31 - Basil Hall Chamberlain's Things Japanese and the ‘Invention of a New Religion’: A Critique of Bushido

Summary

I DO NOT mean to say anything striking if I say that ‘Bushido’ was an English discovery, or more true to say, an English creation, in the same sense that we say the Japanese colour print was discovered in London and Paris; with that discovery we Japanese have almost nothing to do. When Dr Nitobe brought out ‘Bushido’, long before the Russia-Japan War, it was looked upon here as a sort of fiction; the Westerners, not finding a satisfactory answer for the reason of our victory over Russia, made the fiction turn to a fact.

Noguchi Yone, The Academy, 1910

BUSHIDO

In 1911, the English Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850– 1935) left Japan never to return. He made his new home in Geneva, Switzerland. That same year he wrote an essay entitled ‘The Invention of a New Religion’. In this essay Chamberlain criticized what he thought was a fiction created by the Japanese authorities in recent years. Part of this fiction was that ‘…the Japanese nation, sharing to some extent in the supernatural virtues of its rulers, has been distinguished by a high-minded chivalry called bushido, unknown in inferior lands’. This essay was probably inspired in part by the fact that Chamberlain's book Things Japanese, an encyclopaedic introduction to Japan the first edition of which was published in 1890, did not contain an article on bushido, which had become famous throughout the world with Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5.

Prior to 1890, the term bushido was hardly used, but began to appear more frequently in the 1890s. Oleg Benesch discusses uses from about 1890 by Ozaki Yukio, Fukuzawa Yukichi and the Christian Uemura Masahisa among others. Ozaki used the term while in England in 1888 in a short piece on the English gentleman. In 1896 two articles by Takenobu Yoshitarō The bushido or ‘Ways of Samurai’ appeared in both English and Japanese in Taiyō (Sun). Other similar terms, shidōand budō, were sometimes used. However by the late 1890s budōwas only used in the context of the martial arts.

Nitobe Inazō's Bushido: The Soul of Japan was first published in English in the United States in 1900. The basic impulse for Nitobe’s book was his thought that the Japanese were among the ‘superior races’ and had a civilization already developed, not in need of rescue from ‘barbarism’ by Christian missionaries.