japanese, both those who actually espoused the narrow Hagakure version of
bushid6 as well as ordinary citizens imbued with popular moral values,
approved of Asano's motives when he attacked Kira, whether or not it was
against the law. Likewise, there was a similar popular sympathy for the gishi's
revenge against Kira on behalf of their master, perhaps due both to the gen-
eralized ancient Confucian dictum about not living under the same heaven
as the killer of one's father (or, in this case, lord) and the tendency to sym-
pathize with such actions-especially if they ended in the suicide of the pro-
ponents-carried out with great sincerity (purity) of motive.
But clearly the authorities could not react with leniency without risking
potential anarchy: a blanket endorsement of private vendettas could open a
Pandora's box. Therefore, it was decided by the authorities that the Ako
retainers should be condemned to death rather than pardoned.
But Confucian scholars were divided on their approval or disapproval of the
gishi actions. Ogyu Sorai, Dazai Shundai, and Sat6 Nobukata among others
condemned them, primarily because they violated the law. These scholars
placed bakufu law and a concern for public order above the pure motives of
the Ak6 retainers. But Hayashi Nobuatsu, Muro Kyuso-who wrote a two-
volume account of the affair entitled Ak6 gijinrokuac-Miyake Kanran, and
other Confucians supported the nobility of the gishi's intentions. Among most
of those who condemned the actions, and it is generally thought that Sorai's
opinion was the critical one as far as the bakufu's decision was concerned,
there was considerable ambivalence between censure based upon the results
of their action and an admiration for the motive behind it.
Interestingly, among those who also criticized the Ak6 retainers was none

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525

other than Tsunetomo, who in the Hagakure notes that they should have
taken their revenge against Lord Kira immediately without any thought of the
consequences; such was the essence of his shinigurui form of bushid6. It was
pure in motive, not calculating and rational in Confucian terms. For similar
reasons, he was equally critical of the Soga brothers, who in the Kamakura
period waited some seventeen years to carry out a vendetta against their
father's killer.
Thus we have the curious situation that the primary exponent of bushido in
Tokugawa times opposed the actions of the loyal retainers of Ak6, who cap-
tured the imaginations and hearts of Japanese both at that time and later for
their embodiment of the very ethical actions we have come to associate with
bushido! Tsunetomo found himself, albeit for different reasons, in the same
camp as the mainline Neo-Confucianists who also condemned the actions of
the famous forty-seven. While they-some grudgingly-accepted the higher
claims of public law, Tsunetomo remained consistent in support of his ideal of
spontaneous, unconditional, nonrational loyalty to one's lord above all else as
the way of the samurai. If nothing else, Tsunetomo's stand in this case demon-
strates clearly that there was not a single code of ethics for the samurai to
which all warriors held, much less one which had become the "soul" of the
entire Japanese populace.
And that seems to be the major difference between the ethical ideals of that
narrow brand of Tokugawa-period people, who espoused something which
could be called "bushid6," from the mainline Neo-Confucian thinkers, who
espoused a more conventional "shido." I agree with Furukawa, who char-
acterizes the former as emphasizing "purity of motive" and the latter as con-
cerned with "results"-doki shugiad versus kekka shugiae, in his words. That
both ways of thought have long been, were then, and indeed remained
opposed to one another in prewar Japan is clear from the events of history.
One of the interesting parallels to the Ako Incident is the February 26
Mutiny of 1926, right down to the snowfall which blanketed Tokyo on both
occasions. In the modern gishi incident, members of a radical military faction,
claiming ultimate loyalty to the emperor, murdered a number of military and
civilian bureaucrats and raised a "righteous rebellion" against what they re-
garded as misguided policies. Once the rebellion was quieted, the authorities
felt an obligation to condemn the rebels to death, since they could not afford
to sanction such unlawful activities. But public sentiment clearly lay with the
rebels, the purity of whose actions could not be faulted, whose "motives" in
Hagakure bushido terms were correct.
Thus do the ideas of the bushid6 enthusiasts of Edo times connect with the
kokusui shugi zealots of the modern era, linked unintentionally by the
ground-breaking and, I believe, ultimately innocent work of Nitobe Inaz6 in
his "classic" Bushid6 volume, which, rather than bridging the Pacific, in fact
helped to bridge the gap between two expressions of irrational loyalty, both

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526 Hurst

of which were at odds with the dominant intellectual trends of the time. Un-
fortunately for the modern world, Nitobe succeeded far beyond his wildest
imagination ...

NOTES

1. Among the many errors in the text, one was especially noteworthy. Under a picture of a
Japanese soldier about to decapitate a Chinese youth, the text chastisted "bonsai shouting"
Japanese soldiers. Somehow, the image of a Japanese soldier charging a machine-gun nest
screaming "Bonsai!" totally undermined the serious intent of the article.
2. Edward Russell, The Knights of Bushido (London: Cassell, 1958).
3. Ota Yuzo, "'Bridge Across the Pacific'-An Evaluation of Nitobe Inazo's Self-Imposed
Role as a Mediator of Japan and the West" (Paper presented at Nitobe Conference, Vancouver,
October 1983), p. 5.
4. Suchi Tokuhei, Nitobe Inazo to bushido (Tokyo: Seijisha, 1984), pp. 19-32.
5. Ota, "'Bridge Across the Pacific,"' p. 3.
6. Ibid., p. 7.
7. Ibid. Ota quotes Nitobe: "To my shame I cannot discuss with confidence literature of the
East. I regret this very much. When I read books-when my appetite for reading was the
strongest-Japanese literature was out of vogue. So was Chinese literature. When we were
young, we virtually never heard of Tsurezuregusa [Essays in Idleness]. I was about twenty years
old when I first learned of its existence."
8. Bushido was written in English, but was soon translated into German, Polish, Norwegian,
French, Chinese, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese, and several other languages. Roosevelt bought
dozens of copies to give to friends.
9. The book went through ten editions in just fifteen years, and is still widely used today,
even in my own classes.
10. Ota, "'Bridge Across the Pacific,"' pp. 11-12.
11. This strange 1914 book was translated into English by Tsuneyoshi Matsuno, A Comparison
of Bushi-do and Chivalry (Osaka: T. Matsuno, 1984).
12. Inoue Tetsujiro, ed., Bushido sosho, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1905).
13. "Bushido and Christianity," Uchimura Kanzo zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1933),
vol. 15, p. 393.
14. Quoted in Ota, "'Bridge Across the Pacific,"' p. 17.
15. Ibid., p. 22.
16. See, for example, Donn F. Draeger and Robert W. Smith, Comprehensive Asian Fighting
Arts (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1981), pp. 98-99.
17. G. Cameron Hurst III, "Samurai on Wall Street: Miyamoto Musashi and the Search for
Secrets," UFSI Reports, 1982/No. 44 Asia.
18. Appearing on book jacket (writer unknown) of The Book of the Samurai, by Yamamoto
Tsunetomo, trans. William Scott Wilson (New York: Avon Books, 1981).
19. Furukawa Tesshi, Bushido no shiso to sono shuhen (Tokyo: Fukumura Shuten, 1957).
20. Ibid., p. 3.
21. Catharina Bloomberg, Samurai Religion: Some Aspects of Warrior Manners and Customs
in Feudal Japan, 2 vols. (Upsala, Sweden, 1976).
22. Furukawa Tesshi, Bushido no shiso, p. 57.
23. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure (Tokyo: Jinbutsu Oraisha, 1968), vol. 1, p. 76.
24. Furukawa, Bushido no shiso, p. 63, quoting Sorai.
25. Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (New York:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975), pp. 14-40.
26. The other two villains were considerd to be Dokyo and Taira no Kiyomori. The three were
especially singled out by Confucian-minded historians for their lack of loyalty to the throne.

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527

27. Sakaiya Ta'ichi, "Debunking the Myth of Loyalty," Japan Echo 8, no. 2 (Spring 1981):
17-29.
28. Ibid.
29. The classic formulation is Albert Craig, Chdshu in the Meiji Restoration (Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961).
30. Sorai and many others were critical of the kataaf-focusedmartial arts (bugeiag) of the Gen-
roku and later eras, which they ridiculed as "sports of a peaceful age." See G. Cameron Hurst
III, The Martial Arts of Japan, vol. 1 (Yale University Press, forthcoming).
31. Furukawa Tesshi, "The Individual in Japanese Ethics," in Charles A. Moore, ed., The
Japanese Mind (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1967), p. 233.
32. Quoted in Ryusaku Tsunoda, et al., The Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 402.
33. Ibid., p. 399.
34. A good English-language treatment is Bloomberg, Samurai Religion (see note 21 above),
vol. 2, The Ak6 Affair: A Practical Example of Bushido.

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