Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushido Ideal

·期刊原文

Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushido Ideal

By G. Cameron Hurst III

Philosophy East & West

V. 40 No. 4 (October 1990) pp. 511-527

Copyright 1990 by University of Hawaii Press

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G. Cameron Hurst III is professor of` History and East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas.

p. 511

I was traveling in Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong when the Showa Emperor passed away, and I must admit (as an American historian of Japan trained in what might be called the "Reischauer era"), I was somewhat surprised at the vitriolic reaction of so many people, in both the East and the West, toward any signs of Japanese sympathy for this man, who many still regard as ultimately responsible for Japan's war crimes. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times on February 16th by the Committee on the Case Against Hirohito, for example, referred to him as the "other Hitler" and called for his condemnation in a court of world opinion.[1]

The emotional reaction to the emperor's death and funeral protocol, as well as discussions with many who were not Japan specialists, impressed upon me once again the widespread belief that the behavior of Japanese forces in World War II was conditioned by adherence to the old samurai code of ethics called bushido[a], which emphasized unflinching loyalty to the emperor. even to the point of willingly sacrificing one's life, by suicide if necessary. Bushido in many Western minds, as represented, for example, in Baron Russell's The Knights of` Bushido, is intimately linked to the rise of Japanese imperialism, kamikaze[b] attacks, suicide charges, and prisoner-of-war atrocities.[2] That this is a historical perversion -- that even if there was a modern bushido that functioned as a normative ethical code for Japanese troops, it might in fact be a modern creation, with no real link to any Japanese traditional set of ethics, real or imagined -- is seldom considered.

I hope to do two things in this article. First, I want to discuss the concept of bushido and the term itself, for both the Western and Japanese understandings of this term and the associated set of moral values have been terribly distorted in the written record in both countries and as well by the events of modern history. Then I want to examine the often linked concepts of loyalty, honor, and death in medieval and early modern Japan to see if in fact there is any consistent view of them, specifically a view to which the label bushido can be attached.

NITOBE INAZO AND BUSHIDO
One wonders whether the modern Japanese themselves, let alone those of us in the West, would ever have heard of bushido had it not been for the efforts of Nitobe Inazo (1863-1933). In almost every way imaginable, Nitobe was the least qualified Japanese of his age to have been informing anyone of Japan's history and culture. The Christian son of a late Tokugawa samurai from Morioka who was educated largely in English at special schools early in the Meiji era, Nitobe was one of the "Generation of Masters of English"[3] who

p. 512

could communicate with foreigners to a degree that even the most ardent exponents of kokusaika[c] ("internationalization") today would envy. Here was a man far more familiar with the themes and metaphors of classical Western literature than those of his native Japan, far more certain of the dates and events in Western than in Japanese history, who nonetheless set out to present to the West a view of the ethics of premodern Japan that has been accepted rather uncritically ever since. Indeed, Nitobe's Bushido: The Soul of Japan became not only an international bestseller, but served as the cornerstone for the construction of an edifice of ultranationalism that led Japan down the path to a war she could not win.

Nitobe was born in 1862 during the turbulence of the bakumatsu[d] era, but almost immediately embarked upon an educational career that in a sense isolated him from the main events of the age. He began the study of English at age nine and, after several years of study in Tokyo, went off at fifteen to school in Hokkaido, where he became a Christian and studied primarily agricultural economics, in English, from Americans.[4] Hokkaido was only just becoming a real part of Japan, so Nitobe was essentially isolated spatially, culturally, religiously, and even linguistically from the currents of Meiji Japan. In the words of one observer, Nitobe was "the most de-orientalized Japanese I have ever met."[5] Yet at the same ti