Bushido the Soul of Japan: Illustrated

Publisher Marketing: Bushido is the code of moral principles which the knights were required or instructed to observe. It is not a written code; at best it consists of a few maxims handed down from mouth to mouth or coming from the pen of some well-known warrior or savant. More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten, possessing all the more the powerful sanction of veritable deed, and of a law written on the fleshly tablets of the heart. It was founded not on the creation of one brain, however able, or on the life of a single personage, however renowned. It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career. It, perhaps, fills the same position in the history of ethics that the English Constitution does in political history; yet it has had nothing to compare with the Magna Charta or the Habeas Corpus Act. True, early in the seventeenth century Military Statutes (Buke Hatto) were promulgated; but their thirteen short articles were taken up mostly with marriages, castles, leagues, etc., and didactic regulations were but meagerly touched upon. We cannot, therefore, point out any definite time and place and say, "Here is its fountain head." Only as it attains consciousness in the feudal age, its origin, in respect to time, may be identified with feudalism. But feudalism itself is woven of many threads, and Bushido shares its intricate nature. As in England the political institutions of feudalism may be said to date from the Norman Conquest, so we may say that in Japan its rise was simultaneous with the ascendancy of Yoritomo, late in the twelfth century. As, however, in England, we find the social elements of feudalism far back in the period previous to William the Conqueror, so, too, the germs of feudalism in Japan had been long existent before the period mentioned. Contributor Bio:  Nitobe, Inazo Nitobe Inazo (September 1, 1862 - October 15, 1933) was a Japanese agricultural economist, author, educator, diplomat, politician, and Christian during the pre-World War II period. Nitobe was born in Morioka, Mutsu Province (present-day Iwate Prefecture). His father was a retainer to the local daimyo of the Nambu clan. His infant name was Inanosuke. Nitobe left Morioka for Tokyo in 1871 to become the heir to his uncle, Ota Tokitoshi, and adopted the name Ota Inazo. He later reverted to Nitobe when his brothers died. Nitobe was in the second class of the Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University). He was converted to Christianity under the strong legacy left by Dr. William S. Clark, the first Vice-Principal of the College, who had taught in Sapporo for eight months before Nitobe's class arrived in the second year after the opening of the college; thus they never personally crossed paths. Nitobe's classmates who converted to Christianity at the same time included Uchimura Kanzo. Nitobe and his friends were baptized by an American Methodist Episcopal missionary Bishop M. C. Harris. Nitobe's decision to study agriculture was due to a hope expressed by Emperor Meiji that the Nitobe family would continue to advance the field of agricultural development (Nitobe's father developed former waste land in the north of the Nambu domain near present-day Towada, now part of Aomori Prefecture, into productive farmland). In 1883, Nitobe entered Tokyo Imperial University for further studies in English literature and in economics. Disappointed by the level of research in Tokyo, he quit the university and sought study opportunities in the United States. In 1884, Nitobe traveled to the United States where he stayed for three years, and studied economics and political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. While in Baltimore he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). It was through a Quaker community in Philadelphia that he met Mary Patterson Elkinton, whom he eventually married. He also influenced the establishment of the Friends School in Tokyo. While at Johns Hopkins, he was granted an assistant professorship at his alma mater, the Sapporo Agricultural College, but was ordered to first obtain a doctorate in agricultural economics in Germany. He completed his degree after three years in Halle University and returned briefly to the United States to marry Mary Elkinton in Philadelphia.