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Revision as of 04:25, 21 February 2005

I corrected the characters for "loyalty", they clearly must be "忠義" and not "尽忠", which cannot be pronounced as "chugi".

Thanks, bye''

Factual accuracy

It looks like some people have different beliefs regarding the bushido, and this is reflecting on the previous edits of this article. Something must be done about this, and until that happens, the {{disputed}} tag should remain there. Me, I don't know enough about the subject, so I can't really stick my finger on this. I hoped I could find something more reliable here. As for my opinion, I've always thought their code of honor was indeed real in that past. Something that was common sense, followed by a large part of the samurai. Now I don't know anymore, though.

The discussion pertaining this can be carried here.--Kaonashi 04:26, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Recent edits by anon user 203.62.217.146 sound dismissive and POV: "Bushido was the supposed warrior code of the samurai." "In reality, however, bushido was an invention of frustrated samurai", "Today it is dismissed by serious historians" "Bushido re-emerged during World War 2 as Japanese propaganda" etc... Maybe a line could be written on such alternative views (with "serious historian"'s reference please), but isn't organizing the whole article around this theme quite excessive? PHG 10:33, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree this page needs to stay disputed for awhile, and that anon should have worded their entry a little more elegantly, though the actual content of the entry is essentially correct. The mistake people make with the whole samurai/bushido thing is that they are mixing up the eras, and reading the wrong books. The Sengoku Jidai period samurai is the samurai that most people are familiar with. Most of the Akira Kurosawa samurai films are taken from this period (mid 15th century up until the beginning of the 17th century), and this is where the image of the warrior samurai that everyone is familiar with comes from. These samurai were as unloyal as you could imagine, retainers often changed masters, and daimyo were continuingly forming and breaking alliances as soon as an advantage was to be had. Then Tokugawa Ieyasu won the battle of Sekigahara and established the Tokugawa Bakufu, ushering in the "Edo period", and with it several centuries of peace. In this period the samurai quite rapidly became aristocrats. They still wore their swords and some of them even practiced the martial arts, but there were no battles to fight and most samurai spent their lives on guard duty, collecting taxes or enjoying poetry and theatre (along with booze and the odd trip to the brothel!). This is where the image of the elegant & learned samurai comes from, though even that has been exaggerated somewhat over the years. Now, the topic of bushido. I was going to write up my opinions on the matter, but the article listed on the current Bushido page, http://www.koryubooks.com/library/kfriday2.html, does a pretty good job of it (and it's written by historian Karl Friday, to boot). A quick summary would be - during the Edo period, the period of peace, the Tokugawa Bakufu had to find a way to satisfy and reward their samurai, who no longer had much of a chance of moving through the ranks without the opportunity of proving himself in battle, which had been the main cause of promotion in the Sengoku Jidai period. To do this the Bakufu tried to change the concept of "honour" from a personal one to that of the clan and your master. The intent of this was that even if you were likely stuck at your social level for your whole life, you should still work hard to make your clan and your daimyo look better, which in turn will make you look better. To anyone who has read "Hagakure" this should sound familiar, giving and not getting anything back but the knowledge that you've improved your clan's status. As you may imagine, this didn't quite work in practice as samurai are, after all, human beings, and are just as ambitious as everyone else. It also led to some problems, like with Lord Asano and the 47 ronin, who revenged their lord as any good samurai was supposed to, yet were still condemned to death because they acted contrary to the Bakufu's ruling on the matter. But the actions of these 47 men were pretty unique, and could not be considered the standard. The real problem is that during the Edo period there was a certain consensus of what defines a samurai, however it differed from clan to clan and was not a written code in any sense of the word, nor was it followed by each and every man who wore the two swords. It's also important not to think of this as "bushido", as this term was simply not used back in those times. I think a great book that should help disillusion people about samurai of this period is the dairy of Katsu Kokichi, titled "Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai". This is a great example of exactly what a good percentage of the samurai had become during the period of peace following Sekigahara. "The Taming of the Samurai" by Eiko Ikegami is also a great look at the changing role of samurai during the Edo Period, from a sociological perspective. It touches on the Hagakure as well. Personally, I think the Bushido article hosted here needs a couple of things to be complete - a quick description of the transition of the samurai from warriors to administrators, a description on what it meant to be a samurai in the Edo period, the appearance of Bushido as Japanese propaganda after the Meiji restoration and a final blurb about the modern view of the bushido code, comparing the fiction to fact.--AngusH 04:25, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)