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Old 05-30-2009, 11:03 PM   #104
Peter Goldsbury
 
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Re: Aikido and Bushido

I am not entirely sure why you made the last post, or whether we are actually on the same wavelength. I myself have the book and I think we need the first few paragraphs of the Preface to the First Edition:

"About ten years ago, while spending a few days under the hospitable roof of the distinguished Belgian jurist, the lamented M. de Laveleye, our conversation turned during one of our rambles, to the subject of religion. "Do you mean to say," asked the venerable professor, "that you have no religious instruction on your schools?" On my replying in the negative, he suddenly halted in astonishment, and in a voice which I shall not easily forget, he repeated "No religion! How do you impart moral education?" The question stunned me at the time. I could not readily answer, for the moral precepts I had learned in my childhood days were not given in schools; and not until I began to analyse the different elements that formed my notions of right and wrong, did I find that it was Bushido that breathed them into my nostrils.

"The direct inception of this little book is due to the frequent queries put by my wife as to the reasons such and such ideas and customs prevail in Japan.

"In my attempts to give satisfactory replies to M. de Laveleye and to my wife, I found that without understanding feudalism and Bushido, the moral ideas of present Japan are a sealed volume.

"Taking advantage of enforced idleness on account of a long illness, I put down in the order now presented to the public some of the answers given in our household conversation. They consist mainly of what I was taught and told in my youthful days, when feudalism was still in force." (Preface, pp. xi-xii.)

In my university graduate classes (all Japanese students), there tended to be an even split between those who thought that Bushido was crucial for understanding "the moral ideas of present Japan" (even in 2008, when I last taught the class) and those who thought it was a dead concept, never really instantiated, that was finally laid to rest as a result of World War II.

Nitobe's wife was American and I can imagine the domestic scene. I remember a similar scene many years later, when I myself started aikido training in 1969. My Japanese teacher taught that aikido was/is essentially bushido, teaching and practicing all the same virtues that Nitobe lists. The only difference with Nitobe is that my teacher laid far more stress than Nitobe on the Emperor (though Nitobe is fairly effusive):

"Mommsen, comparing the Greek and the Roman, says that when the former worshipped he raised his eyes to Heaven, for his prayer was contemplation, while the latter veiled his head, for his was reflection. Essentially like the Roman conception of religion, our reflection brought into prominence not so much the moral as the national consciousness of the individual. Its nature-worship endeared the country to our inmost souls, while its ancestor-worship, tracing from lineage to lineage, made the Imperial family the fountain-head of the whole nation. To us the country is more than the land and soil from which to mine gold or reap grain--it is the sacred abode of the gods, the spirits of our forefathers: to us the Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a Rechstaat or even the Patron of a Culturstaat--he is the bodily representative of Heaven on earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy. If what M. Boutmy says is true of English royalty--that it "is not only the image of authority, but the author and symbol of national unity," as I believe it to be, doubly and trebly may this be affirmed of royalty in Japan." (Nitobe, Bushido, pp. 14-15.)

Now many years later, I still believe that my first teacher--and also Nitobe, present a view of Bushido that is fundamentally flawed.

Best wishes,

PAG

P A Goldsbury
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