Nitobe Inazō

Nitobe Inazō was a Japanese educator, agricultural economist and diplomat, a Quaker convert who studied in the United States and Germany and later served as an under-secretary-general of the League of Nations in Geneva. He wrote Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) in English to explain Japanese moral values to Western readers. The book presents the samurai code as the source of Japan's ethics, describing virtues such as rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, honour and loyalty, and comparing them with European chivalry. Historians question how far it describes real samurai, but it shaped how Japan was seen abroad.

Key ideas

• Bushido, the unwritten 'way of the warrior', served Japan as a moral code much as chivalry did in Europe.
• Its core virtues include rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honour, loyalty and self-control.
• The code drew on Buddhism, Shinto and Confucianism for its calm before fate, its loyalty and its ethics of relationships.
• Japanese moral traditions can be explained to the West in terms that Christians and Europeans recognise.

Major works

• Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900)
• The Japanese Nation (1912)

In the Book corner

• Bushido: The Soul of Japan 1899 · Beginner
  A short book written in English by the educator and diplomat Nitobe Inazō and first published in 1899. In the preface Nitobe…

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