History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

II. The Ideal

Bushido

The heart of Japanese morality is to be sought in Bushido,[195] the ethics of the samurai. We shall best understand this moral code by thinking of it as the Japanese ideal of chivalry or, perhaps better, as a blending of the Western chivalric, Spartan, and Stoic ideals of goodness and nobility, since in the list of virtues making up the Bushido ideal we find several of the cardinal virtues entering into each of these three distinct types of character.

As we have already intimated, Bushido is an ideal of excellence which grew up out of the root of Japanese feudalism, just as the Western ideal of chivalry developed out of European feudalism. It was essentially an ideal of knighthood, the prime virtue of which was personal loyalty to one’s superior. Fealty to one’s chief was made so dominant a virtue that it overshadowed all other virtues. In the defense or in the service of his lord a samurai might commit, without offense to his sense of moral right, practically any crime, such as blackmailing, lying, treachery, or even murder.

Grouped about this cardinal virtue of loyalty were the other knightly virtues of courage, fidelity to the plighted word, liberality, self-sacrifice, gratitude, courtesy, and benevolence. Liberality, or free-handedness, was carried to such an extreme as to become a defect of character. The true samurai must have no thought of economy and money-making. “Ignorance of the value of different coins was a token of good breeding.”[196] To handle money was thought degrading.

In one respect the code of honor of the Japanese knight was wholly unlike that of the Western knight. It did not include any special duty to woman. “Neither God nor the ladies inspired any enthusiasm in the samurai’s breast.”

The Spartan element in the samurai code appears particularly in the training of the youth. The boy was taught always to act from motives of duty. He was denied every comfort. His clothing and his diet were coarse. He was allowed no fire in the winter. “If his feet were numbed by frost, he would be told to run about in the snow to make them warm.” To accustom him to the sight of blood, he was taken to see the execution of criminals; and to banish foolish fear from his mind, he was forced to visit alone at night the place of execution.[197]

The Stoic element in the ideal appears in the high place assigned to the virtue of self-control. The samurai, like the Stoic, must suppress all signs of his emotions. Like the Stoic, too, he must have courage to live or courage to die, as enjoined by duty. And his code of honor taught him what true courage is: “It is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die.”[198]

This samurai ideal of character constitutes, as we shall see, a molding force in the moral life of Japan. Bushido, it is true, died with the passing of feudalism,[199] but the spirit of Bushido lived on. The samurai’s sense of honor and of duty became the inheritance of the Japanese people. This great bequest of honor and valor and of all samurai virtues is, in the words of the author of the Soul of Japan, but “a trust to the nation, and the summons of the present is to guard this heritage, nor to bate one jot of the ancient spirit; the summons of the future will be so to widen its scope as to apply it in all walks and relations of life.”[200]

The virtue of loyalty to the Emperor, or patriotism

The belief in the divine origin of the imperial house of Japan makes loyalty to the Emperor the supreme duty.[201] During the ascendancy of feudalism this duty, in so far as the samurai class was concerned, was, it is true, overshadowed by the duty of loyalty to one’s immediate feudal superior. The sentiment due the Emperor was intercepted by the daimyos. But in theory loyalty to the imperial house has ever been the paramount virtue of the Japanese. The Emperor’s command is to his subjects as the command of God to us, and obedience must be perfect and unquestioning. So dominant is the place assigned this virtue of loyalty to the head of the nation that the Japanese moralist seems almost to make morality consist in this single virtue, as if “to fear the Emperor and to keep his commandments” were the full duty of man.[202]

This sentiment of the people toward the imperial family renders the government a sort of theocracy. Hence patriotism with the Japanese is in large measure a religious feeling. Indeed, patriotism has been called the religion of the Japanese. It is this virtue, exalted to a degree which the world has never seen surpassed, which has contributed more than any other quality of the Japanese character to make Japan a great nation and to give her the victory over a powerful foe in one of the most gigantic wars of modern times.

Family ethics

If the first duty of the Japanese is to his Emperor, his second is to his parents. In Japanese phrase, the two virtues of loyalty and filial piety are “the two wheels of the chariot of Japanese ethics.”[203] Shinto and Confucianism, as we have seen, have both contributed to the fostering in children of the moral sentiments of grateful love, reverence, and obedience toward parents and all ancestors living and dead. The Japanese regard the high place assigned to these filial duties in the standard of character as a mark of the vast superiority of their morality to ours.[204] The sentiments of filial affection and reverence, coloring as they do the whole moral life, lend to Japanese society an ethical cast which places it in many respects in strong contrast to the social order of the Western nations, and makes it difficult for the Japanese to understand us and for us to understand them.[205]

Woman as wife and as mother

As respects the position of woman the family ethics of Japan are the family ethics of the East. In a work from every page of which breathes the spirit of the Orient, a Japanese writer, dwelling upon the difference between the ethical sentiments respecting family relationships which have been evoked by the different social environments of the East and the West, says: “In the East woman has always been worshiped as the mother, and all those honors which the Christian knight brought in homage to his ladylove, the samurai laid at his mother’s feet.”[206]

Lafcadio Hearn, touching upon this same feature of the family ethics of the Japanese, declares that the Bible text, “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife,” is, to their way of thinking and feeling, “one of the most immoral sentences ever written.”[207]

In another important respect does the domestic morality of the Japanese differ essentially from that of the Christian West. The family is not strictly monogamous, as with us. The moral sense of the Japanese discerns nothing wrong in polygamy or concubinage.[208] As respects the whole relation of marriage, the Japanese appear to be in about the same stage of evolution as had been reached by the Hebrews at the time of Abraham.

A chief virtue of the Japanese women in all their relations is obedience to the one—whether father, or husband, or son—to whom obedience is due. It is the setting of this duty before all other duties that causes the Japanese women sometimes to do what appears to us immoral, but which seems to them truest piety and noblest self-sacrifice.[209] In loyalty to duty, as they interpret duty, they maintain a standard rarely surpassed by the women of any land.[210]

Suicide regarded as a virtuous act

Suicide is infrequent among savage and barbarian races, but is common among all peoples in an advanced stage of civilization. It is not so much the fact itself of self-destruction that claims the attention of the historian of morals, as the light in which the act is viewed; that is, whether it is considered a virtuous or a reprehensible deed.

Now the Japanese regard suicide, if prompted by a good motive, as a justifiable and noble act. The motives with them for the deed are various, as in the case of other peoples, but among these motives is one which discloses the existence among the Japanese of a sentiment unknown or almost unknown among ourselves. The deed is often committed in the way of making a solemn protest against something disapproved of in the conduct or acts of others. Thus when the Japanese government after war with China in 1898 acceded to the demands of Russia, France, and Germany respecting the recession to China of certain territories on the Continent, forty men in the Japanese army, by way of protest, committed suicide “in the ancient way.”[211]

Tyrannicide is also looked upon by the Japanese as an heroic and praiseworthy deed, provided the person committing the act makes clear the self-sacrificing and patriotic character of his motives by at once taking his own life.

Low estimation of the virtue of truthfulness

A marked defect of the moral standard of the Japanese is the low place assigned to the virtue of truthfulness. Among the Japanese, to call a person a liar is not to apply to him a term of reproach, but rather to pay him a pleasant compliment as a person of tact and shrewdness.

This lack of reverence for truth probably springs in part from the virtue of politeness as a root. The extreme emphasis laid upon courtesy as the sign and expression of reverence and loyalty toward superiors fosters the general habit of saying things which are pleasant and agreeable whether they are true or not. This complacent disregard of truth in social intercourse would seem to have dulled the sense of obligation of truth-speaking in other relations.