Bushido, Inazo Nitobe [top rated ebook readers .txt] 📗

so with the Precepts of Knighthood.

These persisted in systematically regarding finance as something

low—low as compared with moral and intellectual vocations.

 

Money and the love of it being thus diligently ignored, Bushido itself

could long remain free from a thousand and one evils of which money is

the root. This is sufficient reason for the fact that our public men

have long been free from corruption; but, alas, how fast plutocracy is

making its way in our time and generation!

 

The mental discipline which would now-a-days be chiefly aided by the

study of mathematics, was supplied by literary exegesis and

deontological discussions. Very few abstract subjects troubled the mind

of the young, the chief aim of their education being, as I have said,

decision of character. People whose minds were simply stored with

information found no great admirers. Of the three services of studies

that Bacon gives,—for delight, ornament, and ability,—Bushido had

decided preference for the last, where their use was “in judgment and

the disposition of business.” Whether it was for the disposition of

public business or for the exercise of self-control, it was with a

practical end in view that education was conducted. “Learning without

thought,” said Confucius, “is labor lost: thought without learning is

perilous.”

 

When character and not intelligence, when the soul and not the head, is

chosen by a teacher for the material to work upon and to develop, his

vocation partakes of a sacred character. “It is the parent who has borne

me: it is the teacher who makes me man.” With this idea, therefore, the

esteem in which one’s preceptor was held was very high. A man to evoke

such confidence and respect from the young, must necessarily be endowed

with superior personality without lacking erudition. He was a father to

the fatherless, and an adviser to the erring. “Thy father and thy

mother”—so runs our maxim—“are like heaven and earth; thy teacher and

thy lord are like the sun and moon.”

 

The present system of paying for every sort of service was not in vogue

among the adherents of Bushido. It believed in a service which can be

rendered only without money and without price. Spiritual service, be it

of priest or teacher, was not to be repaid in gold or silver, not

because it was valueless but because it was invaluable. Here the

non-arithmetical honor-instinct of Bushido taught a truer lesson than

modern Political Economy; for wages and salaries can be paid only for

services whose results are definite, tangible, and measurable, whereas

the best service done in education,—namely, in soul development (and

this includes the services of a pastor), is not definite, tangible or

measurable. Being immeasurable, money, the ostensible measure of value,

is of inadequate use. Usage sanctioned that pupils brought to their

teachers money or goods at different seasons of the year; but these were

not payments but offerings, which indeed were welcome to the recipients

as they were usually men of stern calibre, boasting of honorable penury,

too dignified to work with their hands and too proud to beg. They were

grave personifications of high spirits undaunted by adversity. They were

an embodiment of what was considered as an end of all learning, and were

thus a living example of that discipline of disciplines,

 

SELF-CONTROL,

 

which was universally required of samurai.

 

The discipline of fortitude on the one hand, inculcating endurance

without a groan, and the teaching of politeness on the other, requiring

us not to mar the pleasure or serenity of another by manifestations of

our own sorrow or pain, combined to engender a stoical turn of mind, and

eventually to confirm it into a national trait of apparent stoicism. I

say apparent stoicism, because I do not believe that true stoicism can

ever become the characteristic of a whole nation, and also because some

of our national manners and customs may seem to a foreign observer

hard-hearted. Yet we are really as susceptible to tender emotion as any

race under the sky.

 

I am inclined to think that in one sense we have to feel more than

others—yes, doubly more—since the very attempt to, restrain natural

promptings entails suffering. Imagine boys—and girls too—brought up

not to resort to the shedding of a tear or the uttering of a groan for

the relief of their feelings,—and there is a physiological problem

whether such effort steels their nerves or makes them more sensitive.

 

It was considered unmanly for a samurai to betray his emotions on his

face. “He shows no sign of joy or anger,” was a phrase used in

describing a strong character. The most natural affections were kept

under control. A father could embrace his son only at the expense of his

dignity; a husband would not kiss his wife,—no, not in the presence of

other people, whatever he might do in private! There may be some truth

in the remark of a witty youth when he said, “American husbands kiss

their wives in public and beat them in private; Japanese husbands beat

theirs in public and kiss them in private.”

 

Calmness of behavior, composure of mind, should not be disturbed by

passion of any kind. I remember when, during the late war with China, a

regiment left a certain town, a large concourse of people flocked to the

station to bid farewell to the general and his army. On this occasion

an American resident resorted to the place, expecting to witness loud

demonstrations, as the nation itself was highly excited and there were

fathers, mothers, and sweethearts of the soldiers in the crowd. The

American was strangely disappointed; for as the whistle blew and the

train began to move, the hats of thousands of people were silently taken

off and their heads bowed in reverential farewell; no waving of

handkerchiefs, no word uttered, but deep silence in which only an

attentive ear could catch a few broken sobs. In domestic life, too, I

know of a father who spent whole nights listening to the breathing of a

sick child, standing behind the door that he might not be caught in such

an act of parental weakness! I know of a mother who, in her last

moments, refrained from sending for her son, that he might not be

disturbed in his studies. Our history and everyday life are replete with

examples of heroic matrons who can well bear comparison with some of the

most touching pages of Plutarch. Among our peasantry an Ian Maclaren

would be sure to find many a Marget Howe.

 

It is the same discipline of self-restraint which is accountable for the

absence of more frequent revivals in the Christian churches of Japan.

When a man or woman feels his or her soul stirred, the first instinct is

to quietly suppress any indication of it. In rare instances is the

tongue set free by an irresistible spirit, when we have eloquence of

sincerity and fervor. It is putting a premium upon a breach of the third

commandment to encourage speaking lightly of spiritual experience. It is

truly jarring to Japanese ears to hear the most sacred words, the most

secret heart experiences, thrown out in promiscuous audiences. “Dost

thou feel the soil of thy soul stirred with tender thoughts? It is time

for seeds to sprout. Disturb it not with speech; but let it work alone

in quietness and secrecy,”—writes a young samurai in his diary.

 

To give in so many articulate words one’s inmost thoughts and

feelings—notably the religious—is taken among us as an unmistakable

sign that they are neither very profound nor very sincere. “Only a

pomegranate is he”—so runs a popular saying—“who, when he gapes his

mouth, displays the contents of his heart.”

 

It is not altogether perverseness of oriental minds that the instant our

emotions are moved we try to guard our lips in order to hide them.

Speech is very often with us, as the Frenchman defined it, “the art of

concealing thought.”

 

Call upon a Japanese friend in time of deepest affliction and he will

invariably receive you laughing, with red eyes or moist cheeks. At first

you may think him hysterical. Press him for explanation and you will get

a few broken commonplaces—“Human life has sorrow;” “They who meet must

part;” “He that is born must die;” “It is foolish to count the years of

a child that is gone, but a woman’s heart will indulge in follies;” and

the like. So the noble words of a noble Hohenzollern—“Lerne zu leiden

ohne Klagen”—had found many responsive minds among us, long before they

were uttered.

 

Indeed, the Japanese have recourse to risibility whenever the frailties

of human nature are put to severest test. I think we possess a better

reason than Democritus himself for our Abderian tendency; for laughter

with us oftenest veils an effort to regain balance of temper, when

disturbed by any untoward circumstance. It is a counterpoise of sorrow

or rage.

 

The suppression of feelings being thus steadily insisted upon, they find

their safety-valve in poetical aphorism. A poet of the tenth century

writes, “In Japan and China as well, humanity, when moved by sorrow,

tells its bitter grief in verse.” A mother who tries to console her

broken heart by fancying her departed child absent on his wonted chase

after the dragon-fly, hums,

 

“How far to-day in chase, I wonder,

Has gone my hunter of the dragon-fly!”

 

I refrain from quoting other examples, for I know I could do only scant

justice to the pearly gems of our literature, were I to render into a

foreign tongue the thoughts which were wrung drop by drop from bleeding

hearts and threaded into beads of rarest value. I hope I have in a

measure shown that inner working of our minds which often presents an

appearance of callousness or of an hysterical mixture of laughter and

dejection, and whose sanity is sometimes called in question.

 

It has also been suggested that our endurance of pain and indifference

to death are due to less sensitive nerves. This is plausible as far as

it goes. The next question is,—Why are our nerves less tightly strung?

It may be our climate is not so stimulating as the American. It may be

our monarchical form of government does not excite us as much as the

Republic does the Frenchman. It may be that we do not read _Sartor

Resartus_ as zealously as the Englishman. Personally, I believe it was

our very excitability and sensitiveness which made it a necessity to

recognize and enforce constant self-repression; but whatever may be the

explanation, without taking into account long years of discipline in

self-control, none can be correct.

 

Discipline in self-control can easily go too far. It can well repress

the genial current of the soul. It can force pliant natures into

distortions and monstrosities. It can beget bigotry, breed hypocrisy or

hebetate affections. Be a virtue never so noble, it has its counterpart

and counterfeit. We must recognize in each virtue its own positive

excellence and follow its positive ideal, and the ideal of

self-restraint is to keep our mind level—as our expression is—or, to

borrow a Greek term, attain the state of euthymia, which Democritus

called the highest good.

 

The acme of self-control is reached and best illustrated in the first of

the two institutions which we shall now bring to view; namely,

THE INSTITUTIONS OF SUICIDE

AND REDRESS,

 

of which (the former known as harakiri and the latter as

kataki-uchi )many foreign writers have treated more or less fully.

 

To begin with suicide, let me state that I confine my observations only

to seppuku or kappuku, popularly known as harakiri—which means

self-immolation by disembowelment. “Ripping the abdomen? How

absurd!”—so cry those to whom the name is new. Absurdly odd as it may

sound at first to