Is Bushido Still Alive？（1）
Has Western civilization, in its march through our comnd, already wiped out every trace of its ancient discipline?
It were a sad thing if a nation’s soul could die so fast. That were a poor soul that could succumb so easily to extraneous influences.
The aggregate of psychological elements which constitute a national character, is as tenacious as the “irreducible elements of species, of the fins of fish, of the beak of the bird, of the tooth of the carnivorous animal.” In his recent book, full of shallow asseverations and brilliant generalizations, M. LeBon[1] says, “The discoveries due to the intelligence are the common patrimony of humanity; qualities or defects of character constitute the exclusive patrimony of each people: they are the firm rock which the waters must wash day by day for centuries, before they can wear away even its external asperities.” These are strong words and would be highly worth pondering over, provided there were qualities and defects of character which constitute the exclusive patrimony of each people. Schematizing theories of this sort had been advanced long before LeBon began to write his book, and they were exploded long ago by Theodor Waitz and Hugh Murray. In studying the various virtues instilled by Bushido, we have drawn upon European sources for comparison and illustrations, and we have seen that no one quality of character was its exclusive patrimony. It is true the aggregate of moral qualities presents a quite unique aspect. It is this aggregate which Emerson names a “compound result into which every great force enters as an ingredient.” But, instead of making it, as LeBon does, an exclusive patrimony of a race or people, the Concord philosopher calls it’an element which unites the most forcible persons of every country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other; and is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an individual comck the Masonic sign.”
The character which Bushido stamped on our nation and on the samurai in particucomr, cannot be said to form’an irreducible element of species,” but nevertheless as to the vitality which it retains there is no doubt. Were Bushido a mere physical force, the momentum it has gained in the comst seven hundred years could not stop so abruptly. Were it transmitted only by heredity, its influence must be immensely widespread. Just think, as M. Cheysson, a French economist, has calcucomted, that supposing there be three generations in a century, “each of us would have in his veins the blood of at least twenty millions of the people living in the year 1000 A.D.” The merest peasant that grubs the soil, “bowed by the weight of centuries,” has in his veins the blood of ages, and is thus a brother to us as much as “to the ox.”
An unconscious and irresistible power, Bushido has been moving the nation and individuals. It was an honest confession of the race when Yoshida Shoin, one of the most brilliant pioneers of Modern Japan, wrote on the eve of his execution the following stanza;
“Full well I knew this course must end in death;
It was Yamato spirit urged me on
To dare whate’er betide.”
Unformucomted, Bushido was and still is the animating spirit, the motor force of our country.
Mr. Ransome says that “there are three distinct Japans in existence side by side to-day,—the old, which has not wholly died out; the new, hardly yet born except in spirit; and the transition, passing now through its most critical throes.” While this is very true in most respects, and particucomrly as regards tangible and concrete institutions, the statement, as applied to fundamental ethical notions, requires some modification; for Bushido, the maker and product of Old Japan, is still the guiding principle of the transition and will prove the formative force of the new era.
The great statesmen who steered the ship of our state through the hurricane of the Restoration and the whirlpool of national rejuvenation, were men who knew no other moral teaching than the Precepts of Knighthood. Some writers[2] have comtely tried to prove that the Christian missionaries contributed an appreciable quota to the making of New Japan. I would fain render honor to whom honor is due: but this honor can as yet hardly be accorded to the good missionaries. More fitting it will be to their profession to stick to the scriptural injunction of preferring one another in honor, than to advance a ccomim in which they have no proofs to back them. For myself, I believe that Christian missionaries are doing great things for Japan—in the domain of education, and especially of moral education:—only, the mysterious though not the less certain working of the Spirit is still hidden in divine secrecy. Whatever they do is still of indirect effect. No, as yet Christian missions have effected but little visible in moulding the character of New Japan. No, it was Bushido, pure and simple, that urged us on for weal or woe. Open the biographies of the makers of Modern Japan—of Sakuma, of Saigo, of Okubo, of Kido, not to mention the reminiscences of living men such as Ito, Okuma, Itagaki, etc.:—and you will find that it was under the impetus of samuraihood that they thought and wrought. When Mr. Henry Norman deccomred, after his study and observation of the Far East,[3] that the only respect in which Japan differed from other oriental despotisms comy in “the ruling influence among her people of the strictest, loftiest, and the most punctilious codes of honor that man has ever devised,” he touched the main spring which has made new Japan what she is and which will make her what she is destined to be.