Did the Samurai Really Follow the Bushido Code? | Bushido Explained by Dr. Jared Miracle

 

There was a man who was largely responsible for the early 20th century western understanding of Japan. He was kind of a more of a public diplomat sort of character. His name was Inazo Nitobe and he wrote a book called Bushido that was very much influential and people they still read it in the west.

That book is almost singularly responsible for the way that westerners understand the concept of Bushido and what he was trying to do. So it's no mystery that in the west, you know, in Europe, North America and a lot of other places that have been colonized by western Europe, the general cultural accepted list of behaviors and beliefs is Judeo-Christian, right? Our cultural values, the ways that we interact with each other, it's all even if you're actually Christian as a religion, you still buy into the concepts that are espoused in Judeo-Christian culture, family structure, the way you relate to your employment, all of that stuff, the way you treat people. And so Nitobe is trying to create an analogous idea of, well, okay, here's your Judeo-Christian set of cultural beliefs, and here's what we have in Japan.

And he chose to use Bushido as the concept onto which he could kind of graft all of his new cultural concepts. The problem is, John Green likes to say, the truth resists simplicity. And if you look at Japan historically, there is a vague idea of a thing we might call Bushido in different places, in different times, but it also carries different meanings, depending on which group you're in.

It's important to remember that people think of Japan as this ancient state that has been there since the dawn of humanity. And they like to cling to that idea of, for example, the line of the emperor's family goes back thousands and thousands of years. But Japan as a nation did not exist until the Edo period, and even then very loosely, because all of the warring states, each province was pretty much its own country.

And that was heavily controlled for much of Japanese history. If you were going to go from modern-day Tokyo to modern-day Kyoto, you're passing through checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint of local governments. I mean, it's a lot like Europe, where until the European Union, everybody is the separate country.

And so we still have these separate identities. Same thing there. To this day, Tokyo and other metropolitan areas are integrated, and they have kind of a nationalist concept of what is Japanese.

But I would recommend to anybody to go out to a far province, go out, I mean, not even that far from Tokyo. I used to live in Yamanashi Prefecture, the place where I hope to die eventually. In Yamanashi, they still, if you go out into the mountains, these people have a different concept of who they are as compared to the people living in Tokyo or Osaka or somewhere.

There's still speaking a pretty backwards dialect. They still refer to it by the old pre-modern name. It's not Yamanashi Prefecture, it's Kai.

And that's true in a lot of places that are far from the metropoles. So it's worth keeping in mind that there was no unified concept of what it means to be Japanese, and therefore what people believe to be Bushido. So Bushido is literally the way of the warrior, right? But even that concept of what is a warrior was not crystallized until the Edo period.

And even then, it was because of paperwork. The Tokugawa Shogunate establishes a concept of, here's how society is going to work. And the reason they did that, to a large extent, was because it was a chaotic era, and they needed to solidify everything in place so they could control it.

Because without control, they were just going to break out into more warriors again. It was going to be another warring state. It was a problem.

So to read more about what life would have been like, the work of a scholar named Carl Friday is really important in this regard, because he makes it very clear that what the people over in this province believe to be proper actions of a warrior are in no way related to proper actions over here. And so the concept of a unified, here's how the samurai are going to act, that's a, it's not a modern invention, but it's a fairly recent one in the grand scheme of things.