5DOI: 10.4312/as.2018.6.2.5-12
Guest Editor’s Foreword
Luka CULIBERG *
The Japanese have another cult: the religion of the Samurai. Most of 
the officers belong to this caste. This religion is codified in the code of 
honour called Bushido. It is the soul of the Japanese Army, and it causes 
that fanaticism which the Japanese soldier exhibits on the battlefield. 
This code is the cause of so many suicides of Japanese soldiers on the 
battlefield, because they believe they would be dishonoured if they were 
to be taken prisoner.1 
This is how a Slovene daily newspaper Edinost (Unity), published in Trieste, de-
scribed the notion of bushidō to the Slovene language readers while reporting on 
the progress of the Russo-Japanese War in its December 1st issue of 1904. The 
sympathies of Slovene press at the time were firmly on the Russian side on the 
conflict, and the Japanese were not described in favourable terms. This mysterious 
“code of honour” was derided as a “cult” and was recognised as a cause of Japan’s 
militant fanaticism and later on its imperialism.
At approximately the same time, the U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was al-
legedly purchasing numerous copies of Bushido: The Soul of Japan, a book written 
in English by Nitobe Inazō, to distribute among his friends. Though Japanese 
victory over Russia was received with mixed sentiments in the United States due 
to the ever growing fear of the “Yellow Peril”, Nitobe’s Bushido nevertheless man-
aged to draw enough enthusiasm so that within a decade there appeared nine 
more editions in English in both the United States and Britain, as well as seven 
translations into other languages, as William M. Bodiford points out in his paper 
in the present issue.
* Luka CULIBERG, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies, 
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.  
luka.culiberg[at]ff.uni-lj.si
1 »Še en kult imajo Japonci: vero Samurajev. Tej kasti pripada večina oficirjev. Ta vera je določena 
v častnem kodeksu Bušido. Ta je duša japonske armade in povzroča tisti fanatizem, ki ga kaže 
japonski vojak na bojišču. V tem kodeksu je vzrok tolikim samomorom japonskih vojakov na 
bojišču, ker menijo, da bi bili onečaščeni, če bi jih sovražnik ujel.« Edinost, vol. 29, no. 333, Decem-
ber 1st, 1904, p. 2.
6 Luka Culiberg: Guest Editor’s Foreword
The oscillation between fascination and derision directed toward bushidō in the last 
hundred or so years, both in Japan and abroad, is just one characteristic aspect of 
this ambiguous “samurai code of honour”. Ever since the notion of bushidō took 
the centre stage in the discourse on Japanese culture and national character in the 
Meiji period (1868–1912), various thinkers imbued the notion with the whole gam-
ut of ideological interpretations, seeing in it everything from ultimate evidence of 
Japanese uniqueness on one end, to recognising in bushidō the symbol of Japanese 
civilized status by virtue of the universality of its ethical postulations on the other. 
Moreover, this vague and elusive idea of “samurai honour” continues to function as 
an empty shell for whatever ideological content wishes to occupy its place.
The aim of the present issue of the Asian Studies journal is thus to approach the 
notion of bushidō from as many aspects as possible in order to further unveil some 
of the mystery informing this notion. The seed that bore fruit in the form of pres-
ent issue was planted back in the summer of 2017, when The National Museum of 
Slovenia featured an exhibition, titled The Paths of the Samurai, displaying samu-
rai warrior equipment and related paraphernalia. Among the numerous events 
accompanying the exhibition, the Department of Asian Studies at the University 
of Ljubljana, in cooperation with the National Museum, hosted a symposium 
with the aim to rethink, discuss and further elucidate the tenets that underlie the 
notion of the so-called “way of the samurai”. The majority of contributions in the 
present issue are based on papers presented at that symposium. At this point I 
would first like to express our gratitude to all who came to Ljubljana from abroad 
to share their valuable insights on the subject; and second, I would like to thank 
everyone who submitted their contributions, thus making this journal issue possi-
ble. I am more than convinced that the final result will serve as a valuable resource 
not just for the scholars of Japanese history, but for a much wider readership in-
terested in the workings of ideology in general.
This is all the more so because this ambiguous and popular notion of bushidō 
seems to have drawn until recently only very limited interest among historians 
and other scholars focusing on Japan (see Bodiford in the present issue), and 
only very few academic works have been dedicated to the topic.2 Conversely, it is 
precisely this “samurai honour” which has the power to fascinate the wider public, 
giving free reign to the popular imagination.
Bushidō, written in Japanese as 武士道, and usually translated into English as “the 
way of the warrior”, is a word which was practically non-existent until the late 
2 One recent notable exception is the book Inventing the Way of the Samurai (2014, Oxford Univer-
sity Press) by Oleg Benesch, who unfortunately could not participate at the symposium, however 
his work is often referenced in numerous articles in the present issue.
7Asian Studies VI (XXII), 2 (2018), pp. 5–12
19th century. Bushi was a general term denoting the samurai or the warriors, while 
dō is a Daoist concept of “the Way”. There has never been any “Bible of bushidō”, 
any written code, but there had been isolated texts in the 17th and 18th centuries 
referring to the idea, most notably by Yamaga Sokō, Yamamoto Tsunetomo and 
Daidōji Yūzan. However, even though texts by these authors are read nowadays as 
part of the bushidō canon, they were not widely influential in their own time. For 
example, Yamamoto’s Hagakure was limited to a very small readership of a few 
local samurai of the Nabeshima clan in a manuscript form. It had been completely 
unknown to the general samurai population, and was published for the first time 
only in the 20th century when the samurai were already a thing of the past. Such 
texts had therefore extremely limited effect until the early 20th century when they 
were “discovered” and adopted as the part of new martial ideology of the Imperial 
Japanese Army.
The authors writing about bushidō during the Edo period (1600–1868) were ei-
ther producing nostalgic accounts about the samurai of old when the country was 
still at war, or, conversely, trying to establish and legitimize “the new way of the 
warrior” suitable for the times of Tokugawa peace. Though members of the samu-
rai class still defined themselves as “warriors” during the Edo period, the majority 
of them did not witness any serious armed conflict. Moreover, while the samurai 
had fought battles and wars during the previous centuries, their primary goal was 
to survive and prevail. In those times martial skills, tactics and cunning mattered 
most. When the circumstances transformed them from fighters into administra-
tors of the state, the focus switched to the idea of the samurai ruling by the virtue 
of their moral example. The idea of samurai honour thus came to the fore. Yet 
honour is a much more elusive notion than practical martial skills.
Only a few months before Tokugawa Ieyasu set the future course for the country 
and consequently established the new paradigm for the social role of the samurai 
class with his victory in the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, far away in London the 
earliest recorded performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 took place. This 
story of medieval knights and their feuds features, among others, Sir John Falstaff, 
a fat, corrupt and drunk knight, who instead of a chivalrous expression of fealty to 
his liege lord feigns his own death in order to avoid combat. Moments before this 
“dishonourable” act, he lets the audience in on his thoughts about the notion of 
honour. After asking rhetorically, whether honour can set a broken leg, take away 
the grief of a wound or perform a surgery, Falstaff declares that honour is just “a 
word”, and that a word is nothing but air. 
Honour, as Karl Friday observes in his article in the present issue, is indeed a 
knotty construct. According to Friday, honour represents a ubiquitous value in 
8 Luka Culiberg: Guest Editor’s Foreword
the sense that a great many cultures entertain some sort of corresponding ideal, 
but the substance of honour—the specifics of what behaviours are and are not 
held to be “honourable”—are peculiar to individual times and places. Honour as 
an abstract concept represents qualities that are deemed respectable and worthy 
of admiration, but these qualities are culturally specific, as well as subject to intra-
cultural negotiation.
For example, in an episode of the TV series House, the doctors treat a patient who 
had been charged with treason for exposing the details of the U.S. Army killing 
civilians. A discussion revolves around the issue whether his act of whistleblow-
ing was honourable or treasonous. The soldier betrayed his country, because he 
believed that exposing the truth was honourable, and therefore he accepts the 
consequences—the charge of treason. However, the protagonist of the series, Dr. 
House, takes a position much closer to Sir John Falstaff. He believes that plead-
ing guilty is not honourable, but stupid, and so, in a manner quite reminiscent of 
Shakespeare’s character, says: “What is honour? Dying for your country? Getting 
straight A’s? Killing your daughter because she had the audacity to get raped?”3
Dying for one’s country or exposing that country’s dark secrets, killing an enemy 
in battle or killing one’s daughter because she was “dishonoured” by getting raped, 
people hold diverse or even opposite views on what is honourable. Generally, how-
ever, people would sooner denounce a certain deed, e.g. killing one’s own daughter, 
as not being honourable at all, rather than questioning the idea of honour itself. 
The cynical approach to honour in the manner of Falstaff or Dr. House is cer-
tainly not the usual reaction. We still tend to praise this or that deed or person 
as “honourable”. Honour, as Falstaff observes, might be merely a word, thin air, 
something that won’t set a broken leg or perform surgery. What he doesn’t realize 
is that words as bearers of ideologies are nevertheless powerful, and throughout 
history a word such as honour has had very tangible and material consequences.
“Samurai honour”, as is generally understood nowadays, is an invented tradition 
from the time when the samurai themselves were already a thing of the past. But, 
as Andrew Horvat notes in his article, the effectiveness of ideologies does not 
depend on their historical accuracy. If samurai intellectuals during the Edo period 
were formulating their first ideas about bushidō in order to situate the samurai 
class firmly in its ruling position within the hierarchical structure of society, the 
bushidō of a Christian intellectual such as Nitobe Inazō, writing at the beginning 
of the 20th century, was something completely different. Bushidō in Nitobe’s ver-
sion was no longer just an ethical code belonging to a small samurai elite, but was 
transformed into “the soul of Japan”, ingrained into the fabric of society as a whole 
3 House, Episode 15, Season 8.
9Asian Studies VI (XXII), 2 (2018), pp. 5–12
and forming its cultural and ethical foundation, analogous to Christianity in the 
West. Nitobe explicitly aligned bushidō with the European notion of “chivalry”. 
If Nitobe’s attempt was to draw parallels between bushidō, chivalry and Christian-
ity in order to show the world that Japan should be viewed as a civilization on par 
with the Christian colonial powers, thinkers like Inoue Tetsujirō saw in bushidō a 
marker of Japanese uniqueness, separating it from the rest of the world and po-
sitioning it above all others. The interpretations overseas were also dependent on 
the ideological contexts in which bushidō performed its perceived role. In the early 
20th century, at the time when Japan was embarking on its colonial enterprise, 
there had been many negative assessments, as we have seen in the case of the Slo-
vene newspaper, as well as positive ones, like the reception of Nitobe’s book in the 
U.S. Later on, particularly during the Pacific War, bushidō was identified world-
wide as the cause of Japanese militarism and belligerent fanaticism. However, af-
ter the war and in the context of Japan’s incredible economic development, bushidō 
was reassessed and reinterpreted, this time as a convenient tool for explaining the 
Japanese work ethic and loyalty of employees to their employer.
Historical samurai did of course possess a certain concept of honour, but it was 
not codified or understood as bushidō. “Honour” was, just as is true for ideological 
notions today, a much more fluid and elusive idea, enabling a plurality of ideo-
logical interpretations. The ritual suicide of the 46 “loyal retainers”4 became the 
most iconic canonical narrative of samurai honour, yet the aforementioned author 
of the “bushidō classic” Hagakure as well as many other scholars at the time were 
actually extremely critical of the conduct of the so-called Akō rōshi. Was the ven-
detta of the 47 masterless samurai the epitome of bushidō, or, as Yamamoto would 
have it, were they completely lacking in it? Was Sasaki Takatsuna’s deception, 
when he tricked his rival Kajiwara Kagesue in his race to the battlefield across the 
river Uji, which Naama Eisenstein describes in her article, honourable? Was that 
bushidō or not? Even though historical samurai did not have a codified ethical 
manual, they certainly believed in the idea of honour. There were those samurai 
who would not hesitate to recognise modern bushidō as their ethical guide, as 
there were those who held views much closer to those of Sir John Falstaff, and 
there were all those in between. The present issue of Asian Studies offers impor-
tant, revealing and fascinating research, studies and analyses, which will hopefully 
clarify many such mysteries surrounding this notion.
The issue is divided into four sections. The first section, Defining Bushidō, brings 
together articles dealing with the concept of bushidō itself. Karl Friday looks at 
bushidō and the samurai behaviour in historical context, discussing the notions of 
4 There were 47 rōnin involved in the plot, but only 46 of them performed the ritual suicide.
10 Luka Culiberg: Guest Editor’s Foreword
honour and loyalty based on written sources, from the Akō vendetta through nu-
merous other historical events and war stories, showing that bushidō was far from 
an unchangeable and enduring code of behaviour and illustrating the complex-
ity of samurai thought and early modern ideals concerning honour and loyalty. 
William M. Bodiford takes the “perspective from overseas”, discussing lives and 
afterlives of the notion, which all together add to the construction of the bushidō 
narrative. He does not simply treat it as a term within this or that discourse, but 
is concerned with the many “lives” of bushidō as an interpretive concept, deriving 
its meaning from its relative position within theoretical frameworks, which are 
constantly shifting. In explaining the elusiveness of bushidō, Bodiford employs the 
term “traveling concepts”. Masaki Shiraishi, on the other hand, describes bush-
idō as a hybrid notion, constructed through the process of “transculturation”. He 
shows how since the Meiji Restoration it was necessary for the new modernized 
regime, in order to be maintained, to establish its legitimacy by relying on so-
called cultural traditions. This ideological agony in the face of modernization is 
in Shiraishi’s view apparent in bushidō, which fluctuates between universalism and 
particularism. In the wave of Western modernization, it was not enough to hold 
fast to uniqueness of Japanese own cultural traditions. It was necessary to find 
universally valid criteria or values in Japanese culture.
The articles in the second section titled Historical Backgrounds approach bushi dō in 
its historical manifestations and metamorphoses from the perspectives of archae-
ology, history and art history. Takamune Kawashima focuses on the archaeological 
remains and landscape around the Kashima Grand Shrine, where the oldest evi-
dence of martial arts in Japan can be traced. This region, Hitachi-no-kuni, was the 
border between the centralized ritsuryō state and the regions that lay beyond its 
control in the early eighth century, and was thus an important location where bat-
tles against northern tribal groups took place. According to Kawashima, though 
Kashima itself was apparently not the place for weapon production, it was, in a 
sense, the birthplace of martial arts in Japan. Based on shintō beliefs the Kashima 
Grand Shrine took the initiative for warfare in the ideological and spiritual senses 
too, heralding the beginning of so-called samurai values. The second article by 
Maria Paola Culeddu takes us on a long journey in search of the earliest traces of 
“the way of the samurai” in ancient and premodern writings, from ancient chron-
icles of Japan, war tales, official laws, letters, to martial arts manuals and philo-
sophical essays. By highlighting some of the bushidō values, Culeddu attempts to 
answer the questions as to how and why the representation of the bushi changed 
through history, acknowledging that the samurai were generally not represented 
as they actually were, but as historical circumstances imagined them to be. In 
the final article in this section, Naama Eisenstein, on the other hand, focuses on 
11Asian Studies VI (XXII), 2 (2018), pp. 5–12
visual representations of samurai behaviour. She takes the example of the famous 
episode from the Genpei War (1180–1185) as described in the Heike monogatari, 
and explores how the meaning of this commonly depicted episode changed over 
time. By analysing visual representations, she proposes possible explanations for 
the immense popularity of the story, which in our understanding is certainly not 
one of honour, but rather one of deception.
The third part, Modern Tranformations features four articles focusing on modern 
echoes and representations of bushidō. Danny Orbach traces the bakumatsu “men 
of high spirit” or shishi and their ideology of “purity of the spirit” as a legitimate 
motive for illegal acts, and follows its transformation and application in judicial 
practice during the Taishō and Shōwa periods. He argues that the relative judi-
cial leniency to right-wing terrorists in the early 1930s was interlinked with the 
deep-rooted ideology of subjectivism. This ideology, based on the mythologiza-
tion of the shishi, had, according to Orbach, three main tenets: spontaneity, sin-
cerity and pure motives, defined as an intention to serve the emperor, the country 
and the public good. In the second article of this section Nathan H. Ledbetter 
focuses on the production of Military History of Japan (Nihon Senshi) by the Im-
perial Japanese Army as an attempt to tie the new military institution to the 
samurai tradition—a process of inventing tradition, similar to the one of creating 
the modern bushidō ideology itself. The interpretations contained in Nihon Senshi, 
according to Ledbetter, influenced military thinkers and propagated a version of 
 premodern military campaigns that placed regional military forces as national 
sources of pride. The third article, by Simona Lukminaitė, turns its attention to the 
development of modern education system and examines how bushidō and martial 
arts were employed in the education of women in the Meiji period. In its quest 
for recogni tion of Japan as a civilized and modern state, the Meiji government 
realized the role of women had to be redefined as well, and many intellectuals 
argued that women’s education was one of the shaping-factors to the physical and 
mental development of future generations. Women thus required an upbringing 
that would address this issue. Physical education was a means to, first of all, liber-
ate women’s bodies by allowing physical and mental expression and confidence, in 
addition to assuring their health and thus ability to contribute to society. At the 
same time, it was understood as a means for moral and mental training that would 
ensure good character, especially in the case of martial arts that were seen as capa-
ble of balancing the overemphasis of Western learning in the education of wom-
en. Finally, Andrew Horvat searches for the legacy of “samurai values” and bushidō 
in contemporary Japanese journalism and higher education. This legacy, according 
to Horvat, is not necessarily rooted in actual samurai behaviour, but this in no way 
diminishes the power of ideological perception regarding samurai behaviour. For 
12 Luka Culiberg: Guest Editor’s Foreword
example, the part of bushidō Horvat focuses on in his paper is the moral and ethi-
cal teachings emphasizing jinkaku or superior character, which Edo era educators 
hoped to inculcate into generations of peacetime “warriors-turned-bureaucrats”. 
The expected exemplary behaviour among modern day Japanese journalists work-
ing for Japan’s “serious press”, and the stress on the development of jinkaku in 
contemporary Japanese education are, according to Horvat, evidence enough that 
these values remain very much alive today.
The final section, Alternative Approach, features a paper by authors we could call 
“the practitioners” of modern bushidō in martial arts. The paper is written by G. 
Björn Christianson, Mikko Vilenius and Humitake Seki, the 19th generation 
headmaster or shihanke of the Kashima Shinryū, a Japanese koryū martial arts 
school. It presents a point of view which situates martial arts and bushidō firmly 
within Japanese mythology, focusing on a tale about the bestowal of a mythi-
cal sword Futsunomitama-no-tsurugi to the legendary first Emperor, Jinmu ten-
nō. The article combines archaeological evidence with mythological narratives, 
taking them at face value, and proposes a theory of the development of a longer, 
outwards-curving sword configuration suitable for a style of two-handed usage 
which became part of the kōmyō-ken curriculum within Kashima Shinden Buju-
tsu, in which the authors recognise one of the earliest of the interactions between 
technology and technique that was driving the evolution of bushidō culture.
It is our hope that the present issue of Asian Studies will contribute to the recent 
revival of academic interest in bushidō, and that it will offer readers informative 
contents with many fascinating insights. I wish you an enjoyable reading.
Luka Culiberg, Guest Editor