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The Bushido Code: An Overview

Bushido, which means "way of the warrior," refers to a complex set of Japanese valuesstressing honor and loyalty to country and family above all else. These values beganto develop very informally as early as the ninth century among the samurai warriorclass, as various ideas circulated about the characteristics of an ideal warrior.

Having evolved over many centuries, these warrior values began to become morestandardized as a code during the Tokugawa Shogunate, an era of samurai rule inJapan that began at the turn of the 17th century. In the late 1860s, civil war endedthe nearly 300-year shogunate, bringing about the Meiji imperial restoration and anew era of modernization. Yet the deep-rooted influence of Bushido on Japaneseculture persisted.

A principal value runningBushido was a strict hierarchythat emphasized obedience toauthority. It called for warriorsto fight to the death in battle topreserve the honor of theirfamily or overlord, and in theface of imminent failure ordisgrace, ritualistic suicide

(seppuku) was required.

Off the battlefield, Bushidorequired warriors to exhibit astrict sense of honor and self-control at all times. They wereto maintain a benevolent yetdetached attitude toward life;caring for the earth and otherpeople without developingpassions that could cloud theirjudgment. This ethos bears

deep traces of dominantreligious ideas of the time,including Confucian ideals ofproper social relations and Zen-Buddhist teachings aboutmeditation and reincarnation.

Over time, the basic tenets of Bushido have been variously altered, transposed, andrecycled within Japanese society, but a general emphasis on loyalty to country andfamily, and a downplaying of individualism have remained characteristic.

In the 20th century, Bushido concepts were expressed both through the educationalsystem and by propagandists to fuel Japanese nationalism, as the country pursued itsinternational ambitions and also grappled with the powerful forces of Westernindividualism. With its endorsement of sacrificial death, Bushido also worked as a

Copyright 2005 WGBH Educational Foundation

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motivation for Japanese pilots to take onkamikaze missions during World War II.

What influence the Bushido code may have hadon Chiune Sugihara, whose mother came froma long line of samurai, is difficult to determine.Certainly, his decision to issue unauthorizedvisas to Jewish refugees in Lithuania in 1940embodied the sort of noble altruism thatBushido espouses. Yet many of Sugihara'smajor choices in life such as defying hisfather's wish that he study medicine, and hisdisobedience of government authority in writingthe visas indicate an individualistic streakthat could be seen as running contrary totraditional Bushido ideals. Sugihara's adultconversion to Christianity is a furthersuggestion that Bushido did not constitute his

primary set of motivating values.

Copyright 2005 WGBH Educational Foundation