Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Nitobe Inazo

I don’t know any other book that is as rich as Bushido: The Soul of Japan. It is rich because Nitobe Inazo explains what Bushido is by referring to the words of historical figures and events from the East and the West, and from the ancient and today’s worlds. They cover almost all Eastern and Western cultures the peoples have accumulated: philosophies, religions, politics, literatures, poems, and music. He is so well versed in things past and present, one cannot read Bushido: The Soul of Japan without enough knowledge on many and various things that have taken place in the world history. Let me just give you some of the eminent persons that appear in the first 10 pages of the book (304 pages altogether): Edmund Burke, Dr. George Miller, Commodore Perry, Carl Marx, Minamoto Yoritomo, William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar, Cornelius Tacitus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Alphonse de Lamartine, Yagyu Munenori, Theodor Mommsen, Émile Boutmy, and Arther May Knapp.

The English language he uses is so difficult that I had to consult a dictionary several times in reading even a single page. I also had to read the same sentence several times to grasp its meaning. Honestly speaking, some vocabulary was new to me, who has taught English at a senior high school and have a highest grade in the proficiency examination conducted by the Society of Testing English Proficiency supported by the Ministry Education.

How could he have gained such vast and deep knowledge about the world and such proficiency in English? He must have studied hard in Tokyo Imperial University, Johns Hopkins University in the US, and in Halle University in Germany.

Bushido, in my understanding, consists of loyalty to one’s lord, spirit of self-sacrifice, and compassion for the weak. More than 100 years have passed since he published this book in 1900, the spirit of Bushido is still alive in the Japanese. Just a few years ago I remember Bushido: The Soul of Japan sold well. The spirit of Bushido still remains in the Japanese hearts as Nitobe predicted in the last page of the book: “Bushido as an independent code of ethics may vanish, but its power will not perish from the earth; . . . . its light and its glory will long survive their ruins. Like its symbolic flower, after it is blown to the four winds, it will still bless mankind with the perfume with which it will enrich life.”