I reading Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times”, he makes some assertions about the so-called code of the (Japanese ) samurai-the “Bushido”.
Johnson claims that there is no evidence of this before the 20th century-that it was (essentially), an invention of militaristic japanese nationalists, in the 1920’s.
Johnson claims that bushido was invented to justify the brutal behavior exhibited by the IJA in Korea and China, and that it lacks historical support altogether.
Is this so? Was the whole “smarai warrior loyal to the emperor till death” thing all made p?
The cult of the emperor is mostly subsequent to the Meiji restoration. Before that it was “loyalty to the clan lord till death”.
But the story of the 47 Ronin dates back to 1701, and is a very well known folktale in Japan, and it demonstrates much of the Bushido spirit.
Regards,
Shodan
I call Bushido!
- sorry, the BS reference was irresistable *
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Bushido as a concept certainly existed prior to the 19th century, but
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The concept developed over the course of many years and was not fully formed in its idealized version until well after the Sengoku Jedai, the Japanese civil war in which many samurai-related stories and myths and whatnot are set. Certainly, however, the idea of bushido goes back a long, long time. References to a samurai honor code go back many centuries.
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The version of bushido advanced by the Japanese military junta in the 20th entury was a pretty twisted version, and
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No matter which version you take, it is fantasy to think that the samurai class actually acted that way all, or even most, of the time.
The samurai were in a lot of ways effectively the same people as European feudal nobility. It’s not a perfect comparison but it’s close. And if I were to tell you European knights were all about chivalry, you’d laugh and point out that “chivalry” was all well and fine but most of them were thugs. Well, samurai, same thing.
For an awesome examination, I like the comparison of James Clavell’s* Shogun *to Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi.
The former is a decent enough book (I never could quite finish it), popular in English. It presents the Japanese as damn near an alien species. The samurai are psycho-crazies obsessed with honor, and generally act somewhere between a cross of Data and a Klingon (both from Star Trek). They born to the class, live in the class, and die in the class, thinking only of duty.
The latter is an adventure book, and presents Musashi as a low-ish class person, mostly counted as a Samurai because he’s got a sword, and chronicles his travels and duels. He learns, meets strange people, and generally everyone acts like a human being, if sometimes a weird one. There’s disloyalty, apathy, and love. In fact, Musashi gets his start by taking part in the battle of Sekigahara on the losing side, and then running off to be a mercenary.
Just to be clear, Yoshikawa’s book is fiction, too, right? If one wanted to know what European Knights and chivalry were really like, you wouldn’t read anything with King Arthur in it. King Arthur’s knights are idealized versions…
Actually, “Shogun” is my favourite book. Clavell’s portrayal of samurai is a fantastical one, ahistorical in many ways (for one thing, the central importance of Blackthorne’s cargo of guns and his understanding of them is totally askew; by 1599 the Japanese were arguably the most firearm-armed military on the planet) but it’s a great yarn with great chaacters and some very subtle twists on the “stranger in a strange land” story.
In a sense Shogun and Musashi are just different perspectives on the same thing. Clavell’s characters - Mariko, Toranaga and his family, the Kasigis, Ishido, and the like - are the people at the top of the samurai food chain, the people who had the time and motivation to be obsessed with face and honor. They act and sound like nobility usually did in feudal times. The rank and file samurai are background noise; on a few occasions Clavell mentions that the common soldier dresses in little more than rags because they can’t afford much else. He specifically notes that Toranaga and Ishido are the only daimyo in Japan who issue uniforms to their men.
It also serves as a great allegory to my favorite scene in Ronin:
Jean-Pierre: Forty-seven samurai, whose master was betrayed and killed by another lord. They became ronin - masterless samurai - disgraced by another man’s treachery. For three years they plotted, pretending to be thieves, mercenaries, even madmen - that I didn’t have time to do - and then one night they struck, slipping into the castle of their lord’s betrayer and killing him.
Sam: Nice. I like that. My kind of job.
Jean-Pierre: There’s something more. All forty-seven of them committed seppuku - ritual suicide - in the courtyard of the castle.
Sam: Well, that I don’t like so much.
The Bushido code was real, but as RickJay notes, idealized for the purposes of the Meiji Ishin and the military government that took over the Empire of Japan to glorify military rule and conquest. Common samurai of the Edo period and before did not practice bushido any more than the Knights Templar went off to the Crusades in hope of recovering the Holy Chalice of Christ.
Stranger
The story of Miyamoto Musashi (I assume that’s who the book is about, the description sounds like him) is pretty well documented; he was a real person in history who started as a peasant and became a sword fighting master by dint of much training and learning and trials (and, presumably, talent). I don’t know if he or his contemporaries ever considered him an actual samurai, though. As others have noted, that is mostly an hereditary thing. But actual samurai did fight him as an equal, something they would not have done for just any peasant.
My favorite part of bushido is the concept of seppuku - ritualized suicide. I always saw it as the individual samurai’s ultimate ownership if his own life and destiny. Consider the case where the daimyo is evil or corrupt. The samurai can’t really rebel against his feudal lord without becoming an outcast. But he can make a very strong protest that the family elders might pay attention to by committing seppuku. Of course, the samurai would then be dead, but he might be able to achieve his aim of (for example) changing the clan leadership by this extreme protest.
This is one of the reasons most peasants were glad to be peasants, I suspect.
Roddy
Me, I suspect most peasants (in Japan and everywhere else) made the best out of a bad deal by thinking about the relative drawbacks of being a Lord (I mean, who wants to be hungover from partying all the time? Not me!) and talking up the virtues of their life. And at the same time, plenty of Lords staved off feelings of guilt by imagining the happy peasants content with their humble life. But there weren’t really a whole lot of people who were given the option of peasant or ruling class and actually chose peasant, especially among those who’d actually experienced being a peasant.
I don’t even understand how anyone could deny hundreds of years of writings and art to make a claim like that. It’s like saying music wasn’t invented until the 1900s. Bushido permeated Japanese culture and there are probably millions of historical pieces that reflect it.
Most of it, like he Hagakure, was codified after the glory days of the samurai during the relatively peaceful days of the Tokugawa Shogunate, partly in an attempt to make themselves feel more relevant and important. So it’s not exactly ancient, but not really a totally modern invention either. The nationalist government during WWII twisted it to its own purpose, of course.
my own take is the change in suffix for anything martial from ‘jutsu’ (technique) to ‘do’ (the way.) the difference is obvious. of course, if you keep retelling the stories of martial geniuses like miyamoto musashi and yagyu munenori, you will believe there was something deep and spiritual to being a warrior back then.
besides the experiences of those two and a few others, japanese warriors were pretty much like all the others.
This is a nitpick, but Musashi wasn’t a peasant. He was from a samurai family that was a branch of the Akamatsu clan, which itself, was a branch of the Minimoto/Genji, which was an offshoot of the Imperial family. Admittedly, he was from a not very important branch of the family (although he was also descended from the Iga daimyos), but he was still a samurai.
This article from cracked.com claims that Bushido is another example of a supposedly ancient tradition that isn’t:
I think we need some clarification. Is the question whether Bushido is completely made up in the 1900s or whether what has been written about it since the 1900s is 100% correct?
The OP asked about someone who claims there is no evidence of Bushido before the 20th century. That is trivially easy to prove False.
Now, Bushido was bastardized by the military. You could probably say there is no evidence of some of the things in the military’s version before the 20th century. People seem to take that to mean that Bushido was made up in the 20th century. Let’s not call that Bushido, let’s call it MilBushido.
Bushido - Been around forever and a day.
MilBushido - 20th century.
The Cracked article is about MilBushido. Their links are no help. One flat out says Bushido was made up in 1905 and another tries to clarify the difference between what we believe about Bushido today and how it was practiced throughout history.
I don’t agree that Shogun “presents the Japanese as damn near an alien species” or as “psycho-crazies”, just as human beings with a different world view to our Western Judeo-Christian world view. This is one of Clavell’s strengths - he is good at pursuading you of the validity of a a different way of thinking. Not necessarily better, not necessarily worse - just different. His books are certainly not great literature and he never lets actual history get in the way of a good plot line but he can make the reader accept that not all cultures see things in the same way. The motivation of a character may not make sense in your (the reader’s) terms but it makes sense to them.
It is also clear in Shogun that not all samurai are the same and not all actually live by what we think of as Bushido. We’re shown poor samurai, cowardly samurai, viscious samurai, even a young samurai selling himself to an elderly brothel keeper!
Do you have any cites for this actually occurring?
I call BS on this also. Face it, duty and honor are nice-but slicing your stomach open? I very much doubt that this ahappened, all that often.
Yes, in fact, there are many accounts, both in Japanese history and by Western observers after the Meiji Restoration, that this occurred. *Seppuku *was usually performed as the more honorable option to being executed and having the samauri’s family bear the shame. The victim rarely, if ever, died from bleeding and disembowlment, as the kaishakunin would behead the samurai just after he completed the disembowlment.
If any doubt about this occurring remains, there is the well-documented seppuku by famed author and poet Yukio Mishima in 1970 after a failed attempt to incite the Japanese Defense Forces to rise up and establish a military rule. Of course, Mishima himself was promoting a glorified version of the bushido, but it is clear that a sufficiently motivated person can commit this action.
Stranger