# Japan: Its History, Arts, and Literature/Volume 2/Chapter 5

Chapter V
BUSHI-DŌ OR THE WAY OF
THE WARRIOR
IT is usual to call Buddhism or Shintō the religion of Japan, but if religion be the source from which spring the motives of men's noblest actions, then the religion of Japan was neither the law of the Buddha (Buppō) nor the Path of the Gods (Shin-tō) but the Way of the Warrior (Bushi-do). Shin-tō was never more than a cult. It invited men to obey the suggestions of conscience and to leave the rest to heaven. It provided occasions for festivals which made life perceptibly brighter, and it softened the sterner aspects of Nature's phenomena by associating them with placable spirits. Buddhism, indeed, was a living faith; a faith which often stirred its propagandists to deeds of high devotion and its disciples to acts of enthusiastic self-sacrifice. Yet in all ages Buddhism sat very lightly on the Japanese people. It presented itself to them much as the New Jerusalem presented itself to the writer of the Revelation,—a pageant of picturesqueness and ​grandeur: of chancels refulgent with gold and silver; of vestments glowing with rich colours; of majestic buildings resonant with the music of chaunted litanies; of cedar avenues and pine forests over which floated the voices of sweet-toned bells; of idols inviting artistic admiration rather than inspiring worshipful awe; of restfulness in life and of a eulogistic title and a carefully-tended tomb after death. Buddhism helped to develop the soldier's creed, but never played as large a part as the latter in shaping the nation's moral history.
The earliest outlines of Bushi-dō are to be found in metrical behests conveyed to their families and descendants by captains of the Imperial guard in ancient times.
I
II
​These exhortations embody the rudiments of the bushi's creed, faith in the divinity of the sovereign, and absolute loyalty even to the unquestioning sacrifice of life; a fine foundation for building a strong nation. How far did such sentiments permeate the people? Were they generally entertained or must they be regarded as the creed of a small section only?
It has already been shown in these pages that in the earliest times revealed by history the Japanese nation consisted entirely of soldiers. The sovereign was the commander-in-chief; the Oomi and Omuraji were his lieutenants. There was no distinction of "civil" and "military." When occasion arose, the Emperor or a prince of the blood led the army, and the duty of serving in the ranks devolved on all subjects alike, the great nobles forming a patriarchal council of Generals. But at the close of the seventh century, when the Empress Jito sat upon the throne, the social system of the Tang Dynasty of China commended itself for adoption. The civil and the military were then divided for the first time. Certain officers received commissions appointing them to special posts—as the Generals of the Left and of the Right (Sa-konye and U-konye); the Brigadiers of the Left and of the Right (Sa-hiyoye and U-hiyoye); the Captains of the Left and of the Right (Sa-yemon and U-yemon); a war-office (hyobu-sho) was organised, as were also Cavalry Departments of the Left ​(Sa-maryo) and of the Right (U-maryo), and each important district throughout the Empire had its military division (gundan). All having been originally soldiers, no hereditary claim to carry arms could be set up. Physical qualifications alone received consideration. One-third of the nation's able-bodied males constituted the army, and these being divided into three equal parts, one part served in the capital as palace guards; one had its headquarters in Kiushiu, forming a legion for the protection of the southern coasts against Korean raiders, or for service abroad; and one part garrisoned the provincial posts. As to tactical formation, five men made a section; two sections, a company; five companies, a battalion; two battalions, a regiment, and ten regiments, a division. Six horses were assigned to a company, the best riders and archers being selected for cavalry duty. A division consequently consisted of six hundred mounted men and four hundred foot soldiers. Service was for a period only, and during that period taxes were remitted, so that military duties always found men ready to discharge them. Thus the hereditary soldier—afterwards known as the samurai or bushi—did not yet exist, nor was there any such thing as an exclusive right to carry arms. Weapons of war were the property of the State; stored away in times of peace, and served out periodically when required for fighting or for training purpose.
​The next stage of development had its origin in the usurpation of high offices of State by great families, who encroached upon the Imperial prerogatives, and appropriated, as hereditary perquisites, posts which should have remained in the gift of the sovereign. The Fujiwara clan, taking all the civil offices, resided in the capital, whereas the military posts fell to the lot of the Taira and the Minamoto, who, settling in the provinces, and being thus required to guard the outlying districts and to quell rebellions, found it expedient to surround themselves with men who made soldiering a profession. These latter, in their turn, copying the customs of their superiors, transmitted their functions to their sons, so that there grew up in the shadow of the great houses a number of military families interested in maintaining the power and promoting the prosperity of the masters from whom they derived their own privileges and emoluments. At the close of the eighth century, stubborn insurrections on the part of the autochthons gave new importance to the soldier. The conscription list had to be greatly increased, and it came to be a recognised principle that every stalwart man should bear arms, every weakling become a bread-winner. Thus for the first time the distinction between "soldier" and "working-man" received official recognition, and, in consequence of the circumstances attending the distinction, a measure of ​contempt attached to the latter as compared with the former.
It has been shown in these pages that the continuous growth of the provincial nobles tended to deepen the above line of cleavage, so that, from the middle of the tenth century, the term samurai or bushi acquired a special significance, being applied to themselves and their followers by the magnates, whose power tended more and more to eclipse even that of the Throne. Finally, in the twelfth century, when the Minamoto brought the whole country under the sway of a military organisation, the privilege of bearing arms was restricted to the bushi. Thenceforth the military class entered upon a period of administrative and social superiority which lasted, without serious interruption, until the middle of the nineteenth century. But it is to be observed that the distinction between soldier and civilian, samurai and commoner, was not of ancient existence, nor did it arise from any question of race or caste, victor and vanquished, as is often supposed and stated. It was an outcome wholly of ambitious usurpations, which, relying for success on force of arms, gave practical importance to the soldier and invested his profession with factitious honour. Hence, when Bushi-dō, or the "warrior's way," is spoken of, there should be understood a moral cult, not the special property of one section only of the nation, but representing the development that Japanese char​acter in general tended to assume under certain conditions.
The rules of conduct prescribed for the bushi varied, more or less, in different fiefs, each feudal chief enacting his own code. As a general type it will be sufficient to quote one set of regulations—those formulated by Katō Kiyomasa, a celebrated general of the sixteenth century:—
1. The routine of service must be strictly observed. From six a. m. military exercises shall be practised. Archery, gunnery, and equestrianism must not be neglected. If any man shows greater proficiency than his comrades in the way of the bushi, he shall receive extra pay.
2. Those that desire recreation may engage in hawking, deer-hunting, or wrestling.
3. With regard to dress, garments of cotton or pongee shall be worn. Any one incurring debts owing to extravagance of costume or living shall be considered a law-breaker. If, however, being zealous in the practice of military arts suitable to his rank, a man desires to hire instructors, an allowance for that purpose may be granted to him.
4. The staple of diet shall be unhulled rice. At social entertainments, one guest for one host is the proper limit. Only when men are assembled for military exercises should many dine together.
5. It is the duty of every samurai to make himself acquainted with the principles of his craft. Extravagant displays of adornment are forbidden in battle.
6. Dancing, or organising dances, is unlawful : it is likely to betray sword-carrying men to acts of vio​lence. Whatever a man does should be done with his heart. Therefore for the soldier military amusements alone are suitable. The penalty for violating this provision is death by suicide.
7. Learning should be encouraged. Military books must be read. The spirit of loyalty and filial piety must be educated before all things. Poem-composing pastimes are not to be engaged in by samurai. To be addicted to such amusements is to resemble a woman. A man born a samurai should live and die sword in hand. Unless he be thus trained in time of peace, he will be useless in the hour of stress. To be brave and warlike must be his invariable condition.
The obviously paramount purpose of these regulations was to draw a sharp line of demarkation between the samurai and the courtiers living in Kyōtō. The dancing, the couplet-composing, the sumptuous living, and the fine costumes of officials frequenting the Imperial capital were strictly interdicted by the feudatories, and the veto in Kiyomasa's code was couched in language that must have sounded particularly offensive in the ears of the ancient nobility of Kyōtō. Frugality, fealty, and filial piety—these may be called the fundamental virtues of the bushi. Owing to the circumstances out of which his ​caste had grown, he regarded all bread-winning pursuits with contempt and despised money. It was the constant aim of his leaders to encourage this mood, and they succeeded thoroughly, though their methods were not apparently calculated to ensure success. For while, on the one hand, the allowances granted to a bushi of inferior rank were so meagre that it often became necessary for him to undertake some domestic industry in order to procure means of sustenance, on the other, rewards for distinguished services usually took the form of an increase of income, and in describing a great man's position, one of the first points mentioned was the number of measures of rice he received annually. Emoluments, therefore, should naturally have occupied a large share of attention. But they did not. An ample corrective seems to have been furnished by a system of ranks and grades, through which the samurai could gradually rise by distinguished conduct until he stood within a short distance of the Throne itself. For, although the sovereign towered above all human distinctions, and therefore did not nominally occupy any place in the classification, nevertheless the first grade of the first rank was not bestowed upon any subject. It corresponded to the hiatus left in a document before a mention of the Mikado. If any subject attained to the second grade of the first rank, as some few did under wholly exceptional circumstances, he could feel that he had ascended very ​close to the Throne. Further, a samurai's official rank, being prefixed to his name, constituted a species of title which he valued as much as the right of carrying a sword. For these various reasons, but chiefly because bread-winning was originally the business of those not physically qualified to be soldiers, the bushi regarded money with indifference and even contempt. To be swayed in the smallest degree by mercenary motives was despicable in his eyes.
The bushi was essentially a stoic. He made self-control the ideal of his existence, and practised the courageous endurance of suffering so thoroughly that he could without hesitation inflict on his own body pain of the severest description.
The power of surrendering life with heroic calmness has been developed by men in all ages, and is regarded by philosophers as an elementary form of human virtue, practised with most success in an uncivilised state of society before the finer appreciations of the imaginative and intellectual faculties have been developed by education. But the courage of the bushi cannot justly be ascribed to bluntness of moral sensibility resulting from semi-savage conditions of life. It has been shown in these pages that the current of existence in Japan from the Nara epoch onward set with general steadiness in the direction of artistic refinement and voluptuous luxury, amid which men could scarcely fail to acquire habits and ​tastes inconsistent with acts of high courage and great endurance. The bushi's mood, therefore, was not a product of semi-barbarous conditions, but rather a protest against emasculating civilisation. He schooled himself to regard death inflicted by his own hand as a normal eventuality. The story of other nations shows epochs when death was welcomed as a relief and deliberately invited as a refuge from the mere weariness of living. But wherever there has been liberty to choose, and leisure to employ, a painless mode of exit from the world, men have invariably selected it. The euthanasis of the Romans was achieved by the opened vein or the numbing herb, and only the barbarian captive who had to resort to any available weapon and to seize the earliest opportunity, displayed contempt of physical suffering in the hour of death. The bushi, however, deliberately adopted a mode of suicide so painful and so shocking that to school the mind to regard it with indifference and resort to it without flinching was a feat not easy to conceive. His method was to plunge a short-sword into the left side of the abdomen, swop it across to the right, giving it a sharp upward turn at the end of the gash; then to withdraw it, thrust it into the back of the neck, and cut toward the throat. Assistance was often rendered by a friend, who, sword in hand, stood ready to decapitate the victim immediately after the stomach had been gashed; but there were innumerable ​examples of men who consummated the tragedy without aid, especially when the sacrifice of life was by way of protest against the excesses of a feudal chief or the crimes of a ruler, or when some motive for secrecy existed.
It must be observed that the suicide of the bushi was never inspired by any doctrine like that of Hegesias. Death did not present itself to him as a legitimate means of escaping from the cares and disappointments of life. Self-destruction had only one consolatory aspect, namely, that it was the soldier's privilege to expiate a crime with his own sword, not under the hand of the executioner. He might not be haled before a legal tribunal, like a common peasant or an artisan. It rested with his feudal chief to determine his guilt, and his peremptory duty was never to question the justice of an order to commit suicide, but to obey without murmur or protest. For the rest, the general motives were to escape the dishonour of falling into the hands of a victorious enemy, to remonstrate against some official abuse which no ordinary complaint could reach, or, by means of a dying protest, to turn a liege lord from pursuing courses injurious to his reputation and his fortunes. This last was the noblest reason for suicide, and by no means the most infrequent. Scores of examples are recorded of men who, with everything to make existence desirable, fortune, friends, high office, and higher prospects, deliberately laid down their lives at the prompting of loyalty, their ​sense of duty depriving the seppuku of all its horrors. There the Japanese bushi rose to a remarkable height of moral nobility. He had no assurance that his death might not be wholly fruitless. So, indeed, it often proved. If the sacrifice achieved its purpose, if it turned a liege lord from evil courses into the path of sobriety, the bushi could hope that his memory would be honoured. But if, in obedience to the common promptings of human nature, the lord resented such a violent and conspicuous method of reproving his excesses, then the faithful vassal's retribution would be an execrated memory and, perhaps, suffering for his family and relatives. Yet the deed was perpetrated again and again. The loyal servant committed to paper a last appeal to the better instincts of his master, and then calmly disembowelled himself.
If he was always ready to die for the sake of his master's fair fame, the bushi naturally counted suicide preferable to his own dishonour. Uyesugi Kenshin, feudal chief of Echigo, one of the greatest captains of the sixteenth century, enacted a code of regulations in which the heaviest penalty prescribed for a bushi was deprivation of his swords; the second, death; the third, banishment. It is recorded that one of his vassals, Nagao Uyemon, having committed a serious offence, Kenshin condemned him to forfeit the privilege of carrying a sword, and when strong intercession ​was made for the man on the plea that his father had done great deeds, Kenshin agreed to commute the sentence to suicide.
Innumerable instances present themselves of men who laid down their lives to save those of their feudal chiefs. Indeed such cases were so common that historians did not think it worth while to relate them unless some exceptional circumstances distinguished the event. One or two must be set down here, however, for the sake of illustrating not merely this particular phase of the bushi's character, but also his methods in general.
Towards the close of the twelfth century, after the overthrow of the Taira clan, which event was brought about chiefly by the military genius of Yoshitsune, the latter, becoming an object of jealousy to his brother Yoritomo, who wielded the administrative power, had to fly northward to Ōshiu. Attended by a small band of faithful followers, who had fought beside him in all his campaigns, he reached the plain of Yoshino, where his pursuers pressed upon him so closely that unless they could be checked, escape seemed impossible. Yoshitsune had reconciled himself to his fate when one of the party, Satō Tadanobu, a swordsman of the highest skill, asked permission to personate his chief and await the enemy's onset, hoping that during the interval thus gained his comrades could continue their flight. Yoshitsune was most unwilling to sacrifice an old friend, ​but Tadanobu insisted that hesitation would give the foe time to surround them, and then all must die. At length Yoshitsune consented, and having changed armour with Tadanobu, "tearfully continued his flight." A fierce combat ensued. Tadanobu, proclaiming himself Yoshitsune, slew a score of his assailants, and finally cutting a way through their ranks, reached Kyōtō, where he concealed himself in the house of a woman who had formerly been his mistress, until an opportunity of rejoining Yoshitsune should present itself. The woman had for lover at the time Kajiwara Kagehisa, one of Yoritomo's captains. Looking for credit and reward, she revealed to Kagehisa the fact that Tadanobu was hiding in her house. But Kagehisa, whose conduct at this point is described as that of a "true bushi," rebuked the woman sternly. "I have orders to search diligently for Yoshitsune," he said, " but I have no order to search for Tadanobu, and I should deem myself disgraced if, for the sake of guerdon, I sought the life of one of the most loyal soldiers in the Empire. Tadanobu was once your lover. If you are not sufficiently virtuous to die for him, you can at least help him to escape." With that he turned his back on the woman and never visited her again. But she, now adding chagrin to cupidity, repaired to Rokuhara, and gave information to the officials there. Two hundred men were sent to seize Tadanobu. Again he fought a splendid ​fight, cutting down fifteen or sixteen of his assailants, so that at last they retired beyond the reach of his sword, and bent their bows to shoot him. Then he ascended to the roof of the house and shouted to them to hold their hands while he spoke: "A crowd of you have come to attack me as I slept. Cowards! Did you not dare to challenge me in fair fight? I have already given my life to my lord on the plain of Yoshino, and to lose it now is nothing. It would be easy to fall, fighting so long as my sword had an edge. But to slay one or two hundred common fellows like you would be an idle task. Yet you shall not carry to Kamakura a lying story how you took the head of such an one as Tadanobu. See now how a true warrior dies, so that you may tell it to your children." Thus speaking, he plunged his sword into his body and drew it across and upward in the true seppuku fashion. Yoritomo applauded his death in terms of high praise, and caused his body to be buried with all honour.
Prince Morinaga, besieged by his enemies (1333 A.D.) and reduced to desperate straits, fled at the last moment from his castle. If the assailants suspected his flight, escape would be impossible. Murakami Yoshimitsu, donning a suit of the Prince's armour, ascended a tower, and presenting himself to the enemy, shouted, "Hear me, rebels! I, the son of the Emperor Godaigo, destroyed by your disloyalty, die here by my own ​hand. Learn from me how to die, that you may know it when your time comes." Then taking off his armour, he cast it from the tower, and cutting open his stomach, tore out his intestines, dashed them against the battlements, and fell with his sword in his teeth. His son Yoshitaka would have followed his example, but the father forbade him to make any needless sacrifice of his life, which belonged to his Prince. Yoshitaka, therefore, joined the Prince, and subsequently, when the latter was hard pressed, Yoshitaka planted himself in the path and held off the pursuers until, having received ten wounds, he finally leaped into a bamboo grove and committed suicide.
When Kamakura fell, the Hōjō chief, Takatoki, with eight hundred and seventy of his principal vassals, repaired to the temple Tōshō-ji, where they all committed suicide. Many other followers of the Hōjō died by their own hand in various parts of the town. Among the latter was Andō Sayemon. Driven from his post with a remnant of his troops, only a hundred men, and finding his house destroyed, his wife and children gone, and Takatoki's castle in ruins, he prepared with his comrades to commit seppuku beside the smoking ruins, for, not knowing that Takatoki and his men were even then dying at Toshō-ji, he complained bitterly of the disgrace that the flames which destroyed the castle of the lord of all Japan had not been watered by the blood of at least a ​thousand of his soldiers. At that moment a messenger arrived carrying a letter from Ando's niece, who was married to Nitta Yoshisada, commander-in-chief of the hostile forces. She advised Andō to surrender to Yoshisada, pledging herself to intercede for him. It is related that Andō's answer was: "A soldier's wife must have a soldier's heart if she is to bear him children worthy of his name. All men knew that it has been my privilege to live a warrior's life, and if now, when fate has found me, I yielded to the foe, shame would be my lot. Yoshisada may have thought to put me to the proof, but his wife should not have helped him to insult me by such a proposal." Then, wrapping the letter round the hilt of his sword, he disembowelled himself, and his example was followed by all his soldiers.
Uyesugi Kenshin, desiring to secure the province of Shinano against the enterprises of his rival, Takeda Shingen, gave it in fief to his brother-in-law, Nagao Masakage. Presently doubts began to be thrown on the fidelity of Masakage. Kenshin resolved to have him put to death, and took counsel as to how the decision might be carried out. His chief vassals urged him to desist, pointing out that only vague suspicions existed; that to act on such evidence might involve the very catastrophe they sought to avert, namely, the loss of Shinano, and that to compass the death of his own brother-in-law would be a disgrace to Kenshin. But he overruled their ​objections and ordered Sadayuki, chief of Nojiri, to contrive the removal of the supposed traitor. Sadayuki repaired to Nojiri, invited Masakage to pay him a friendly visit, took him out on the lake in" a boat having its keel planks loosened, and throwing his arms around him, died with him. People did not detect the hand of Kenshin in this incident. They imagined that it was the sequel of a private quarrel between the two men, and Kenshin confirmed the delusion by confiscating Sadayuki's fief. But he subsequently bestowed large revenues on Sadayuki's son, and adopted as his own heir Masakage's son, the afterwards celebrated Uyesugi Kagekatsu.
Two other instances may be quoted, one as helping to express the motive of the bushi's loyalty, another as illustrating his heroic courage:—
Takeda Katsuyori, his forces scattered in battle, escaped with only forty men to the mountain of Temmoku. There he was joined by Kamiyama Tomonobu. This man, previously one of Katsuyori's chief vassals, had been dismissed in consequence of his unwelcome warnings that disaster must result unless his lord adopted different courses, and in consequence of slanders directed against him. He found higher service elsewhere, yet when he learned that Katsuyori was reduced to helpless extremity, he hastened to his side and died with him.
​Okudaira Nobumasa, besieged in the castle of Nagashimo by Takeda Katsuyori, found himself reduced to such straits for provisions that unless succour arrived speedily he must surrender. He called for a volunteer to carry the news of his plight to Tokugawa Iyeyasu, by whom he had been stationed to guard the castle. Torii Suneyemon undertook to bear the message. He succeeded in making his way through the enemy and reaching Iyeyasu, who assured him that Oda Nobunaga was then marching to the relief of the castle, and that he himself would set his forces in motion for the same purpose the following day. He therefore advised Suneyemon to remain in the camp and join the troops in their movement towards the castle. Suneyemon, however, refused to remain a moment. His comrades, he said, would be anxiously awaiting his return. But in attempting to re-enter the castle, he fell into the enemy's hands. They offered him his life as well as large reward, if he would proceed to the walls and warn the garrison that succour could not arrive and that nothing was left but surrender. He consented. Then Katsuyori's men, having bound him to a cross, set it up before the castle and, by means of a letter-bearing arrow, summoned the garrison to the ramparts to receive his message. Suneyemon, a circle of spear-points directed against his naked bosom, raised his head and shouted to the garrison: "Before three days you will be relieved. ​Stand fast." As he uttered the last word the spears clashed in his body.
There is scarcely any limit to the number of historical incidents illustrating this phase of the bushi's character. They seem to indicate that heroic loyalty was the rudimentary virtue of the Military epoch. Before formulating any general conclusion of that kind, however, it will be wise to consider some of the other attributes revealed by the records of the bushi's acts.
The history of humanity shows that moral principles have never been allowed to interfere greatly with the consummation of ambitious designs. No contradiction of that experience is to be found in the story of the samurai. If loyalty and fidelity were conspicuously displayed by him in a subordinate position, he sometimes violated both without hesitation for the sake of grasping power or climbing to social eminence. When Ashikaga Takauji, one of the principal Kamakura generals, was about to march from Kamakura to Kyōtō at a crisis in the history of the Hōjō's supremacy, suspicions were cast upon his loyalty, and the Hōjō Vicegerent asked him to sign an oath of fidelity. He did so without hesitation, and, a few days later, accepted the Emperor's commission to destroy the Hōjō. It would not be easy to find many instances of treachery following so close on the heels of asseverations of loyalty, but there are almost innumerable examples of men plotting against those ​to whom they owed the foundations of their fortune, or betraying those that trusted them. Vicarious but striking evidence of the prevalence of such lapses is furnished by the success that attended slanders, and the readiness of men in power to listen to whispers against the fealty of their subordinates or the constancy of their allies. Indeed the victim of unjust slander is a figure encountered perpetually in the annals of mediæval Japan, and the only circumstance that palliates his existence is the sympathy he receives from the dramatist and the historian. If, in those unquiet times, the traducer found a credulous audience, the contumely heaped upon his memory is sufficient indication that his methods were contrary to the moral code of the nation, and especially of the bushi. Moreover, as against these displays of treachery and deceit, must be set the circumstances of the era: an era when a man's strength to defy attack was the measure of his safety; when a state of war being the normal condition of the nation, the wide license of method permissible in war received general sanction, and when no success was too large nor any office too high to be beyond the reach of resolute and unscrupulous daring.
That the vendetta was largely practised in the Military epoch is doubtless attributable mainly to the fact that there did not exist any competent or trustworthy tribunals, acting in the interests of society and ready to undertake the office of ​punishment instead of leaving it to the wronged person. The passion of revenge has always and everywhere shown itself one of the most durable of human motives. In Japan it inspired untiring, implacable tenacity of deadly purpose. Men devoted long years to pursuing the slayer of a father or some less intimate relative; abandoned fortune and position in order to carry out the quest, and did not allow extreme hardships to divert them from their aim. But if these displays of resolution and endurance elicit applause, there is generally to be found in the circumstances that gave rise to the vendetta some revolting exhibition of treachery, vindictiveness, or ferocity. A man defeated in a fencing-match to which he has himself challenged his opponent, subsequently waylays the latter, and shoots him from behind, or hires assassins to destroy him, or contrives his disgrace by preferring false charges officially against him. A samurai, with the aid of his paramour, inveigles a rival to a drinking-bout and slays him as he lies unconscious under the influence of wine. A soldier who sees another promoted over his head, devises an elaborate scheme to convict him of conspiracy which he has never contemplated. Such acts, forming the prelude to vengeance achieved in despite of great difficulties and lengthy delays, are almost sufficiently numerous to lower the general standard of the bushi's morality; but when the spirit they displayed is balanced against the spirit they ​evoked and against the instances of heroic loyalty with which the records abound, the excess is certainly not on the evil side.
The expedients resorted to by combatants and political rivals during the Military epoch evinced a liberal rendering of the principle that everything is fair in war. Oda Nobunaga did not hesitate to forge documents containing false accusations against men whom he wished to destroy. Hideyoshi, the Taikō desiring to purchase the friendship of Iyeyasu, by whom he had been defeated in battle, took his own sister-in-law from her husband, one of his vassals, and sent her to Iyeyasu. The girl's husband committed suicide, but Iyeyasu, though cognisant of these things, accepted her for the sake of her beauty and because of the purpose of the gift. More instructive, however, than the multiplication of historical instances is the text of the Chinese treatises from which the bushi derived military instruction. It is there laid down that the spy is the highest product of skilled strategy, and five varieties are minutely described, the greatest expert being he that, simulating disaffection to the master he really serves, wins the confidence of the enemy, and, living in their midst, deceives them into adopting suicidal courses. Obata Kagemori, one of the most celebrated tacticians of Japan, played that role successfully when, a secret emissary of Iyeyasu, he lived in the castle of Osaka, and succeeded in thwarting, ​while pretending to promote, the plans of its master Hideyori. It may be broadly stated that moral principles received no respect whatever from framers of political plots or planners of ruses-de-guerre. Yet the Taikō, who stands conspicuous among Japan's great leaders for improbity in the choice of means to a public or a military end, desired to commit suicide rather than survive the ignominy of failure to fulfil a pledge. Nothing, indeed, could be more erroneous than to conclude that because the dictates of right and honour were ignored in dealing with an enemy, the bushi showed similar laxity in intercourse with friends and comrades. Such an error would correspond to inferring that the immorality displayed by modern nations in their relations with each other is reflected in the conduct of the individuals composing them.
The bushi entertained a high respect for the obligations of truth. "A bushi never lies" was one of his favourite mottoes; or, to put it in his own language, "A bushi has no second word" (bushi ni nigon nashi). Industrial veracity never existed in Japan. Neither commerce nor manufacturing enterprise acquired at any time sufficient importance to demonstrate the injurious effects of want of mutual confidence and the value of strict fidelity to engagements. Political veracity remained similarly undeveloped. Probably no other nation continued throughout so many centuries entirely unacquainted with public ​controversy or debate in any form, whether religious, philosophical, or political. It cannot even be said that object lessons in the uses of a judicial spirit were furnished by the law courts, for these simply administered the edicts of rulers without attempting to set forth the reasons of their decisions. There was, in fact, nothing to educate the spirit of fair play which is the invariable companion of a love of truth. Yet the bushi unquestionably set high store by veracity, and had a keen sense of the dishonour and disgrace that ought to attach to a falsehood. This word "falsehood" is not here employed in the very extensive sense given to it by moral philosophers in the Occident. According to the view entertained by the bushi in the Military epoch and still prevalent throughout the Japanese nation, the obligation to reveal facts in their nakedness is relative. If it is evident that misfortune will be entailed or distress caused by absolute frankness of declaration, concealment, or even misrepresentation, is considered justifiable. Truth is not set upon a pedestal above the sorrows and sufferings of existence, or even above the cares and worries of daily life. If, indeed, the consequences of the spoken word will fall entirely upon the speaker, the duty of veracity becomes theoretically imperative. But if the interests or welfare of others is at stake, statements may be adapted to occasions. That is the philosophy of falsehood in Japan to-day as it was in the ​Military epoch. "The untruth of convenience" (hōben no uso), the "white lie," is not counted an offence against morality. What the bushi meant when he announced his creed, "no second word," was that a pledge or promise must never be broken; that if a military man engaged himself to do a certain thing, he must do it at whatever cost to himself. That was not truth for truth's sake: it was truth for the sake of the spirit of uncompromising manliness on which the samurai based all his code of morality. His doctrine gradually permeated society at large. In the seventeenth century written security for a debt took the form, not of the hypothecation of property, but of an avowal that failure to pay would be to forfeit the debtor's title of manhood, or to confer on the creditor the right of publicly ridiculing him. Had such a principle continued to grow in reverence, it would have served as an excellent substitute for industrial veracity. But the development of luxurious and effeminate habits during the long reign of peace under the Tokugawa administration, undermined the virile morality of the bushi. His ideals deteriorated and his example ceased to be a wholesome incentive. At the commencement of Japan's resumed intercourse with foreign nations in the middle of the nineteenth century, samurai visited the open ports to transact business for their liege lords, and the foreign merchant soon learned that their word was as good as their bond. Pride of ​race in the presence of the alien reinforced their weakened pride of manhood and held them faithful to their engagements. But it has ever been the experience of the foreigner that no such fidelity can be expected as a common trait of the business man's character in Japan.
The devoted fealty of the samurai towards his feudal chief cannot be said to have extended to is attitude towards the sovereign. To the majority of the military class the Throne seems to have presented itself in the light of a comparatively unimportant abstraction. If the great Court nobles made a puppet of the Emperor in the early eras, the bushi showed even less reverence in their bearing towards him in mediæval times, and that the tendency of their minds was not in any sense monarchical is a conclusion which forces itself upon the attention of any careful reader of Japanese annals. Kiso Yoshinaka, the "Morning Sun Shōgun," who struck the first strong blow at the power of the Taira in the twelfth century, openly declared that the ex-Emperor was a monk, the Emperor himself, a baby, and the Regent (Kwampaku) a greater man than either of them. This mood showed itself very strongly in the time of the Hōjō. At the outset of their career they came into collision with the Throne, and they marked their victory by deposing an Emperor and banishing three ex-Emperors to remote islands. Such arbitrary proceedings did not shock the bulk of the samurai. ​They spoke of the attempt made by the ex-Emperor Gotoba to free himself from the Kamakura yoke as "the rebellion" of the sovereign. In their eyes the repository of the administrative power, namely, the Vicegerent in Kamakura, was the ruler of the Empire, and any one, of whatever station, that ventured to oppose him was counted a rebel. A further development of this tendency took place under the administration of the same chieftains: their conception of the best form of government was evidently a military oligarchy based on popular approval. The second of that remarkable line of Vicegerents, in conjunction with his twelve councillors, promulgated a constitution of fifty articles, founded on the principles of humanity and justice, without any reference to stereotyped formulæ about the virtues and divinity of the Throne. It is true that Yasutoki himself, like all the great Hōjō chiefs, made no attempt to usurp high office. But he did not hesitate to exercise supreme authority. Some account must be taken, indeed, of the Imperial Court's signal failures to inspire respect at that epoch. The Emperor Shijō amused himself by having the floors of the Palace salons waxed so that the ladies of the Court might fall when they walked on them. Finally he fell himself and died of the injuries received. No one then doubted that the power to nominate the next sovereign rested with the Hōjō chief, nor did he show any hesitation in ​choosing a Prince whose father had stood aloof from all intrigues against Kamakura. When the delegate to whom Yasutoki entrusted the commission of enthroning the new sovereign, asked what he should do if, on reaching Kyōtō, he found that the succession had already become an accomplished fact, Yasutoki replied briefly: "Never mind. Only take care that my nominee ascends the Throne." If one of the Imperial Princes despatched from Kyōtō to fill the office of Shōgun in Kamakura, was found an undesirable personage, the Hōjō sent him back, and the samurai spoke of him as having been "exiled" to Kyōtō. It was also by a Hōjō Vicegerent that the Imperial line was divided into two branches privileged to occupy the Throne alternately for ten years. The limit of the time was arithmetically fair, for the reigns of the fifteen sovereigns, from the eightieth to the ninety-fourth, immediately preceding this new regime, had averaged only nine years. But the people could not fail to see that the sacred right of succession and the whole theory of the Emperor's relations to his people were violated by an arrangement which made two Imperial families competitors for a decennial tenure of the Crown, and substituted the fiat of a subject for the divine title of the sovereign. The last of the Hōjō Vicegerents, Takatoki, did no violence to the customs of his time when he sent a force of soldiers to Kyōtō to dethrone the Emperor, and ​thus became responsible for the spectacle of a sovereign fleeing from his palace disguised in female garments. This oligarchical tendency did not undergo any change with the fall of the Hōjō. Kono Moronao, the commander of the first Ashikaga Chief's soldiers, instructed his followers thus: "If you want estates, take those of the Emperor. A living Emperor is a mere waster of the world's substance, and an obstacle to the people. He is not a necessity, but if we must have him, a wooden effigy will do equally well." Probably such an extreme view had few adherents, but its expression did not provoke any remonstrance. Hideyoshi, the Taikō, adopted a more respectful attitude towards the Throne, though in some respects he was essentially democratic. Thus he showed absolute indifference to aristocratic claims in choosing his assistants, being guided solely by his judgment of a man's capacity. Among his great captains, Fukushima Masanori was originally a carpenter; Katō Kiyomasa, a nameless nobody like the Taikō himself; Konishi Yukinaga, the son of a druggist; Ishida Katsushige, a page in a temple. But recognising the necessity of hiding his own lowly birth under the shadow of a great office—that of regent—he was careful to exalt the giver of the office. Hence the Imperial Court fared well at his hands. Yet one of Hideyoshi's deliberate acts was strikingly inconsistent with any genuine sense of the dignity of the sovereign. At a ​banquet in his castle at Fushimi, to which the Emperor, the Empress, and the Prince of the Blood repaired, he presented a sum of 5,530 ryō to the sovereign, and gave five hundred koku of rice to the Empress, and three hundred to the Princes. Moreover, while strictly forbidding the general use of the chrysanthemum and paullownia badges, on the ground that they appertained solely to the sovereign, he not only used them himself, but gave surcoats on which they were blazoned as rewards to his followers. It seems, in short, to have been his purpose to show that while the Throne should be stable, it owed its stability to the support of great subjects like himself. Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, undoubtedly aimed at establishing his government on the will of the people. It may be true that, at times, the fortunes of his own house assumed larger dimensions on his political horizon than the interests of the nation: that would have been natural in the greatest statesman born amid such circumstances. But the words addressed by him to the nobles who surrounded his death-bed were unequivocal: "My son has now come of age. I feel no anxiety for the future of the State. But should my successor commit any grave fault in his administration, do you administer affairs yourselves. The country is not the country of one man, but the country of the nation. If my descendants lose their power because of their own misdeeds, I shall not ​regret it." To his son, Hidetada, he said: "Take care of the people. Strive to be virtuous. Never neglect to protect the country." The spirit of such injunctions is plain. It is true that this remarkable statesman increased the allowances for the maintenance of the Emperor and the Imperial Family, and did nothing to impair the stability of the Throne. But he emphatically asserted the absolute right of the Shōgun to exercise the executive authority independently of the sovereign, himself accepting, at the same time, the responsibility of preserving public peace and good order. Further a code of eighteen laws enacted by him for the control of the fiefs had his signature only, and did not bear the Sign Manual.
That the anti-monarchical tendencies of the bushi were recognised by some deep thinkers among themselves may be clearly gathered from the doctrine enunciated by Kumazawa Banzan, chief vassal of the Okayama fief, at the close of the seventeenth century. He taught that the mission of a lord was to develop the welfare of his people; that the Emperor was the true head of the nation, the Shōgun being only His Majesty's lieutenant; and that the samurai were mere bandits, regarding the sovereign as a wooden idol and the common people as dust. To find any one advocating such views in feudal Japan at the close of the seventeenth century seems as remarkable as the fact that Banzan was ​suffered to ventilate them freely, and that when he lectured in Yedo, the very stronghold of the samurai's power, all the magnates went to hear him. In his eyes the word "people" meant not the military class only, but the nation at large. He enunciated the theory which was carried into practice a century and a half later at the Meiji Restoration. Nor did he stand alone in his peculiar beliefs. His contemporary, Hotta Masatoshi, chief Minister of the Shōgun Tsunayoshi, fearlessly proclaimed the doctrine that "the people are the basis of a nation," and sought to give it practical effect by protecting the agricultural classes, and inculcating the principles of loyalty to the sovereign, the people's father. These men were the outcome of a reaction against the masterful demeanour of the bushi towards the non-military classes of the people, and against his often displayed disposition to make light of the Throne.
In the dying words of Iyeyasu, quoted above, a strong note of patriotism is audible. As he closed his eyes on the world where he had played such a conspicuous part, the welfare of the country concerned him more than the permanence of the magnificent position he had won for his own family. But in the sayings and doings of the bushi generally, from the Heian era down to the close of the Military epoch, no evidence appears that love of country was ever a dominant sentiment, if the fact be excepted that they spoke of the spirit animating themselves, the spirit of the ​samurai, as Yamato-damashii, thus assigning to it a national character. There was in truth nothing in the conditions or incidents of their existence to educate patriotism,—no rivalry with other States, no struggle for the safety of altar and hearth. The security and prosperity of the fief to which each bushi belonged were the limits of his mental horizon. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the Meiji era, there suddenly flamed up throughout the whole nation a fire of patriotism which burned thenceforth with almost fierce strength. The Yamato-damashii ceased to be a theoretical sentiment and became a practical inspiration. Men of the samurai class devoted themselves with absorbing energy to the task of raising their country's international status. Nothing in their history suggested the probability of such a display of vigorous patriotism. The explanation, however, is simple. What stirred their hearts so profoundly was the discovery that in many of the essentials of material civilisation their country was separated by an immense interval from Occidental States. They found that, during centuries of seclusion, Japan had fallen far behind Europe and America in the race of progress, and that unless she was to lie permanently under the reproach of semi-barbarism, a strong effort on the part of her people was necessary. Such ready recognition of an unwelcome fact reflects credit on their intelligence. But that phase of the matter need not be ​considered here. The point deserving emphasis is that, prior to the abolition of feudalism in the Meiji era and the re-commencement of foreign intercourse, there had been no evidences of the existence of patriotism among the Japanese people, and that the event which evoked the sentiment was well calculated to produce such an effect. In the sixteenth century, when object-lessons in the nature and quality of Occidental civilisation were first submitted for Japanese inspection by the Portuguese and the Dutch, no marked superiority could be claimed for the foreign systems. On the contrary, the strangers presented themselves in the guise of truculent, law-despising, covetous, and uncultured adventurers, their minds degraded by the pursuit of gain, which the bushi held in traditional contempt, and their manners disfigured by a lack of the courtesies and conventionalities so scrupulously observed in Japan; whereas the appliances and contrivances of their civilisation were very little better than those of the Japanese, and the æsthetic side of their nature was apparently quite undeveloped. But when, after an interval of more than two centuries, they appeared once more upon the scene, everything had changed. The locomotive, the steamship, the telegraph, the man-of-war, the rifle, the machinery of manufacture—all these and many other striking features were absolutely novel. The display dazzled the Japanese completely, and stirred them to such a ​sense of their country's inferiority that men who had never previously looked beyond the fortunes of the fief to which they owed allegiance, now fixed their eyes on Japan as a whole, and became haunted by a feverish longing to raise her rapidly from the lowly place she occupied. Nothing short of direct association with the Japanese samurai of that era could convey a just idea of their importunate anxiety to bring Japan "abreast of Western nations." That phrase (gaikoku to kata wo naraberu) was perpetually in their mouths. Had the feudal system survived, their energy of effort would have been exerted on behalf of each fief separately; but feudalism having disappeared, it was upon the country at large that the stigma of international deficiency fell, and it was of the country as a whole that men thought with solicitude. It is true that Japan had always been esteemed by its people a land of divine origin, and very likely that estimate helped to accentuate the chagrin of discovering her inferiority in matters of material civilisation. But if the teachings of history be of any value, the conclusion is inevitable that, so far as practical displays are concerned, Japanese patriotism is a sentiment of modern development, and that those who claim any exceptional wealth of innate patriotism for her people must be classed as emotional partisans rather than as sober annalists.
In this context another cognate point may conveniently be noticed. It is usually said of ​the modern Japanese that their loyalty to the Throne is limitless, and that a counterpart cannot be found elsewhere. The Japanese themselves assert the fact; assert it with vehemence and insistence calculated to suggest doubt rather than to inspire confidence. But the above historical analysis shows conclusively that if loyalty to the Throne survived down to the Meiji era, it did so in spite of frequent encroachments upon the Imperial prerogatives and constant displays of disrespect; that it seldom or never took the form of practical reverence, and that its existence as a directing influence could not possibly be inferred from the conduct of either the bushi or the Court nobles in ante-Meiji days. In short, like his feverish patriotism, the almost delirious loyalty of the modern Japanese, though its roots may be planted in the soil of a very ancient creed, never showed any signs of vigorous growth until the profound fealty of the bushi towards their liege lords was transferred, after the abolition of feudalism, to the only figure that had survived all vicissitudes, the sovereign. It is not intended to deny that loyalty to the Throne partakes of the character of a religion in modern Japan, and that the people's reverence for the Sovereign amounts almost to worship. But with the frequently asserted claim that such loyalty is traditional, such reverence hereditary, it is impossible for any careful student of history to fully agree.
​The ties of consanguinity snapped easily in mediæval Japan when subjected to the strain of ambition or of loyalty. A vassal's duty to his chief outweighed the claims of filial piety, and men were frequently confronted by the dilemma of having to choose between the two during an era when great houses, whose heads and dependents had long been on terms of close friendship and intermarriage, were driven by the exigencies of the time into opposite camps. On the eve of the fight at Sekigahara which finally established the Tokugawa sway over the whole of Japan, Sanada Masayuki and his two sons, Nobuyuki and Yukimasa, had to consider whether they would join the Tokugawa chief, Iyeyasu, or enter the camp of his enemies, the Osaka party. The old man declared that his obligations to the Tokugawa bound him to their side; his sons said that they could not forget what the Taiko had done for their family, and that they would sacrifice their lives in the Osaka cause. The three men parted in the most friendly manner. It is recorded that Masayuki then repaired to the house of his elder son in order to bid a last farewell to his daughter-in-law and his grandchild. But Nobuyuki's wife would not admit him. "The bond of parent and child is broken," she said, "since each has espoused a different cause. I should be untrue to my husband if I did not exclude from his house an ally of his enemy." The old man expressed profound satisfaction with ​a reply so true to the dictates of the Bushi-dō. He survived the battle, but his two sons perished.
The spirit dictating such acts is well displayed in a letter addressed by the mother of Kōda Hikoyemon to her son. The latter with his liege lord, Oda Nobutaka, had espoused the cause of the Taikō's enemies, and thus the lives of Hikoyemon's mother and of Nobutaka's mother, who were held hostages in the Taikō's hands, became forfeit. The Taikō threatened to put the women to death unless their sons returned to his camp, whereupon Hikoyemon's mother wrote to her son: "Fealty to his lord is the first duty of every man in the empire, and it is the law of nature that parents should die before their children. My life is sacrificed to the cause of our lord and the cause of our house. Let no one mourn for me. Do you, true to the way of the warrior and the path of filial piety, remember that to have a mother is no reason to be unfaithful." This brave lady was crucified.
Nevertheless no pledge was regarded as better securing the observance of a promise than to give one's mother as a hostage. The Taikō, when all other means of winning the confidence of Iyeyasu had failed, placed his mother in the hands of the Tokugawa chief, and at once obtained the latter's trust. Oda Nobunaga lost his life by disregarding such a pledge. Among his captains was Akechi Mitsuhide, a brave soldier and skilled leader but eccentric and sensitive. Besieging a ​castle in Tamba, Mitsuhide induced its holders, two brothers, to surrender by giving his mother as a hostage that their lives should be spared. But Nobunaga ordered the two men to be burned at the stake. Their followers then inflicted the same fate on Mitsuhide's mother, and Mitsuhide avenged her by rebelling against Nobunaga and compassing his death. So, too, the value of family relations was recognised in the celebrated campaign which the Kamakura men undertook against Kyōtō at the instance of Masa, Yoritomo's widow. In order to guard against disaffection at the eleventh hour, a danger not to be slighted inasmuch as the war was virtually a rebellion against the Emperor, the Kamakura chiefs divided their soldiers so that, if a father went with the army, his son remained in Kamakura, and if one brother was despatched to the south, another stayed in the north.
Neglect of family ties in deference to fealty was a respectable act compared with the unnatural sacrifices made at the shrine of ambition. From the time (1156) when, in the Hōgen insurrection, two brothers fought against two brothers, a father against his son, and a nephew against his uncle, the annals are disfigured by many such incidents. Yoritomo destroyed his brothers, his uncle, and his cousin. His widow Masa did her step-son to death. Nobunaga waged war with his father-in-law and his brother-in-law. Takeda Harunobu fought against his father, ​Nobutora. Takauji caused his nephew to be poisoned. There is no lack of these occurrences. It is not to be doubted that the necessity of constantly subduing emotions which human nature has endowed with paramount force, created a special moral perspective for the bushi, and dwarfed his estimate of sentiments that exercise dominant sway over normally constituted minds. Throughout his whole career he had to hold himself ready to calmly face catastrophes in comparison with which all tender emotions seemed insignificant, and there is no difficulty in conceiving that the stoicism he was expected to show in the presence of deadly peril obtruded itself into relations of life where its display was incongruous and unbecoming.
Ruthlessness frequently evinced towards vanquished foes was another example of the callousness educated in the bushi by the scenes of bloodshed among which he lived. When, in consequence of falling under suspicion of treason, Hidetsugu, the Taikō's adopted son, was ordered to commit suicide, his wife, his concubine, and his children were all put to death without mercy by order of the Taiko. The Tokugawa chief, Iyeyasu, showed similar inclemency. After he had effected the final conquest of the Osaka party, he put to death all the relatives and surviving supporters of its leader. Certainly in thus acting, the Taikō and Iyeyasu merely followed a custom approved by many generations, ​"Comprehensive punishment" had long been counted one of the administrator's most effective weapons. If a farmer absconded leaving his taxes unpaid, or fled to another district in the hope of finding lighter feudal burdens, his whole family, his relatives and his friends, were included in the circle of his penalty. No more profoundly pathetic spectacle presents itself in all the drama of Japanese history than the fate of the family of Sogoro, the noble farmer who, because he presented a petition on behalf of his tax-burdened fellow-rustics, was crucified with his wife and two little sons. The only excuse, a very slender one, that can be offered for such cruelty is that this device of converting a man's relatives and friends into constables interested in securing his obedience to the laws, was not of Japanese origin. It had been borrowed, in the seventh century, from China, where the chain of vicarious responsibility used to be drawn out to extraordinary length. But no era of Japanese annals was more disfigured by its exercise than the centuries of the bushi's supremacy. The plea of established custom is not without validity. But what can extenuate the conduct of Iyeyasu when he caused his wife to be executed for plotting against him, and compelled his son to commit suicide in expiation of a crime which the unfortunate youth had not been proved to have committed, and, in fact, had not committed; or of Iyemitsu, the third Tokugawa Shōgun, who condemned his brother ​to a similar fate? It is evident that the habit of despising wounds and death when they fell to his own lot, taught the bushi to deal them out to others with indifference. Cruelty in his case sprang from callousness to suffering rather than from vindictiveness. His faculty of intellectual realisation had been blunted by the stoicism he was compelled to practise.
No feature of the bushi's character is more discreditable than his slavish yielding to the erotic passion. In the camp, where the presence of women was generally impossible, he thought no shame of resorting to unnatural liaisons, and out of that indulgence there grew a perverted code of morality which surrounded such acts with a halo of martial manliness. But in that respect the conduct of the Japanese samurai is deprived of singularity by numerous counterparts in other countries. What differentiates him is his undisguised indifference to chastity for its own sake, as well as to the obligations imposed by the marriage tie. It is remarkable that Buddhism, which in all its forms, with one exception, insisted upon the observance of celibacy by its ministers, failed completely, in the case of its disciples, to subject the passions of the flesh to any of the restraints that Christianity enforced so successfully in Imperial Rome. In vain the student looks among the heroes of the Military epoch for a man who made purity ​an ideal, continence a duty, or conjugal fidelity a law. The Taira chief, Kiyomori, regarded women as mere playthings, and indulged the caprices of his passion with absolute shamelessness. After he had overthrown his enemy Yoshitomo, the head of the Minamoto clan, he succumbed to the beauty of the latter's concubine, Tokiwa, and in order to purchase her complaisance saved the lives of her three sons, by whom the power of his house was subsequently crushed. Yoshitsune, the so-called Bayard of Japanese history, left a very tarnished record. In the days of his insignificance he won the love of Torurihime, whose sorrows endowed her country with a new branch of dramatic literature. From her he transferred his affections to the daughter of Kiichi Hōgen, for the sake of gaining access to a strategical treatise in the possession of her father. At the battle of Dan-no-ura he appropriated the wife of an Imperial prince, and his escape from Kyōtō in the hour of his broken fortunes received a special tinge of romance from his parting with the beautiful dancing-girl Shizuka. Yoshinaka, the first of the Minamoto to shake the Taira's power, derives something of his fame from the military prowess of his concubine Tomoye, but his biographers take little notice of the fact that his infatuation for Matsu, a lady of noble lineage, contributed to his downfall. Even when the enemy were at the gates he could not tear himself from her pillow, nor ​did he regard the call of duty until a faithful vassal committed suicide to emphasise a remonstrance against such weakness. Nitta Yoshisada, the type of a loyal soldier in his time, lost the opportunity of his life and sacrificed the cause of his sovereign through his passion for a Court beauty whom the Emperor had bestowed on him. When the Ashikaga leader, Takauji, his forces shattered in battle, fled westward, Yoshisada might have consummated his final overthrow by immediate pursuit. He repaired, instead, to the arms of his mistress. Kono Moronao, Takauji's principal captain, by endeavouring to compass a man's death in order to enjoy his wife, drove them both to commit suicide, and subsequently abducted an ex-Regent's sister who had been destined for service at Court. The lady Yodo, most beloved of the Taikō's concubines, had been entrusted to his protection by the noble soldier Shibata Katsuiye when the latter was on the eve of perishing by his own hand in his beleaguered castle. Matsu, who occupied the next place in the Taikō's affections, was obtained by a political ruse; and, most shameful of all, he invented a paltry pretext to order the suicide of his old friend, the gentle dilettante Sen-no-Rikiu, because the latter declined to urge his daughter to break a vow of fidelity to her deceased husband by receiving the Taikō's addresses. Iyeyasu, the great Tokugawa chief, ​employed his power in a singular fashion. A high official had caused a man to be put to death on a trumped-up accusation in order to possess himself of the widow. She, flying to the castle of Iyeyasu, made her complaint; whereupon the Tokugawa ruler ordered the official to commit suicide, and then compelled the woman to become his own concubine. These examples constitute only a fraction of the recorded catalogue, but, on the other side, there is nowhere to be seen a figure ennobled by purity of life; nowhere a man whose love of one woman and one only stands prominent among the motives of his great deeds. Such men there may have been, but they are not found among the makers of the nation's history. To woman alone was left the honour of practising conjugal fidelity and virtuous self-restraint, and the ideal of objective virtue she attained contrasts vividly with the abyss of self-indulgence into which the other sex fell.
Abuse of the marital tie inflicted its own penalty. In ancient and in medieval days the most prolific source of dissension was succession to an estate. Nearly every man of rank or station had at least one concubine as well as a wife, and in the absence of an heir born of the latter the former perpetually intrigued to have her son declared heir in preference to the next of kin or to the son by adoption. Then it happened, not infrequently, that after an illegitimate child had been ​made heir, a son was born to the wife, and intrigues at once commenced to obtain the succession for the legitimate offspring. Such a change seems natural; but in the interval before the birth of the legitimate child, it often happened that the question had been complicated by many newly formed relations of which the concubine took advantage to prevent the deposition of her offspring. Again and again troubles involving large sections of the feudal aristocracy grew out of these complications, and the Taikō, sensible of the necessity of removing such a factor of disturbance, attempted, first, to interdict the keeping of concubines in general, and then had recourse to the less drastic method of declaring two the maximum number. His panegyrists have inferred from this veto a high moral aim. But the Taikō has no title to such praise. When a Christian propagandist preached to him the doctrine of one consort only for one husband, he said, "Relax that restriction and I might believe your teaching." His legislation was dictated by considerations of expediency only. Naturally it proved abortive.
It is a philosophical tenet that the imagination in its first stages concentrates itself on individuals; then, by an effort of abstraction, rises to an institution or well-defined organisation; and finally grasps a moral or intellectual principle. Some analysts of Japanese character maintain that the spirit of the bushi belonged to the first category; ​that his loyalty was not a principle observed for its own sake, but only a form of reverence or affection, primarily for his father, and secondarily for his feudal chief, whom he regarded as his father. According to that theory the Bushi-dō is an outcome of the doctrine of filial piety. But the river cannot rise higher than its source. If, as has been already shown, the parental tie was unhesitatingly sacrificed on the altar of feudal fealty, it is plainly unreasonable to suppose that the latter derived its inspiration from the former. History proves, by example after example, that not the occupant of the Throne but the Throne itself was an object of veneration in Japan. It proves also, and even less scrutiny is needed to detect the fact, that not the representative of a great house but the house itself commanded the leal services of the bushi. Again and again the individual was stripped of all authority and reduced to the position of a mere figure-head by men who were nevertheless willing to give their lives for the honour of the name he bore and the support of the family he represented. Every page of Japanese annals reveals the same spectacle,—the institution preserved, the individual ignored. And looking a little closer, it is found that the imagination of the noblest type of bushi fixed itself ultimately neither on the person of the chief he followed nor on the preservation of the house he served, but upon his own duty as a soldier, upon the way of the warrior (Bushi-dō). If he ​subordinated the individual to the institution, so also he surrendered his own life when the institution fell, and found in "duty" (gi) a force that nerved him to a shocking and most painful mode of self-immolation. Civilisation has taught the Occident to believe that the suicide is insane; that moral equilibrium must have been lost before a man's hand can turn the pistol or knife against his own person. The act seems so terrible that its performance cannot be associated with sober reflection. Yet the severing of the jugular vein or the scattering of the brains brings instant release, and is therefore much easier than the samurai's method of comparatively slow self-torture, while in his case there can be no question of insanity. In the full possession of his senses, calmly and deliberately, he disembowelled himself, and his commonest motive was to avoid the dishonour of surviving defeat, to consummate his duty of loyalty, or to give weight to a remonstrance in the interests of virtue or the cause of the wronged. It would seem that the beginnings of this mood are to be sought in the old and barbarous institution called junshi, or "associated death." From whatever region of Asia the primæval Japanese came, they brought with them the custom that a sovereign or prince should be followed to the other world by those who had ministered to him on this side of the grave — his wife, his concubine, his principal servitors. The law which enforced this cruel obligation ​was rescinded in the first century a. d., but the principle survived. Men and even women persuaded themselves that it was necessary to render beyond the grave the same services they had performed in life, and self-immolation at the demise of a ruler or master continued to be occasionally practised until the Nara and Heian epochs, when the nation fell into effeminate and luxurious habits inconsistent with any heroic displays of altruism. In the mean while Confucianism and Buddhism had come. Both exercised a strong influence in moulding the national character. The former especially won a high place in Japanese esteem from the first, probably because of the reverent observance it received in China, whence Japan borrowed so many models. A society founded on the "five relationships" — ruler and ruled, husband and wife, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, friend and friend — seemed the most perfect organisation within reach of human beings, and imagination could not rise to any loftier conception than that of the motives informing these relationships — authority guided by righteousness and benevolence on the part of ruler, husband, father, and elder brother; submission guided by righteousness and sincerity on the part of ruled, wife, son, and younger brother; the mutual promotion of virtue by friends. The Chinese sage inculcated the duty of sincerity or fidelity, but did not indicate the manner of discharging it. There ​the Japanese samurai derived a rule from his own ancient custom of self-sacrifice. The moral principle was Chinese; the heroic practice, Japanese. Confucius further taught contempt for money, and that part of his teaching, taken in conjunction with Mencius' doctrine that extravagance is fatal to discipline, appealed strongly to the bushi. It was from these two philosophers, also, that the Japanese learned to set the institution above the individual. What Confucius had drafted in outline, Mencius compiled in detail; namely, that while the right to rule is of divine origin, the title of the ruler depends on his personal character and his conduct of affairs; and that if he fail to establish such a title, he should be removed by a member of his own family, or by one of his chief officials, or by a "minister of heaven." The guiding principles of the bushi's practice are here easily recognised. The nobler portion of those principles commanded little obedience amid the usurpations and extravagances of the Court nobility, but when the foundations of military feudalism began to be laid, the five relationships and the duties connected with them acquired a new value from the strength and security they conferred on the provincial organisations. Then, again, the old custom of "associated death" was revived. Men sacrificed themselves, sometimes singly, sometimes in hundreds, in order to accompany a liege lord beyond the grave to continue in the other world the ​services rendered in this. Everywhere in Japan the cemeteries bear witness to that extraordinary spirit of devotion: the tomb of the chieftain stands surrounded by humbler sepulchres of faithful vassals who refused to survive him. The practice remained in vogue until the middle of the seventeenth century, and would probably have survived until the Meiji Restoration had not the Tokugawa Viceregents employed all their influence and authority to check it. Iyeyasu, and after him Iyetsuna, issued proclamations embodying the doctrine that the duty of the samurai required him not to court death for the sake of ministering to a departed chief, but to remain in life for the sake of serving his successor." Sorrow for the dead, service for the living," — that was the new creed.
Something more, however, than a profound conception of duty was needed to nerve the bushi for sacrifices such as he seems to have been always ready to make. It is true that parents took pains to familiarise their children of both sexes from very tender years with the idea of self-destruction at any time. The little boy was taught how the sword should be directed against his bosom; the little girl how the dagger must be held so as to pierce the throat; both grew up in constant fellowship with the conviction that suicide must be reckoned among the natural incidents of every-day existence. But superadded ​to the force of education and the incentive of tradition there was a transcendental influence. Buddhism supplied it. The tenets of that creed divide themselves, broadly speaking, into two doctrines, salvation by faith and salvation by works, and the chief exponent of the latter principle is the Zen sect, which prescribes "meditation" (zazen) as the vehicle of enlightenment. The student here approaches ground where the sceptic will refuse to follow; yet it is ground that has been trodden by countless feet through numerous generations, and no rational man can deny all validity to the testimony of so many disciples. At first, according to the evidence of devotees, the hours devoted to meditation in the ordained position bring to the imagination only a succession of mundane images. But gradually this chain of rambling thoughts grows more and more tenuous, until at last its links cease to be visible, the state of "absorption" supervenes, and the mind is flooded by an illumination which reveals the universe in a new aspect, absolutely free from all traces of passion, interest, or affection, and shows written across everything in flaming letters the truth that for him who has found Buddha there is neither birth nor death, growth nor decay. Lifted high above his surroundings, he is prepared to meet every fate with indifference. Whatever analysis psychologists may apply to this mental condition, its attainment seems to have been a fact in the case of the bushi of the ​Military epoch and to be a fact in the case of the Japanese soldier to-day, producing in the former readiness to look calmly in the face of any form of death, and in the latter a high type of patriotic courage.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 31.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 32.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 33.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 34.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 35.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 36.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 37.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 38.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 39.
* ↑ ​Note 31.—The Japanese military man is called indiscriminately samurai or bushi. Samurai originally signifies "guard," ​and shi is the Sinico-Japanese pronunciation of the same ideograph, which, with the prefix bu (military), makes the compound bushi, or military guard. The terms samurai and bushi are used in these pages without distinction.
* ↑ ​Note 32. The term hyaku-sho, here translated "working-man," means literally "one engaged in any of the various callings" apart from military service. In a later age a further distinction was established between the agriculturist, the artisan, and the trader, and the word hyaku-sho then came to carry the signification of "husbandman" only, a sense which it possesses at the present time.
* ↑ ​Note 33.—It sometimes happened that the samurai made a habit of attending performances given by shira-byoshi (the geisha of that era), and deadly brawls often resulted.
* ↑ ​Note 34.—The act of cutting open the stomach was called harakiri or seppuku, different pronunciations of ideographs having the same meaning.
* ↑ ​Note 35.—Yamato is the old name for Japan.
* ↑ ​Note 36.—Little credence can be attached to a statement often advanced by Japanese historiographers that the crime of high treason has never been known in Japan. There are several instances. The elder brother of the Empress plotted against the life of the Emperor Suinin (29 B.C.–71 A.D.). Soga no Umako caused the Emperor Susun to be assassinated (591 A.D.), in order to place a princess on the throne. The Emperor Kōbun was attacked by his uncle and driven into the mountains, where he committed suicide (478 A.D.). The Empress Dowager and her favourite, a Buddhist priest (Dokyo), drove the Emperor Junnin into exile (764 A.D.), banishing with him many princes of the blood and killing others. Mototsune, a representative of the Fujiwara family, seized the Emperor, Yozei (885 A.D.), and placed him in confinement. In 939 A.D. the Taira chief, Masakado, raised the standard of revolt and endeavoured to win the Throne for himself. The Hōjō chief, Takatoki, sent an army to attack the Palace of the Emperor Godaigo, took him prisoner, dethroned him, and sent him into exile (1331 A.D.). Ashikaga Takauji, in 1335 A.D., reduced the sovereign's stronghold and placed him in confinement. Such a record cannot be ​reconciled with any theory of invariably reverential loyalty to the person of the Emperor.
* ↑ ​Note 37.—The names of such great captains as Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi (the Taikō), Uyesugi Kenshin, Takeda Shingen, etc., are connected with liaisons of this description.
* ↑ ​Note 38.—The Taikō resembled Napoleon I. in his determined manner of overriding obstacles and his ruthless indifference to the feelings of others. Writing to his wife from Odawara, where he was besieging the Hōjō stronghold, he said: "Send Yodo to me here. I like her. You shall have me at your side when I return."
* ↑ ​Note 39.—It is curious to observe the difficulty that attended the abolition of the custom of junshi. When Tadayoshi, the fourth son of Tokugawa Iyeyasu, died in 1601, not only did three of his most trusted vassals commit suicide, but a fourth, who had been banished to Oshiu in consequence of some offence, hastened to Yedo and killed himself within the precincts of the Temple Zōjō-ji. In the same year Hideyasu, second son of Iyeyasu, died. Two of his attendants immediately committed suicide, and his chief factor was about to follow their example when peremptory vetoes arrived from Hidetada, the reigning Viceregent, and from Iyeyasu himself. In his letter forbidding the act, Iyeyasu declared that should the practice be resorted to by any feudatory's vassals thereafter, the fief would be confiscated, his view being that true loyalty required, not sacrifice of life, but transfer of services to the deceased lord's successor. Nevertheless, when Kunimatsu, the eight-year-old son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was put to death in 1615, his tutor, Tanaka Rokuyemon, committed suicide; and when the second Tokugawa Shōgun, Hidetada, died in 1632, although, as has been said, he had himself interdicted the junshi, his squire, Morikawa Shigetoshi, followed him to the other world. So, on the demise of Date Masamune in 1636, several of his vassals committed suicide; and on the death of the third Tokugawa Shōgun, Iyemitsu, in 1651, five men and one woman killed themselves, and four other men, attendants of the suicides, took the same step. At length, in 1663, the fourth Shōgun, Iyetsuna, decreed that if the junshi were practised in any fief, the latter's revenues should be confiscated; ​and six years later, when, on the death of Matsudaira Tadamasa of Utsunomiya, one of his vassals adhered to the old custom, the Yedo administration reduced the estates of the fief by twenty thousand koku, executed the two sons of Sugiura Matsubei, who had committed suicide, and banished his grandson. Not until the exaction of these terrible penalties did the custom receive its death-blow.
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