The modern reinvention of Bushido: Inazō Nitobe’s samurai code and its cultural and political impacts
Written by Michael Rosenbaum
It’s well known that the Star Wars series pays homage to the style of samurai films of Akira Kurosawa.[1] Recent adaptations have borne this out. The episode “Duel” of the anthology show “Star Wars: Visions” (2021) imitated a number of both stylistic and narrative elements associated with various Kurosawa films. The episode “Duel” follows an unnamed warrior helping to defend a nearby town, a premise nearly identical to the film “Seven Samurai” (1954). As in the films that inspired it, the unnamed protagonist of “Duel” is led into confrontation not by a threat to his person, but rather his moral duty to protect innocents around him. This morality of the protagonist is then questioned by the main twist of the episode: the protagonist “sacrifices” his anonymity and is revealed to be himself a sith, the recurrent evil of the Star Wars universe. These sacrifices of both safety and anonymity embody the trope of the chivalrous samurai in the narrative. But the character maintains the moral qualities of honor and sacrifice supposedly followed by all samurai (and / or wandering rōnin à la the protagonist in “Yojimbo” (1961)). They follow a code: bushido.
While the idea of a samurai as an upright moral figure already has enough cultural cachet to be subverted, the idea of a righteous samurai is itself a newer phenomenon than one might expect. The portrayal of the samurai as a group of warriors motivated by a uniform moral code was invented by Inazō Nitobe (1862-1933), a Japanese intellectual who sought to redefine the samurai of Japan as an analog of the European knight, drawing on similar codes of conduct and invested with parallel moralities.[2] Just as “Duel” is an homage to the work of Kurosawa sixty years ago, Kurosawa himself drew upon cultural touchstones originating sixty years before the production of his films. His idea of the noble samurai was inspired first and foremost by the work of Inazō Nitobe.
Nitobe’s main work and the progenitor of the model of the noble samurai was Bushido: The Soul of Japan. In it, Nitobe redefined the samurai as analogous to medieval knights and a unified code of bushido to the code of chivalry. The attempt to imbed an equivalence between Japanese national development and Western national developments had immense consequences. Most violently, it served as a partial justification of Japanese colonial expansion in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria in the early 1900s. But on a broader level, it has profoundly changed the way Japanese culture is perceived in the West and likewise Japanese self-image. The characteristics associated with samurai are part of this mystique. They are functionally inseparable. And so, when an inversion of the samurai ideal occurs, as in the “Duel” episode, it stands out. But the inversion is not of the samurai as they were, but instead of the samurai that Nitobe created.
Nitobe’s work was written for two audiences. First, for Western audiences, it was written to connect a form of Japanese morality (for which Nitobe reinvented the word bushido) with Christian ethics. This is not a religious text, but a cultural one. Christianity for Nitobe meant the romantic ideal of European medieval knighthood. It meant the march of progress that created the great empires of the day, and that restrained them in a system like the League of Nations, a system that Nitobe himself was an active participant in.[3]
But the book was also written for a Japanese audience to propagate the emerging idea of a Japanese national character.[4] Critically, it tried to create an equivalency between Europe’s development from the medieval period and Japan’s past. By drawing parallel connections between the two cases, Nitobe argued that Japan could develop in the European mold. Nitobe was reinterpreting Japanese history to fit into the European model of development.[5] Notable are the parallels drawn between the noblesse oblige of the medieval knight and bushido, the moral role of Christianity in Europe and the Shinto, Buddhist, and Confucian moral systems in Japan.[6] This would enable a moral justification of actions, often violent actions, in emulation of European countries. In Bushido, martial and cultural progress are interrelated. Nitobe directly cites the work of Sir Walter Scott in drawing parallels between patriotism and honor (translated by Nitobe to giri), both being related (according to Nitobe) to the martial defense of the nation.[7] These combined in a sinister fashion. Nitobe would spend the last years of his life defending the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) by equating the interests of Japan in the region with those of Russia (a European empire).[8]
For a book that sought to syncretize two different cultures, the author himself was emblematic of this split. Born in Japan, Nitobe studied agriculture in Japan and the United States and was a convert to the Quaker denomination of Christianity. But Nitobe’s family were ancestral members of Japan’s insular samurai caste. His grandfather, who raised Nitobe, like the rest of his caste, had become effectively clerks as their privileges deteriorated under radical social transformations in the Tokugawa and Meiji regimes. This profoundly shaped perceptions of samurai purpose and left a romantic longing for martial glory by the time of Nitobe’s birth.[9]
Nitobe’s schooling reflects a split in the sources present in Bushido. He makes many references to both Confucian scholars as well as European idealists and romantics.[10] Members of the romantic and idealist movements, as part of a rejection of material and industrial society in the nineteenth century. These stark transformations were parallelled in Japan, where the sudden collapse of the country’s feudal class structure. Many of the authors referenced in the text of Bushido, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, the stoic Herbert Spencer, and Sir Walter Scott, looked back at an idealized medieval age. Their writings attempted to carry through the traditions and values of the older, gentile Europe to the modern day. These romantic and idealist writers were themselves mythmakers. Among these writers, Scott in particular was responsible for much of the myth of the brave medieval knight through stories like Ivanhoe.
Through developing the idea of a uniform code of conduct for samurai — bushido — Nitobe was reinventing a term that had only been used in a scattered handful of works over time. This reimagined term was part of the creation of a mythologized and idealized samurai in Japan along a model earlier used in the West to reinterpret the medieval knight. This Western reimagination had two integral elements its reimagination by Nitobe would share, a quasi-christian military honor and military-originated cultural tradition, each drawn from Western sources. Scott’s work portrayed the honorable warrior and Sir Philip Sidney was seen by Niutobe as a proponent of the (English) military classes’ positive influence on the cultural development of their nations. Just as Scott’s work popularized a particular version of the idea of the medieval knight in Europe, Nitobe developed the analogous idea in Japan. Nitobe’s main seven characteristics of the samurai are a key to this perception; justice, courage, benevolence, politeness, veracity, honor, and loyalty. These are similar to the romantic movement’s interpretations of the medieval knight, specifically the movement’s interpretation of the code of chivalry.[11] The connection between samurai and knights was the thin edge of a number of historical comparisons that sought to equate the development of Japan more broadly with Western countries at the end of the nineteenth century. This equivalency helped justify ideologically the Japanese Empire’s colonial conquest of Taiwan, Korea, and later war in China until 1945.
Perhaps there is no better example of the proliferation of the idea of the noble samurai than the show “Star Wars: Visions” itself, the entire first season of which was created and animated in Japan. The first episode for the show was “Duel". The episode follows closely the trope of an unnamed warrior helping to defend a nearby town. Samurai are an instantly recognizable part of Japanese history and a well-known cultural symbol. The actions of the warrior are predictable because culturally samurai are expected to act in accordance with their equally well-known code. But there is no single code. Bushido, and the singular morality of samurai it created, was a politically motivated idea. Perhaps its most powerful effect was supplying the connection between a supposed national character and contemporary Japanese expansion. But impressively, Nitobe’s version of samurai ethics became an important part of Japanese self-definition.
[1] David Miller, “Star Wars: Every Kurosawa Reference & Homage In Movies & Shows Explained,” ScreenRant, September 9, 2021, https://screenrant.com/star-wars-movies-shows-akira-kurosawa-influences-references-explained/.
[2] G. Cameron Hurst, “Death, Honor, and Loyality: The Bushidō Ideal,” Philosophy East and West 40, no. 4 (1990): 512-513.
[3] Inazō Nitobe, Bushido, the Soul of Japan (Project Gutenberg), accessed February 22, 2023, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12096; Samuel M. Snipes, “The Life of Japanese Quaker Inazo Nitobe,” Friends Journal, August 1, 2011, 5-7.
[4] Karl F. Friday, “Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian’s Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition,” The History Teacher 27, no. 3 (1994): 339–49, https://doi.org/10.2307/494774, 342-344.
[5] G. Cameron Hurst, “Death, Honor, and Loyality: The Bushidō Ideal,” Philosophy East and West 40, no. 4 (1990): 514.
[6] Inazō Nitobe, Bushido, the Soul of Japan (Project Gutenberg), accessed February 22, 2023, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12096
[7] Honor is one of the chapters in Nitobe’s work, in which there are multiple references to Scott and “knightly” behavior, Inazō Nitobe, Bushido, the Soul of Japan (Project Gutenberg), accessed February 22, 2023, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12096.
[8] Samuel M. Snipes, “The Life of Japanese Quaker Inazo Nitobe,” Friends Journal, August 1, 2011, 6-7.
[9] G. Cameron Hurst, “Death, Honor, and Loyality: The Bushidō Ideal,” Philosophy East and West 40, no. 4 (1990): 511-512; Samuel M. Snipes, “The Life of Japanese Quaker Inazo Nitobe,” Friends Journal, August 1, 2011.
[10] Inazō Nitobe, Bushido, the Soul of Japan (Project Gutenberg), accessed February 22, 2023, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12096; “Star Wars, Samurai, and Medieval Knights,” presented at “Modern Extremism and the Medieval World” conference organized by the Medievalist Toolkit (Profs. Sarina Kuersteiner, Adam Matthews, Robin Reich). Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, April 21-22, 2023.
[11] G. Cameron Hurst, “Death, Honor, and Loyality: The Bushidō Ideal,” Philosophy East and West 40, no. 4 (1990): 514-516.