Bushido, the Soul of Japan, by Inazo Nitobe, [1905], at sacred-texts.com
CHAPTER IX
THE DUTY OF LOYALTY
FEUDAL morality shares other virtues in common with other systems of
ethics, with other classes of people, but this virtue--homage and fealty
to a superior--is its distinctive feature. I am aware that personal
fidelity is a moral adhesion existing among all sorts and conditions of
men,--a gang of pickpockets owe allegiance to a Fagin; but it is only in
the code of chivalrous honour that loyalty assumes paramount
importance.
In spite of Hegel's criticism 1
that the fidelity of feudal vassals, being an obligation to an
individual and not to a commonwealth, is a bond established on totally
unjust principles, a great compatriot of his made it his boast that
personal loyalty was a German
virtue. Bismarck had good reasons to do so, not because the Treue
he boasts of was the monopoly of his Fatherland or of any single nation
or race, but because this favoured fruit of chivalry lingers latest
among the people where feudalism has lasted longest. In America, where
"everybody is as good as anybody else," and, as the Irishman added,
"better too," such exalted ideas of loyalty as we feel for our sovereign
may be deemed "excellent within certain bounds," but preposterous as
encouraged among us. Montesquieu complained long ago that right on one
side of the Pyrenees was wrong on the other, and the recent Dreyfus
trial proved the truth of his remark, save that the Pyrenees were not
the sole boundary beyond which French justice finds no accord.
Similarly, loyalty as we conceive it may find few admirers elsewhere,
not because our conception is wrong, but because it is, I am afraid,
forgotten, and also because we carry it to a degree not reached in any
other country. Griffis 1 was
quite right in stating that whereas in China Confucian ethics made
obedience to parents the primary human duty, in Japan precedence was
given to loyalty. At the risk of shocking some of my good readers, I
will relate of one "who could endure to follow a fall'n lord" and who
thus, as Shakespeare assures, "earned a place i' the story."
The story is of one of the greatest characters of our history,
Michizané, who, falling a victim to jealousy and calumny, is exiled from
the capital. Not content with this, his unrelenting enemies are now
bent upon the extinction of his family. Strict search for his son--not
yet grown--reveals the fact of his being secreted in a village school
kept by one Genzo, a former vassal of Michizané. When orders are
dispatched to the schoolmaster to deliver the head of the juvenile
offender on a certain day, his first idea is to find a suitable
substitute for it. He ponders over his school-list, scrutinises with
careful eyes all the boys, as they stroll into the class-room, but none
among the children born of the soil bears the
least resemblance to his protégé. His despair, however, is but for a
moment; for, behold, a new scholar is announced--a comely boy of the
same age as his master's son, escorted by a mother of noble mien.
No less conscious of the resemblance between infant lord and infant
retainer, were the mother and the boy himself. In the privacy of home
both had laid themselves upon the altar; the one his life--the other her
heart, yet without sign to the outer world. Unwitting of what had
passed between them, it is the teacher from whom comes the suggestion.
Here, then, is the scapegoat!--The rest of the narrative may be
briefly told.--On the day appointed, arrives the officer commissioned to
identify and receive the head of the youth. Will he be deceived by the
false head? The poor Genzo's hand is on the hilt of the sword, ready to
strike a blow either at the man or at himself, should the examination
defeat his scheme. The officer takes up the gruesome object before him,
goes calmly
over each feature, and in a deliberate, business-like tone,
pronounces it genuine.--That evening in a lonely home awaits the mother
we saw in the school. Does she know the fate of her child? It is not for
his return that she watches with eagerness for the opening of the
wicket. Her father-in-law has been for a long time a recipient of
Michizané's bounties, but since his banishment, circumstances have
forced her husband to follow the service of the enemy of his family's
benefactor. He himself could not be untrue to his own cruel master; but
his son could serve the cause of the grandsire's lord. As one acquainted
with the exile's family, it was he who had been entrusted with the task
of identifying the boy's head. Now the day's--yea, the life's--hard
work is done, he returns home and as he crosses its threshold, he
accosts his wife, saying: "Rejoice, my wife, our darling son has proved
of service to his lord!"
"What an atrocious story!" I hear my readers exclaim. "Parents deliberately sacrificing their own innocent child to save the
life of another man's!" But this child was a conscious and willing
victim: it is a story of vicarious death--as significant as, and not
more revolting than, the story of Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac.
In both cases was obedience to the call of duty, utter submission to
the command of a higher voice, whether given by a visible or an
invisible angel, or heard by an outward or an inward ear;--but I abstain
from preaching.
The individualism of the West, which recognises separate interests
for father and son, husband and wife, necessarily brings into strong
relief the duties owed by one to the other; but Bushido held that the
interest of the family and of the members thereof is intact,--one and
inseparable. This interest it bound up with affection--natural,
instinctive, irresistible; hence, if we die for one we love with natural
love (which animals themselves possess), what is that? "For if ye love
them that love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the
same?"
In his great history, Sanyo relates in
touching language the heart struggle of Shigemori concerning his
father's rebellious conduct. "If I be loyal, my father must be undone;
if I obey my father, my duty to my sovereign must go amiss." Poor
Shigemori! We see him afterward praying with all his soul that kind
Heaven may visit him with death, that he may be released from this world
where it is hard for purity and righteousness to dwell.
Many a Shigemori has his heart tom by the conflict between duty and
affection. Indeed, neither Shakespeare nor the Old Testament itself
contains an adequate rendering of ko, our conception of filial
piety, and yet in such conflicts Bushido never wavered in its choice of
loyalty. Women, too, encouraged their offspring to sacrifice all for the
king. Even as resolute as Widow Windham and her illustrious consort,
the samurai matron stood ready to give up her boys for the cause of
loyalty.
Since Bushido, like Aristotle and some modern sociologists, conceived the state as
antedating the individual,--the latter being born into the former as
part and parcel thereof,--he must live and die for it or for the
incumbent of its legitimate authority. Readers of Crito will remember
the argument with which Socrates represents the laws of the city as
pleading with him on the subject of his escape. Among others he makes
them (the laws or the state) say: "Since you were begotten and nurtured
and educated under us, dare you once to say you are not our offspring
and servant, you and your fathers before you?" These are words which do
not impress us as any thing extraordinary; for the same thing has long
been on the lips of Bushido, with this modification, that the laws and
the state were represented with us by a personal being. Loyalty is an
ethical outcome of this political theory.
I am not entirely ignorant of Mr. Spencer's view according to which
political obedience--loyalty--is accredited with only a transitional
function. 1 It may be so. Sufficient
unto the day is the virtue thereof. We may complacently repeat it, especially as we believe that
day to be a long space of time, during which, so our national anthem
says, "tiny pebbles grow into mighty rocks draped with moss."
We may remember at this juncture that even among so democratic a
people as the English, "the sentiment of personal fidelity to a man and
his posterity which their Germanic ancestors felt for their chiefs,
has," as Monsieur Boutmy recently said, "only passed more or less into
their profound loyalty to the race and blood of their princes, as
evidenced in their extraordinary attachment to the dynasty."
Political subordination, Mr. Spencer predicts, will give place to
loyalty, to the dictates of conscience. Suppose his induction is
realised--will loyalty and its concomitant instinct of reverence
disappear forever? We transfer our allegiance from one master to
another, without being unfaithful to either: from being subjects of a
ruler that wields the
temporal sceptre we become servants of the monarch who sits enthroned
in the penetralia of our hearts. A few years ago a very stupid
controversy, started by the misguided disciples of Spencer, made havoc
among the reading class of Japan. In their zeal to uphold the claim of
the throne to undivided loyalty, they charged Christians with
treasonable propensity in that they avow fidelity to their Lord and
Master. They arrayed forth sophistical arguments without the wit of
Sophists, and scholastic tortuosities minus the niceties of the
Schoolmen. Little did they know that we can, in a sense, "serve two
masters without holding to the one or despising the other," "rendering
unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's and unto God the things that are
God's." Did not Socrates, all the while he unflinchingly refused to
concede one iota of loyalty to his dæmon, obey with equal
fidelity and equanimity the command of his earthly master, the State?
His conscience he followed, alive; his country he served, dying. Alack
the day when a
state grows so powerful as to demand of its citizens the dictates of their conscience!
Bushido did not require us to make our conscience the slave of any
lord or king. Thomas Mowbray was a veritable spokesman for us when he
said:
"Myself I throw, dread sovereign, at thy foot.
My life thou shall command, but not my shame.
The one my duty owes; but my fair name,
Despite of death, that lives upon my grave,
To dark dishonour's use, thou shall not have."
A man who sacrificed his own conscience to
My life thou shall command, but not my shame.
The one my duty owes; but my fair name,
Despite of death, that lives upon my grave,
To dark dishonour's use, thou shall not have."
A man who sacrificed his own conscience to
the capricious will or freak or fancy of a sovereign was accorded a
low place in the estimate of the Precepts. Such an one was despised as nei-shin, a cringeling, who makes court by unscrupulous fawning, or as chō-shin,
a favourite who steals his master's affections by means of servile
compliance; these two species of subjects corresponding exactly to those
which Iago describes,--the one, a duteous and knee-crooking knave,
doting on his own obsequious bondage, wearing out his time much like his
master's ass; the other
trimming in forms and visages of duty, keeping yet his heart
attending on himself. When a subject differed from his master, the loyal
path for him to pursue was to use every available means to persuade him
of his error, as Kent did to King Lear. Failing in this, let the master
deal with him as he wills. In cases of this kind, it was quite a usual
course for the samurai to make the last appeal to the intelligence and
conscience of his lord by demonstrating the sincerity of his words with
the shedding of his own blood.
Life being regarded as the means whereby to serve his master, and its
ideal being set upon honour, the whole education and training of a
samurai were conducted accordingly.
Footnotes
82:1 Philosophy of History (Eng. trans. by Sibree), Pt. IV., sec. ii., ch. i.
83:1 Religions of Japan.
89:1 Principles of Ethics, Vol. I., pt. ii., ch. x.
