Bushido: "The Unwritten Code of Laws"

Japan recognized that the domain of a function was changing, and, if the landed estate wanted to be a office (politically, economically, and militarily), it would contract to change dramatically in every area.

The question, then, is how much Bushido move to affect Japan as the nation went through this operate of great change.

One great change was in political relation. previous(prenominal) to the era under study, Japan was ru guide by a small group of powerful men drawing their power from imperial government. The masses were not included in politics to any meaningful degree. The expanding militarization of Japan at the number of the century was certainly shaped in part by the " appearance of the warrior" of the code of Bushido. At the same time, the people began to bear witness a political activism which began to play a part in politics. As we read in Okamoto:

At the time of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan's outside(prenominal) policy was controlled by a decision-making oligarchy. . . . Unity among its members was strengthened by their palpate of national mission, an overall similarity in domains of origin

. . . [and] the position that they were . . . shielded by the constitution from outside pressures.

All of these factors promoting angiotensin converting enzyme were in part outgrowths of the way of the warrior---nationalism, similar origins, and a sense that the leaders were superior to the people. Okamoto

The public, which knew nought of Japan's weaknesses and which had been led to expect much more generous concessions from a "defeated" Russia, was outraged by the terms of the settlement. Throughout the nation individuals and groups denounced the peace treaty as "shameful" and totally unacceptable. grand opposition to the treaty and to the "traitorous" Katsura government was organized by patriotic societies and party activists.

Enterprise, hard work, and tenacity---three qualities which would qualify as elements of the way of the warrior, the code of Bushido.

Imperial Japanese Commission. Japan in the origination of the 20th Century. Tokyo: Imperial Japanese Commission, 1904.

Public assessment on foreign policy issues, however, was anything only feeble and acquiescent.

Its strongly nationalistic quality reflected national aspirations and fear of Western encroachment, and the functionary indoctrination of the masses in a state-centered ideology reinforced this sanctioned tendency. Public opinion at the time of the Russo-Japanese War was promoted and led by those

The basic argument of Nitobe is that the qualities of the samurai, or the warrior, or the associate of Bushido, are qualities which were growing in importance in Japanese society at the turn of the century when he wrote and make his book. On "rectitude or justice," for example, he writes: "Here we have it away the most cogent precept in the code of the samurai. zero point is more loathsome to him than underhand dealings and crooked undertakings."

. . . . The peak . . . stood face to face with the governed---with the entire mass of the people. . . . The keen cleverness of our enlightened Sovereign . . . was not slow to perceive that in order to become a powerful State it was a matter of prime necessity that these units, or rather each(prenominal) individual unit, should be developed to higher standards of perfection and of civilization, and that they should not, as heretofore, remain a passive element in the State, but
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