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]