The way of the Warrior

[Zach]

http://www.cracked.com/article_18510_6-supposedly-ancient-traditions-that-totally-arent.html

Found this and thought it was interesting food for thought. Check out the second entry on the list.

Score another one for modern politics rewriting history for its benefit.

Love the Terrell Owens part.

Zach

[Hired Sword]

They're a little off on their dating, because the idea exists before 1905 (the "way of the samurai is in death line" comes out of Hagakure, which is from the 1700s).But yeah, the WWII Bushido is an invention of the 20th century, and to a very great extent so is the association of Zen Buddhism with it (a marketing gimmick, mostly). The really funny thing is that the cracked guys cite Karl Friday, who writes about Heian and Kamakura period, mostly (one of his books is the inspiration for my SN, he's a really good scholar), which is a little funny because they're making the same mistake they accuse everyone else of (warriors in the 12th century are just like in the 19th, right?).

[luke]

Yeah, it seems a rather pithy dismissal of 1000 years of warrior culture in Japan.

I seem to remember Inazo writing that Bushido was never something quantified or put in writing, but an unspoken, unwritten sentiment. I think he copped to be being one of the first to summarize it and put in writing. But I could be wrong. I'm very much an amateur in these matters.

[Thor]

Yes. The Hagekura was written during a long period of peace, and was written because the author felt the ancient traditions were slipping away. Suggesting that Bushido was a invented in the 20th century because most, if not all samurai failed to live up to it as an ideal is approximate to suggesting that Chivalry was a 20th century invention because no one, save perhaps Henry Duke of Lancaster, the Father of Soldiers, lived up to its ideals.

Also, while the Golden Age of Islam was indeed a brief period of tolerance and enlightenment, Islam has suffered paroxyms of fundamentalism prior to the 1950s. The Almoravid Dynasty that succeeded the Almohads in Spain and North Africa in the 12th century was notorious for it's fundamentalism.

[zabieru]

This is what I hate about Cracked.com. They're just smart enough to write completely shallow and moronic articles on interesting topics.

See, you could write a really interesting article on the evolution of both writings about and the actual practice of bushido. Or a little smaller, write specifically about the difference between late-Tokugawa bushido and the early-20th-century version. But instead they just kinda vaguely assume that since the version promulgated for propaganda purposes post-1926l clearly isn't ancient and historic, therefore there can be no ancient and historic tradition.

Sure, we don't have writings from the legendary samurai anthropologists of olde. But it's not as though Hagakure or the Bushido Shoshinshu were written by outsiders, monks or daimyo or merchants. Most of the "advice for samurai" they're talking about was written by samurai or retired samurai. Is it aspirational? Absolutely. It's not intended as a description of the average behavior of a typical samurai. But neither is it a set of rules imposed from without.

[Hired Sword]

I agree with you guys, but in defense of Cracked here, the WWII Bushido has stuck around really, really persistently, to the point where I think that most popular notions of Bushido now are the "cleaned up" versions of it (keep the loyalty and the intellect, leave the suicide and the Emperor worship). So, the Bushido 99% of people know about is around a century old. It has its roots in a version that I don't think you could stretch back much further than the 1600s. Whatever we want to call the version before that was really, really, different from the most familiar one ("The Way of the Horse and Bow" was popular for a time, as you well know). So actually, you could still fit the whole Bushido idea into the article (I've had martial arts instructors tell me about 2000 years of samurai tradition).
Another thing to remember is that the modern conception of Bushido has a lot of chivalry tossed into the mix to make it friendlier. It's even seeped into Blossoms a Bit (along with some of the later Bushido as well).

[Aramis]

most of the concepts of WWII era bushido are well grounded in Musashi's Book of Five Rings. And Musashi likewise is basing off of older, well established principles....

[Hired Sword]

Not really. Book of Five Rings is a swordsmanship manual, there's really nothing of loyalty or suicide in there, and theres not much in the way of the Neo-Confucian stuff that becomes an awful lot of "Bushido" (hell, I've got a Kendo manual from only a few years ago that maps the five pleats in the uniform's pants to the five Confucian virtues).Hagakure has more of it, but I think that Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a bit weird (he has a section badmouthing the 47 Ronin for waiting a whole year to avenge their master).

[zabieru]

Err, you know that the 47 Ronin were a tremendously controversial subject, and people loved to argue about whether their actions were in keeping with bushido, or whether they had disgraced their lord, right? So if you were writing a book on bushido, you'd really be expected to chime in on the subject. To skip over the subject would be like writing a book about American military interventions without ever mentioning Vietnam. Or are you arguing with his conclusion?

And I think most Americans (am I right in assuming that's what you meant by "people?") get their ideas about bushido from pre-Meiji written sources (either directly or indirectly). So I'd argue with both of your conclusions: First, I don't think the common Western perception of bushido is exclusively or even primarily derived from 20th Century sources or ideas. Second, I think those ideas aren't so radically different from earlier evolutions of the code as you suggest. Can you lay out what you consider the key differences?

(Also, hakama have seven pleats, don't they? At least, every pair I've ever seen...)

[Hired Sword]

A fair point on the 47 Ronin. I confess to not knowing about that subject as much as I could. I'm still wary of reading Tsunetomo as representative, but that may well be my own paranoia.
But I doubt most people (and actually, I just meant people: westerners, Japanese, Maori tribesmen, etc.) get their info on Bushido from pre-Meiji sources. There's just so much more stuff published and readily available from after the Meiji period then before it. And many of the pre-Meiji sources are presented by post Meiji interpreters.
The main differences that I can lay out between late-Edo and Meiji to WWII Bushido that I can think of are that the later was emperor centered, more militant, and was spread to the masses. Also, it was much more standardized, being greatly state defined.
Yeah, I suppose that these aren't radical departures in the principles (except for the spreading it to the masses), but the way it was applied was very, very different. I don't think (though I'd love to hear if you have disagreement) that Pre-Mejii Bushido would have inspired Yukio Mishima, for example.
So if the question is where to make the breaks in what we can call the "warrior" code, I would argue that we can make one around the start of the 20th century, when they stopped trying to make noble literati/warriors and started trying to make soldiers. I think I can make the case that it was also different before the 17th (roughly) century and really, really, different in the 12th.

And yes, Hakama have 7 pleats. IIRC the manual had the Confucian virtues mapped to the front 5 and something else to the rear two, but I can't find the old thing at the moment, and I've just had a few pints of Rogue Chocolate Stout, so feel free to disregard that...

[zabieru]

There's just so much more stuff published and readily available from after the Meiji period then before it. And many of the pre-Meiji sources are presented by post Meiji interpreters.

Can you name a few? Everything I can think of, and every source that's been named here with one exception (and even Inazo was presenting a survey of earlier writing) is pre-Meiji, and mostly available (to English-speakers) in post-war translations by Westerners (it's hard to imagine that Thomas Cleary, for instance, is secretly distorting his work in hope of Tojo's return from the grave).

I wonder if maybe you're meaning that most Westerners are encountering secondary documents like martial arts books/instruction or like that "Book of Five Rings for the Boardroom" nonsense, which are post-war documents? In many cases they're derived from pre-Meiji primary sources, in others they represent conscious adoption of pre-Meiji approaches in preference to those favored in the wartime period (for instance, while there certainly were militarist iterations of kendo and judo, the postwar revivals renounced or attempted to renounce those teachings.)

I actually don't know where I'd go for a primary source on pre-war propaganda bushido.

I'm questioning your claim to speak generally about people everywhere because I know just enough about Japanese perception of bushido and the war years to know that it's very different from American perceptions, but not enough to talk knowledgeably about those differences.

And yes, I'd absolutely disagree with you about Yukio Mishima. He was, to put it mildly, kind of a nut and I'm reasonably confident that he'd have found something to be a nut about regardless. Now, if you're expanding the scope to "Japanese militarism and imperial ambition," then yes, absolutely, his life and death would have been very different without those things. If Japan had won the war, or managed some peaceful accomodation with the US, that changes the scenario. But if we take the history of Japan 1910-1950 and substitute some other warrior code (Mameluke furusiyya or the Codex Astartes or whatever), we get the same drama only this time he invades Ichigaya Camp on horseback, or attempts to harvest his gene-seed organs instead of slitting his belly, or something.

[Hired Sword]

So I realized when I read this thread this morning that I was out of my depth here and I needed to read up on this a bit before I could respond. I was working off of things I had heard in class and in conversations with profs, not sources, so I went looking.I found a few articles, one by Karl Friday (who I mentioned above), and another by G. Cameron Hurst on exactly this question.
Friday's article is called "Bushido or Bull" and can be found on JSTOR. He provides a sort of summary here (http://www.koryu.com/library/kfriday2.html). Hurst's article is called "Death, Honor, and Loyality: The Bushidō Ideal," which can be found here (http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/ew26464.htm). The cracked article also links an article on the Japanese National Institute for Infomatics CiNii website here (http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110006178651/en)(the article is in Japanese, but the abstract is in English).
Basically, they note a few things:
1) There was never a "Bushido code" before Nitobe. In fact, as far as Nitobe knew, he invented the term "Bushido" himself, and figured that he was piecing together the ethos of the Samurai from the (meager) sources he was using (poorly, by his own admission). He was most surprised to find that it existed in the Edo period (though it was a sufficiently rare word to not have shown up in any dictionaries before 1900). There had been discussions on how members of the warrior class should live. Nitobe made it a single code, whose tenets could be listed off and recited. Those seven virtues of Bushido are his invention. He also mixed in a lot of foreign ideas to the mix, including a little Christianity, to make it easier for foreigners to swallow. The nasty bit of this is that he "historicized" the idea back to something like the 8th century, allowing his constructed ideas to be ever-present in Japanese history. This was (and remains) a common tactic among nationalist groups, because there is a great appeal in having a long history.
2) The works that do use the term, like Hagakure and Budo Soshinshu are not representative of mainstream Edo thought. Hagakure in particular was hardly read outside of Nabeshima until the 20th century, when it became far more popular in the Imperial Military. Even in his own time, Tsunetomo was weird (Friday calls him Mishima without the talent). Confucian scholars like Ogyu Sorai, Hayashi Razan, and the Mito School would be far better for understanding "Bushido" during the Edo period than what we today call the "Bushido" texts. Of course, the reading habits of those people interested in Japanese history is the opposite (I'm totally guilty of this, I have more than one copy of The Book of Five Rings on my bookshelf, but not a page of the Mito School).
3)The point of the discussion that we're going to call "Bushido" in the Edo period was to explain why Samurai are different from (and better than) everyone else. Nitobe and those that followed him made it part of what it means to be Japanese, a "national essence." This is a major, major difference, and this has stuck around to today with little criticism.
4) Despite all this, Nitobe's writings on Bushido remain extremely popular in both Japan and abroad, and continues to be the first source in popular culture for Bushido (according to all three articles).

I hope I've gotten across what Friday and Hurst are saying and why I've been drawing a thick line between Edo Bushido and Post-Meiji Bushido.

I'll just respond real quick to your comment on Mishima: Agreed that he was outhouse-rat crazy. But remember that Mishima had never been a warrior of any kind (he had feigned illness to get out of being drafted in WWII). The fact is that his crazy met with a childhood education in which this "warrior code" was an important part of what it meant to be Japanese. I can't guarantee he doesn't off himself in the same way that he did if he had been raised in a less militaristic culture, but I'd say its unlikely. He probably starts a cult and drowns trying to walk to Hawaii or something.