Abstract

Nitobe Inazō's Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899) agrees with SAE on the question of living and dying to a degree beyond what is usually expected: he writes plainly that to hasten death or to court it is alike cowardice; that to die for a cause unworthy of dying for is a dog's death; and he quotes, approvingly, that where life is more terrible than death it is the truest valour to dare to live.

SAE's prohibition on self-destruction overlaps with him in conclusion, with a different reason. His is the proper use of honour; SAE's is that a subject's own termination also terminates the relations and undertakings that unfold on condition of him, for which he bears responsibility. And the difference in range can be named: his criterion ceases to block where honour genuinely requires death; SAE's still blocks.

The divergence is concentrated at one place, and it is one he argued for himself: in the Sugawara story a child is delivered to die in another's stead, and Nitobe defends it, calling the boy a conscious and willing victim. The principal type of criticism here is ground conflict — he holds that the interests of a house and of its members are one and indivisible, and by that the child's standing as an independent end is cancelled.

And the volume closes by drawing out one line the material forces: the line between preserving the carrier and mere acquiescence lies not in the magnitude of the cost but in whether, after the concession, the standing as a subject has been handed over.

1. To Court Death Is Cowardice

The commonest impression of bushido is seeking death. Nitobe denies this explicitly, and his denial is not an incidental qualification but a recurring claim. At the close of the chapter on suicide: still, for a true samurai to hasten death or to court it, was alike cowardice.

And he gives a specimen. A warrior defeated in battle after battle, chased from plain to hill and from bush to cavern, hungry and alone in the hollow of a tree, his sword blunt, his bow broken, his arrows spent — he held death to be cowardice, and with a fortitude approaching a Christian martyr's composed an extempore verse: come, oh come, ye dread of dreads, pile ye up on my shoulders' strength; that I may not lack the strength to test how much I can endure.

In the situation with the strongest reasons for self-slaughter, this man held self-slaughter to be cowardice.

2. A Dog's Death, and to Dare to Live

From the chapter on courage: death for a cause unworthy of dying for, was called a dog's death. He quotes the Prince of Mito: to rush into the thick of battle and to be slain in it is easy enough, and the merest churl is equal to the task; but it is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die. And he distinguishes explicitly: to run all kinds of hazards, to place oneself in jeopardy, to rush into the jaws of death, are often identified with valour, and in the profession of arms such rashness — what Shakespeare calls valour misbegotten — is unjustly applauded; but not so in the Precepts of Knighthood.

He quotes Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, and says it is an exact English rendering of what their precepts taught over and over: it is a brave act of valour to contemn death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live.

So the honour system Nitobe sets out explicitly rejects the courting of death and dying for what is unworthy, and places living when it is right to live among the marks of true courage. This overlaps closely in conclusion with SAE's prohibition on self-destruction, which holds that one may not complete a gesture by way of destroying the carrier of cultivation. The two criteria are aimed at the same class of act.

3. A Contrast That Must Be Supplied: Here He Is Not a Transmitter

The three items above read like the tradition's own account of itself. They are not. The most famous line of the Hagakure is: the way of the samurai is found in death. What follows it carries no qualification to the effect that this is not the courting of death. On the contrary, it says that at the moment of choosing between two courses one should settle quickly upon the side of death, and act with a mind so settled.

And it then raises the most natural objection itself — if one dies without accomplishing the aim, is that not a dog's death? — and dismisses it. The reason: in a real predicament one cannot foresee which course will attain the aim; and since men naturally incline toward living, one's reasoning will attach itself to the side of preserving life. That being so, settling the mind on the side of death is what keeps one from being led by that inclination. So on one and the same term the two run in opposite directions.

In this one place, on the question of living and dying, what Nitobe sets out runs contrary to the direction of the Hagakure's opening passage, and he does not note the difference. The reason for the narrowing must be given: to write that he made a systematic revision would exceed the material — this volume examined a single opening passage, made no survey of the whole book, and examined none of the tradition's other literature. From one contrary direction, systematic does not follow. So this claims one divergence, not a programme of revision — and its function is to limit the object of the criticism below to Nitobe's own claim at that place, not to the tradition.

4. The Reasons Differ

His argument hangs on honour. Courting death is cowardice not because life has value in itself but because one who courts death is buying the appearance of honour with an easy act — rushing into battle to be killed is something the merest churl is equal to, so it proves nothing. He connects this to Mencius: Heaven, when it is about to confer a great office, first exercises the mind with suffering and the sinews with toil — so endurance is part of the office. And then the criterion: true honour 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. So his criterion is: does this death serve that decree.

SAE's reason is different, and stating it requires avoiding the language of ownership. This volume does not write that carrier does not belong wholly to him. Such a formulation describes a person as a thing partly owned by others, and that is precisely the grammar this series exists to refuse: a person who can be partly owned by others is not an end but property — and to argue you may not cancel yourself in the language of property leaves the door open, once the argument succeeds, to others' right of disposal over him.

Relation-and-responsibility language instead: a subject's termination terminates not only his own unfolding but the relations and undertakings that unfold on condition of him; he bears responsibility toward those relations, and the other parties to those relations do not thereby hold rights over him. The difference is real: ownership language permits the step since it does not belong to you alone, the community may dispose of you. Responsibility language does not permit it — a responsibility cannot be turned round into another's right of disposal.

And the difference in range: Nitobe's criterion ceases to block where honour genuinely requires death; SAE's still blocks. On his criterion, whether a death is admissible depends on whether it serves the decree — so where the decree does require death, his criterion not only fails to block, it pushes. And his own examples are of that kind: seppuku as an institution is the route by which a samurai could expiate crimes, apologise for errors, escape disgrace, redeem friends, or prove his sincerity, and in four of those five death is the way the office is discharged. SAE's does not vary with that condition: he still bears responsibility toward those relations that unfold on condition of him, and that does not change because honour requires something. The practical significance: Nitobe blocks dying for the appearance of honour, and does not block dying for its substance — and the latter is the class that actually occurs within this system.

5. Two Things He Criticises Himself

His criticism of giri — obligation — is severe: giri thus understood is a severe taskmaster, with a birch-rod in his hand to make sluggards perform their part. It is a secondary power in ethics… owing to this artificiality, giri degenerated in time into a vague sense of propriety called up to explain this and sanction that — as, for example, why a mother must, if need be, sacrifice all her other children in order to save the first-born; or why a daughter must sell her chastity to get funds to pay for the father's dissipation. Starting as right reason, giri has, in my mind, often stooped to casuistry. It has even degenerated into cowardly fear of censure.

This criticism is consistent with SAE's position: a norm that replaces the subject's judgement with an external sense of propriety will be used to argue for anything. And the reasons are close. His turns on giri's artificiality and its being secondary — it does not grow out of the person but is a substitute set up by the social structure so that obligations can be enforced where affection is absent. SAE would put it more specifically: it moves the position of judgement from the subject to an external standard of propriety, and once moved, anyone can occupy it. The two examples he gives both use one person as a means to another, and both appear in the form of this is how it ought to be.

The second is shame, and here SAE agrees with reservation. He describes it as the principal lever of a child's moral education — you will be laughed at, do you not feel ashamed? were the last appeals to correct behaviour on the part of a youthful delinquent — and his own evaluation is positive: the sense of shame seems to me the earliest indication of the moral consciousness of our race. This volume does not dispute whether it is the earliest; that is an empirical judgement about developmental order. What is to be pointed out is its position. Shame is a reaction to being seen — its occurrence requires an observer, whether physically present, imagined, or an internalised communal gaze. So in a normative system whose principal lever is shame, the standard lies outside the subject, and the subject's task is to conform to it.

And Theorem Four requires the opposite direction: that a subject cannot-not be questioned, and that questioning requires the subject to be able to answer — able to say I think that standard is wrong. Shame does not supply that position: the correct response to shame is correction, not rebuttal. One thing must be acknowledged: he sees part of this problem himself, writing that giri has even degenerated into cowardly fear of censure — which is what the shame lever looks like when it runs out of control. He criticised the loss of control; he did not criticise the lever.

6. The One Place of Divergence: the Story

In the chapter on loyalty, Nitobe says himself that he will give an example that may possibly shock some readers. Sugawara no Michizane was exiled; his political enemies meant to root out his line, and found that his young son was hidden in a village school kept by an old retainer, Genzō. The order came down: on such a day, produce the head of the young criminal. The first thing that occurred to Genzō was to find a substitute. He went through the school register, he scrutinised every boy who entered the classroom; not one resembled the child he was protecting. Then a new pupil arrived — a comely boy of the same age as his lord's son, brought by a mother of noble bearing.

Nitobe inserts a sentence here, and it is the most consequential in the passage: the mother and the boy himself were equally conscious of the resemblance between the young lord and his young servant. In the privacy of home both had laid themselves upon the altar: the one his life — the other her heart, yet without sign to the outer world. Unaware of what had passed between them, the teacher himself proposed the substitute. On the appointed day, the officer come to verify the head — the boy's own father — took up the dreadful object, calmly examined feature after feature, and in a composed, businesslike tone pronounced it genuine. That evening, crossing his own threshold, he said to his wife: rejoice, my wife, our darling son has proved of service to his lord.

7. His Defence

Nitobe anticipates the reader's reaction and answers it: “what a cruel story!” I hear my readers exclaim — “parents deliberately sacrificing their own innocent child to save the life of another man's.” But this child was a conscious and willing victim: it is a story of vicarious death — as significant as, and not more revolting than, the story of Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac. In both cases it was obedience to the call of duty, utter submission to the command of a higher voice… but I abstain from preaching.

And immediately after, the structural account he gives: individualism in the West, in recognising the separate interests of father and son, husband and wife, necessarily brings into strong relief the duties owed by one to the other; but Bushido held that the interest of the family and of the members thereof is intact — one and inseparable.

This place touches the ground of humanity is an end, and must be criticised. The point of contact is unmistakable: a child is handed over as a substitute for another child, and the defence takes the form of he was willing.

8. The Principal Criticism Is Ground Conflict

A more convenient line of criticism must be excluded first: that he violates the criteria he set down above — internal failure. Two common arguments for that line do not hold. The first says that judging whether a thing is worth dying for requires the dier's own judgement; the second says the tree-hollow warrior was required to endure, so why not this child. Both assume that worth dying for is settled by individual weighing. In Nitobe's system it is not. What settles it is duty — given externally by the position a person occupies. The tree-hollow warrior's duty required him to live, his task being unfinished; Genzō's substitute's duty required him to die, his position making him able to serve as a substitute. Within that system the two are consistent, not in conflict — those are not two applications of one criterion, but two conclusions of one criterion at two different positions.

The principal criticism: what Nitobe maintains here is that the interests of a house and of its members are one and indivisible. By that, the child's standing as an independent end is cancelled. He states it plainly himself, and this is a straightforward ground conflict; there is no need to pretend that he has given and then violated a unified criterion of living and dying. SAE's ground requires that each person have a position as an end which cannot be merged. A system that merges members' interests into the whole of the house cancels exactly that position. And in this particular arrangement, the result of the cancellation is: the whole of that child's function within it is that his face resembled another child's.

This place needs no demonstration that he contradicts himself, and none should be sought. Where a text touches the ground, one says so without detour; the convenience of the detour is false — if the other party's system is in fact internally coherent, the detour is a construction, and a reader who checks will disbelieve both it and everything else.

9. A Word Carrying More Than His Own Account Can Support

This criticism is not internal failure; it lies on the argument axis. He records himself how the lever of shame operates on children — you will be laughed at, this will disgrace you, do you not feel ashamed? are the last appeals to correct a youthful delinquent — and calls shame the earliest indication of moral consciousness. And he criticises giri for degenerating into cowardly fear of censure. And the word he uses to defend this sacrifice is a conscious and willing victim.

This is not he contradicts himself — he never maintained that willing means free of moral formation, so he violates no claim of his own. It is that the weight the word carries here cannot be supported by his own account of moral formation. He knows better than anyone how strong that lever is; he devotes a passage to how it works on children. And at the place where it most needs saying what this child's willingness amounts to, he does not bring that knowledge to bear. This is a criticism of the sufficiency of an argument, not of the consistency of a system. Its force is less than internal failure would be, but it is real: an argument has used a concept it has itself already weakened.

10. What SAE Says Here, and the Abraham Analogy

SAE's position can be stated in one sentence, and it introduces nothing new: willing cannot make a person a means and no longer an end. The formulation does not say you may not use a person as a means without consent. It says you may not use a person merely as a means. Consent changes one aspect of the matter; it does not change that person's position within the arrangement — and the whole of his function within this arrangement is that his face resembles another child's.

And the Abraham analogy is a second defect on the argument axis: evidence pointing the other way. Nitobe says the two are as significant as, and not more revolting than, one another. But the story ends with an angel staying the knife. The point of that story is precisely that the sacrifice did not take place. In Genzō's story the blade fell, the head was verified, and the father went home and said what he said. Nitobe cited a counterexample in his own support. This is neither internal failure nor ground conflict — he violates no claim of his own, and at this step he cancels no one's standing as an end. It is that the evidence he brought points the other way. The shape the two defects share: the material an argument uses stands, under its user's own handling, on the opposite side.

11. One Thing That Must Be Said

The criticism here may not be read as a verdict on bushido as a whole, nor as a comparison of cultures. Reason one: Nitobe himself supplies elsewhere the criteria SAE agrees with, and by the earlier finding those criteria are his own at that point rather than the tradition's transmission. So this is not how that system of theirs is but this author's claim at this place conflicts with SAE's ground.

Reason two: delivering another's child to die is not the property of any one culture. Nitobe himself cites Abraham. And any system that places something — a house, a lord, a cause, a nation — above its members and declares that the interest is one and inseparable will produce the same act somewhere.

Reason three, and the most important: what is criticised here is not those parents, and not that child. It is the sentence of defence. Those parents did what they did, at a cost beyond estimation; and Nitobe in 1899 wrote for it this child was a conscious and willing victim — and it is that sentence which turns a tragedy into a model that can be recommended.

12. A Line the Material Forces

Between preserving the carrier and mere acquiescence, the line lies not in the magnitude of the cost but in whether, after the concession, the standing as a subject has been handed over. This does not belong in a closing list of loose ends, for a reason: the prohibition on self-destruction has a direction in which it is easily misused — if preserving the carrier is a precept, then any surrender, any compromise, any concession can invoke it in its own defence. And this volume's material forces the line out, because the whole force of Nitobe's system is directed against exactly that misuse: what he means to block is the man who is always calculating whether he can survive, and such a man can indeed accomplish nothing.

The line: preserving the carrier is not fighting this time, because fighting would cost this community its capacity to go on cultivating — after not fighting it is still there, its cultivation still continuing, only in a changed form. Mere acquiescence is not fighting this time, in exchange for this community's accepting the position of a thing disposed of — it is still alive, but as a self-unfolding subject it is no longer there. The line does not lie in the magnitude of the cost: a community that has accepted extremely humiliating terms but kept its capacity to go on deciding its own direction is preserving the carrier; a community whose terms were not severe but which is thereafter directed by others is acquiescing, even if its losses were smaller.

This line holds up against a case of very great cost. Take Gandhian bearing: participants are arrested, beaten, dispossessed — the cost is not small — and what they surrender is bodily liberty, not the position from which they decide their own direction; the movement continues, and its direction is still set by the participants. On this line, that falls on the side of preserving the carrier. Set the line at magnitude of cost and that case cannot be decided; set it at has the standing as a subject been handed over and it decides cleanly. Whether to feed this back into the treatise, this volume does not answer — but as it stands the prohibition does not contain it, and without it the prohibition can be invoked to justify any concession whatever.

13. Left Unresolved in This Volume

The shame lever places the standard outside the subject, contrary to the direction Theorem Four requires. But SAE offers no replacement. How a community is to transmit norms to children without using shame is not answered here, and the question is not rhetorical — shame is universally used because it works. A related observation is kept: the spiritual cohesion demanded by the theorists of total war and the lever of shame treated here point in the same direction — conformity, not judgement. The difference is only of scale: shame operates within a family and a village, total war across an entire nation.

What willing amounts to in a child raised under the lever of shame raises a more general question: under what conditions does willing count? And the question is equally sharp for SAE — Theorem One's gate of genuine rising depends on the other party's actually wanting to resist, and that too is a judgement about willingness. Not answered here.

And the finding that Nitobe is a reviser rather than a transmitter rests on the direction of argument in a single opening passage, with no survey of the whole book. Its scope is confined to the question of living and dying, and may not be generalised to Nitobe revised bushido as a whole.