Bushido: The Soul of Japan

A short book written in English by the educator and diplomat Nitobe Inazō and first published in 1899. In the preface Nitobe recalls being asked by the Belgian jurist Émile de Laveleye how moral education could be given in Japan without religious instruction in schools; his answer was bushidō, the largely unwritten code of the samurai. He traces its sources to Buddhism, Shintō and Confucian teaching, then devotes chapters to its virtues: rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, veracity, honour, loyalty and self-control. He discusses the education of the samurai, the institutions of ritual suicide and redress, the sword as the soul of the samurai, and the position of women, often comparing bushidō with European chivalry and Christian ethics. He ends by asking whether bushidō can survive in modern Japan. Historians have criticised the book for presenting an idealised, unified code that owes much to Victorian ideas of chivalry and later suited nationalist uses.

It shows how one Meiji intellectual translated samurai ethics for a Western audience, and it is a useful case study in how traditions are reconstructed to answer modern questions.