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

>Many thrilling anecdotes were told of those who atoned by death for

ni-gon, a double tongue.

 

The regard for veracity was so high that, unlike the generality of

Christians who persistently violate the plain commands of the Teacher

not to swear, the best of samurai looked upon an oath as derogatory to

their honor. I am well aware that they did swear by different deities or

upon their swords; but never has swearing degenerated into wanton form

and irreverent interjection. To emphasize our words a practice of

literally sealing with blood was sometimes resorted to. For the

explanation of such a practice, I need only refer my readers to Goethe’s

Faust.

 

A recent American writer is responsible for this statement, that if you

ask an ordinary Japanese which is better, to tell a falsehood or be

impolite, he will not hesitate to answer “to tell a falsehood!” Dr.

Peery[14] is partly right and partly wrong; right in that an ordinary

Japanese, even a samurai, may answer in the way ascribed to him, but

wrong in attributing too much weight to the term he translates

“falsehood.” This word (in Japanese uso) is employed to denote

anything which is not a truth (_makoto_) or fact (_honto_). Lowell tells

us that Wordsworth could not distinguish between truth and fact, and an

ordinary Japanese is in this respect as good as Wordsworth. Ask a

Japanese, or even an American of any refinement, to tell you whether he

dislikes you or whether he is sick at his stomach, and he will not

hesitate long to tell falsehoods and answer, “I like you much,” or, “I

am quite well, thank you.” To sacrifice truth merely for the sake of

politeness was regarded as an “empty form” (_kyo-rei_) and “deception by

sweet words,” and was never justified.

 

[Footnote 14: Peery, The Gist of Japan, p. 86.]

 

I own I am speaking now of the Bushido idea of veracity; but it may not

be amiss to devote a few words to our commercial integrity, of which I

have heard much complaint in foreign books and journals. A loose

business morality has indeed been the worst blot on our national

reputation; but before abusing it or hastily condemning the whole race

for it, let us calmly study it and we shall be rewarded with consolation

for the future.

 

Of all the great occupations of life, none was farther removed from the

profession of arms than commerce. The merchant was placed lowest in the

category of vocations,—the knight, the tiller of the soil, the

mechanic, the merchant. The samurai derived his income from land and

could even indulge, if he had a mind to, in amateur farming; but the

counter and abacus were abhorred. We knew the wisdom of this social

arrangement. Montesquieu has made it clear that the debarring of the

nobility from mercantile pursuits was an admirable social policy, in

that it prevented wealth from accumulating in the hands of the powerful.

The separation of power and riches kept the distribution of the latter

more nearly equable. Professor Dill, the author of “Roman Society in the

Last Century of the Western Empire,” has brought afresh to our mind that

one cause of the decadence of the Roman Empire, was the permission given

to the nobility to engage in trade, and the consequent monopoly of

wealth and power by a minority of the senatorial families.

 

Commerce, therefore, in feudal Japan did not reach that degree of

development which it would have attained under freer conditions. The

obloquy attached to the calling naturally brought within its pale such

as cared little for social repute. “Call one a thief and he will steal:”

put a stigma on a calling and its followers adjust their morals to it,

for it is natural that “the normal conscience,” as Hugh Black says,

“rises to the demands made on it, and easily falls to the limit of the

standard expected from it.” It is unnecessary to add that no business,

commercial or otherwise, can be transacted without a code of morals. Our

merchants of the feudal period had one among themselves, without which

they could never have developed, as they did, such fundamental

mercantile institutions as the guild, the bank, the bourse, insurance,

checks, bills of exchange, etc.; but in their relations with people

outside their vocation, the tradesmen lived too true to the reputation

of their order.

 

This being the case, when the country was opened to foreign trade, only

the most adventurous and unscrupulous rushed to the ports, while the

respectable business houses declined for some time the repeated requests

of the authorities to establish branch houses. Was Bushido powerless to

stay the current of commercial dishonor? Let us see.

 

Those who are well acquainted with our history will remember that only a

few years after our treaty ports were opened to foreign trade,

feudalism was abolished, and when with it the samurai’s fiefs were taken

and bonds issued to them in compensation, they were given liberty to

invest them in mercantile transactions. Now you may ask, “Why could they

not bring their much boasted veracity into their new business relations

and so reform the old abuses?” Those who had eyes to see could not weep

enough, those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize enough, with

the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally and irrevocably

failed in his new and unfamiliar field of trade and industry, through

sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful plebeian rival. When

we know that eighty per cent. of the business houses fail in so

industrial a country as America, is it any wonder that scarcely one

among a hundred samurai who went into trade could succeed in his new

vocation? It will be long before it will be recognized how many fortunes

were wrecked in the attempt to apply Bushido ethics to business methods;

but it was soon patent to every observing mind that the ways of wealth

were not the ways of honor. In what respects, then, were they different?

 

Of the three incentives to Veracity that Lecky enumerates, viz: the

industrial, the political, and the philosophical, the first was

altogether lacking in Bushido. As to the second, it could develop little

in a political community under a feudal system. It is in its

philosophical, and as Lecky says, in its highest aspect, that Honesty

attained elevated rank in our catalogue of virtues. With all my sincere

regard for the high commercial integrity of the Anglo-Saxon race, when I

ask for the ultimate ground, I am told that “Honesty is the best

policy,” that it pays to be honest. Is not this virtue, then, its own

reward? If it is followed because it brings in more cash than falsehood,

I am afraid Bushido would rather indulge in lies!

 

If Bushido rejects a doctrine of quid pro quo rewards, the shrewder

tradesman will readily accept it. Lecky has very truly remarked that

Veracity owes its growth largely to commerce and manufacture; as

Nietzsche puts it, “Honesty is the youngest of virtues”—in other

words, it is the foster-child of industry, of modern industry. Without

this mother, Veracity was like a blue-blood orphan whom only the most

cultivated mind could adopt and nourish. Such minds were general among

the samurai, but, for want of a more democratic and utilitarian

foster-mother, the tender child failed to thrive. Industries advancing,

Veracity will prove an easy, nay, a profitable, virtue to practice. Just

think, as late as November 1880, Bismarck sent a circular to the

professional consuls of the German Empire, warning them of “a lamentable

lack of reliability with regard to German shipments inter alia,

apparent both as to quality and quantity;” now-a-days we hear

comparatively little of German carelessness and dishonesty in trade. In

twenty years her merchants learned that in the end honesty pays. Already

our merchants are finding that out. For the rest I recommend the reader

to two recent writers for well-weighed judgment on this point.[15] It is

interesting to remark in this connection that integrity and honor were

the surest guaranties which even a merchant debtor could present in the

form of promissory notes. It was quite a usual thing to insert such

clauses as these: “In default of the repayment of the sum lent to me, I

shall say nothing against being ridiculed in public;” or, “In case I

fail to pay you back, you may call me a fool,” and the like.

 

[Footnote 15: Knapp, Feudal and Modern Japan, Vol. I, Ch. IV. Ransome,

Japan in Transition, Ch. VIII.]

 

Often have I wondered whether the Veracity of Bushido had any motive

higher than courage. In the absence of any positive commandment against

bearing false witness, lying was not condemned as sin, but simply

denounced as weakness, and, as such, highly dishonorable. As a matter of

fact, the idea of honesty is so intimately blended, and its Latin and

its German etymology so identified with

 

HONOR,

 

that it is high time I should pause a few moments for the consideration

of this feature of the Precepts of Knighthood.

 

The sense of honor, implying a vivid consciousness of personal dignity

and worth, could not fail to characterize the samurai, born and bred to

value the duties and privileges of their profession. Though the word

ordinarily given now-a-days as the translation of Honor was not used

freely, yet the idea was conveyed by such terms as na (name)

men-moku (countenance), guai-bun (outside hearing), reminding us

respectively of the biblical use of “name,” of the evolution of the term

“personality” from the Greek mask, and of “fame.” A good name—one’s

reputation, the immortal part of one’s self, what remains being

bestial—assumed as a matter of course, any infringement upon its

integrity was felt as shame, and the sense of shame (_Ren-chi-shin_) was

one of the earliest to be cherished in juvenile education. “You will be

laughed at,” “It will disgrace you,” “Are you not ashamed?” were the

last appeal to correct behavior on the part of a youthful delinquent.

Such a recourse to his honor touched the most sensitive spot in the

child’s heart, as though it had been nursed on honor while it was in its

mother’s womb; for most truly is honor a prenatal influence, being

closely bound up with strong family consciousness. “In losing the

solidarity of families,” says Balzac, “society has lost the fundamental

force which Montesquieu named Honor.” Indeed, the sense of shame seems

to me to be the earliest indication of the moral consciousness of our

race. The first and worst punishment which befell humanity in

consequence of tasting “the fruit of that forbidden tree” was, to my

mind, not the sorrow of childbirth, nor the thorns and thistles, but the

awakening of the sense of shame. Few incidents in history excel in

pathos the scene of the first mother plying with heaving breast and

tremulous fingers, her crude needle on the few fig leaves which her

dejected husband plucked for her. This first fruit of disobedience

clings to us with a tenacity that nothing else does. All the sartorial

ingenuity of mankind has not yet succeeded in sewing an apron that will

efficaciously hide our sense of shame. That samurai was right who

refused to compromise his character by a slight humiliation in his

youth; “because,” he said, “dishonor is like a scar on a tree, which

time, instead of effacing, only helps to enlarge.”

 

Mencius had taught centuries before, in almost the identical phrase,

what Carlyle has latterly expressed,—namely, that “Shame is the soil of

all Virtue, of good manners and good morals.”

 

The fear of disgrace was so great that if our literature lacks such

eloquence as Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Norfolk, it nevertheless

hung like Damocles’ sword over the head