01 INTRODUCTION

Bushido¹ tends to stir people’s imaginations. The term is synonymous on the one hand with strength, masculinity, fearlessness, honor, and transcendence, and on the other, callousness and cold-hearted brutality. The most visible vestige of samurai culture in the modern age is budo, that is, the Japanese traditional martial arts, and these are indisputably Japan’s most successful cultural exports, with literally tens of millions of enthusiasts around the world. People practice these arts not only as a means of self-defense or as competitive sports, but also in the pursuit of spiritual development.

Another factor that sparked interest in bushido—although by no means a driving force now—was Japan’s remarkable postwar economic success. In the days of the bubble economy in the late 1980s, the belief that Japan’s economic and business accomplishments could be attributed to management practices deriving from “samurai strategy” was widely held. The Japanese culture boom of the 1980s and 1990s encouraged many people to take up martial arts, and to study translations of famous warrior books, such as Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, Daidōji Yūzan’s Budō Shoshinshū, and of course, Yamamoto Jōchō’s (Tsunetomo)² Hagakure. Nowadays, Japanese culture has been embraced by a new generation of “anime otaku,” or diehard devotees of Japanese animation and pop culture.

There have been many popular movies over the years promoting samurai ideals, including The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise and Watanabe Ken. This film sparked a resurgence of interest in samurai ethics. Also of note was the critically acclaimed 1999 film, Ghost Dog, starring Forest Whitaker, which used Hagakure aphorisms as reference points throughout the story about an African-American hit man.+++(5)+++ He worked for a Mafia mobster, seeing himself as a devoted “retainer,” unflinching in his loyalty to the man who saved his life years ago.

Despite the noble depictions in modern pop culture and literature, some scholars have described samurai as nothing more than “valorous butchers.” Indeed, there is no denying that throughout Hagakure death sentences are violently dished out for the most trivial of offenses. From the standpoint of contemporary morality, the apparent cheapness of life in samurai society seems truly obscene. Texts such as Hagakure, which advance death so matter-of-factly, shock our sensibilities, especially in an age when people have a propensity to avoid contemplating their own mortality.

For example, our society denounces suicide, and capital punishment for murder is a highly contentious issue. To the samurai, however, death was celebrated as being integral to their honor and way of life. Attachment to life hindered a warrior during a catastrophe, and so it was deemed virtuous to train one’s mind and spirit to be able to choose death with firm resolve if the situation called for ‘decisive action.’ As such, while the extremist attitudes and scenes portrayed so vividly in Hagakure may repulse the modern reader, the aphorisms provide a window on an age and a society that, although foreign to our own lifestyle, will serve to stimulate readers into contemplating challenging questions regarding the human experience. In order to appreciate the content, it is important to first put things into context.