新学期开学了，无聊来贴上学期的论文一篇……
Between Myth and Reality
--A Critical Review of Nitobe Inazo’s Bushido
During a passage which revealed a curious and deep-seated cynicism of human nature underneath the coat of idealism, Sir Thomas More remarked in Utopia that men could not be trusted to do good without a sincere fear of divine judgment and retribution. In other words, More regarded religion as a necessary ethical structure without which the human society would cease to function properly. It was precisely the same line of reasoning that lay behind a Belgian jurist’s astonished inquiry to Nitobe Inazo: without an established church (at least, in the western sense), how could the Japanese society steer itself away from the brink of moral collapse? Nitobe’s belated reply was to write Bushido: the Soul of Japan.
What exactly constituted this ethical system called bushido that was supposed to embody the very moral fiber of Japan both past and present, and one which will preserve itself in the age to come? After shortly explaining the sources of bushido, Nitobe’s presentation of bushido’s doctrines is mainly consisted of detailed discussion regarding eight specific virtues: rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, veracity, honor, loyalty, and self-control. He also addresses two related topics at length: the institution of hara-kiri and the social status of women under the bushido system. For conclusion, an evaluation of bushido’s influence on Japanese society and its future in a rapidly modernizing Japan is given.
It should be made clear that the purpose of this critical review is far from offering a point-by-point abridged version of the actual contents of Bushido the book. Rather than simply summarizing all of Nitobe’s personal views, in the following pages a number of holistic themes relating to the book will be discussed, along with specific examples taken from the text as supplements. These themes include: the inherent though concealed ambivalence in Nitobe’s stance, the non-native origin of bushido, the incongruence between the practice and the ideal, and finally, the relationship between bushido and religion as well as its implications. These discussions, it is hoped, will bring one to a fuller understanding and more balanced appreciation of the book in a wider context.
To begin with, there are several contextual peculiarities regarding Bushido which are highly relevant. The first is that Nitobe, like a number of prominent intellectuals in early modern Japan, was a Christian. Thus it is not surprising that in the book there are incessant comparisons made between Christian doctrines and bushido. Given the fact that Nitobe was attempting to introduce the idea of bushido to the western audience by imagining it as the substitute of religion as the moral pillar of society, these comparisons are obviously warranted. However, one cannot help but notice that Nitobe did not simply compare bushido with Christianity—rather, he attempted to illustrate that the ideas embodied in bushido was compatible with Christianity and other western canon of moral order. When it was plainly impossible to do so, he admitted bushido to be inferior. In this sense, one might say that Bushido was Nitobe’s sincere attempt to establish or defend Japan’s respectability in the western eyes through arguing that Japan’s moral ideals were in fact close to their Anglo-Saxon counterpart, however strange or even barbarous some Japanese practices may first appear to a foreigner. This is what one might call a classical case of periphery mentality.
Yet hand in hand with this deeply ingrained acceptance of relative Japanese backwardness, Nitobe also exhibited a clear sense of pride in both the institution of bushido itself and in Japan as a country. Indeed, just as he reluctantly conceded that bushido was inferior to Christianity in certain aspects, he also did not forget to exalt bushido by attempting to present its principles as universal truths—and thus endowing it with a transcendent timelessness. Not only so, in his elevation of the virtues of the cherry blossom above that of the European rose’s, one might even detect a trace of belief in Japanese spiritual superiority over certain aspects of western values. With someone possessing a personal background and career as international as Nitobe did, it is only to be expected that his writings might betray subtle ambiguities and torn beliefs; but Japan’s precarious and awkward position in the international community at the time also undoubtedly contributed to the underlying inconsistencies in the tones of Bushido.
Although the prevalent image of bushido in the west has arguably changed little since the book’s first publication more than a century ago, it needs to be remembered that Bushido was written in a time when Japan was making its transition from the Tokugawa feudal period to a modern nation-state. Forced to end the country’s isolation, Japan’s political leaders and intellectuals searched for a road to modernity which made sense to the Japanese. As with many late modernizing countries, one of the most paramount questions they faced was how to preserve the “Japanese” essence and upon it construct a new Japan with historic authenticity despite the shedding of old customs and traditions. The solution, according to Nitobe, lay in the perpetuation of the bushido doctrine. Japan had indeed emerged from its Tokugawa slumber, yet “the light of chivalry, which was a child of feudalism, still illuminates our moral path, surviving its mother institution”. That is to say, bushido—as a spirit if not as an established system—was to fulfill the role as the bridge between the past and the future, the foundation of the modern Japanese nation-state.
As may be expected, such a pivotal role should only be played by something that is intrinsically and undisputedly “Japanese”. Hence Nitobe placed a great emphasis on the native character of bushido, as is clear from the very first lines of the Preface: “Chivalry [that is, bushido] is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossoms.” In advancing such a position, he deliberately downplayed the scope of foreign influences in his explanation of the sources of bushido. In that first chapter, Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucius, Mencius and Wan Yang Ming are listed as the chief influences on the development of bushido. It is arguable that amongst these five, only Shintoism may be regarded as an indigenous creation. Yet Nitobe did not acknowledge that Buddhism had been a foreign religion which originated in India and was introduced to Japan by Chinese missionaries. Of Confucius, the greatest of Chinese philosophers, it was commented that his scholarly enunciation was “but a confirmation of what the [Japanese] race instinct had recognized before his writings were introduced from China.” In other words, Confucius had only articulated what was already in the Japanese consciousness and gave it a convenient name of “the five moral relations”, a mouthpiece for the yamato damashii. Having thus made bushido more or less pure-blooded in its pedigree, Nitobe could then go on to pronounce that Japan possessed a race and civilization superior to India and China, and that placed Japan properly by the side of the European states.
However, it is evident that these revered points of reference were far from perfect in themselves. Reading the book in the present day, nothing but sheer irony and distaste is evoked by Nitobe’s admiring declaration that the greatness of the colonial British Empire was built upon Tom Brown’s idea of “to leave behind him the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one.” Yet writing at the end of the 19th century, the author could apparently take the ideals at their face value, avoid linking flowery rhetoric together with actual deeds which are far less flattering. On the other hand, as he elaborates on bushido’s influence on the Japan consciousness throughout the book, it is not difficult to see how Nitobe came to be squarely caught, as preachers and propagators of belief systems invariably are, in that painful crevice between ideal and reality. The Japanese intellectual in him could not turn a blind eye to the horrendous abuses made by the samurais—the very same samurais who have been trained under the system of bushido—so close to home.
Naturally, Nitobe refused to mark these tragedies and evils as the products of bushido itself. Thus from beginning to end, he spared no effort to condemn what he believed to be excesses unfit for the name of bushido. Borrowing from Sir Walter Scott, he lamented that “as it [the idea of giri] is the fairest, so it is often the most suspicious, mask of other feelings”. In his view, this is true not only of the degeneration of giri, but of the lofty principles presented by bushido has a whole. For example, while reflecting on the story of a peasant who was cut in two by a samurai in a case of “the emperor’s new cloth”, Nitobe reasoned that “it is plainly unfair to take an abnormal case to cast blame upon the Precepts, any more than to judge of the true teaching of Christ from the fruits of religious fanaticism and extravagance”. Yet interestingly enough, in the very next sentence, he hastened to add that there is a sense of touching nobleness in both “religious monomania” and the “extreme sensitiveness of the samurai about their honor”—in other words, although still unjustified, such actions were ultimately understandable because they originated from beautiful ideals. He would only lament that “it was a great pity that nothing clear and general was expressed as to what constitutes Honor”. At the end of it all, after reading many similar acknowledgements, reservations and retractions, one cannot help but ask: is Nitobe’s overall defense of bushido satisfactory? If abuses were truly so rampart, does not the corrupted version overtake the original in terms of impact and influence? One is left to wonder if the high virtues of bushido, as Nitobe argued they were supposed to be, had really existed in Japan as a coherent moral system on a significant scale.
With the above in mind, it is worth noting that the position of bushido in the Japanese consciousness as presented by Nitobe is a necessarily ambiguous one when one considers the original question: what is the moral pillar of Japanese society in religion’s stead? Nitobe’s overall claim in his book is that 1. Bushido, although influenced by religion and comparable to religion in its moral teachings, is strictly an ethical order, and 2. it has permeated the overall society and etched itself on the national consciousness. In other words, bushido to Japan is what Rousseau might have termed a “civil religion” under changed circumstances. Nevertheless, upon a closer examination of both the text itself and Japanese history in general, one will discover that both of these two suppositions are seriously flawed.
Interestingly, explicit discussion regarding the emperor is almost altogether conspicuously absent from Bushido. This may in part be explained by the relative weakness and forced modesty of the emperor’s office during the long feudal period. Moreover, as it originally was in Tokugawa’s time, bushido did not place a particular emphasis on the “revere the emperor” doctrine. After all, the most concrete point of loyalty for the samurai was that of their immediate superiors, and in fact it was precisely the Meiji Restoration which saw the abolition of samurai as a formal class in the interest of forging a modern nation. It nonetheless remains true, however, that the emperor was commonly regarded as the descendant of the goddess Amaterasu herself in a line unbroken, the undisputed head and chief priest of Shintoism—a religion which Nitobe himself credited with “thoroughly imbued Bushido with loyalty to the sovereign and love of country”. It logically follows, then, that it was Shintoism which was able to cut cross individual loyalties and unite the nation-state under one sovereign—presumably, the emperor since the Meiji Restoration. Despite the important implication of the emperor system, in Bushido there was but one mention of it in passing, and then without focusing on the emperor as an individual: “ancestor-worship, tracing from lineage to lineage, made the Imperial family the fountain-head of the whole nation.”
Of course, as history would bear witness, Shintoism as sanctioned and prompted by the modern Japanese state (and with the emperor indispensably at its very ideological center) functioned much more than simply the embodiment of the “common ancestry” myth. Considering that Nitobe was attempting to establish Japan as a respectable nation-state in the eyes of his European and American readers, his failure to expand upon this matter of national unity and sovereign power is most regrettable and rather peculiar. One is invited to speculate that he, being a Christian himself and keenly aware of the fact that his audience was almost uniformly Christian, did not feel comfortable dwelling upon the fundamentally heathen character of the Japanese people at length. Indeed, in the very same paragraph in which he acknowledged the importance of Shintoist influence on the development of bushido, he rushed to add that rather than strictly seeing Shintoism as a religion, the readers should regard it as a collection of “race emotions which this religion expressed”, for what Shintoism has are “impulses rather than doctrines”. One might say that by that single sentence, Nitobe had largely deprived bushido of its religious associations.
Yet to Nitobe, if bushido was fortunately divorced from the heathenness of Shintoism, it still was blessed with a spellbinding quality which religions commonly enjoyed. Claiming that “the samurai grew to be the beau ideal of the whole race”, he concludes that although the lower class common people could not attain the elite ideals of bushido due to their woefully limited personal capacities and negligent upbringing, they were nevertheless highly influenced by it: they unreservedly admired the samurai and thus endeavored to emulate the Precepts, regardless of age or gender. Trickle-down ethics, as one might label it. (As for the higher class of the nobles, the book dismissed them as altogether effeminate.) Nostalgia and propaganda aside, the historical truth in this claim is rather dubious. It was far from easy to live as a peasant during the feudal period in Japan, thus as Maruyama Masao correctly notes, the peasants were forever attempting to rebel against the upper class, which included the samurai. Even within the book itself, Nitobe failed to offer any concrete example of this supposed universal emulation of samurai ethics. In fact, perhaps all too unwittingly, he wrote of many instances to the contrary. For example, the long discussion of the Japanese merchant class’ unethical practices demonstrated that there is a deep moral divide between the practices of the merchant class and the ideals of the samurai class. Similarly, on the status of women inside out outside of the household, Nitobe readily acknowledged that “in no class did she experience less freedom than among the samurai”, a natural outgrowth of the militant character of the samurai class. It should be stressed that bushido, however popular and readily useable as a metaphor of “the soul of Japan”, remained the self-appointed ideology of an exclusive class which held its power through oppression and often by the use of force.
In the end, then, what is or was bushido to the Japanese as a people? In his book’s concluding chapters, Nitobe presented bushido as the very root of the yamato damashii, the national spirit which will see to the construction of a new and respectable Japan. Although it is fundamentally a product of feudalism and the samurai has already been abolished as a class, its truths contained in the way of the samurai will not be simply washed away by the modern age. Indeed, the modern Japan came to be born through the old Japan’s true virtues, as “the great statesmen who steered the ship of our state through the hurricane of the Restoration and the whirlpool of national rejuvenation, were men who knew no other moral teaching than the Precepts of Knighthood.” In this manner, Nitobe predicated, bushido will persist as the heart of Japan even long after its name has been forgotten.
At the same time, Nitobe also looked beyond Japan’s borders and deemed bushido as a part of the eternal, transcendental truth. One might say that Nitobe the Japanese intellectual insisted that particular system of bushido was as uniquely Japanese as the cherry blossoms, while Nitobe the Christian reasoned that the principles of bushido are part and parcel of the ultimate Truth. This is, of course, but one of the many internal contradictions contained in the book Bushido—contradictions which, as have been argued, stemmed from the author’s personal background but more fundamentally, Japan’s position in the world at the time. In this sense Bushido is perhaps best read as one episode to be remembered along the way of Japan’s struggle for modernization and the forging of a “Japanese” national identity at the turn of the last century.
