Bushido by Inazo Nitobe (best ebook reader for surface pro .txt) 📖

pluck of the youths who dared an

attempt on his life and ordered that they should be allowed to die an

honorable death. Their little brother Hachimaro, a mere infant of eight

summers, was condemned to a similar fate, as the sentence was pronounced

on all the male members of the family, and the three were taken to a

monastery where it was to be executed. A physician who was present on

the occasion has left us a diary from which the following scene is

translated. “When they were all seated in a row for final despatch,

Sakon turned to the youngest and said—‘Go thou first, for I wish to be

sure that thou doest it aright.’ Upon the little one’s replying that, as

he had never seen seppuku performed, he would like to see his brothers

do it and then he could follow them, the older brothers smiled between

their tears:—‘Well said, little fellow! So canst thou well boast of

being our father’s child.’ When they had placed him between them, Sakon

thrust the dagger into the left side of his own abdomen and

asked—‘Look, brother! Dost understand now? Only, don’t push the dagger

too far, lest thou fall back. Lean forward, rather, and keep thy knees

well composed.’ Naiki did likewise and said to the boy—‘Keep thy eyes

open or else thou mayst look like a dying woman. If thy dagger feels

anything within and thy strength fails, take courage and double thy

effort to cut across.’ The child looked from one to the other, and when

both had expired, he calmly half denuded himself and followed the

example set him on either hand.”

 

The glorification of seppuku offered, naturally enough, no small

temptation to its unwarranted committal. For causes entirely

incompatible with reason, or for reasons entirely undeserving of death,

hot headed youths rushed into it as insects fly into fire; mixed and

dubious motives drove more samurai to this deed than nuns into convent

gates. Life was cheap—cheap as reckoned by the popular standard of

honor. The saddest feature was that honor, which was always in the

agio, so to speak, was not always solid gold, but alloyed with baser

metals. No one circle in the Inferno will boast of greater density of

Japanese population than the seventh, to which Dante consigns all

victims of self-destruction!

 

And yet, for a true samurai to hasten death or to court it, was alike

cowardice. A typical fighter, when he lost battle after battle and

was pursued from plain to hill and from bush to cavern, found himself

hungry and alone in the dark hollow of a tree, his sword blunt with

use, his bow broken and arrows exhausted—did not the noblest of

the Romans fall upon his own sword in Phillippi under like

circumstances?—deemed it cowardly to die, but with a fortitude

approaching a Christian martyr’s, cheered himself with an impromptu

verse:

 

“Come! evermore come,

Ye dread sorrows and pains!

And heap on my burden’d back;

That I not one test may lack

Of what strength in me remains!”

 

This, then, was the Bushido teaching—Bear and face all calamities and

adversities with patience and a pure conscience; for as Mencius[20]

taught, “When Heaven is about to confer a great office on anyone, it

first exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with

toil; it exposes his body to hunger and subjects him to extreme poverty;

and it confounds his undertakings. In all these ways it stimulates his

mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies.” True honor

lies in fulfilling Heaven’s decree and no death incurred in so doing is

ignominious, whereas death to avoid what Heaven has in store is cowardly

indeed! In that quaint book of Sir Thomas Browne’s, Religio Medici

there is an exact English equivalent for what is repeatedly taught in

our Precepts. Let me quote it: “It is a brave act of valor to contemn

death, but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest

valor to dare to live.” A renowned priest of the seventeenth century

satirically observed—“Talk as he may, a samurai who ne’er has died is

apt in decisive moments to flee or hide.” Again—Him who once has died

in the bottom of his breast, no spears of Sanada nor all the arrows of

Tametomo can pierce. How near we come to the portals of the temple whose

Builder taught “he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it!”

These are but a few of the numerous examples which tend to confirm the

moral identity of the human species, notwithstanding an attempt so

assiduously made to render the distinction between Christian and Pagan

as great as possible.

 

[Footnote 20: I use Dr. Legge’s translation verbatim.]

 

We have thus seen that the Bushido institution of suicide was neither

so irrational nor barbarous as its abuse strikes us at first sight. We

will now see whether its sister institution of Redress—or call it

Revenge, if you will—has its mitigating features. I hope I can dispose

of this question in a few words, since a similar institution, or call it

custom, if that suits you better, has at some time prevailed among all

peoples and has not yet become entirely obsolete, as attested by the

continuance of duelling and lynching. Why, has not an American captain

recently challenged Esterhazy, that the wrongs of Dreyfus be avenged?

Among a savage tribe which has no marriage, adultery is not a sin, and

only the jealousy of a lover protects a woman from abuse: so in a time

which has no criminal court, murder is not a crime, and only the

vigilant vengeance of the victim’s people preserves social order. “What

is the most beautiful thing on earth?” said Osiris to Horus. The reply

was, “To avenge a parent’s wrongs,”—to which a Japanese would have

added “and a master’s.”

 

In revenge there is something which satisfies one’s sense of justice.

The avenger reasons:—“My good father did not deserve death. He who

killed him did great evil. My father, if he were alive, would not

tolerate a deed like this: Heaven itself hates wrong-doing. It is the

will of my father; it is the will of Heaven that the evil-doer cease

from his work. He must perish by my hand; because he shed my father’s

blood, I, who am his flesh and blood, must shed the murderer’s. The same

Heaven shall not shelter him and me.” The ratiocination is simple and

childish (though we know Hamlet did not reason much more deeply),

nevertheless it shows an innate sense of exact balance and equal justice

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Our sense of revenge is as

exact as our mathematical faculty, and until both terms of the equation

are satisfied we cannot get over the sense of something left undone.

 

In Judaism, which believed in a jealous God, or in Greek mythology,

which provided a Nemesis, vengeance may be left to superhuman agencies;

but common sense furnished Bushido with the institution of redress as a

kind of ethical court of equity, where people could take cases not to be

judged in accordance with ordinary law. The master of the forty-seven

Ronins was condemned to death;—he had no court of higher instance to

appeal to; his faithful retainers addressed themselves to Vengeance, the

only Supreme Court existing; they in their turn were condemned by common

law,—but the popular instinct passed a different judgment and hence

their memory is still kept as green and fragrant as are their graves at

Sengakuji to this day.

 

Though Lao-tse taught to recompense injury with kindness, the voice of

Confucius was very much louder, which counselled that injury must be

recompensed with justice;—and yet revenge was justified only when it

was undertaken in behalf of our superiors and benefactors. One’s own

wrongs, including injuries done to wife and children, were to be borne

and forgiven. A samurai could therefore fully sympathize with Hannibal’s

oath to avenge his country’s wrongs, but he scorns James Hamilton for

wearing in his girdle a handful of earth from his wife’s grave, as an

eternal incentive to avenge her wrongs on the Regent Murray.

 

Both of these institutions of suicide and redress lost their _raison

d’être_ at the promulgation of the criminal code. No more do we hear of

romantic adventures of a fair maiden as she tracks in disguise the

murderer of her parent. No more can we witness tragedies of family

vendetta enacted. The knight errantry of Miyamoto Musashi is now a tale

of the past. The well-ordered police spies out the criminal for the

injured party and the law metes out justice. The whole state and society

will see that wrong is righted. The sense of justice satisfied, there is

no need of kataki-uchi. If this had meant that “hunger of the heart

which feeds upon the hope of glutting that hunger with the life-blood of

the victim,” as a New England divine has described it, a few paragraphs

in the Criminal Code would not so entirely have made an end of it.

 

As to seppuku, though it too has no existence de jure, we still hear

of it from time to time, and shall continue to hear, I am afraid, as

long as the past is remembered. Many painless and time-saving methods of

self-immolation will come in vogue, as its votaries are increasing with

fearful rapidity throughout the world; but Professor Morselli will have

to concede to seppuku an aristocratic position among them. He

maintains that “when suicide is accomplished by very painful means or at

the cost of prolonged agony, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it

may be assigned as the act of a mind disordered by fanaticism, by

madness, or by morbid excitement.”[21] But a normal seppuku does not

savor of fanaticism, or madness or excitement, utmost sang froid being

necessary to its successful accomplishment. Of the two kinds into which

Dr. Strahan[22] divides suicide, the Rational or Quasi, and the

Irrational or True, seppuku is the best example of the former type.

 

[Footnote 21: Morselli, Suicide, p. 314.]

 

[Footnote 22: Suicide and Insanity.]

 

From these bloody institutions, as well as from the general tenor of

Bushido, it is easy to infer that the sword played an important part in

social discipline and life. The saying passed as an axiom which called

 

THE SWORD THE SOUL OF THE

SAMURAI,

 

and made it the emblem of power and prowess. When Mahomet proclaimed

that “The sword is the key of Heaven and of Hell,” he only echoed a

Japanese sentiment. Very early the samurai boy learned to wield it. It

was a momentous occasion for him when at the age of five he was

apparelled in the paraphernalia of samurai costume, placed upon a

go-board[23] and initiated into the rights of the military profession

by having thrust into his girdle a real sword, instead of the toy dirk

with which he had been playing. After this first ceremony of _adoptio

per arma_, he was no more to be seen outside his father’s gates without

this badge of his status, even if it was usually substituted for

everyday wear by a gilded wooden dirk. Not many years pass before he

wears constantly the genuine steel, though blunt, and then the sham arms

are thrown aside and with enjoyment keener than his newly acquired

blades, he marches out to try their edge on wood and stone. When be

reaches man’s estate at the age of fifteen, being given independence of

action, he can now pride himself upon the possession of arms sharp

enough for any work. The very possession of the dangerous instrument

imparts to him a feeling and an air of self-respect and responsibility.

“He beareth not his sword in