Was "Bushido" (Samurai Code) Complete BS?

[rogerbox]

@mac_bolan00

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 good post. There is a Japanese comic I really love called “Blade of the Immortal” which takes place shortly after the feudal era. A rogue school of swordsmen basically travel Japan killing all other sword schools, because they believe that the ritualized, spiritual kendo crap they teach in peaceful time swordschools is just a way for crappy samurai to pay the rent and has nothing to do with actual martialness (i.e., war).

[Fubaya]

Here is a list of incidents involving Junshi, committing Seppuku because your master died. It was common enough that they tried to outlaw it several times.

[TokyoBayer]

Let me be clearer. What I am asking for is a cite for the following case:

@Roderick_Femm

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. **

Has this ever happened in pre-modern Japan? Where there samurais who were killing themselves in protest of corrupt leadership, (specifically because the samurai felt that the leader was evil or corrupt and not because the samurai was on the wrong side of a leader).

So, I’m sitting here considering this case, and I can’t think of one happening. This is why I’m asking for cites. All references to one radical nut in the 1960s do not fulfill this request. Bonus points if you can get up to 12. The importance of 12 is that is the number which would surpass the number of “burning martyrs” in just this year alone.

Generally, in the past 30 years since I first lived in Japan, in actual discussions in RL, as well as reading or participating in internet discussions, the concepts related to honor, samurai, *bushido *and suicide, including seppuku, are areas which are generally the most misunderstood while being idealized.

I found this particularly true here on the Dope.

@Shodan

The cult of the emperor is mostly subsequent to the Meiji restoration. Before that it was “loyalty to the clan lord till death”.

No. Not even close. The “cult of the emperor” wasn’t even that particularly compelling. Scholars who have studied the journals and letters of the tokkou members (called kamizaki in the West) have remarked on how little space was spent on the emperor. The young kids’ last thoughts were about their families and other group members.

@RickJay

1. Bushido as a concept certainly existed prior to the 19th century, but
   [. . .]
   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.

Good post, but it always needs to be clarified that the samurai class was much larger than the European feudal nobility, and incorporated many others, such as foot solders and bureaucrats.

@MarcusF

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.

It’s been decades since I read Shogun, but I was not impressed with his portrayal of Japanese in that or Chinese in his other books.

[RickJay]

@TokyoPlayer

Good post, but it always needs to be clarified that the samurai class was much larger than the European feudal nobility, and incorporated many others, such as foot solders and bureaucrats.

Like I said, it’s not a perfect comparison. The samurai class was not only larger, but in being larger played a much more significant role in shaping Japan’s economy, to the point that eventually they became an unsupportable burden.

It’s been decades since I read Shogun, but I was not impressed with his portrayal of Japanese in that or Chinese in his other books.

Of course, Clavell’s portrayal of the Portuguese, Dutch et al. isn’t all that balanced or fair, either. He’s showing a very small slice of Japanese society, a tiny upper slice, in fact.

Still, though, there’s a remarkably broad cast of characters. Part of the point of “Shogun” is that your perspective is gradually switched. At the beginning, the Europeans are the people the reader identifies with and the Japanese are aliens who all appear the same. But by the end, it’s the Europeans who are aliens, all weird, quarreling jerks, and the Japanese are the ones who seem like normal people with actual three-dimensional personalities. You expect Blackthorne, the English hero, to be the guy who decides matters… and as it turns out, he was just being used as bait the whole time, and his actions don’t really matter at all.

[Kobal2]

@RickJay

4. 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.

This, very much so.
It’s really comparable to the concept of chivalry here in the West. The notion started popping up around the 12-13th century IIRC, the idea that maaaybe there was something more to be found in the concept of nobility than simply “I got the might, so I got the right”. Then it got a big revival during the 18th when a lot of books about romantic, chivalric knights got written, such as Ivanhoe, the Song of Roland, Beowulf… lots of pretty guys in shining armours, righting wrongs and defending the meek because those were the shining morals of a by-gone Golden Age.

But historically, knights and nobles were pretty much thugs. Violent looters, rapists, murderers, thieves, extortionists, schemers and plotters, patricides, fratricides… Unpleasant people to be around, really. The times, they were always rotten.