The myth of the obedient samurai is younger than we often think

Today we step once again into the world of samurai warfare – this time much earlier. We leave behind the bloody fields of Sengoku and travel back through time. We pass the Ashikaga courts in Kyoto, the Kamakura mounted archers shooting at Mongol sails off Hakata, the first shōgun Yoritomo founding his bakufu by Sagami Bay. We descend deeper still – into the age when the imperial court in Kyoto wrote poetry and regarded warriors from the provinces as barbarians. The end of the twelfth century.

Early morning, somewhere in a valley in Settsu Province. Mist lies in the folds of the field, horses snort. On both sides, bands of warriors form up. From one of them a lone rider emerges. He approaches the enemy line within good bowshot, halts his horse, rises in the stirrups. He does not draw his sword. He shouts no insults and no orders. He pronounces his own name. His father’s name. His grandfather’s name. A list of victories, battles, and temples beneath which the blood of his line soaked into the earth. He speaks long, loud, and clearly, so that the chronicler on the other side can write everything down. He waits for someone of equal rank to answer in kind. Only then will he ride out to single combat.

This was a Japanese battle in the twelfth century. Not formation, not discipline, not the obedient advance toward the enemy. First, the exchange of names. This ritual was called nanori (名乗り) – literally “naming oneself”. Its purpose was neither tactical nor military. It was social, psychological, theatrical. The warrior rode out alone to find an opponent of equal rank, so that his name – in victory or in death – would enter the chronicles. The outcome of the battle mattered to him less than whether he would be remembered.

The image we usually carry in our heads – the samurai as a silent, obedient servant, slotted into the hierarchy like a cog, ready to die for his lord without hesitation – is far more recent than we tend to think. It was made in the twentieth century, for the needs of the militarist empire and for export. The word bushidō in its present, ennobled sense was introduced only in 1899 by a Japanese man writing in English, for American publishers in Philadelphia.

The famous opening line “The way of the warrior is to die” (武士道といふは死ぬ事と見つけたり) was written by a man who had never been to war. The most celebrated book of the samurai spirit, Hagakure, was composed in a clerk’s office, not on a battlefield. Meanwhile, the real bushi of bygone ages, if his lord failed to notice his service, would sell his horses and saddles, ride to the shōgunal capital, and there press his case for reward in the bakufu chancery. The lord was a party to a contract, not a deity. Loyalty – a currency, not a cult. Honor – one’s own name elevated by brave deeds, which had to have witnesses. Let us see how it really looked – with mud beneath the hooves, blood on the helmets, and rational calculation in the head.

The Bow and the Horse

Let us begin with the term the warriors themselves used for their craft. Not bushidō – that word appears in circulation only rarely, and only toward the end of the sixteenth century, taking on its present, lofty meaning only in the twentieth. In the medieval period people spoke of kyūba no michi (弓馬の道), “the way of the bow and horse”. Or, more simply – yumiya no michi, “the way of the bow and arrow”. The name is precise, because the profession of these men was shooting from horseback. The first weapon of the Japanese warrior was neither sword nor even pike, but the bow – long, asymmetric, held from below, used from the back of a small, stocky horse closer in stature to a pony than to a modern mount. The sword would come into its own only in close combat, when the arrows had run out.

The class that began to crack open the aristocratic order of the Kyoto court in the twelfth century came from the provinces. From far estates in the east, by Lake Biwa, in the Kantō mountains, in the Mutsu valleys. These were men of the land – owners of fields who had learned to defend their holdings by arms, because the Kyoto court had stopped sending troops when someone needed to be subdued. Karl Friday, one of the foremost contemporary historians of Japanese “knighthood”, in his book Hired Swords, shows how this class came into being: not by imperial decree, but as a business. The court hired local armed men for tasks it could no longer resource itself. Over decades, the armed men ceased to be a tool of the court and became its contractors. And at last, on the eve of the age of the samurai – its competitors.

The relationship between lord and vassal rested on a concrete exchange. I will name it in Japanese, because it has its canonical formula: go-on to hōkō (御恩と奉公), “favor and service”. The lord gave land, the right to inheritance, a place in the hierarchy. The vassal fought when summoned. The key lies in that first element. Without land, there is no loyalty. Without reward for blood spilled, the vassal departs and no one pursues him. Had a medieval samurai been told that he was supposed to “love his lord”, he would have looked back without comprehension. The lord was a party to a contract, not a father, not an emperor, not a deity.

Out of this contractual, earthbound, provincial class also grew a habit that, as we shall see, would become decisive – the habit of publicly tending to one’s own name. Since land was given for service, and service had to be seen and recorded, the warrior did not fight for the fight itself. He fought so that someone would tell of it. And if his lord failed to notice – the warrior himself would ride to the bakufu capital (once we are speaking of Kamakura times) and remind him. No one did this for him. We shall see this shortly.

Sunset at Ichi-no-tani

Seventh day of the second month, third year of the Juei era (20 March 1184), Suma beach west of present-day Kobe. The forces of Minamoto under the command of Yoshitsune fell on the Taira from the direction no one expected – from the mountains, descending down a sheer slope (about this and other maneuvers which the brilliant young general Yoshitsune is said by legend to have learned from the tengu, I write here: Tengu – the Japanese archetype of a master who failed, yet kept teaching). The Taira break, run for the boats, try to put out to sea. Across the beach moves a Minamoto veteran: Kumagai no Jirō Naozane. Forty-three years old. A mounted archer, son of a local family from Musashi Province. He is looking for someone of consequence to behead, because returning from battle with the head of a man of rank means returning with the right to land.

He sees in the water a rider in lacquered armor and white silk who has turned his horse toward a boat full of fleeing Taira. Naozane draws out his war fan, waves it, and shouts. “Come back! It is cowardly to show your back to an enemy!” This too is ritual – one cannot behead an opponent fleeing with his back turned without losing one’s own face. He must be turned. He must, of necessity, turn around. Otherwise, no land.

The rider turns. His name is Taira no Atsumori, he is fifteen years old, and he is the grandson of an uncle of the emperor. Naozane pulls him from his horse into the water, pins him with his knees, removes the helmet. And stops. He looks into the face of a fifteen-year-old with blackened teeth and the powdered makeup of the court – the age of his own son Naoie, who is also fighting somewhere along this same beach. This is not a child’s face, but it is decidedly not the face of a hardened warrior either. It is the face of a young, inexperienced courtier who was never meant to fight. The hand with the dagger hangs in the air.

The Heike Monogatari (“The Tale of the Heike”), the great epic of the Genpei War composed in the thirteenth century, describes this scene with merciless psychological precision. Naozane says to the boy: “Though I might wish to spare you, my comrades are nearby. Flight will not save your life in any case. Better that your head be mine, for then I can offer prayers for you”. He seizes the boy by the hair. He weeps. He cuts. Then he will search the sash and find a flute called Saeda, “Little Branch” – the same one he heard the morning before, when someone on the Taira side was playing it in their camp. A little branch of imperial heritage. Kumagai will hide it beneath his armor and carry it with him for the rest of his life.

The original text places in Naozane’s mouth a brief lamentation that the historian Paul Varley judged to be the strongest cry against slaughter in the Heike: nothing is so bitter as to be born into a family of warriors. Soon afterward, still before the war’s end, Kumagai will lay down his sword, shave his head, and become a monk-disciple of Hōnen, founder of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. He will die in the first decade of the thirteenth century as a simple wandering monk named Renshō.

Why is this scene important for us? Because Naozane did not fail his lord. He did not break the contract, he did not desert, no one accused him of disloyalty. Naozane lost no face socially. He felled an enemy in single combat, fulfilled the ritual, returned with the head and the reward. From the standpoint of the contract with the lord, from the standpoint of witnesses, from the standpoint of the chronicle – there is no blemish. The Heike describes him as a hero. And yet something split him from within so deeply that he did not finish his career as a warrior. He laid down his sword, shaved his head, and became the monk Renshō. What overcame him? Not shame, but shock.

For the first time in his life he had seen the face of a child beneath the helmet of his enemy. A face that should have been in the palace, not on sands soaked in battle blood. Let us recall that Naozane was not a samurai-poet but a provincial mounted archer who had killed scores of men without hesitation. It was not conscience that turned him into a monk. It was the collision of the world in which he lived – a world of fields and blood – with the world of the Heian court aristocracy, to which the fifteen-year-old boy with blackened teeth belonged. Naozane realized that he had not killed a soldier. He had killed a child who was never meant to fight. The honor of the bushi had no answer to this.

This lesson was repeated endlessly by later writers, by playwrights of nō, by makers of ukiyo-e prints, by kabuki. “Atsumori” by Zeami, composed around 1400, is one of the most shattering plays in the repertoire – Naozane, now a monk, returns after years to the beach at Suma and meets there the ghost of the boy he killed. The whole drama lies in the fact that the ghost does not blame the monk, and the monk cannot forgive himself. Loyalty to the lord does not appear here even as a concept. The question simply is not raised. What counts is only the face – the one seen once, on the sand, beneath the helmet.

Suenaga Rides to Kamakura

A hundred years later, autumn 1274. From the bells of the temples along the Hakata coast comes a new tone. On the horizon, over the Sea of Japan, appears a fleet of a power never before seen by the Japanese. The Mongols of Kublai Khan arrived from Korea with a fleet of nine hundred ships and close to forty thousand men – Mongol, Korean, and Chinese troops together, under banners that no one on the Archipelago could read. The attack lasts only two days, then a storm scatters the fleet. Seven years later they return, more numerous still, and again a typhoon scatters them – the same one that centuries later would receive the poetic name “divine wind” (I write more about these events here: Kamikaze – Two Divine Typhoons of Life, One Grim Wind of Death).

Among the defenders of Kyūshū, on the marshy fields outside Hakata, fights a twenty-nine-year-old warrior from Higo Province. His name is Takezaki Suenaga. He comes from a minor house, has four companions, one horse, two relatives by his wife’s line. He is a gokenin – a direct vassal of the Kamakura shōgunate. Under fire from Mongol bows he loses his horse, falls into the mud, and is saved by another unit that charges in just in time. All of this is documented, because Suenaga preserved himself for us in an unprecedented way. After the war he commissioned in Kyoto a series of illustrated scrolls in which every scene was painted with himself at the center. The scrolls bear the title Mōko Shūrai Ekotoba (蒙古襲来絵詞, “Illustrated Account of the Mongol Invasions”), are dated to 1293, and are one of the costliest single sources for medieval Japan.

After the first invasion, Suenaga was overtaken by the ordinary frustration of the age. He fought, he survived, he had service and witnesses, but the Kamakura bakufu did not reward him even with a scrap of land. There was no land – none had been won, because it had been a defensive war. And without reward the warrior from Higo had no means to support his line. Suenaga did something strange to our ears but ordinary in his age – he sold his horses and saddles, traveled to Kamakura, and began going from office to office. He demanded an audience. He presented his witnesses. Each in turn dismissed him: too little evidence, too late, no one in the secretariat knew him.

Thomas Conlan, the Princeton historian who translated the scrolls into English in In Little Need of Divine Intervention (Cornell 2001), points to the decisive moment. Suenaga at last obtained a personal audience with Adachi Yasumori, the magistrate of rewards and one of the most powerful men of the shōgunate. He showed his witnesses, told of his losses. Adachi heard him out, checked, confirmed. Suenaga at last received a horse and an estate in Higo. In the colophon of the scroll Suenaga inscribed about himself a line that needs no commentary:

弓矢の道は、進みて取る名こそ大切なれ

(yumiya no michi wa, susumite toru na koso taisetsu nare)

“On the way of the bow and arrow, one thing alone is precious –

the name built by moving forward.”

(more literally: “As for the way of the bow and arrow – the name seized by advancing, that very thing is precious.”)

Such are the words of a man whom, despite the ideology of bushidō imposed centuries later, in the age of tanks and rifles, we would rather classify as a full-blooded medieval knight. And yet. Without office, without orders from above, without a faction at his back – he organized his own publicity campaign before the bench of justice. He sold horses to buy bureaucracy. He commissioned the costliest known illustrated scroll to perpetuate his own name. Every scene shows Suenaga. In the description of the arrow striking his horse the author writes Suenaga’s name, not the name of the army. In the description of the charge that rescues him he writes Suenaga’s name, not the name of his lord. Personal honor, with a document of the bureaucracy in hand, with an invoice from the painter, with historiography on private commission.

This is not the image of a collective warrior. It is the image of a man who treats himself as a separate historical project and is ready to invest his whole fortune in it.

The Snake of Mino, the Gate of Honnō-ji, the Hill of Matsuo

Sengoku jidai, the era of multi-generational, bloody war, 1467–1600. This is the heart of most modern productions about samurai. It was then that personal honor reached the point at which no one pretended any longer that some other loyalty existed. After the Ōnin War (1467–1477) the Ashikaga state fell apart like a poorly tied parcel; the shōgunate existed in form, but the provinces slipped from its control one after another. In Japanese historiography this whole era is named with a single word: gekokujō (下剋上), “the lower overthrows the higher”. A vassal may kill his lord and take his place. A daimyō may change sides on the eve of battle. Brothers kill brothers. Sons drive out fathers. When law ends – he who does not calculate, dies.

The first face of this era is Saitō Dōsan, “the Snake of Mino” (died 1556). Japanese tradition told of him for centuries as the textbook example of gekokujō – a former monk, lamp-oil merchant, who made a fortune, bought a manor, then entered the politics of his province as an adviser, rid himself of rivals, and finally became daimyō of Mino. The most recent research, based on the Rokkaku jōtei jōsho rediscovered in the 1960s, shows that this road actually took two generations – Dōsan’s father, Nagai Shinzaemonnojō, began the process and the son completed it. But the very fact that such a legend could arise and serve for four hundred years as the canonical portrait of the era says as much as historical truth. Sengoku was an age in which everyone believed it: you begin as a monk, you end as a daimyō. Or you begin as a daimyō and end in the mud with your head on a pole.

Dōsan ended with the second variant. In 1556 his son (or adopted son, we do not know) Yoshitatsu declared war on him by the Nagara River. The father had to face twelve thousand men with his own three thousand. He fought fiercely, but briefly. The head of the “Snake of Mino” arrived on a pole in his son’s camp. The son did not live long either – Mino passed on into the hands of Oda Nobunaga, who was Dōsan’s son-in-law – who in turn left Mino as inheritance to his own son-in-law, knowing his own son would kill him. The family logic of Sengoku in its full glory.

The second face, still more famous: Akechi Mitsuhide. Evening of 20 June 1582. Mitsuhide breaks camp at Sakamoto castle with thirteen thousand men, ostensibly westward to aid Hideyoshi, who is besieging Takamatsu castle in Bitchū Province. Mitsuhide is one of the most trusted generals of Oda Nobunaga, the most powerful man in Japan, who for the first time in a very long while has a real chance of unifying the country. Oda is spending that night at the temple Honnō-ji in Kyoto, with only some hundred and fifty men in his guard. He has trusted that Mitsuhide is going where he was told to go.

Mitsuhide turns at the Katsura River. He turns east. At dawn on 21 June he surrounds the temple Honnō-ji from every side. Nobunaga wakes to gunfire. He tries to fight, then withdraws to the main hall, commits seppuku, the temple burns. The most powerful man in Japan is dead.

Later Japanese tradition, beginning with Hayashi Razan’s Oda Nobunaga-fu from the first half of the seventeenth century, puts in Mitsuhide’s mouth a brief, celebrated formula: “Teki wa Honnō-ji ni ari” – “the enemy is in Honnō-ji”. With this sentence he is said to have revealed the goal of the march to his men at the Katsura River. Modern historiography (Luís Fróis in his History of Japan, the memorial of Honjō Sōemon, recent monographs by Owada Tetsuo and Goza Yūichi) has shown that this is a literary creation, not an authentic quotation. According to the soldier-witnesses, Mitsuhide revealed the goal of the expedition to no one below officer rank until the last moment – the common soldiers entering the temple were convinced that they were attacking the camp of Tokugawa Ieyasu on Nobunaga’s order.

But here begins the matter most important for us. Mitsuhide rode into Kyoto with thirteen thousand men. These men followed him. They did not stop at the gate. They did not demand explanations. They did not begin to calculate. They moved on the temple of their supreme lord, Oda Nobunaga, without inner resistance. The choreography of betrayal worked because betrayal was a known phenomenon of that age. Mitsuhide was no exception. He was the rule, only this time striking the greatest name. Thirteen days later, at the Battle of Yamazaki, he himself died, killed by peasant bandits during his flight. The thirteen-day shōgunate, as it was ironically called. His head was delivered to Hideyoshi in a sack.

The third face, the one that makes the skin crawl. 21 October 1600, the Sekigahara valley in Mino Province. After a night of pouring rain the mist hangs over the field like an evil omen. Two armies face each other, together over a hundred and fifty thousand men. On one side Tokugawa Ieyasu and his East. On the other Ishida Mitsunari and the West, defending the right of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s young son to inherit.

On Mount Matsuoyama, on the southern flank of the West, sits with fifteen thousand men (sources give between fifteen and seventeen thousand) a warrior named Kobayakawa Hideaki. Nephew of Hideyoshi’s wife. Adopted in turn by Hideyoshi, then given to the Kobayakawa house, heir to a powerful domain, veteran of the war in Korea, known for charging the front line with a spear at Ulsan and even taking a captive, for which his own uncle Hideyoshi reprimanded him (and reduced his estate).

Hideaki is supposed to ride with the West. So it is formally arranged, so it was promised to Mitsunari, so Hideaki before the battle aided in the siege of Fushimi castle. In reality, he has long been negotiating secretly with Tokugawa. Tokugawa has promised him domains. Mitsunari has promised him domains and the title of chancellor. Both promised. Hideaki promised both of them in return.

The battle begins at the Hour of the Dragon (eight in the morning). The mist slowly lifts. The West does well, the East prevails in places, in places falls back. Mitsunari sends a smoke signal (狼煙, noroshi, “wolf smoke”), trying to draw Hideaki down from the hill as agreed. Hideaki does not respond. Ōtani Yoshitsugu, a leprous veteran defending Mitsunari’s flank, instinctively shifts part of his men to face the hill – he sees what Hideaki will do before Hideaki sees it himself. An hour passes. A second hour passes.

Tokugawa loses patience. He orders his arquebusiers to open fire on Hideaki’s position, short volleys, just so, from nine hundred meters’ distance (some contemporary Japanese historians, among them Jun Shiramine, question this episode – it appears only in later Edo sources). Whatever the immediate trigger, around noon Hideaki rises, makes his decision, and descends from the hill. He descends not on Tokugawa, but on his own flank – on Ōtani Yoshitsugu. Ōtani had six hundred men in his first rank. Hideaki had fifteen thousand. Ōtani, seeing his line break, ordered one of his vassals to cut off his head and hide it from the enemy. The vassal carried out the order. The head of Ōtani Yoshitsugu was never found.

After Hideaki, four more commanders of the West deserted. Mitsunari’s line tore apart like a worn sieve. The battle that Edo for centuries described as lasting six hours – as is now clear from a recently discovered letter by Tokugawa himself dated 21 October – lasted about two hours. At two in the afternoon Tokugawa declared victory. Sekigahara was a wager in which one young warrior, calculating through the whole morning, bet on the right side. With that single move he decided the history of Japan for two hundred and sixty-eight years.

The end of Hideaki’s story has in it something hard to call justice, but akin to poetic irony. Tokugawa granted him a domain worth five hundred and twenty thousand koku of rice. Two years later, in autumn 1602, Hideaki began to lose his mind. He drank beyond all measure, hallucinated, spoke to the absent. According to later tradition he saw every night the ghost of Ōtani Yoshitsugu, returning to take back his head. On 1 December 1602 he died young, without a male heir. The Kobayakawa house was extinguished in a single generation, their domains passed to the Ikeda clan. Tokugawa received the news without comment.

What seems crucial here is not moral. Hideaki is not a figure to be condemned or admired. He is a figure whose behavior in Sengoku was entirely ordinary. Practically every great battle of that era had a moment when someone on one side crossed to the other. At Anegawa (1570) the Asai’s allies deserted. At Mikatagahara (1572) Tokugawa was abandoned by his allies. At Nagashino (1575) the Takeda clan expected, and never received, reinforcements from the Mōri. Loyalty was a currency, not a code. A currency the warrior spent with the greatest care – but spent, not deposited.

The Lacquered Cage

On 21 October 1600, when Ōtani Yoshitsugu asked to have his head cut off, an era was ending. Tokugawa Ieyasu won Sekigahara, in 1603 he would become shōgun, in 1615 he would finally extinguish the Toyotomi house at Osaka. The Edo period begins – two and a half centuries of peace, during which the class of warriors, whose identity was war, is moved into administrative offices (see more here: The shogunate is not a monarchy. How did the precise machinery of samurai administration function?).

The Tokugawa were not stupid. They knew what a Sengoku samurai was. They themselves had come from precisely there. They also knew that a society in which two million men carried two swords each and had the habit of settling minor disputes in the street would not keep the peace even for a decade. So they introduced a system that Eiko Ikegami, sociologist of the New School for Social Research, called in her monograph The Taming of the Samurai (Harvard 1995) a long, quiet domestication of the warrior. The class is locked into the castle town of each daimyō. The samurai can no longer change clan with impunity. Every daimyō spends every other year in the shōgunal capital as a hostage, while his family resides there permanently (the system of sankin-kōtai, “alternate attendance” – more here: Ten ri a day and not a moment of silence: the lives of ordinary people in daimyō processions under the Edo shogunate ). All private vengeance among samurai becomes regulated (on the law of vengeance in Edo, here: Katakiuchi – A License for Samurai Clan Revenge in the Era of the Edo Shogunate). Duels become a crime if they do not follow a procedure approved by the castle. Honor remains – but it becomes institutionalized.

A literature appears that tries to describe the identity of the Sengoku era already from the perspective of longing. Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, from 1716 – the book on which Mishima built his own myth – is the work of an older samurai convinced that the samurai of old are no more.

The famous opening “The way of the warrior is to die” (“bushidō to wa shinu koto to mitsuketari”, 武士道といふは死ぬ事と見つけたり) is the line of a man who had never been to war.

Tsunetomo was a clerk-bookkeeper in the Saga domain, where local custom forbade him to commit seppuku after his lord’s death. He wrote out of nostalgia, not experience. Hagakure is to the Edo period what to the twentieth century would be a book titled “How the Knights of the Round Table Really Lived” written in a tax office. A longing for something unknown and already gone – yet it becomes canon. Because no living samurai of Sengoku are left. There are only their bureaucratic successors.

In this same period there also arose a great dispute that best shows in which direction personal honor begins to shift under the weight of the new system. The case of the forty-seven rōnin of Akō, 1701–1703. The lord of Akō, Asano Naganori, drew his sword in the shōgun’s palace against the protocol inspector Kira Yoshinaka. For having drawn a blade in the palace, Asano was that same day compelled to commit seppuku, his domain was confiscated, his vassals declared rōnin – warriors without a lord.

Forty-seven of them, under the leadership of Ōishi Kuranosuke, for two years played the part of exemplary rōnin: drunks, merchants, loafers. On the evening of 30 January 1703 they entered Kira’s house, killed him, brought his head to the grave of their lord at the temple Sengaku-ji, and then turned themselves in to the authorities. Ogyū Sorai, the foremost Confucian of the era, advised the shōgun to take a course apparently at odds with what the people wanted: the rōnin should be granted the right to an honorable death, not the gallows – but they were to be condemned for private vengeance against public law, not rewarded for loyalty. They died by seppuku, one after another. All of them.

Sorai saw the case exactly as the new logic of the state required: the forty-seven had not conducted themselves as exemplary vassals. They had conducted themselves as medieval samurai. Vengeance for one’s lord was, in that era, no longer a virtue but a form of egoism, a private cult of personal honor under the pretext of loyalty. The Tokugawa state could not tolerate this. The people adored the forty-seven as heroes. Ogyū Sorai saw in them an anachronism.

This case shows that the personal honor of the samurai did not die in 1600. It went underground. It surfaced for generations as contraband. Tokugawa Japan was a multi-generational life of the warrior class in a lacquered cage – beautiful, polished, with golden fittings, but a cage.

An Invented Face

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 1899. A small Japanese man in a frock coat is writing the preface to his book, in English – not for Japanese readers, but for a Western audience. His name is Inazō Nitobe. He is the son of a low-ranking samurai from distant northern Mutsu, but he was never a samurai himself – at the age of nine the class into which he was born was abolished by imperial decree. He studied in Sapporo in the school founded by William Clark, was a Protestant, a Quaker, married an American Quaker, took his doctorate in Germany. He is an agronomist. He writes about agriculture, cooperatives, rice cultivation. And now he is writing this small book in English, which is to answer a question put to him once by a Belgian jurist: “Is religion not taught in Japanese schools? Then where does your morality come from?” The book is titled Bushido: The Soul of Japan. A short essay, ornate, with quotations from the Bible and Confucius.

Karl Friday, in his famous article “Bushidō or Bull?” (“The History Teacher”), notes a thing that ought to make any reader pause for a second. Nitobe wrote of the word bushidō as though convinced he had just invented it. It had been used so rarely in Japanese literature before the Meiji era that Nitobe must have taken it for his own novelty. The word had existed earlier, but on the margin, in Buddhist and military books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the Kōyō gunkan about the Takeda clan, in Hagakure, in a few Confucian texts. In everyday circulation, and in the self-awareness of the samurai themselves, it was practically absent. The classic medieval warrior spoke of kyūba no michi, of musha no narai (“the warrior’s custom”), of yumiya no michi. The word bushidō is used by no one in the surviving medieval documents.

Nitobe thus took a rare technical term and filled it with new content. The moral discipline of the Japanese “nobleman” filtered through the Victorian ideal of the English gentleman, seasoned with Confucius and a measure of Quaker ethics of self-discipline. For the Western public at the end of the nineteenth century, Bushido was a success. It read smoothly, sounded noble, said what the Western reader wanted to hear: that Japan had a morality of its own, as deep as Christianity, that samurai were Japanese knights, that East and West could meet on a plane of shared virtues.

Still more important was its reception in Japan itself. The book was translated into Japanese in 1908, nine years after the English original. By then the Empire of Japan had already been building a new army for two decades – modern, conscript, on the Prussian model – and it needed an ideology that would tie the peasant recruit to the myth of the samurai, whom that peasant had previously known mostly as the one who took his rice. Nitobe’s Bushido fitted perfectly. Absolute loyalty to the lord, and in the new age – absolute loyalty to the emperor. Death for the lord as the height of virtue. Obedience, self-discipline, contempt for one’s own life.

In the instructions of the Ministry of War for the new conscript army, issued as early as December 1871, a sentence appeared that Friday cites as central: “this spirit constitutes the essence of the old bushidō”. In 1937 the Ministry of Education issued Kokutai no hongi (“Fundamentals of Our National Polity”) – a kind of modern sacred scripture of the empire – in which bushidō was proclaimed the central moral principle of Japan, higher than Confucianism and Buddhism. In 1944, when over the Pacific the planes of young men with hachimaki headbands were shattering, the propagandists of the empire explained to mothers that their sons had died “samurai-fashion”, in a tradition a thousand years old. This was a lie. The tradition I have described here did not rest on anonymous sacrifice for the state. It rested on Naozane searching the beach for someone who would answer him by name, and on Suenaga riding personally to Kamakura to sell his horse for an honorarium.

The irony of history closes with a figure we all know from the film with Tom Cruise. Saigō Takamori (1828–1877). The great samurai of Satsuma, one of the architects of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The man who personally helped destroy the Tokugawa shōgunate, set the emperor anew on the throne, and build modern Japan. And then – the year 1873 – he disagreed with the rest of the government over Korea. He withdrew. He returned to Kagoshima. He began running private military schools there. When in 1877 his former students attacked a government arsenal, Saigō had no choice – he stood at their head.

The Satsuma Rebellion lasted eight months. The modern imperial army, which Saigō had helped to create, drove the rebels across Kyūshū. On 24 September 1877, on the hill of Shiroyama just outside Kagoshima, Saigō, wounded by a bullet in the hip and abdomen, can no longer walk. His trusted retainer Beppu Shinsuke carries him down the slope and sets him in a quiet place. “Shinsuke, this place will do. Be my second.” Saigō turns his face east, toward Tokyo and the imperial palace, bows his head. With a single stroke of the katana Beppu severs his head and hides it from the imperial troops, so it would not fall into their hands as a trophy. Beppu himself, that same day, throws himself with his last companions into a suicidal charge and dies. The rebellion ends. Twelve years later, on 22 February 1889, on the day the Meiji Constitution is proclaimed, the emperor issues a posthumous pardon. Another nine years later, on 18 December 1898, in Ueno Park in Tokyo, a bronze statue of Saigō by Takamura Kōun is unveiled – not in uniform, but in hunting dress, with his dog Tsun at his side. It stands there to this day.

The last samurai – in every language version, in every film, in every history of Japan written for foreign audiences – was a rebel. He died raising a sword against the state for which he himself had built the army. For decades a tradition grew that made one speak of the samurai as a paragon of obedience. Saigō Takamori demonstrates that the last of this line died doing exactly what the first of them had done – he placed his own face higher than the word of his superior.

To Have Face

The personal honor of the samurai is not the same thing as Western individualism. Here this essay ends, but here too begins a question to which I have no answer.

The Western individualist, the heir of Locke, Mill, and Kant, says: I have a right. A right to life, to property, to freedom of thought. The right derives from my person, it is mine, regardless of whether anyone recognizes it. I can live on a desert island and still possess the right. So is individualism understood in the tradition from Hobbes to the modern declaration of human rights.

The samurai said something radically different. He said: I have face. “Face” – in Japanese kao (顔), or, more sharply, mentsu (面子) – is a notion that cannot be placed on a desert island. “Face” exists only in the eyes of others. It arises when someone is watching. It is a mirror that someone holds within a circle of witnesses – peers, neighbors, chroniclers, warriors on the other side of the battlefield. The personal honor of the samurai was an extreme individualism and an extreme embeddedness in society all at once. He fought alone, but for witnesses. He spoke his own name, but so that someone else would hear it and remember.

Takezaki Suenaga sells a horse, rides to Kamakura, presents his witnesses before Adachi. Alone – but before the bench of justice. Kumagai Naozane beheads Atsumori because custom demands it – and everyone watches. Mitsuhide surrounds Honnō-ji because he wants the world to remember who did it. Kobayakawa Hideaki descends from the hill – but descends before all of Japan at once. “Face” is public, always.

This is why modern Japan, which we see from outside as a collective, harmonious, hierarchical, obedient country, may not be what we take it for. Honne and tatemae, “the true self” against “the outward self”, do not vanish. They shift. The fear of losing face, the obsession with how others see, the calculation of one’s position in a web of relations – these are the same engine that the Heian rider engaged before charging an enemy formation.

I do not know whether the “collective” Japan, seen from outside, is not simply a continuation of honor-based individualism. The surface has turned by a hundred and eighty degrees, the engine has stayed the same. I leave this question to the reader. I myself know only one thing – the image of the Japanese warrior as a silent cog in the machinery of hierarchy has no support in six hundred years of sources. I read these sources and I see someone else. I see a man who rides up to an enemy formation, rises in his stirrups, and shouts his own name. He shouts long, loud, and clear. He waits until someone hears. And only then does he fight.

Sources

1. Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan, Harvard University Press, 1995.

2. Karl F. Friday, Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan, Stanford University Press, 1992.

3. Karl F. Friday, Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan, Routledge, 2004.

4. Karl F. Friday, “Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian’s Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition”, The History Teacher, vol. 27, no. 3 (May 1994).

5. Thomas D. Conlan, State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003.

6. Thomas D. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Takezaki Suenaga’s Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, Cornell East Asia Series, 2001.

7. 笹間良彦, 武家戦陣作法集成 (Sasama Yoshihiko, “Buke senjin sahō shūsei” – “Compendium of Samurai Battle Customs”), Yūzankaku, 2003.

8. 藤木久志, 戦国の作法 (Fujiki Hisashi, “Sengoku no sahō” – “Customs of the Sengoku Era”), Kōdansha, 2008.

9. 笠谷和比古, 武士道の思想 (Kasaya Kazuhiko, “Bushidō no shisō” – “The Thought of Bushidō”), Chikuma Shobō, 2012.

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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