Bushido

Loyalty, frugality, courage, honour and a readiness to die: the list is real, but the tidy version of it arrived late. Samurai spent the Sengoku period switching sides, hiring out and staying alive. It was the long Tokugawa peace, when a warrior class had paperwork instead of battles, that produced the essays telling warriors what a warrior was meant to be.

Hagakure, dictated by the retired retainer Yamamoto Tsunetomo around 1716, is the famous one, and its most quoted line locates the way of the warrior in death. Almost nobody read it at the time. The word reached English through Nitobe Inazo, whose book Bushido: The Soul of Japan appeared in 1900, written in English for foreign readers and comparing samurai ethics to European chivalry.

Nitobe turned a scattered set of house rules into a national idea, and the military of the 1930s pushed that idea somewhere he had not intended. Fiction keeps the clean version: the retainer who honours a promise made to a dead lord, the swordsman who refuses to draw first, the code that costs its holder everything and gets followed anyway.