{"id":2493,"date":"2025-09-25T19:16:37","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T10:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/?p=2493"},"modified":"2025-09-25T19:20:57","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T10:20:57","slug":"budo-beat-37-bridging-the-past-the-present-and-the-pacific","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/?p=2493","title":{"rendered":"Budo Beat 37: Bridging the Past, the Present, and the Pacific"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The \u201cBudo Beat\u201d Blog features a collection of short reflections, musings, and anecdotes on a wide range of budo topics by Professor Alex Bennett<\/a>, a seasoned budo scholar and practitioner. Dive into digestible and diverse discussions on all things budo\u2014from the philosophy and history to the practice and culture that shape the martial Way.<\/em>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nitobe Inaz\u014d (1862-1933) is one of those names you just can\u2019t avoid if you spend any time talking about samurai. He is remembered as an educator, diplomat, and Quaker who became Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations! His life story is and career is just so phenomenal, there’s no way I can do it justice in this blogpost. (If you want to know a LOT more about the man, I suggest you check out the introduction in my book<\/a> \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
“Bushid\u014d” brushed by Nitobe Inaz\u014d, the word that came to define the spirit of the samurai for the modern world.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

His lasting fame comes from a slim English book he published in 1900, Bushido: The Soul of Japan<\/em>. He framed the samurai ethic around seven core virtues: gi<\/em> (\u7fa9 = rectitude), y\u016b<\/em> (\u52c7 = courage), jin<\/em> (\u4ec1 = benevolence), rei<\/em> (\u793c = politeness), makoto<\/em> (\u8aa0 = sincerity), meiyo<\/em> (\u540d\u8a89 = honour), and ch\u016bgi<\/em> (\u5fe0\u7fa9 = loyalty). He compared this moral framework to European chivalry and Christian ethics, presenting bushido as a universal code of character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That book gave the world its most widely read version of the \u201csamurai code\u201d. It was translated into multiple languages, avidly read by Theodore Roosevelt, and remains in print today as an all time classic. Scholars are quick to call it out for what it is: romantic, historically shaky, and more Thomas Carlyle and Bible than Yamaga Sok\u014d or Daid\u014dji Y\u016bzan. It is often dismissed in academia as hyped-up nonsense. Yes, ye olde bullshido\u2026 Notwithstanding, love it or hate it, Nitobe\u2019s Bushido<\/em> still matters because it continues to shape how people think about samurai ethics, in Japan and abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Nitobe Inaz\u014d\u2019s Bushid\u014d: The Soul of Japan was first published in English in 1899\/1900 and publsihed by a small Quaker publishing house, Leeds & Biddle. Given the fuss being made about it around the world, it was first translated into Japanese in 1908 by Nitobe’s student, Sakurai Hikoichir\u014d, and later re-translated by Yanaihara Tadao for Iwanami Shoten. Lauded for its portrayal of a noble warrior ethic yet criticised as a Meiji-era nationalist construct, the book continues to spark debate over what bushid\u014d truly meant to the samurai of old.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Anyway. Why Nitobe in this blogpost? I went up to Hanamaki last week following the yabusame<\/em> in Morioka (Iwate Prefecture) and met up with my mate Jonathan Levine-Ogura. Monuments to Nitobe are found everywhere in Iwate, and Jonathan took me to see the Hanamaki Nitobe Memorial Museum not too far from where he lives. The museum lays out the Nitobe clan’s story in a way you can’t get from his book alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a nutshell, way back in 1189, just as the Kamakura era was kicking off, Minamoto-no-Yoritomo gave Chiba Tsunehide a solid pat on the back for his war efforts and handed him a chunk of land. The fief sat out in Shimotsuke, what we now call Tochigi, and included the areas of Nitobe, Takaoka, and Aoya. Tsunehide packed up the family and headed for Nitobe, where they settled in. Skip ahead five generations and Chiba Sadatsuna clearly fancied a bit of rebranding. Out went the old surname, in came Nitobe. From there, the Nitobe family story really began to write itself.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
One of the museum\u2019s display areas traces the Nitobe clan right back to its earliest roots. Visiting on a weekday, we had the place more or less to ourselves. It\u2019s a little off the beaten track, and while more could be done to accommodate international visitors with multilingual explanations, the atmosphere is very pleasant. There are actually several museums like this dotted around the regions where the Nitobe family once lived and left their mark.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The museum in Hanamaki is a place where you can learn about the Nitobe past through records of their achievements, as well as exhibits tracing Inaz\u014d\u2019s upbringing and life, using documents and actual artefacts. You walk through displays of genealogy charts, household objects, canal maps, and photographs, and suddenly Nitobe is no longer just an influential Quaker in Geneva who wrote a quaint little book about bushido, but the real deal heir of a samurai line that had lived in and around Hanamaki since 1598. For over two centuries, the Nitobe clan served under the Nanbu lords, instructing the castle retainers in both letters and martial arts while later on pouring their energy into land development. They were samurai who taught, fought, and dug with equal passion.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
A secret scroll from the Kanze-ry\u016b school of yawara (jujutsu), earned by a member of Nitobe Inaz\u014d\u2019s family. The Nitobes were licensed instructors in several martial traditions.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

That context makes Nitobe Inaz\u014d\u2019s famous words, \u201cI wish to become a bridge across the Pacific\u201d, sound less like lofty rhetoric and more like family inheritance. The Nitobe clan (not just Inaz\u014d) are still revered by people in the district to this day for what they achieved. They literally reshaped the landscape around them. When Inaz\u014d said he wanted to be a bridge, he was following in the family trade of connecting, cultivating, and building. This is very apt as Inaz\u014d\u2019s illustrious international career in the post-samurai age remained very much centred on agricultural pursuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibits begin with the practical side of samurai life in the north. Edo-period Morioka was hit by no fewer than seventy-six crop failures. Rice meant survival, and the Nitobe clan were instrumental in planning and constructing canals from Lake Towada to Sanbongi, transforming land that would otherwise have gone barren. One display shows maps of the Inaoi River project, completed around 1860 by his grandfather Tsut\u014d and father J\u016bjir\u014d, which guaranteed bumper harvests the following year. Then they laid out plans for a brand-new town called Inaoi-ch\u014d, laid out in a tidy four-way grid with a dozen neat neighbourhoods. That little project ended up being a blueprint for modern city planning in Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Nitobe Tsut\u014d (1793\u20131871), grandfather of Inaz\u014d, was a Nanbu domain samurai and later a timber merchant and reformer. Born at Hanamaki Castle, he weathered political upheaval, and eventually led the reclamation of the Sanbongi Plain before becoming senior councilor of Shichinohe. His life bridged the worlds of warrior, timber merchant, and pioneer, shaping the Nitobe family legacy.
<\/em>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Inaz\u014d (childhood name Inanosuke) was born around this time in 1862. His very name, Inaz\u014d, meaning \u201cto produce rice\u201d, was a tribute to that agricultural success. Seeing the irrigation plans alongside family records, you understand that service for the Nitobes was measured in full bellies, not battlefield triumphs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another display presents a set of swords that were heirlooms of the Nitobe clan. Looking at that, I was reminded of the coming-of-age ceremony when five-year-old boys of warrior families first put on the pleated trousers (hakama<\/em>) and joined the samurai community. Apparently, Inaz\u014d stood on a go<\/em> board, sword at his hip, and inducted into a centuries-old order. Within a decade, it was gone. The Meiji Restoration (1868) swept away the class system, outlawed swords, and left the samurai with nothing but memories (and normal haricuts). Later in life, he confessed that losing the sword made him feel \u201clonely in the loins\u201d. People laugh at the phrase, but looking at those swords, I sensed the dislocation: a boy raised for one world, but pushed into another before he had knew what was going on.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Nitobe family swords.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The museum does not hide the darker parts of the Nitobe story, but doesn\u2019t go into too much detail either. His father, J\u016bjir\u014d, was accused of illicit trading with the French, selling silk without permission to raise money for development projects. He was put under house arrest. The charges were dropped, but the humiliation remained, and he died at age forty-eight \u201cof despair\u201d. It\u2019s only alluded to in the museum, but if you know about it, you feel the sting. Nitobe\u2019s later insistence that the worth of any act \u201clies in its motive and sincerity\u201d was not just empty theory. It was personal testimony from a family that had seen hard-earned honour unravel overnight, but was ultimately salvaged through continued hard work.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Nitobe Inaz\u014d (on the left) entered the second class of Sapporo Agricultural College (today\u2019s Hokkaido University), where he embraced Christianity under the lasting influence of William S. Clark, the college\u2019s first Vice-Principal (though the two never met). Alongside classmates such as Uchimura Kanz\u014d (right), Nitobe was baptized by Methodist Episcopal Bishop M. C. Harris. His choice of agriculture reflected Emperor Meiji\u2019s wish that the Nitobe family continue its legacy of cultivating new land, a path begun by his father in the northern Nanbu domain.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

There are lighter sides to the story, too. Inaz\u014d was a known shite as a lad, prone to fights, his mother forever apologising to neighbours. Once pushed toward study, he became relentless. The museum tracks his path to Tokyo, his adoption by his uncle \u014cta Tokitoshi, his studies at the English school in Tsukiji, then Sapporo Agricultural College. The displays emphasise how foreign learning and Christian ideas gradually mixed with the traditional values drilled into him by his mother. When he signed the Covenant of Believers in Jesus at Sapporo and was baptised as Paul Nitobe, it was not a rupture so much as another graft onto an already complex inheritance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being able to read between the lines through my previous research into the man, the museum panels were clear to me: this was a clan that had always mixed martial obligation with practical service. Inaz\u014d simply carried that blend into new soil, so to speak.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
This would look really good on your bookshelf!<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Seeing all this made me reflect on my own work with Nitobe. A few years ago, I published an annotated edition of his Bushido: The Samurai Code of Japan with Tuttle<\/em>. I laid his rather convoluted text out with context, footnotes, and critical commentary. That book picked up an Independent Publisher Book Award, which was somewhat gratifying (thank you Inaz\u014d), but what mattered more was the process of really sitting inside Nitobe\u2019s words. At an earlier time in my academic career, I treated his Bushido<\/em> as a problem text, beautiful prose but somewhat unreliable history; an \u201cinvented tradition\u201d packaged for a Western audience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After walking through the Hanamaki museum, I was reminded again that this is not the fairest way to read it. If the nebulous ideas collectively known as bushido had always been a series of re-inventions, different voices shaping warrior values for their own eras, ranks, and regions, then Nitobe\u2019s thesis is as legitimate as any. Seeing how far back his family stretches into samurai lore, how they lived duty in mud and maps, makes his ideals as valid as the strictures of Yamaga or Daid\u014dji. He may have dressed it in pretty Victorian English, but the bones were his own.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Dr<\/em>. Nitobe held key teaching posts throughout his career. He began as a professor at Sapporo Agricultural College, then taught at Kyoto Imperial University and Tokyo Imperial University, while also serving as principal of the prestigious First Higher School. Later he became head of Takushoku University and the founding president of Tokyo Woman\u2019s Christian University, where he championed liberal education and character formation. Through these roles and as Japan\u2019s first exchange professor to the United States, he left a lasting mark on both Japanese and international education.
<\/em>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The museum does not shy away from the later contradictions either. His role in colonial administration in Taiwan and as a professor in colonial policy at Kyoto University, his attempts to humanise Japan\u2019s expansion, his awkward position in the 1930s, torn between loyalty to his country and loyalty to international ideals, all of it is presented plainly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Popular polymath though he was, the notorious \u201cMatsumoto incident\u201d, when an offhand remark about militarists and communists got printed and he was forced to apologise before angry veterans, is not recounted (at least, I couldn\u2019t see anything related to it). But in the photos of his later life standing proud with his American wife, Mary Elkinton, I could detect burgeoning signs of frustration in his eyes. Not because of his wife I should add! But because he traversed a time of absolute turmoil, domestic and international, and much of his later years were spent stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Defending Japan to the world on the one hand, and criticising Japan to his countrymen on the other. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Mary Patterson Elkinton Nitobe (1857\u20131938), born into a prominent Quaker family in Philadelphia, married Nitobe Inaz\u014d in 1891 and made Japan her lifelong home. She supported her husband\u2019s work, including Bushid\u014d: The Soul of Japan, and was active in education, internationalism, and fostering U.S.\u2013Japan relations. Even after his death she remained in Japan, editing his reminiscences and continuing her quiet but influential role as a cultural bridge.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

By the time you reach the final cartoon cutouts just outside the exit, the arc is complete. Born in Morioka in 1862 as the son of a samurai, Nitobe Inaz\u014d came of age just as the sword was about to be outlawed. Topknots cut away, the proud Nanbu samurai were reclassified as ordinary blokes. He became a Christian, a Quaker, and a fluent writer in English, and was perhaps the only man of his generation who could have written Bushido: The Soul of Japan<\/em>, an expose on the Japanese people in a form the West was eager to read. It was polished, persuasive, guaranteed to annoy academics, and remains a bestseller to this day. Which is probably why it annoys academics! <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
You can tell this is Japan. <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

From a boy in hakama<\/em> standing on a go<\/em> board to the \u201cStar of Geneva\u201d at the League of Nations, his life veered through loss, reinvention, and triumph before ending with the bleak irony of dying abroad in 1933 just as Japan turned its back on the internationalism he had spent a lifetime preaching. His was a life that never fits into a neat formula, but it makes sense if you see it as an extension of that family tradition in Hanamaki: service, adaptation, and the conviction that honour lives in motive.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
On November 1, 1984, Nitobe Inaz\u014d\u2019s portrait was placed on the Series D 5,000-yen note, honouring him as a symbol of learning and culture. Since those notes have long disappeared from circulation, however, younger generations today seldom recognize his face or even know who he was. Sigh…<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Walking out with Jonathan, I mused that the museum hadn\u2019t shifted my own reading of Nitobe. It had actually reaffirmed my understanding. With regards to his book on bushido, many experts will go on calling it flawed. Fair enough. But in Hanamaki you see the pedigree that gave it weight. The Nitobes had lived and worked as samurai for centuries. They had taught, fought, engineered, and survived. Nitobe was simply putting their values into print, in the only idiom that could make sense to his audience. It is quite brilliant, I think, when appreciated in this light.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The \u201cBudo Beat\u201d Blog features a collection of short reflections, musings, and anecdotes on a wide range of budo topics by Professor Alex Bennett, a seasoned budo scholar and practitioner. Dive into digestible and diverse discussions on all things budo\u2014from the philosophy and history to the practice and culture that shape the martial Way. Nitobe Inaz\u014d (1862-1933) is one of those names you just can\u2019t...","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[47,88,89],"class_list":["post-2493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-b-blog","tag-bushido","tag-hanamaki","tag-nitobe-inazo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2493"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2519,"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions\/2519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/budobooks.jp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}