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

the entire stock, root and branches, and plant the seeds of the Gospel

on the ravaged soil? Such a heroic process may be possible—in Hawaii,

where, it is alleged, the church militant had complete success in

amassing spoils of wealth itself, and in annihilating the aboriginal

race: such a process is most decidedly impossible in Japan—nay, it is

a process which Jesus himself would never have employed in founding his

kingdom on earth. It behooves us to take more to heart the following

words of a saintly man, devout Christian and profound scholar:—“Men

have divided the world into heathen and Christian, without considering

how much good may have been hidden in the one, or how much evil may

have been mingled with the other. They have compared the best part of

themselves with the worst of their neighbors, the ideal of Christianity

with the corruption of Greece or the East. They have not aimed at

impartiality, but have been contented to accumulate all that could be

said in praise of their own, and in dispraise of other forms of

religion.”[34]

[Footnote 34: Jowett, Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, II.]

But, whatever may be the error committed by individuals, there is little

doubt that the fundamental principle of the religion they profess is a

power which we must take into account in reckoning

THE FUTURE OF BUSHIDO,

whose days seem to be already numbered. Ominous signs are in the air,

that betoken its future. Not only signs, but redoubtable forces are at

work to threaten it.

Few historical comparisons can be more judiciously made than between the

Chivalry of Europe and the Bushido of Japan, and, if history repeats

itself, it certainly will do with the fate of the latter what it did

with that of the former. The particular and local causes for the decay

of Chivalry which St. Palaye gives, have, of course, little application

to Japanese conditions; but the larger and more general causes that

helped to undermine Knighthood and Chivalry in and after the Middle Ages

are as surely working for the decline of Bushido.

One remarkable difference between the experience of Europe and of Japan

is, that, whereas in Europe when Chivalry was weaned from Feudalism and

was adopted by the Church, it obtained a fresh lease of life, in Japan

no religion was large enough to nourish it; hence, when the mother

institution, Feudalism, was gone, Bushido, left an orphan, had to shift

for itself. The present elaborate military organization might take it

under its patronage, but we know that modern warfare can afford little

room for its continuous growth. Shintoism, which fostered it in its

infancy, is itself superannuated. The hoary sages of ancient China are

being supplanted by the intellectual parvenu of the type of Bentham and

Mill. Moral theories of a comfortable kind, flattering to the

Chauvinistic tendencies of the time, and therefore thought well-adapted

to the need of this day, have been invented and propounded; but as yet

we hear only their shrill voices echoing through the columns of yellow

journalism.

Principalities and powers are arrayed against the Precepts of

Knighthood. Already, as Veblen says, “the decay of the ceremonial

code—or, as it is otherwise called, the vulgarization of life—among

the industrial classes proper, has become one of the chief enormities of

latter-day civilization in the eyes of all persons of delicate

sensibilities.” The irresistible tide of triumphant democracy, which can

tolerate no form or shape of trust—and Bushido was a trust organized by

those who monopolized reserve capital of intellect and culture, fixing

the grades and value of moral qualities—is alone powerful enough to

engulf the remnant of Bushido. The present societary forces are

antagonistic to petty class spirit, and Chivalry is, as Freeman severely

criticizes, a class spirit. Modern society, if it pretends to any unity,

cannot admit “purely personal obligations devised in the interests of an

exclusive class.”[35] Add to this the progress of popular instruction,

of industrial arts and habits, of wealth and city-life,—then we can

easily see that neither the keenest cuts of samurai’s sword nor the

sharpest shafts shot from Bushido’s boldest bows can aught avail. The

state built upon the rock of Honor and fortified by the same—shall we

call it the Ehrenstaat or, after the manner of Carlyle, the

Heroarchy?—is fast falling into the hands of quibbling lawyers and

gibbering politicians armed with logic-chopping engines of war. The

words which a great thinker used in speaking of Theresa and Antigone may

aptly be repeated of the samurai, that “the medium in which their

ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.”

[Footnote 35: Norman Conquest, Vol. V, p. 482.]

Alas for knightly virtues! alas for samurai pride! Morality ushered into

the world with the sound of bugles and drums, is destined to fade away

as “the captains and the kings depart.”

If history can teach us anything, the state built on martial virtues—be

it a city like Sparta or an Empire like Rome—can never make on earth a

“continuing city.” Universal and natural as is the fighting instinct in

man, fruitful as it has proved to be of noble sentiments and manly

virtues, it does not comprehend the whole man. Beneath the instinct to

fight there lurks a diviner instinct to love. We have seen that

Shintoism, Mencius and Wan Yang Ming, have all clearly taught it; but

Bushido and all other militant schools of ethics, engrossed, doubtless,

with questions of immediate practical need, too often forgot duly to

emphasize this fact. Life has grown larger in these latter times.

Callings nobler and broader than a warrior’s claim our attention to-day.

With an enlarged view of life, with the growth of democracy, with better

knowledge of other peoples and nations, the Confucian idea of

Benevolence—dare I also add the Buddhist idea of Pity?—will expand

into the Christian conception of Love. Men have become more than

subjects, having grown to the estate of citizens: nay, they are more

than citizens, being men.

Though war clouds hang heavy upon our horizon, we will believe that the

wings of the angel of peace can disperse them. The history of the world

confirms the prophecy the “the meek shall inherit the earth.” A nation

that sells its birthright of peace, and backslides from the front rank

of Industrialism into the file of Filibusterism, makes a poor bargain

indeed!

When the conditions of society are so changed that they have become not

only adverse but hostile to Bushido, it is time for it to prepare for an

honorable burial. It is just as difficult to point out when chivalry

dies, as to determine the exact time of its inception. Dr. Miller says

that Chivalry was formally abolished in the year 1559, when Henry II. of

France was slain in a tournament. With us, the edict formally

abolishing Feudalism in 1870 was the signal to toll the knell of

Bushido. The edict, issued two years later, prohibiting the wearing of

swords, rang out the old, “the unbought grace of life, the cheap defence

of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise,” it rang

in the new age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.”

It has been said that Japan won her late war with China by means of

Murata guns and Krupp cannon; it has been said the victory was the work

of a modern school system; but these are less than half-truths. Does

ever a piano, be it of the choicest workmanship of Ehrbar or Steinway,

burst forth into the Rhapsodies of Liszt or the Sonatas of Beethoven,

without a master’s hand? Or, if guns win battles, why did not Louis

Napoleon beat the Prussians with his Mitrailleuse, or the Spaniards

with their Mausers the Filipinos, whose arms were no better than the

old-fashioned Remingtons? Needless to repeat what has grown a trite

saying that it is the spirit that quickeneth, without which the best of

implements profiteth but little. The most improved guns and cannon do

not shoot of their own accord; the most modern educational system does

not make a coward a hero. No! What won the battles on the Yalu, in Corea

and Manchuria, was the ghosts of our fathers, guiding our hands and

beating in our hearts. They are not dead, those ghosts, the spirits of

our warlike ancestors. To those who have eyes to see, they are clearly

visible. Scratch a Japanese of the most advanced ideas, and he will show

a samurai. The great inheritance of honor, of valor and of all martial

virtues is, as Professor Cramb very fitly expresses it, “but ours on

trust, the fief inalienable of the dead and of the generation to come,”

and the summons of the present is to guard this heritage, nor to bate

one jot of the ancient spirit; the summons of the future will be so to

widen its scope as to apply it in all walks and relations of life.

It has been predicted—and predictions have been corroborated by the

events of the last half century—that the moral system of Feudal Japan,

like its castles and its armories, will crumble into dust, and new

ethics rise phoenix-like to lead New Japan in her path of progress.

Desirable and probable as the fulfilment of such a prophecy is, we must

not forget that a phoenix rises only from its own ashes, and that it is

not a bird of passage, neither does it fly on pinions borrowed from

other birds. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” It does not come

rolling down the mountains, however lofty; it does not come sailing

across the seas, however broad. “God has granted,” says the Koran, “to

every people a prophet in its own tongue.” The seeds of the Kingdom, as

vouched for and apprehended by the Japanese mind, blossomed in Bushido.

Now its days are closing—sad to say, before its full fruition—and we

turn in every direction for other sources of sweetness and light, of

strength and comfort, but among them there is as yet nothing found to

take its place. The profit and loss philosophy of Utilitarians and

Materialists finds favor among logic-choppers with half a soul. The

only other ethical system which is powerful enough to cope with

Utilitarianism and Materialism is Christianity, in comparison with

which Bushido, it must be confessed, is like “a dimly burning wick”

which the Messiah was proclaimed not to quench but to fan into a flame.

Like His Hebrew precursors, the prophets—notably Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos

and Habakkuk—Bushido laid particular stress on the moral conduct of

rulers and public men and of nations, whereas the Ethics of Christ,

which deal almost solely with individuals and His personal followers,

will find more and more practical application as individualism, in its

capacity of a moral factor, grows in potency. The domineering,

self-assertive, so-called master-morality of Nietzsche, itself akin in

some respects to Bushido, is, if I am not greatly mistaken, a passing

phase or temporary reaction against what he terms, by morbid distortion,

the humble, self-denying slave-morality of the Nazarene.

Christianity and Materialism (including Utilitarianism)—or will the

future reduce them to still more archaic forms of Hebraism and

Hellenism?—will divide the world between them. Lesser systems of morals

will ally themselves on either side for their preservation. On which

side will Bushido enlist? Having no set dogma or formula to defend, it

can afford to disappear as an entity; like the cherry blossom, it is

willing to die at the first gust of the morning breeze. But a total

extinction will never be its lot. Who can say that stoicism is dead? It

is dead as a system; but it is alive as a virtue: its energy and

vitality are still felt through many channels of life—in the philosophy

of Western nations, in the jurisprudence of all the civilized world.

Nay, wherever man struggles to raise himself