The archetypal image of bushidõ: a samurai fighting bravely among a fall of cherry blossom.
Just as Shintō means ‘the way of the gods’, so does the well-known expression bushidõ mean ‘the way of the warrior’. There is a strange parallel between the emergence of the two terms. The word ‘Shintō’ was introduced to provide a label for something that had been going on for centuries and had required no name until it was felt necessary to distinguish it from something else. As noted earlier, scholars are divided as to whether this happened when Buddhism was introduced, or when the founding fathers of the Meiji government sought to create a new ideology. Bushidõ has a similarly confusing genesis. No event was more important to its creation, development and dissemination than the publication as late as 1905 of a book called Bushido: The Soul of Japan, written in English by Inazo Nitobe. It carries the subtitle ‘an exposition of Japanese thought’, and is widely regarded as a classic, particularly by people who have not actually read it.1
As attested by its century-long catalogue of reprints, its translation into numerous languages and its enthusiastic reception by Westerners and Japanese alike, no book has been more influential in making the ideas and ideals of ‘the way of the warrior’ accessible to the outside world. Bushido: The Soul of Japan stimulated the publication of other works. One year after its arrival an English translation appeared of an autobiographical work that seemed to confirm everything that Nitobe’s book stood for. In Human Bullets a Japanese soldier tells how he made up his mind to sacrifice his life in battle, because ‘I was fully determined to die this time.’2 This was Nitobe’s thesis translated into stirring and chilling action, which gave it the blessing of authenticity.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan is a very curious work. Its author was born in 1863, but was shielded from the turbulence of the Meiji Restoration, first by the education he received in schools where the main medium of teaching was in English, then by the Christianity he espoused and to which he remained dedicated all his life, and finally through a certain physical isolation in Hokkaidō. The result was a highly literate scholar with a keen sense of internationalization, whose immersion in a Western education of the English public school variety (often referred to as ‘muscular Christianity’) was equalled only by his stunning lack of knowledge of Japanese culture.3 This would not have mattered had he not produced a book about Japan that was to become an international bestseller outside Japan and a cornerstone of right-wing nationalism within it. That is what happened, however, and although he willingly admitted his ignorance over vital topics such as Zen Buddhism (‘so far as I understand it…’)4 Nitobe’s book, with its strange blend of samurai myths and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, became regarded as the bible of bushidõ.
Central to Nitobe’s presentation of bushidõ as the ‘warrior’s code’ is his identification of seven key values: justice, courage, benevolence, politeness, veracity, honour and loyalty. In the same way that critics of Shintō’s official line of history readily acknowledge the pre-existence of kami worship, so it must be recognized that all these virtues were present in Japan in pre-Meiji times. All indeed are splendid ideals that would first have graced the halls of a daimyõ’s castle and then transformed his sword-wielding samurai into brush-wielding exemplars of Tokugawa society. Where Nitobe exceeded his brief was to assume that they made up a rigid ‘warrior’s code’ called bushidõ. Nitobe presents bushidõ as a code that was ancient and universally adhered to by the samurai, who effectively swore to obey it like a version of the Hippocratic Oath. Such was the popularity of Nitobe’s work that not only was all this fully accepted, but his other misconception – that bushidõ was a moral force that had become in modern times ‘the soul of Japan’ – became true by default as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In an age that actively sought fundamental values for a rapidly changing society, Nitobe’s thesis was exactly what early 20th-century Japan wanted to hear. In 1908 Itō Hirobumi included the word in his Reminiscences on the Drafting of the New Constitution:
The great ideals offered by philosophy and by historical examples of the golden ages of China and India, Japanicized in the form of a ‘crust of customs’, developed and sanctified by the continual usage of centuries under the comprehensive name of bushidõ, offered us splendid standards of morality, rigorously enforced in the everyday life of the educated classes.5
Thirty years later bushidõ is mentioned several times in Kokutai no hongi (Fundamentals of Our National Polity), the high-water mark of Japanese nationalistic writing. It was first published in 1937, and 2 million copies were eventually printed. By this time the devout Christian Inazo Nitobe had been dead for four years, and one wonders what he would have made of the following section:
A single combat with swords: the ideal role of every samurai, but one that was not often performed, even during times of war.
Bushidõ may be cited as showing an outstanding characteristic of our national morality. In the world of the warrior one sees inherited the totalitarian structure and spirit of ancient clans peculiar to our nation. Hence, though the teachings of Confucianism and Buddhism have been followed, these have been transcended. That is to say, though a sense of obligation binds master and servant, this had developed into a spirit of self-effacement and of meeting death with a perfect calmness… It is this same bushidõ that shed itself of an outdated feudalism at the time of the Meiji Restoration, increased in splendour, became the Way of loyalty and patriotism and has evolved before us as the spirit of the imperial forces.6
Katagiri Katsumoto, one of the ‘Seven Spears of Shizugatake’, in mounted combat during that famous battle in 1583.
Prior to Nitobe, a wide range of expressions – all meaning ‘the way of the warrior’ – may be found in the literature, such as shidõ and budõ (the first syllables are the same as in bushidõ). But where the actual term bushidõ appears the meaning is always that of a general attitude rather than a rigid accepted code known to all. Nitobe’s book does, however, make it clear that bushidõ was less concerned with the individual samurai than with the relationships the samurai had with others, of which the most important was that between master and follower. One of the finest expressions of this relationship comes from Torii Mototada, who wrote a last letter to his son in 1600 prior to the fall of Fushimi castle, which he had defended so valiantly for Tokugawa Ieyasu:
For myself, I am resolved to make a stand inside the castle, and to die a quick death. It would not be difficult to break through the enemy and escape… But that is not the true meaning of being a warrior, and it would be difficult to account as loyalty… to show one’s enemy one’s weakness is not within the family traditions of my master Ieyasu. It is not the way of the warrior to be shamed and avoid death even under circumstances that are not particularly important. It goes without saying that to sacrifice one’s life for one’s master is an unchanging principle.7
The reality of bushidõ lay not in any seeking of death, but in the relationship of service between a samurai and his master, as seen in this scroll in Matsuyama castle.
Torii Mototada sees his conduct as being in keeping with the tradition of service to the ideals of the Tokugawa family, rather than being driven by a code. He goes on to remind his son of their family and its relationship with the Tokugawa, referring to the ‘benevolence’ of their lord and the ‘blessings’ they had received at his hands. It is this relationship that is the key to his behaviour, not some abstract philosophical principle.
That Torii Mototada’s master recognized his own obligation in giving benevolence is shown by the document that the first Tokugawa Shogun left for the instruction of his followers. The Tõshõg goikun, effectively ‘The Testament of Tokugawa Ieyasu’, was first published during the reign of his grandson, the third Tokugawa Shogun, Iemitsu. In language curiously reminiscent of the Chinese concept of Heaven’s Mandate, the Tokugawa had been divinely entrusted with ruling Japan in the way of heaven (tendõ), but if that rule were exercised badly the mandate could be withdrawn. To Ieyasu the ‘way of the warrior’ had been since ancient times the means by which the Shogun had purified the realm of evil. The quality of chshin (loyalty) was the virtue required of inferiors, while their leaders responded with jihi (benevolence), which was the hallmark of a peaceful and just government. In a curious analogy made with the Japanese crown jewels, the three cardinal virtues in achieving a harmonious outcome were wisdom, the principle of the mirror; benevolence, the principle of the sword; and straightforwardness, the principle of the jewel.8
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who inspired fierce loyalty, here plays the shõ, a wind instrument like pan pipes, as his troops move into action at the battle of Shizugatake in 1583.
CONFUCIANISM AND THE SAMURAI
One of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s retainers, Okubo Tadataka, wrote a book in 1622 called Mikawa Monogatari, where he acknowledged that Ieyasu’s triumph in re-establishing the Shogunate was due to the close spiritual cohesion he had achieved between a lord and his followers. This system of mutual dependence was retained as the samurai moved from the battlefield to civil administration, and became a fundamental element in Tokugawa rule.9 Not surprisingly, such a tight system of ethics did not come from nowhere, and central to this master/follower relationship were the teachings of Confucius. In Confucian eyes good government was based on virtue and example rather than on sheer military might, and was expressed as a balance between the two sacred entities of the nation and the family. Just as the father was head of the family, to whom was due the obligation of kõ (filial piety), the Shogun was the head of the nation, to whom was due also the obligation of ch (loyalty).
Strictly speaking, the ‘official theology of the Tokugawa regime’ was not Confucianism but Neo-Confucianism.10 Neo-Confucianism had been created as a response to the dominance of Taoism and Buddhism in China around the time of the Song Dynasty by scholars such as Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who felt that Confucianism lacked a metaphysical system and proceeded to give it one. Neo-Confucian influence was present at the start of the Tokugawa Shogunate, either as the orthodox Zhu Xi school (in Japanese shushi gaku), or the views of Wang Yangming (1472–1529), who stressed one’s everyday behaviour rather than the mere investigation of things or legitimating of status. The quest for the crucial innate knowledge, according to some of Wang Yangming’s followers, was best served by meditation that would bring intuitive enlightenment, a process that had much in common with Zen. Other interpretations of Wang Yangming stressed shisei (acting out of sincerity) a notion that would become the lever for rebellion in the later Tokugawa Period.11
An image of Confucius inside the hall of the Nagasaki Confucian temple, housed since its destruction by fire in 1959 within the Zen Kōfukuji in Nagasaki.
As Confucian adviser to Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hayashi Razan reckoned that ‘those who are adept at the handling of troops regard the arts of peace and the arts of war as their left and right hands’.12 His role was to assist Ieyasu, the man of war, to become a man of peace as well, and to crown his military success with the achievement of an enduring social order based on Confucian ethics, where the samurai cultivated the arts of peace and devoted themselves to Confucian learning. Other scholars were less idealistic, seeing their role primarily as a challenge to find something for the unemployed samurai class to do. In his book Taiheisaku, Ogy Sorai (1666–1728) denounced what he saw as the bad behaviour of his class, both on duty and off, writing, ‘perhaps they believe that the mere acquisition of their professional skills, martial arts, is the way of the warrior’.13
Yamaga Sokō (1622–85) agreed that there was more to the way of the warrior than prowess at martial arts. He was a follower of Wang Yangming, and was also an early advocate of the importance of studying Western warfare and equipment, a need that was only recognized at a national level two centuries later. Sokō was profoundly concerned with the need to find a new role to replace the now unnecessary one of fighting battles. He believed that the samurai had to serve as a model for society, serving his lord with exemplary devotion and with no thought of personal gain while displaying the traditional samurai values of austerity, self-discipline and readiness to face death. The umbrella terms he uses for these ideals include shidõ (the way of the samurai) and bukyõ (the warrior’s creed), for which bushidõ is often loosely substituted*,* although nowhere does Sokō imply the rigid warrior’s code envisioned by Nitobe.14
Whatever the gloss placed on his words, Sokō was wise enough to recognize the difficulty of applying those ideals to the days of peace, but if he had survived three decades more he would have seen a classic instance of the principles he espoused being put into operation. This is the well-known story of the Forty-Seven Rōnin, whose revenge killing in 1702 amazed contemporary Japan.
RELIGION AND THE RŌNIN
The loyal 47 samurai were retainers of Asano Naganori (1667–1701), who was based in the town of Ako (now Bansh Ako) in Harima province. In 1700 Asano, together with a certain Kira Yoshinaka, was commissioned to entertain envoys of the emperor at the court of the Shogun. Kira Yoshinaka held the office of ‘Master of Ceremonies’, and it was the custom that his colleague should give him some presents in order to get instruction from him and thus avoid any error of etiquette. When Asano brought no gifts Kira, deeply offended, spared no opportunity to scorn his colleague. One day Asano lost his temper, drew his short sword and wounded Kira on the forehead. Even to draw a weapon in the presence of the Shogun was a very serious matter, so Asano was arrested. He was ordered to commit seppuku, and actually carried out the act the same day that he had attacked Kira.
The Shogun added to the agony by deciding that the territory of Ako should be confiscated as punishment. By this act Asano Naganori’s retainers were to be made unemployed and dispossessed. They would become rõnin (masterless samurai, literally ‘men of the waves’), and it was at this point that they decided to avenge their dead lord. The chief retainer Oishi Yoshio Kuranosuke retired to Kyōto, where he began to plot a secret revenge with the 46 others. The blanket of concealment they wove was to become the most famous characteristic of the vendetta. Kira Yoshinaka feared that there might be a plot against him, but his spies only found men apparently addicted to drink and given to pleasure.
Two of the celebrated Forty-Seven Rōnin, whose revenge killing stunned contemporary Japan. This scroll is in the Oishi shrine in Bansh Ako.
On a snowy night in December 1702, Asano’s retainers took a surprise revenge on Kira at his mansion in Edo. The guards were taken by surprise, the doors were broken in by huge mallets, and a fierce swordfight ensued. Oishi Yoshio cut off Kira’s head and placed it on Asano’s tomb in the Sengakuji temple in recognition that a solemn duty had been fulfilled. They also left a written address to Asano:
we, who have eaten of your food, could not without blushing repeat the verse, ‘Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth with the enemy of your father or lord,’ nor could we have dared to leave hell and present ourselves before you in paradise, unless we had carried out the vengeance which you began.15
One of the rõnin had been killed in the raid, so it was the remaining 46 who went to the authorities and proclaimed what they had done. The government had thus been placed in a nice quandary. The samurai of Ako had fulfilled their moral duty but had broken the law, and, theoretically at least, law and moral duty could not come into conflict in Tokugawa Japan, because both were based upon the Tokugawa ‘state religion’ of Neo-Confucianism.16
The first consideration dealt with the legality of their vendetta. Even in a society that valued the notion of revenge, a man was not entirely free to do as he liked, and there had emerged during the 17th century a system of registered vendetta called kataki uchi. If a deed was committed that required avenging, the avenger was required first to present a complaint to his own daimyõ, from whom he would get authorization to search for and slay the enemy.17 The existing precepts did not actually allow for avenging the death of one’s lord, only a relative. That was the first complication for the Ako samurai. The second problem was that their vendetta depended totally upon launching a surprise attack on the well-defended Kira, so registration would have been impossible anyway.
The decision the government reached was that the law must be upheld at all costs. The possible consequences of giving official approval to an unauthorized vendetta were too ominous to contemplate, so the rõnin were ordered to commit seppuku, a course of action for which they had been prepared from the start.18 In spite of the adulation heaped upon them by later generations, the reaction from one of their best-known contemporaries was unenthusiastic. A passage in Hagakure criticizes the Forty-Seven Rōnin:
After their night attack, the rōnin of Lord Asano made the mistake in failing to commit hara kiri at Sengakuji. Furthermore, after having let their lord die, they delayed in striking down his enemy… These Kamigata types [i.e. from central Japan as distinct from sophisticated Edo] are clever and good at doing things that earn them praise,… but they are unable to act directly without stopping to think.19
The author clearly preferred an act of revenge to be carried out in a death frenzy ‘without stopping to think’, rather than slowly, carefully planned and in secret, but Yamamoto Tsunetomo, the author of Hagakure, was something of an ‘armchair samurai’. He was a retainer of the Nabeshima han, and when his lord died he wished to follow him in death (junshi). Being frustrated in this, Tsunetomo retired and produced Hagakure (Hidden Behind Leaves) – the archetypal samurai manual published in 1716. In it we may detect something of Tsunetomo’s despair; first, that the peaceful days of the Tokugawa Period made it impossible for him to live like a true samurai, and second, that the laws against junshi enacted by the Tokugawa prevented him from dying like one. Hagakure, with its famous sentence proclaiming that ‘the way of the warrior is found in death’, was his therapy, and it is more than a little ironic to hear him criticizing the Forty-Seven Rōnin in its pages. In an age when samurai were government employees whose loyalty, once expressed so dramatically on the battlefield, had become reduced to turning up for work on time, both he and they were glorious anomalies. Far from being typical samurai of the age, the loyal retainers of Ako became famous because they were so different from almost all their contemporaries.
A Japanese businessman burns incense before the graves of the Forty-Seven Rōnin in the Sengakuji in Tokyo.
Later generations came to idolize the Forty-Seven Rōnin, and one commentator wrote, ‘from scholars, ministers and gentlemen down to cart pullers and grooms, there is no one who does not slap his thighs in admiration’.20 Although they were officially criminals, they could still be worshipped as chshin gishi (loyal and dutiful samurai), who sacrificed their lives for a transcendent cause.21 Once the Tokugawa were safely out of the way the Forty-Seven Rōnin could be safely honoured at a higher level, and in their own little way they contributed something to the Meiji polity. One of the first acts of the new Meiji emperor was to send a message to the Sengakuji:
Yoshio, you and the others resolutely grasped the righteous duty binding a lord and his vassal in exacting revenge and then greeting death according to the law. Even a hundred generations later, people are still inspired by your deeds. I wish to express my deep appreciation and praise to you.22
By this endorsement the Meiji government further repudiated the legal and religious judgement of the hated Tokugawa whom they had replaced. Yamaga Sokō’s teachings, which had provided the inspiration for the Forty-Seven Rōnin, had also been promulgated by Yoshida Shōin, one of the great martyrs of the restoration movement. Apart from settling this score, the Meiji government would go no further in honouring the Ako samurai. Because the wounding of Kira had occurred during the visit of an imperial messenger, to some extent the Ako affair could be seen as insulting to the emperor.
A shrine to Oishi Yoshio and his companions was founded in their home town of Bansh Ako in 1912 and became a further place of pilgrimage along with the Sengakuji in Tokyo. In an incident that transcended religious beliefs, Zen had played no part in the revenge of the Forty-Seven Rōnin other than the coincidence that the place where Kira’s head was taken was a Sōtō Zen temple. Confucian ideas of filial piety and benevolence on the one hand and loyalty on the other were the motivations that drove them forward, and there was no argument as to where their duty lay in this classic blending of the enduring traditions of the samurai and the sacred.
THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES
The Meiji Restoration gave Japan more than new rulers. It provided unique challenges that arose from the interaction between tradition and modernity. To one foreign commentator at least, it also provided a new religion:
The new Japanese religion consists, in its present early stage, of worship of the sacrosanct Imperial Person and of His Divine Ancestors, of implicit obedience to Him as head of the army (a position, by the way, opposed to all former Japanese ideas, according to which the Court was essentially civilian); furthermore, of a corresponding belief that Japan is as far superior to the common ruck of nations as the Mikado is divinely superior to the common ruck of kings and emperors.23
This is quite an acute observation, as the military upheavals of the restoration period were to be followed within a few years by further incidence of conflict, when the same founding fathers sent Japanese troops to fight in foreign wars. These soldiers were not samurai but conscripts, and the introduction of conscription challenged many values in Japanese society. Former samurai families greatly resented having to mix with lower classes.24 Farmers resented the disruption that conscription caused to rural life when simple country boys, whose ancestors had been forbidden from carrying weapons by Hideyoshi’s Separation Edict, suddenly became soldiers. The introduction of conscription even provoked riots among people to whom the ideals of the defunct samurai class meant nothing.
The challenge faced by the government was quite considerable. Somehow this disparate entity called the Japanese army had to be made to perform on the battlefield in the spirit of the samurai of old, and it was uncomfortably clear that such commitment did not come naturally to the majority of their fighting men. Conscription had destroyed forever the traditional bonds of loyalty that had existed between a samurai and his daimyõ. These values may have become almost meaningless except in extreme cases like the Forty-Seven Rōnin, but what was there to put in their place? Some of the officers in the new Japanese army may have been descended from samurai, and lugged ancestral swords into battle as a link to their ancestors’ honourable past. But this would not work for the common soldiers who now constituted almost 95 per cent of the Japanese armed forces.25 They needed something on which they could focus their loyalty to the point of death. The solution, of course, was for them to concentrate their patriotic spirit on the emperor, to whom the conscript swore absolute loyalty on enlisting. Just as the samurai had once repaid the ‘debt’ for the ‘benevolence’ shown to him by his lord with a display of self-sacrificing loyalty, so now was the entire population of Japan placed in a similar situation of debt simply by being born as a subject of the emperor.
To the background of cherry blossoms, the eternally poignant symbol of the samurai, Toda Ujikane points his war fan in the direction of the enemy. He is wearing a typically practical suit of armour embellished by a lavish helmet with a large maedate (helmet crest). This statue of him is outside Ogaki castle.
The emphasis laid right from the start on the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the emperor implies that such an extreme demand came no more naturally to a Japanese fighting man than it did to a soldier of any other nation. How far could the ordinary man ever identify himself with the samurai ideal set out in Hagakure?
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, muskets, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.26
The answer would appear to be ‘very little’, so the world of the sacred was brought in to bolster the failing values of the world of the samurai. For example, during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 Buddhist army chaplains served on the battlefield just as their predecessors had done centuries before. Many of the priests came from the Pure Land sect based at Nishi Honganji, and were to return to the battlefield when Japan went to war against Russia in 1904. During that conflict their leader, Otani Kōzui, sensed a duty and a responsibility that went far beyond the immediate spiritual needs of the dying soldiers:
The Russo-Japanese War is the most important event of our times, upon which depends not only the survival of our country, but of our religious sect as well… Therefore we should devote ourselves to aiding in this war not only to protect the nation but to protect the Buddhist faith… If Japan loses the war and is forced to come under the control of the Russians, we cannot expect them to tolerate the existence of Buddhism…27
As Pure Land believers the Honganji priests naturally reassured the dying that they would be rescued by the nembutsu and go to the Pure Land, but their words to the living went far beyond Buddhist assurances and personal psychology. It was a deliberate attempt to foster and support the ‘spirit of Japan’ (yamato damashii), constantly reiterated through exhortations about the need for patriotism, reminding the soldiers that this was expressed above all through devotion to the emperor. One sermon reads, ‘Dying in war is honourable… So soldiers must win, win, and win, even if it means holding on to the last rock, and serve the emperor and people to ease their anxiety.’28
Otani’s wartime efforts did not go unheeded, and in 1912 he was personally thanked in a note from the Meiji emperor, whose name had been on the lips of the dying soldiers who had done their duty. But the achievement of an honourable death in war was difficult to reconcile with the tragic reality of the battlefield and the loss of friends and family. So, instead of providing a means of accepting death, the common religious behaviours associated with joining the army and then living within its demands expressed more of a desire to avoid death. Prayers at shrines were offered for survival rather than for glorious extinction, and the carrying of shrine amulets provided a personal psychological and religious assurance. Some amulets became renowned for their power to ‘avoid bullets’. One private’s account describes his feeling of ‘divine protection’:
Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, appears above the battle as the kami kaze pilots attack the American fleet. From a mural in the Kamikaze Museum in Chiran.
I was lucky to have escaped injury in the three battles in which I had to take part, and am very happy and satisfied… I am convinced that it was because of the divine protection from the gods and buddhas, and am very grateful to them.29
But if these ideals of willingness to die for the emperor failed for the ordinary conscript of 1904, surely there is evidence of their successful acceptance during the final months of Japan’s greatest conflict, when suicide pilots dived their planes into the flight decks of American carriers? The suicide pilots even chose a name for themselves that linked them directly to the destruction of the Mongol invaders by the kami kaze. Some authors are under no illusion that the kami kaze were the ultimate expression of the samurai ideal. In The Japanese Cult of Tranquillity, von Durkheim compares the state of mind of the kami kaze pilots to that of a Zen monk ‘who knows when his hour has come’. To him the kami kaze were the supreme expression of the true Japanese outlook:
To speak of their performance in such terms as ‘patriotism’, ‘idealism’, ‘youthful dedication’, or ‘heroism’ is to misjudge them entirely. These pilots, in risking death, proved that a form of human death does exist in the midst of life… There is a manner of dying which transcends the antithesis ‘life and death’…. He has attained perfect tranquillity…30
What is most interesting here is that in seeking the answer to the state of mind of the kami kaze, von Durkheim goes back far beyond the Meiji Restoration and its patriotism to the vocabulary of Hagakure, where, in its most famous phrase, ‘the Way of the Samurai is found in death’.31 At first sight, the letters and diaries of the kami kaze pilots would appear to confirm this view. They indeed appear to have attained the state of tranquillity that was essential before setting off on the final mission. That their deaths had meaning was one comfort as they shrouded their natural human impulses in a protective cloak of acceptance. The giving of branches of cherry blossom bearing the eternal symbol of the samurai, the fastening of white headbands round the forehead and the drinking of a final cup of sake before leaving were all tiny rituals that linked their acts to the ancient samurai tradition: ‘To die while people still lament your death; to die while you are pure and fresh; this is truly bushidõ. Yes, I was following the way of the samurai… I would fall “as pure as the cherry blossom.”’32
Passages like this remind one of the continuity of the relationship between the samurai and the sacred. There is the same appeal to precedent that was expressed on board Shigenobu’s ship in 1592, evidence that within this self-selected elite the ideals of the samurai could provide the means to transcend the natural human fears that mundane religious rituals and appeals to patriotism never seemed to achieve.
Angels carry a dead kami kaze pilot to heaven in a mural in the Kamikaze Museum in Chiran.
A similar attitude is to be found in a later ‘self-selected Japanese elite’ of the so-called ‘Red Brigade’ terrorists of the early 1970s. These men provided a Japanese example of the violent world-revolutionary terrorists of the times, and ‘contributed’ to the cause of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) by spraying machine-gun bullets at Lod Airport in Israel in 1972. Yet even in such a bizarre international act of cooperation the spirit of the samurai was not far from their minds. The confessions of their leader reveal that when they were training in Lebanon ‘they would finish their after-dinner grenade-throwing with a session of moon viewing’.33
There is much more of a religious dimension apparent in the acts of a more recent coterie of ‘sacred Japanese warriors’. In March 1995 a religious cult called Aum Shinrikyō, which had begun its existence as a yoga and meditation group, embraced mass murder when it released poison gas on a Tokyo subway train. Investigation into the incident revealed a sinister version of one of Japan’s ‘New Religions’ that was controlled by a charismatic figure who had moved from a quest for universal salvation to an acceptance of a symbolic battle between good and evil. As the group retreated from the world this battle became less and less purely symbolic and more and more real, culminating in the death of its own followers along with many innocent people.34 Nothing could have been further from the ideals of bushidõ: the essential but elusive way of the warrior.