WAR compels the attention.  It is the touchstone that reveals alike root-brutalities and transcendent virtues of heroism and self-sacrifice.  Behind the ghastly veil of agony and bloodshed we are often able to feel dimly on one of the sides some animating motive of patriotism, some high devotion to a cause, some impelling enthusiasm that drives individuals, brigades, armies even, to almost impossible heights of daring and endurance.

For the past year our eyes have been riveted on one of the most horrible wars of modern times.  While both nations have displayed conspicuous courage, the Japanese have manifested a wise and yet reckless heroism, an amazing foresight, a generosity, a modesty, a courtesy that we seek for in vain in the annals of other wars.  What is the vital root whence these qualities spring?  Not religion, in our sense of the term, for travellers unite in reporting that the religions of Japan have only a slight hold upon the people.  The fibre that is behind the Japanese arms is not spiritual but moral, and Japan offers to our astonished sight the spectacle, unique, perhaps, with the exception of Sparta, of a nation nourishing a high status of duty on the fruits of an ancient philosophy, and deriving its overwhelming force from the practice of a code of ethics.

We know but little as yet about this Japanese philosophy, this code of ethics that is called Bushido. Allusions to it in the works of travellers, stray articles in newspapers passed almost unnoticed until the object-lesson of the war compelled our interest and set us searching out for causes.  And most opportunity we have come across a little book on Bushido, by a native of Japan,* which contains in small compass a luminous exposition of the principles of Bushido.  The facts are admirably marshalled, and the book is written in limpid English.  It is full of learning, both Eastern and Western---not unassimilated learning, which is, according to a typical Samurai saying,
an ill-smelling vegetable, which must be boiled and boiled until it is fit for use."  Dr. Nitobe defines Bushido as a Code of Chivalry, or Principles of Knighthood.  It is the direct offspring of Japanese feudalism, deriving, however, moral sustenance from Buddhism, Shintoism, and from the teaching of Confucius.

The tripod that supports Bushido is, we read, Wisdom, Benevolence and Courage--courage that is moral as well as physical--the "doing what is right."  "It is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die." Bushido, at first a military code of ethics, has filtered down through the whole nation, and the book casts many interesting side-lights on such subjects as politeness and ceremony and other striking Japanese characteristics.  As homage and fealty to a superior are the distinctive features of feudalism, so loyalty is regarded as the primary human duty.  As we read we are made to feel how many of the qualities displayed in the present war spring directly from this root.  And yet, to quote a writer in the Times, "Bushido is not a religion, but a philosophy."  Dr. Nitobe says in this connection: "If religion is no more than 'morality touched by emotion,' as Matthew Arnold defines it, few ethical systems are better entitled to the rank of religion than Bushido,"  But that religion is not properly so defined is admitted in another place, where we are told that the Samurai, the practisers of Bushido, relegated religion and theology to the priests, and concerned themselves with them only in so far as they helped to nourish courage.

We pause here to ask: Can a man, can a nation, live by philosophy alone?  Lofty, heroic as its fruits are shown to be, has it wherewithal to satisfy the whole nature of the individual and of the State?  "What has philosophy given the world but unending words?" exclaims Mr. Fielding in "The Hearts of Men."  "It is the denial of emotion, and emotion is life....  Hope and beauty and happiness are strangers to that twilight country."  Buddhism, the prevailing religion of Japan, Mr. Fielding himself allows to consist chiefly in a rule of conduct or course of ethics.

Hope and beauty and happiness.  Think back for a moment on our conception of Japan before the war.  Beauty and happiness were integral parts of the picture.  We imagined a people of whom the lowest rag-picker was as refined in thought and manner, as cultivated as the highest aristocrat; travellers told us tales of rickshaw-men stopping to draw one another's attention to the sunset; we saw photographs of the great festivals of the flowers, the blooming of the cherries, the blossoming of the irises, and read how the masses crowded to these with a quiet rapture that knows no parallel in our western world.  Beauty and happiness!  Surely this land of philosophers is no twilight country bereft of these.  The war has shown the nobility of Japan to consist in the fulfillment of duty, and to be rooted in ethics.  But the happiness of Japan springs from another source, and perhaps we are not too daring if we suggest that this source is the worship of the beauty of the world.  Does not Maeterlinck say: "The soul may well be no more than the most beautiful desire of our soul."

It would be hard to say whether a high moral law gives us insight of vision into this beauty, ---whether to see all things clearly without impediment springs from being inwardly good and pure; or whether, on the other hand, the love of lovely things purifies and elevates until the highest moral law becomes a necessity of being.  A'Kempis holds to the first sequence, while a perfect Bengali poem of the people, quoted by Sister Nidevita, prefers the second:
        "Oh Mother Earth, Father Sky,
        "Brother Wind, Friend Light,
        "Sweetheart Water,
        "Here take my last salutation with folded hands;
        "For to-day I am melting away into the supreme
        "Because my heart became pure,
        "And all delusions vanished
        "Through the power of your good company."
But at any rate, that the moral law, and the worship of the beauty of the world, both rightly understood, are interdependent and complete one another, and may in time come to fulfill all the aspirations of humanity, is barely open to question.  Kant saw this when he linked together in one memorable sentence "the Moral Law and the starry heavens."

Stray men of the West have felt through the ages awe and ecstasy before the beauty of the world. Chaucer, when he rose before sunrise to see the daisy open "Kneeling always till it unclosed was, Upon the smale swete softe gras," was in close kinship of soul with the Japanese who throng in unquestioning delight to see the flowering of the irises.  "When the Creator himself is pictured as making new resolutions in his heart upon smelling a sweet savour (Gen. viii.21)," says Dr. Nitobe, "is it any wonder that the sweet-smelling season of the cherry blossom should call forth the whole nation from their little inhabitations?"  Fiona Macleod tells of an old Gaelic peasant who stood unbonneted at sunrise, and who answered, when questioned, "Every morning like this I take off my hat to the beauty of the world."  Wordsworth feels in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living globe
         "A motion and a spirit that impels
         "All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
         "And rolls through all things,"
and W.B. Yeats sees "In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way..."
But these are stray men scattered here and there; and we look with wondering eyes to a whole people for whom in times of peace the great events of the year are the blossoming of the flowers, and who nourish their heroism on philosophy, and their happiness on Beauty.
 

IMAGE	IMAGE NO.	DATA
	mrk2005-011	(Tuesday 26 April) "Ishiwari-zakura" (石割桜; the "Rock Splitting Cherry Tree"), Court of Justice, Uchimaru.  It is another symbol of Iwate Prefecture.  Inazo Nitobe's Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899) begins: "Chivalry is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom; nor is it a dried-up specimen of an antique virtue preserved in the herbarium of our history" (Ch. I, "Bushido as an Ethical System").  Cf. also Ch. XV, "The Influence of Bushido," in which he refers to the cherry blossom (Jap. "sakura") as "the favourite of our people and the emblem of our character."  For Nitobe, "Ishiwari-zakura" must have been the special cherry tree because he was very familiar with it in his early years since he was born in a lower Samurai house as their third son in Morioka.
	mrk2005-012	(Tuesday 26 April) "Ishiwari-zakura" (the "Rock Splitting Cherry Tree"), Court of Justice, Uchimaru: Originally here stood the chief retainer's house during the Edo Period (1603-1867).
	mrk2005-015	(Tuesday 26 April) "Ishiwari-zakura" (the "Rock Splitting Cherry Tree"), Court of Justice, Uchimaru: Originally here stood the chief retainer's house during the Edo Period (1603-1867).
	mrk2004-099	(Sunday 22 August) A monument of Inazo Nitobe (1862-1933), Iwate park: "I do hope that I will be a bridge over the Pacific Ocean."  He told so for the first time in the viva-voce examination of Tokyo Imperial University at the age of 21.
	mrk2004-142	(Tuesday 8 September) Statue of Inazo Nitobe (by Fumio Asakura, 1983), Birthplace of Inazo Nitobe, Shimonohashi-cho, Morioka
	mrk2004-143	(Tuesday 8 September) Statue of Inazo Nitobe (by Fumio Asakura, 1983), Birthplace of Inazo Nitobe, Shimonohashi-cho, Morioka
	mrk2004-146	(Tuesday 8 September) Birthplace of Inazo Nitobe, Shimonohashi-cho, Morioka: he was born here as the third son of Jujiro Nitobe in 1862.  Inazo's father, Jyujiro, and grandfather, Tsutou Nitobe, were known as the promoters of reclaiming the waste land of Sanbongihara (now Towada City), Aomori.