LITMIR.BIZ

      HAGAKURE IN CONTEXT

INTRODUCTION

Bushido1 tends to stir people’s imaginations. The term is synonymous on the one hand with strength, masculinity, fearlessness, honor, and transcendence, and on the other, callousness and cold-hearted brutality. The most visible vestige of samurai culture in the modern age is budo, that is, the Japanese traditional martial arts, and these are indisputably Japan’s most successful cultural exports, with literally tens of millions of enthusiasts around the world. People practice these arts not only as a means of self-defense or as competitive sports, but also in the pursuit of spiritual development.

Another factor that sparked interest in bushido—although by no means a driving force now—was Japan’s remarkable postwar economic success. In the days of the bubble economy in the late 1980s, the belief that Japan’s economic and business accomplishments could be attributed to management practices deriving from “samurai strategy” was widely held. The Japanese culture boom of the 1980s and 1990s encouraged many people to take up martial arts, and to study translations of famous warrior books, such as Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, Daidōji Yūzan’s Budō Shoshinshū, and of course, Yamamoto Jōchō’s (Tsunetomo)2 Hagakure. Nowadays, Japanese culture has been embraced by a new generation of “anime otaku,” or diehard devotees of Japanese animation and pop culture.

      There have been many popular movies over the years promoting samurai ideals, including The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise and Watanabe Ken. This film sparked a resurgence of interest in samurai ethics. Also of note was the critically acclaimed 1999 film, Ghost Dog, starring Forest Whitaker, which used Hagakure aphorisms as reference points throughout the story about an African-American hit man. He worked for a Mafia mobster, seeing himself as a devoted “retainer,” unflinching in his loyalty to the man who saved his life years ago.

      Despite the noble depictions in modern pop culture and literature, some scholars have described samurai as nothing more than “valorous butchers.” Indeed, there is no denying that throughout Hagakure death sentences are violently dished out for the most trivial of offenses. From the standpoint of contemporary morality, the apparent cheapness of life in samurai society seems truly obscene. Texts such as Hagakure, which advance death so matter-of-factly, shock our sensibilities, especially in an age when people have a propensity to avoid contemplating their own mortality.

      For example, our society denounces suicide, and capital punishment for murder is a highly contentious issue. To the samurai, however, death was celebrated as being integral to their honor and way of life. Attachment to life hindered a warrior during a catastrophe, and so it was deemed virtuous to train one’s mind and spirit to be able to choose death with firm resolve if the situation called for ‘decisive action.’ As such, while the extremist attitudes and scenes portrayed so vividly in Hagakure may repulse the modern reader, the aphorisms provide a window on an age and a society that, although foreign to our own lifestyle, will serve to stimulate readers into contemplating challenging questions regarding the human experience. In order to appreciate the content, it is important to first put things into context.

THE HAGAKURE PHENOMENON

Properly titled Hagakure-kikigaki (literally “Dictations given hidden by leaves”), Hagakure is now one of the most famous treatises on bushido. Completed in 1716, the content consists of approximately 1,300 vignettes and contemplations of varying lengths, divided into 11 books. It covers the people, history, and traditions of the Saga domain3 in the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, and also records anecdotes about warriors from other provinces. Although some of the content is abstract in nature, the pages are filled with engaging stories about the feats of individual samurai and the maelstrom of retainership, premised by a balance of insanity and equanimity, rather than a convoluted philosophical discourse.

      The first two books of Hagakure are believed to have been dictated by Yamamoto Jōchō (1659–1719), a middle-ranking retainer of Nabeshima Mitsushige (1632–1700), daimyo of the Hizen (Saga) province, to fellow clansman Tashiro Tsuramoto (1678–1748). Books 3 to 6 are about the Nabeshima lords and episodes that occurred in the Saga domain; Books 7 to 9 delve into the “meritorious feats” of Saga warriors; Book 10 is a critique of samurai from other provinces; and Book 11 provides supplementary information about miscellaneous events and various aspects of warrior culture.

      Although Jōchō undoubtedly provided a fair proportion of the information contained in Book 3 onwards, given that some of the entries relate to people and happenings after his death, Tashiro Tsuramoto clearly pieced together much of the content from other sources. Thus, although the book is commonly attributed to Jōchō, it was ultimately Tsuramoto’s abiding efforts that brought it to fruition.

The content is censorious of the Tokugawa shogunate (the warrior government based in Edo) in some sections as a reaction to restrictive decrees that reduced samurai to a “mechanical cog in the bureaucratic wheel of state.”4 It was also critical of the actions of certain eminent warriors of the Saga domain. Because of its somewhat guileless critiques of local dignitaries, and the effete ways of metropolitan “Kamigata” warriors of Edo and Kyoto, Hagakure was treated cautiously as a “forbidden text,” and secretly circulated only among members of the Saga domain until it was thrust into the limelight and popularized in the militaristic atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s. The content was considered too inflammatory for Hagakure to be openly endorsed within the Saga domain, and it was not even used as a text in the domain school, Kōdōkan, where young Saga warriors were educated. Given the book’s far-reaching recognition today, however, it has become a source of great pride for the people of modern-day Saga Prefecture.

      Modern interest in Hagakure transpired through a resurgent fascination in the traditions of bushido, ironically after the samurai class had been dismantled as Japan embarked on its quest to modernize. Although the samurai class was brought to an end during the Meiji period (1868–1912), it

Скачать книгу