51 DOI: 10.4312/as.2018.6.2.51-70
Bushidō as a Hybrid: Hybridity and  
Transculturation in the Bushidō Discourse
Masaki SHIRAISHI*
6
Abstract
Since Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition, many of traditions have been 
exposed as invented or reinvented in modernity. Bushidō is no exception. Many have ar-
gued for its modernity and constructedness, and some even for its hybridity. The present 
paper takes modern constructedness of bushidō as a starting point, and focuses its analysis 
on the process of hybridisation. In the bushidō theories I take up in this paper, bushidō is 
constructed as a hybrid right from the start, and their attempts to legitimatise bushidō 
and Japanese tradition inevitably involve its hybridisation. To shed light on what hap-
pens when bushidō is hybridised, I adopt the concept of transculturation. Transculturation 
helps us to analyse the mediation process and cultural change involved with hybridisation. 
Eventually, I contend that it is not because of its purity but its hybridity that bushidō has 
appeared so persuasive and attractive.
Keywords: bushidō, hybridity, transculturation, modernity, tradition
Bushidō kot hibrid: hibridnost in transkulturacija v diskurzu o bushidōju
Izvleček 
Vse od Hobsbawmovega in Rangerjevega vplivnega zbornika The Invention of Tradition 
so bile številne tradicije prepoznane kot izmišljene ali ponovno odkrite v modernosti. 
Bushi dō ni pri tem nikakršna izjema. Številni so dokazovali njegovo modernost in kon-
struiranost, včasih tudi njegovo hibridnost. Bushidō kot modern konstrukt v tem prispe-
vku služi kot izhodišče za analizo procesa njegove hibridizacije. V obravnavanih teorijah 
bushidōja je ta koncept zgrajen kot hibrid že v izhodišču in njihovi poskusi legitimizacije 
bushidōja in japonske tradicije nujno vključujejo hibridizacijo. Da bi prikazal, kaj se zgo-
di, ko se bushidō hibridizira, uporabljam koncept transkulturacije. Tako lažje analiziramo 
procesa mediacije in kulturne spremembe, ki sta povezana s hibridizacijo. Na koncu sledi 
poudarek, da bushidō ni prepričljiv in privlačen zaradi svoje izjemnosti, temveč prav zaradi 
svoje hibridnosti. 
Ključne besede: bushidō, hibridnost, transkulturacija, modernost, tradicija
* Masaki SHIRAISHI, PhD, part-time lecturer,
 Kobe College, Kobe, Japan.
 masaking122[at]hotmail.com

52 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
Transculturation and Hybridity of Bushidō 
The discourse on bushidō in the late Meiji period shows the entangled needs of 
traditional societies in the face of inevitable modernisation. On the one hand, the 
project of modernisation requires the modernising societies to be cut off from their 
premodern traditions. On the other hand, for the new modernised regime to be 
maintained, it is necessary to establish the legitimacy of the new order by relying 
on continuing cultural traditions. This is especially true in the case of countries 
like Meiji Japan, where the modernising forces were mostly seen as foreign and 
the dominant elites were overwhelmingly constituted by the former ruling class. 
Another ideological agony in the face of modernisation is apparent in bushidō, 
which fluctuates between universalism and particularism. In the wave of Western 
modernisation, it was not enough for Japan to hold fast to the uniqueness of its 
own cultural traditions. It was necessary to find universally valid criteria or values 
in Japanese culture. The discourse on bushidō can thus be seen as a response to 
this ideological necessity. In bushidō, supposedly incongruous elements such as the 
West and Japan, or tradition and modernity, are interdependent upon and inter-
connected with each other in a process of mutual construction. Bushidō is both 
traditional and modern, national and international, and particular and universal. In 
a word, bushidō is a hybrid. I would insist that this hybrid character of bushidō is not 
adequately focused upon in the previous literature on bushidō, and this is because 
most of these arguments centre around unearthing its modern constructedness. 
Many bushidō researchers (Suzuki 2001; Kanno 2004; Saeki 2004; Taniguchi 2007; 
Benesch 2014) agree upon its modern invented character. In fact, this was first 
pointed out by a contemporary of Nitobe. B. H. Chamberlain (1912) claimed that 
bushidō was a newly invented word. It was only after the Sino-Japanese War that 
the word bushidō became in vogue and started to be used widely. Until around the 
start of the twentieth century, bushidō remained an unusual term. It is also stressed 
in the literature on bushidō that the modern usage of the word is almost unrelated 
to the actual deeds and ethics of the samurai in the Middle Ages. For example, 
in arguing about Nitobe’s Bushido, Ota (1986, 68) clearly refers to the “ahistorical 
character of bushidō”, and claims that “what he named bushidō was fairly different 
from the historical values of samurai”. Such analysis does not, however, provide 
a sufficient account of how bushidō was ideologically reconstructed, because they 
tend to see Meiji bushidō as a mere modern myth, rather than a hybrid between 
modernity and tradition. This is the flip side of the same coin of traditionalism. 
Modern constructionists tend to see bushidō as simply a product of modernity, 
while traditionalists see it as cultural essence rooted in the national past. One way 
or another, bushidō is constructed as purity. 

53 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
To grasp what escapes from sight, I turn to Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion (1992) 
about transculturation. Transculturation is a concept that was elaborated through 
her in-depth examination of European travel writings on the African and Ameri-
can continents. She devoted a chapter on Alexander von Humboldt’s famous trip 
to the new continent. In this, she criticised a traditional account of that trip that 
explains Humboldt’s conception of the American continent as prime nature in 
terms of the influence of Romanticism. For her, this kind of argument does not 
really theorise encounters between different cultures. In this scheme, the arrow 
of influence points in one direction only. In other words, agency is only allowed 
for the side that brings about change. The other side, stripped of any capacity of 
meaningful action, is merely waiting to be influenced and changed. 
Accounting for the image of the American continent as prime nature through 
transculturation enables all the elements in the scheme to have agency. Pratt’s 
following statement clearly shows this: 
[...] to the extent that Humboldt “is” a Romantic, Romanticism “is” 
Humboldt; to the extent that something called Romanticism constitutes 
or “explains” Humboldt’s writing on America, those writings constitute 
and “explain” that something. (1992, 134) 
It is in this sense that Pratt stressed the importance of “travelees”, who are usually 
not represented as influential figures in the written text but nevertheless leave 
traces in the discourse. As she notes, “(s)uch traces of the everyday interaction 
between American inhabitants and European visitors suggest the heterogeneous 
and heteroglossic relationships that produced the European’s seeing and knowing” 
(ibid., 132). She also points out that creole intellectuals had already started to 
glorify wildness and the sublimity of great nature in the Americas. The image of 
Latin American prime nature should be regarded as a product of a heteroglossic 
moment
1
 that emerged in Humboldt from his encounter with at least three differ-
ent agents: European Romanticism, Latin American intellectuals, and the natural 
scenery of the new continent. In other words, it was a hybrid.
There is an analogous interpretative scheme in the discussion about the construct-
edness of bushidō. The air of militarism and fervent nationalism that was so prev-
alent in the Japanese empire is often referred to as a main explanatory factor. 
Kanno’s argument (2004) exemplifies this. After depicting the practical ethics of 
the samurai through a closer look at the historical materials of the Middle Ages 
and early modernity, he concludes that Meiji bushidō was in fact false bushidō 
1 “Heteroglossia” is a concept of Mikhail Bakhtin that refers to a condition of encounters and con-
flicts between different social languages. See Bakhtin (1981).

54 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
in the sense that the core of the samurai spirit was removed from it. Moreover, 
bushidō was remodelled to satisfy the military needs of the Meiji government to 
build its national army.
2
 In this scheme, bushidō theory is exhaustively explained 
by the nationalistic motive behind it. Agency is taken away both from bushidō 
theorists and the concept of bushidō. If we take nationalism as the only or final 
cause, both nationalism and bushidō become a Latourian black box (Latour 1987), 
a transparent intermediary that just passes agency from one side to another. The 
hybridity of bushidō thus disappears. There is also the reverse-side risk. Modern 
constructionists like Ota tend to explain Meiji bushidō theories, especially those of 
Nitobe, as made up by Western influences, as if it was conjured up from thin air. 
It is thus necessary to build a theoretical framework focusing on intercultural 
encounters in and hybridity of bushidō. This framework needs to go somewhat 
beyond Hobsbawm and Ranger’s famous theory of “the invention of tradition” 
(1983), which tends to focus on exposing the modernity and constructedness of 
supposedly continuing and unchanging traditions. It is necessary to examine what 
happens when tradition is invented in modernity. As such, the invention of tradi-
tion in modernity is not the goal of this discussion. It is rather the starting point 
of our analysis. It is necessary to examine by what logic the bushidō theorists of the 
time invented a new tradition, and through what rhetoric they justified their act of 
the invention. As I demonstrate in the following discussion, a key to understand-
ing their invention is the hybridity of bushidō. It is hybridity rather than purity 
that authorises and provides discursive force to their argument. 
To bring bushidō’s hybridity to light, it is necessary to examine how it is made hybrid. 
To put it differently, our analysis needs to be focused on the process of hybridisation. 
This enables us to see why bushidō had to be constructed as a hybrid rather than a 
pure entity. It is necessary to point out here that hybridisation and transculturation 
are in some sense overlapping concepts, rather than two neatly separated categories. 
I thus utilise both concepts in the following discussion because they have differ-
ent but interrelated analytical focuses. While the concept of hybridisation centres 
around the issue of how the supposedly fixed boundaries are dissolved and the sup-
posedly pure entities are intermingled, the concept of transculturation concentrates 
its analysis on the process of mediation and cultural change.
Pratt’s concept of transculturation is a useful analytical tool to dig more deeply 
in the process of hybridisation. Its conceptual efficacy rests on its focus upon the 
2 Following this perspective, Harada (2017) demonstrates the connection of the Meiji bushidō with mili-
tarism in light of the rescripts to soldiers. Ota (1986, 61–2) more clearly states that “most of the bushidō 
literature of the time seems to be written in support of the universal conscription system when the 
military draft was obligatory”. Exceptional to this trend is Kasaya, who searches for the intellectual roots 
of bushidō in the bushidō literature of the Edo period, which seems closer to the conventional view.

55 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
mediation process. In the bushidō discourse analysed below, the supposedly different 
entities are connected. For this connection to be made, there has to be mediators 
which reconcile difference. Through identifying these mediators and how they func-
tion, we can understand the processes and consequences of intercultural encounters. 
To analyse the cultural change resulting from an intercultural encounter, I add an 
Ortisian dimension to transculturation. Fernand Ortis was the Cuban anthropolo-
gist who coined the term transculturation (1940). Ortis’s original intention behind 
inventing a new word for analysing cultural transformation was simple: to counter 
the then-dominant discourse of acculturation that emphasised assimilation and in-
tegration. He submitted a new concept to grasp cultural change more comprehen-
sively. He did not deny acculturation, but rather subsumed it under transcultura-
tion with two additional moments: “deculturation”, or uprooting from its original 
context; “neoculturation”, or the creation of new cultural phenomenon. Identifying 
these three moments helps us to better understand the dynamics of cultural change 
through decomposing the complex process of transculturation.
In the analysis that follows, I focus on the bushidō articles that were written in the 
late Meiji period. It was not only a time of “bushidō’s boom”, in which discourse 
on bushidō spread, but it was in this period that the incongruities between mo-
dernity and tradition were very acutely felt. It should also be noted that I take up 
only some of the authors on Meiji bushidō. I selected them among many others 
because their arguments, in different ways, are best able to demonstrate bushidō’s 
hybridity. I admit that this selection excludes several important works on bushidō, 
such as Adachi Ritsuen (1901), although it is one of several books in the Meiji era 
devoted to this subject. The selection was made for the sake of clarity. I must add 
that my contention is not that all the bushidō theories are hybrid, but that bushidō 
was constructed as a hybrid in some, though important, contexts, and that this 
hybridity is one of the crucial reasons why it seemed so attractive and persuasive.
Legitimatising the Traditional through Hybridisation and 
Transculturation 
Entangled and sometimes contradictory ideological needs are clearly observable 
in bushidō theorists’ search for the equivalent in Western culture. Among the 
most eloquent speakers about bushidō in this respect were Japanese Christians
3
, 
including Uemura Masahisa (1858–1925) and Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), 
3 Although Ukita Kazutami (1859–1946) and Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930) are Japanese Chris-
tians who were also eloquent about bushidō, I do not have space here to examine their arguments. 
Regarding these, see Benesch (2014). 

56 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
whom I take up in this section and the next, respectively. During the 1890s, Ue-
mura delivered a series of articles on bushidō to a Christian newspaper (Fukuin-
shinpō), which he founded himself. His aim was to relate bushidō, in his funda-
mental argumentation, to the foreign religion that he followed. This intention 
is quite apparent in the titles of two of these articles, “Kirisutokyō to bushidō” 
(Christianity and bushidō), and “Kirisutokyō no bushidō” (Bushidō of Christi-
anity). In the following discussion, I focus on the first of these, in which the 
hybridity of bushidō is more clearly seen. 
To connect these two seemingly alien systems of belief, Uemura not only finds 
bushidō’s counterpart in the West but also simplifies both concepts. On the one 
hand, he reduces the concept of bushidō to the point of being devoid of any mean-
ingful cultural content other than willingness to protect one’s honour through the 
exercise of martial actions. This simplification separates bushidō from the complex 
whole of the samurai’s lived experience, from which practical lessons and ethics 
are drawn, and turns it into a theoretical philosophy governed by a set of prin-
ciples, thus giving it universally valid criteria. This theoretical manoeuvre makes 
it easy to identify bushidō with analogous deeds and values that can be found in 
the tradition of Western culture. On the other hand, he invokes the image of 
European chivalry, depicting it as “holding a sword in the right hand and Bible 
in the left.” In other words, its essence lies in martial deeds on the one hand and 
religiosity on the other. This simplified image of a knight is easy to identify with 
that of a samurai, who was supposedly also pious.
Finding its equivalent in and establishing similarities with Western culture is a 
common and useful tactic for valorising bushidō in Meiji Japan. In an article titled 
Shinshi (On Gentlemen) published in 1888, Ozaki Yukio (1858–1954) made an 
analogy between being a gentleman and bushidō.
4
 Ozaki presented several char-
acteristics that were supposed to be common to bushidō and gentlemanship: bushi 
and gentlemen “do not neglect one’s duty in search of self-interest”, “value honour 
and do not speak coarsely nor behave meanly”, “do not submit to the strong nor 
contempt the weak”, “keep promises and devote oneself to the public”, and find 
“glory in honourable poverty”. He did not forget to add at the end that “if we 
count commonalities, the list could go on and on” (Ozaki 1955, 746). 
Even though the characteristics recounted by Ozaki are more numerous than 
those of Uemura’s discourse, their ways of valorising bushidō are same: by reducing 
a complex ethos of one particular class to a set of universal principles through ab-
straction. The commonalities of their argumentation go further. They both saw in 
4 Ozaki seemed to like the analogy of bushidō with gentlemanship and repeated it afterwards in his 
speeches and writings. See Ozaki (1913).

57 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
bushidō an ideal past totally distinct from contemporary Japanese society. Uemura 
lauded bushidō as “a beautiful flower and a fruit nourished by Japanese people for 
several hundred years”, and lamented that it perished overnight (1966, 395). He 
argued that contemporary society was deeply affected by materialism, partisan-
ship, the pursuit of self-interest, and momentary pleasure. His argument is char-
acterised by grief over the lost soul of an idealized society that supposedly existed 
until it was modernised. Similarly, Ozaki lamented how different shinshi were 
in Japan from gentlemen in England, although the term shinshi was a Japanese 
translation of the English “gentleman”. He poignantly remarked that in Japanese 
shinshi was just another name for a rich person whose deeds were characterised by 
immorality. In this respect, it was not appropriate for Ozaki to parallel Japanese 
shinshi with English gentlemen. In a similar vein to Uemura, Ozaki regarded this 
as a sign of spreading moral degradation in Japanese society. In contrast, an Eng-
lish gentleman was supposed to be defined not by his wealth, but by his moral be-
haviour. He “does not fear the strong nor contempt the weak” and “values honour 
and trust so that he does not deceive his conscience” (Ozaki 1955, 745). 
Uemura’s and Ozaki’s arguments thus show a remarkable resemblance in their 
rhetoric: poignant criticism of contemporary society as excessively materialistic 
and morally degraded; praise for orthodox Western cultural tradition as honour-
able and righteous; the characterisation of chivalry and bushidō in terms of their 
feudal origins; and clear nostalgia for the lost tradition. This kind of search for an 
ideal in a historical past is far from unique. Bringing up the idealised past to criti-
cise the present is one of the most typical strategies intellectuals adopt when they 
face inevitable modernisation. We can call it Romantic, “modern traditionalist”,
5
 
or just conservative. However, their discourse about bushidō was not solely framed 
by a Romantic traditionalist thinking that praises a purely endogenous tradition. 
What is not typical is that this idealised past was connected to the foreign. The 
endogenous tradition itself, even in the purified form, was not enough to legiti-
mise their argument. This partly explains why they established the equivalence of 
bushidō with something in the Western orthodoxy. 
But their aim seemed not to be legitimising bushidō itself. Their more apparent 
intention was to attack the moral degradation of a modernising society from 
both sides, from the idealised past extracted from the endogenous tradition on 
the one hand, and the idealised foreign that leads to civilisation and moderni-
ty on the other. In this attempt, bushidō was identified and amalgamated with 
the foreign. Bushidō was, in other words, constructed as a hybrid. It is at once 
5 I use this oxymoronic term to point to the modern character of traditionalist thinking. We can 
simply call it “traditionalist” as Levenson (1958) does.

58 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
Japanese and European, endogenous and foreign, and traditional and modern. 
This hybridity is produced through blurring supposedly fixed boundaries at a 
highly abstract level. It is for this hybridity that bushidō appeared attractive to 
Uemura and Ozaki, and this also gave a critical edge and persuasive power to 
their argument, even if they were not conscious of this at all. If it were con-
structed as a purely endogenous tradition, bushidō’s power would be rather lim-
ited as the feudal tradition became more and more powerless in the context of 
civilization and enlitenment (bunmei kaika). 
While bushidō plays the role of a powerful critical tool in their discourse, it also 
functions as a versatile mediator. In Uemura’s discourse, bushidō mediates Japa-
nese cultural tradition and chivalry which is deeply connected with Christianity 
(“holding a sword in the right hand and Bible in the left”). In Ozaki’s argument, 
it mediates Japanese tradition and being a gentleman, which is considered as an 
honourable tradition of a renowned civilisation. Bushidō and chivalry, or gentle-
manship, are mediated through universal principles at the abstract level. In this 
schema of mediation, Uemura’s and Ozaki’s arguments look almost identical. 
Through bushidō, the advanced modernity of the West and belated modernity of 
Japan are connected. Therefore, recovering the supposedly lost tradition paves the 
way for future modernisation. This transculturation of bushidō subsuming three 
moments constitutes an Ortisian conception. Bushidō was uprooted from the real 
lives of samurai through abstraction, acculturated into Euro-American cultural 
language by analogy, and neoculturated as a hybrid between Japan and the West. 
In all those moments, bushidō undergoes a change, and these changes are pro-
duced by the other mediators. 
In sum, by the power of hybridisation and mediation, bushidō is transculturated and 
revived as a powerful cultural ideal that can serve as the basis for criticism about 
the moral degradation of Japanese society, and as a key to its future improvement. 
Through finding bushidō’s equivalent in Western cultures and recognising that 
they have simplified principles in common, not only is the civilisational status of 
Japan elevated to equal to that of the West, or rather, to a level of universality, but 
its uniqueness is also protected by being seen as valuable. Moreover, the contin-
uance of an endogenous cultural tradition is legitimised and assured, and Japan’s 
potential for future modernisation is apparently demonstrated. 
Yet, to attain this acrobatic valorisation, it was necessary to assume bushidō’s gen-
eral validity to the Japanese nation as a whole. Since bushidō was originally a class 
ethic only valid for a minority of the samurai class, some sort of rhetorical device 
was demanded to make this assumption plausible. In the fourth section, we will 
see an oblique solution to this problem in the bushidō discourse of Inoue. 

59 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
Encounter between Japan and the West and Transculturation of 
Bushidō 
The invocation of images from Western cultures is a widely used tactic in Nitobe’s 
famous book Bushido: The Soul of Japan. Nitobe’s work is outstanding in the bush-
idō discourse not only due to its long-standing popularity and international fame, 
but also due to its systematic composition and the experiential fertility generated 
by its numerous impressive tales and legends. The first edition of the book was 
published in English in 1900, reflecting the fact that it was written for Euro- 
American readers from English-speaking countries. This supposed addressee is 
a sign of the fundamentally transculturating character of Nitobe’s book. In fact, 
references to Western cultures can be found all over his work. Analogies that 
liken Japanese culture to Western cultures are frequently utilised and established. 
By this, I do not just mean that he was using these references and analogies to 
translate and recount “the Soul of Japan” for those who were not familiar with it. 
But instead I contend that this process of translation involves transculturation and 
hybridisation of bushidō. 
This is exemplified by Nitobe’s treatment of the famous warlord Uesugi Kenshin’s 
tale. Uesugi sent salt to his long-time rival, Takeda Shingen, and thus saved him 
from his plight, saying, “I do not fight with salt, but with the sword”. This legend 
is likened to Marcus Furius Camillus’ famous phrase “we Romans do not fight 
with gold, but with iron”, and then to Nietzsche’s words “You are to be proud of 
your enemy; then, the success of your enemy is your success also” (Nitobe 2008, 
24). Especially in terms of honour, the correspondence between bushidō and the 
European knightly tradition was so obvious to Nitobe that he wrote: 
It is indeed striking how closely the code of knightly honour of one coun-
try coincides with that of others; in other words, how the much-abused 
oriental ideas of morals find their counterparts in the noblest maxims of 
European literature. If the well-known lines “Hae tibi erunt artes—pa-
cisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos,” were 
shown a Japanese gentleman, he might readily accuse the Mantuan bard 
of plagiarising from the literature of his own country. (Nitobe 2008, 27) 
Clearly, the fact that Vergilius, the “Mantuan bard”, had written this poem far be-
fore the time of samurai did not bother Nitobe, for his intention was not to point 
out plagiarism but to stress that such similarity existed between Japanese and 
Western cultural traditions, and that a famous phrase of the renowned Roman 
poet would have sounded very familiar to the Japanese. 

60 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
A notable example in this respect is Nitobe’s interpretation of the tale of Ōta Dō-
kan, a warlord in the Muromachi period, who, while mortally wounded, added his 
lines to the couplet cast by his enemy. “Ah! How in moments like these, Our heart 
doth grudge the light of life”, asked his enemy. Dōkan replied, “Had not in hours 
of peace, it learned to lightly look on life”. Nitobe interpreted this tale as show-
ing “a sportive element in a courageous nature” for “[t]hings which are serious to 
ordinary people, may be but play to the valiant” (ibid., 23). Bloody life-and-death 
situations were thus reread as being merely “sportive”. This interpretation is made 
plausible by finding commonality at the most abstract level: the playfulness and 
necessity of a capacious mind and courage. At the same time, the word “sportive” 
is vested with connotations that are in accord with this context. It is not only 
courage but also playfulness that is related to fearlessness in the face of a life-or-
death fight. The capacious mind is coloured with its readiness for death. This sort 
of analogy with sport is in a certain sense fundamental to Nitobe’s bushidō theory. 
In the last paragraph of the first chapter, titled “Bushido as an Ethical System”, he 
takes up Tom Brown’s words, seeing the spirit of fair play in them, and asks: “Is it 
not the root of all military and civic virtue?” 
However, a closer look into bushidō eventually leads to the discovery of difference. 
Nitobe admits that there are some elements in bushidō and the Japanese cultural 
tradition which seem odd or grotesque to the eyes of Europeans and Americans. 
Especially important in this respect are seppuku, kataki-uchi (revenge), and the 
social position of women. He allots two chapters to account for these subjects and 
reconcile the differences. Reflecting the difficulty of such a reconciliation, these 
are the two longest chapters in Bushido.
Because of its barbarity in conduct and incompatibility with the Christian in-
junction against suicide, seppuku certainly appeared as a pressing issue for Nitobe. 
He made a two-step argument to overcome its uncivility. Firstly, he neutralizes 
the brutality and bloodiness of seppuku. He starts this by citing Brutus’s words 
from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Thy (Caesar’s) spirit walks abroad and turns 
our swords into our proper entrails” (ibid., 56). In this citation, Nitobe establishes 
equivalences between the samurai’s conduct in reality and an epic act of Ancient 
Roman in the theatrical spectacle. Through this equivalence, the brutality of sep-
puku that constitutes and symbolizes bushidō is aesthetised. Nitobe then goes on 
to spiritualise seppuku by referring the traditional belief of seeing the human ab-
domen as “the seat of the soul and of the affections”. The bloody image of stabbing 
and cutting through one’s belly with a dagger is thus transformed into the sym-
bolism of the following sentence: “I will open the seat of my soul and show you 
how it fares with it” (ibid., 57). The aesthetisation and spiritualisation introduced 
here cleanse the bloodiness of seppuku and bushidō. Secondly, Nitobe attempts to 

61 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
justify the suicidal logic of seppuku. Given his strong faith in Christianity this is 
utterly surprising, and it seems that he made much effort to argue the point here. 
Here again, bringing up the cases of honourable suicide from Western history 
and culture works as an effective tactic. Nitobe thus refers to Cato the Younger, 
Petronius and Socrates, besides Brutus, all of who died in legendary tragedies and 
whose suicides have been repeatedly and vividly described in drama, paintings, 
literature, history books, and so on. Nitobe also compares Japanese suicides to 
Christian martyrs. However, it is only after seppuku’s bloodiness is cleansed that 
its oddness and incompatibility with Christian faith are mitigated through iden-
tifying commonalities like these. 
Through these tactics, Nitobe reconciles differences and justifies the conduct of 
Japanese people that would have been despised by, or at least appeared odd to, 
the Europeans and Americans of the day. Although the difference between Japan 
and the West is manifestly stated, this is neutralised in the next instance. This is 
accomplished by several different tactics: aesthetisation, spiritualisation, identify-
ing commonality and establishing equivalence at the abstract level. Through these 
approaches, the barbarousness of bushidō is neutralised and its access to the civi-
lised world is secured. In other words, it is translated into Euro-American cultural 
language and becomes connected to the foreign. 
Nitobe’s entire book is engaged with the same task as the articles of Uemura and 
Ozaki—that is, the task of legitimising Japanese cultural tradition and accounting 
for it from two contradictory points of view: its particularity as well as excellence 
on the one hand, and on the other, its similarity to Western cultural tradition and, 
in cases where it seems plausible, its universality. What can be more clearly seen 
in Nitobe’s discourse is that achieving this seemingly impossible goal involves 
not only accounting for Japanese cultural traditions according to Euro-American 
cultural language, but also in rereading the latter in relation to the former. In other 
words, the terms and concepts that are of Euro-American origin are reinterpreted 
in the light of Japanese narratives and cultural frameworks. 
The analogies referred to above are just a small part of the whole. If we enlist the 
many figures and things from Western culture that Nitobe raises, the list could go 
on and on. In other words, Nitobe’s argument is full of cultural mediators. These me-
diators are more varied and the mediation they perform is more complex than seen 
in Uemura’s and Ozaki’s arguments. The mediators here are not historical figures or 
notable intellectuals from Europe, like Nietzsche or Vergilius, but rather their words 
and anecdotes, since equivalences are established between the latter. The mediators 
sometimes take the form of concepts of Western origin, such as “sport” or “fair play”. 
Either way, they function as mediators for bushidō and transculturate it in a way that 

62 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
sounds familiar to a Euro-American public. Mediating between outright difference 
needs complicated processes. As shown in the case of seppuku, the reconciliation of 
difference involves a neutralising process like spiritualisation or aesthetisation. Only 
after being mediated through such a process is the bloodiness of seppuku cleansed. 
Bushidō, composed of brutal behaviour, is thus transculturated in a civilised fashion. 
Here again, we can identify three moments but in a rather different way than we 
have seen in Uemura and Ozaki. In the process of the aesthetisation of seppuku, 
these three moments appear simultaneously. Bushidō is deculturated by erasing its 
bloodiness and being disembodied,
6
 acculturated to a Euro-American cultural con-
text through being overlaid on the image of a Shakespearean drama, neoculturated 
as a hybrid that appears familiar and attractive to the foreign public. The hybridity 
of bushidō is useful to make it more persuasive to Western audience. In this respect, 
Nitobe was not only “a bridge across the Pacific”, as he himself wished to be, but also 
a transculturator, as Pratt called Humboldt. 
Purification by Separation and Selective Hybridisation 
Nitobe recognised that bushidō was a product of “an organic growth of decades 
and centuries of military career”, and admitted “its intricate nature” (Nitobe 2008, 
26). This makes bushidō ambiguous, because being a product of something organ-
ic logically suggests its premodern character, while bushidō theorists demanded 
that it be a representational virtue of modern Japan. The ambiguity of bushidō 
was worsened by the permeation of Euro-American cultural elements, for which 
Nitobe himself was responsible by playing the role of cultural mediator. In this 
case, the purity of bushidō as a Japanese cultural tradition, not its capacity to be 
modern, was threatened. It is no wonder then that uncertainty and discontent 
about what the word bushidō signifies were still openly manifested in 1905. One 
of the elder statesmen of the Meiji Restoration, Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), 
claimed: “the word bushidō is really queer” (Ōkuma 1905, 7). For him, bushidō was 
a term that was groundlessly coined by the scholars of Han learning, irredeema-
bly Chinese in nature, and coming into vogue due to the military fervour of the 
Russo-Japanese war. To him, what everyone saw as the spirit of bushidō, valuing 
righteousness (gi) and courage (yū), was actually a common characteristic of all 
Japanese people, and not restricted to the minority warrior class (just four hun-
dred thousand among forty million, by his estimate). Ōkuma claimed that popular 
samurai tales like Chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers) had played the role 
6 It is probably interesting to think of bushidō as “disemboweled” by aesthetisation and spiritualisa-
tion.

63 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
of national instruction for the Japanese people, implicitly teaching them the val-
ues of righteousness and courage. For him, the very popularity of these tales was 
evidence that the Japanese people had long respected these values. 
Ōkuma’s article shows the strong demand for a double separation: separation 
from the Chinese tradition on the one hand, and from the ancien régime tradi-
tion of Tokugawa Bakufu on the other. This double separation purifies bushidō 
by removing it from the alien others who, in reality, directly influenced it. Thus 
purified, bushidō supposedly becomes capable of representing the new nation of 
Meiji Japan. 
Although Ōkuma himself is not regarded as an ultra-nationalist, the demand 
for separation and purification seen in his argument is one of the key drives be-
hind the ultra-nationalistic discourse on bushidō. This drive can be regarded as a 
response to the uncertainty and ambiguity of bushidō. Bushidō could have been 
regarded as a legitimate manifestation of Japanese particularity only after the trac-
es of foreign influence, which were contaminating its cultural purity, were wiped 
away. As shown in Ōkuma’s article, contaminating remnants were regarded as 
having a two-fold origin: on the one hand, from the feudal past that binds it to the 
fallen class, and on the other, from the Chinese cultural tradition that had more or 
less dominated the intellectual field before the waves of Westernisation came to 
Japan. In both cases, bushidō is not only contaminated and thus somewhat unqual-
ified, but is also related to the premodern past that would foreclose the modern-
isation of Japanese society. We can see the oblique resolution of this problem in 
the bushidō discourse of Inoue Tetsujirō (1856–1944), the first Japanese professor 
of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University. 
Given his position as a major exponent of ultra-nationalist bushidō, it is curious 
that Inoue showed recognition of its shortcomings in his 1901 article. These are 
said to be kataki-uchi and seppuku, upon which “all the civilised people frowned” 
(Inoue 1905a, 60). However, he immediately dismissed these practices as mere 
formal superficiality. To Inoue, these practices were just misdeeds despite the fact 
that they were historically held as essential values for the samurai class. Accord-
ing to Inoue, what was significant was not bushidō’s formality but its spirit, and 
its spirit lies in the disposition of the Japanese people, as recently proven by the 
military accomplishments of the Japanese army in the Sino-Japanese War and the 
Boxer Rebellion. This identification of bushidō with the entire nation of Japan was 
justified as follows: “Bushidō did not originate from an individual advocator, but is 
a product of the Japanese nation” (ibid., 60).
It is also curious that Inoue’s discourse looks very similar to Nitobe’s when we ob-
serve some uses of the cultural traditions of the West. Bushidō was likened to Stoic 

64 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
philosophy and chivalry. However, Inoue differs from Nitobe in that he quick-
ly noted bushidō’s distinctiveness from these traditions. Bushidō is different from 
Stoicism since it is “not theoretical, but decisive in execution”, and from chivalry 
because it “does not worship women” (ibid., 59). It is clear from this statement that 
the Western cultural traditions were referred to not to identify bushidō with them, 
but to stress its uniqueness. 
Both instances show a fast change in logic, which is a characteristic of Inoue’s 
form of argument. The rather abrupt change suggests that bushidō’s shortcomings 
and its equivalents in Western culture are brought up as a rhetorical device to bal-
ance his argument and, more importantly, to clarify bushidō’s essence. This is one 
of the distinctive characteristics of Inoue’s discourse that separates him from the 
other bushidō theorists discussed above, who sought similarities between bushidō 
and the orthodox traditions of Western culture. Negating certain actions that had 
been thought to be a part of bushidō’s distinguishing marks and differentiating it 
from similar cultural traditions are useful tools for extracting bushidō in its purest 
form. From this pure form, it is distinguished from equivalents in Western culture, 
and the deeds and thoughts of the samurai are also thus differentiated. 
The double separation that Inoue made here is not the same as that demanded by 
Ōkuma, and the difference is not slight. Both made attempts to separate bushidō 
from its feudal past, and did so by identifying it with the spirit of the Japanese 
nation as a whole. Inoue’s argument differs from Ōkuma’s in that he did not resort 
to concrete evidence. Instead, he relied on the philosophical distinction between 
form and content, or the superficial and the essential. This categorical manoeuvre 
allowed Inoue to construct an idealized bushidō in which the deeds of the samurai 
are no longer relevant, since they are not essential. It gave him the absolute cogni-
tive capacity to negate any of the deeds of the samurai. 
Inoue’s discourse is also different from Ōkuma’s in that Chinese influences were 
almost completely disregarded, because the logic he deployed precludes the possi-
bility that such influences contaminated bushidō ’s essence. This is seen in perhaps 
the most remarkable part of his article. Here, Inoue insisted that Western moral 
theories like Kant or Hegel’s philosophy should be “grafted” onto bushidō. T o him, 
the Japanese spirit lies in “its power of assimilation which had always absorbed 
foreign thoughts” (ibid., 62). It was in this context that he claimed that the “future 
purpose of our nation should be a consequence of conjugation between Western 
and Eastern moralities like these” (ibid., 63). This sentence does not sound like 
that of a parochial ultra-nationalist, in that it highly regards foreign values. He 
was quick, however, to add that selecting the most valid among them is necessary 
to avoid contradiction with Japanese values. 

65 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
Inoue did not present the Western values that he thought would be most valid nor 
did he propose selection criteria. Still, his intention behind the proposed selection 
is clear in the latter part of the article, which is devoted to criticism of “Yasegaman 
no setsu”, an article written by the founder of Keio University and one of the most 
influential intellectuals of the era, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901). Inoue’s criti-
cism was not about the content of the article itself but about Fukuzawa’s way of 
life in general. He accused Fukuzawa of too much Westernisation and the aban-
donment of his own traditions. Inoue poignantly remarked, 
once exposed to Western moralism, Fukuzawa renounced all traditional 
moralism and became a promoter of Western values [...] We cannot find 
any independence in his thought. If one valued bushidō highly, he would 
have known that the historically developed thought of the nation should 
never have been easily discarded. (ibid., 65)
The problem for Inoue was not Westernisation, but discarding one’s own tradition all 
together. These two things were clearly differentiated in his mind. While the latter 
attitude eliminates the possibility of retaining one’s national identity, the intention of 
adopting the former, if done carefully, would certainly maintain that possibility. Words 
like assimilation and graft are an effective rhetoric in this respect, since anything im-
ported from outside can be regarded as “only branches, not the tree itself ”.
In this respect, the logical structure of Inoue’s discourse closely resembles the 
national slogan of the time, wakon yōsai (Japanese soul with Western compe-
tence). The soul of the Japanese nation could have been kept intact even if it 
imported and grafted onto itself things and ideas of Western origin. For the 
soul was regarded to reside in an inner area which should be untouched by the 
outside influences of the technological change and institutional shifts brought 
about by Western modernisation. By the same token, bushidō was constructed in 
Inoue’s discourse as essentially and unchangeably Japanese despite its absorp-
tion of outside influences. Even if bushidō became hybridised by grafting West-
ern moral theories onto it, it still retains its purity since such foreign thoughts 
or values were “only branches, not the tree itself ”. Inoue clearly states in another 
article about bushidō (1905b, 135) that
however much is learned from the (Western) theories of ethics, they are 
executed by the Japanese spirit. By the same token, the Japanese soldiers 
in the Russo-Japanese war won not only by using machines. If the ma-
chines alone had won, the achievements of victory belong to the ma-
chines, not to the soldiers. These machines are, however, operated by the 
spirit of the Japanese nation. Elaborated theories of ethics are the same 

66 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
as delicate machines. They are operated by the Japanese people. The spirit 
of their operation must rely on bushidō.
 It is no wonder then that Inoue was ready to admit the influence of Confucianism 
on bushidō. It was regarded as a constitutive element of bushidō that was absorbed 
into the Japanese national consciousness, whose essence remains intact in the very 
act of absorption. 
In Inoue’s discourse, questions about the ambiguity of bushidō that had been man-
ifested in Ōkuma’s work were settled, or rather, made meaningless, through its pu-
rification and by establishing the Japanese national spirit as the subject of hybridi-
sation. By the same token, the double separation that Ōkuma considered necessary 
was made irrelevant. On the one hand, bushidō’s continuity with the feudal tradition 
of the Tokugawa Bakufu was unproblematised through Inoue’s distinction between 
superficial formality and essential spirit. On the other hand, foreign influences from 
China were incapacitated by the power of assimilation. They were regarded as ab-
sorbed into the Japanese spirit. The uncertainty of bushidō was fixed, and the ambi-
guity clarified. Conceptual operations like these essentialise bushidō and thus confer 
onto it the potential for becoming a national ideology. We shall not forget, however, 
that this was all done by admitting the hybridity of bushidō and the national spirit.
In a certain sense, Inoue’s theory of bushidō makes a sharp contrast with Uemura’s 
and Ozaki’s arguments. Their logic goes inversely. While Inoue consciously hy-
bridises bushidō and then renders its hybridity meaningless through the power of 
assimilation, the other two theorists purify bushidō and then hybridise it by iden-
tification with the foreign. Conversely, their conceptual manipulations are quite 
similar, and the only difference is their sequence. Inoue’s argument also seems to 
be contrasting with Nitobe’s discourse. While Inoue argues nationalistically for 
pure tradition and tries to make bushidō as nationalistic as possible, Nitobe pre-
sents bushidō for an international public and translates it into Euro-American cul-
tural language. If we pay closer attention to the legitimatisation process, however, 
their arguments are not so dissimilar either. Inoue explicitly hybridises bushidō to 
legitimatise it as a purely Japanese tradition. Nitobe hybridises bushidō to make it 
valid and acceptable to the Western cultural context. Consciously or unconscious-
ly, they thus both legitimatise bushidō through hybridisation. 
Ideological Function and the Hybridity of Bushidō 
Bruno Latour (1993) revealed a profound paradox that the “modern consti-
tution” has long had. According to him, the modern constitution rests on two 

67 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
types of completely different practices: purification and translation. The first 
“creates two entirely distinct ontological zones” (Latour 1993, 10). The second, 
which can also be called hybridisation, mixes these supposedly distinct zones 
and creates hybrids. Purification has been openly manifested while hybridisa-
tion has been hidden, since modernist thinking does not tolerate such chaos of 
classification. The paradox between these practices is that “the more we forbid 
ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes” 
(ibid., 12). Therefore, purification and hybridisation are two sides of the same 
coin, and in modern history have developed hand in hand. It is in this sense that 
“we have never been modern”.
Even though Latour’s main aim is to problematize the nature-society divide and 
the corresponding nonhuman-human divide, and to show that such divides are 
and have always been a deceit, the core insight of the quotation above is applicable 
to our discussion here. The same rule can be applied to the tradition-modernity 
divide. The more we try to provide it with an outlook of pure tradition, the more 
modern it becomes. The bushidō discourse is a remarkable example of this. To 
make bushidō look like a pure tradition, some theorists have used the strategy of 
separation, and many have resorted to abstract simplification. One even openly 
attempted to purify bushidō by hybridising it. Their very act of purification approx-
imates bushidō to a constructed modern tradition. The more they idealise bushidō 
by simplification, the more it becomes distant from the samurai way of life. The 
more they try to make bushidō suitable for contemporary Japanese society, the 
more it loses its traditional roots in the real lives of samurai. The more they try to 
purify bushidō, the more its hybridity becomes undeniable. 
This obliqueness of bushidō discourse reflects the contradictory situation that Jap-
anese society of the Meiji era found itself in. In the mid-Meiji period, the rapid 
pace of modernisation and Westernisation had already deeply changed Japanese 
society, creating a Romantic nostalgia for the time before the great transforma-
tions. This situation would easily arouse moral resentment against contemporary 
society, as most of the texts on bushidō are decorated with images of grief over 
materialism and moral degradation. In this situation, what was called upon was a 
cultural discourse capable of at once sustaining its own culture and universalising 
it, simultaneously protecting tradition and making it adaptable to modernisation. 
Japanese society had to modernise itself while maintaining its traditions. In order 
to modernise, it had to accept foreign influences against which moral resentment 
was aroused while constructing a national identity based on its own uniqueness. 
The intellectuals of the time would have faced inescapably paradoxical ideological 
needs. Driven by these, the bushidō theorists made an attempt to modernise bushi-
dō while simultaneously attempting to turn it into a pure tradition.

68 Masaki Shiraishi: Bushidō as a Hybrid
This ideological necessity is acutely manifested in the discourse on bushidō. All the 
bushidō theorists discussed here would have fulfilled this ideological function, but 
their logic and rhetoric differed. In Uemura, Ozaki, and Nitobe’s discourses, bush-
idō was universalised by demonstrating bushidō’s similarity to its Western coun-
terparts. Due to this type of universalisation, the traditional outlook of Japanese 
society was sustained while also showing its potential for future modernisation. 
However, in this mostly unconscious act of translation and transculturation, two 
changes were made to bushidō: it was disconnected from the complex whole of the 
lived experiences of the samurai and simplified and reduced to its principles, and 
it was reinterpreted according to Western cultural language.
While valorising bushidō, the question of the uniqueness of the Japanese nation 
was overlooked. Separated from the ways of the samurai that certainly included 
rules of conduct incomparable with the modern principles, it was made compa-
rable to other cultural traditions in the West. Bushidō’s ideological status in the 
civilised world was clearly elevated. In turn, however, bushidō became something 
indistinguishable from certain Western cultural traditions. Bushidō’s capacity to 
represent the particularity of Japanese culture was thus ruined. In Inoue’s dis-
course, bushidō fulfilled its role as a truly national ideology. Inoue purified bushidō 
through the distinction between superficial formality and the essential spirit. This 
distinction made the deeds of the samurai irrelevant. The use of vocabulary such 
as “assimilation”, “absorption”, or “graft”, on the other hand, made foreign influ-
ences meaningless. This was much more of a complete separation than Ōkuma 
had wanted. This purified cultural tradition was, however, in an essential sense a 
hybrid since it “grafted” foreign cultures onto it, and integrated them as its own 
constitutive elements. By this logic, bushidō attained its legitimate position as a 
tradition capable of “absorbing” modern advanced thoughts and technologies 
from the West.
How shall we understand this oblique hybridity of bushidō? A conventional ac-
count would posit that the bushidō theorists represented the real way of the sam-
urai on the assumption that bushidō is a historical substance. A critical analysis 
would disclose that bushidō was made up from nowhere, merely reflecting Western 
influences and driven by the fervour of military nationalism. Although both ac-
counts are somewhat true, and the first account is much more naïve and the sec-
ond much more sophisticated, both overlook something important. For in both 
cases bushidō is postulated as a transparent intermediary. Our analysis so far has 
clearly shown that the bushidō theories taken up here are neither puppets nor 
transparent intermediaries. They are the meeting points where different agencies 
encounter each other and mediators in which hybrids interbreed. 

69 Asian Studies VI (XXII), 1 (2018), pp. 51–70
As I have shown above, the hybridity of bushidō is what makes it persuasive, ac-
ceptable, and attractive. As such, hybridity would presumably be a key to its sur-
vival in modern Japan, where its original bearers have long vanished. If bushidō had 
continued as a pure ethic of the traditional samurai class it could not have lasted in 
modern society. In this respect, bushidō’s resilience, which Benesch (2014) points 
out as one of its key characteristics, comes from its hybridity. Implicitly or explic-
itly, bushidō has been a useful vessel capable of containing under the same banner 
different and often contradictory moments: martial values and literacy (文武両
道), universality and particularity, nationalism and internationalism, the West and 
Japan, and modernity and tradition. 
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