Paper short abstract:

This paper explores hybridity of bushido which reflects contradictory necessity of Japanese modernity. My aim is to demonstrate how it simultaneously served for reproduction of traditional culture and transition of hegemony from the old order to the new one.

Paper long abstract:

Studies on bushido have revealed that it is one of the most typical examples of modern invented tradition, almost invalid for actual practices and values of bushi from the middle ages to the early modernity(Kanno 2004; Taniguchi 2007; Suzuki 2001). In fact, it was already pointed out by a contemporary of Nitobe. Chamberlain(1912) claimed that Bushido was a newly invented tradition, the term itself coined in the Meiji period. In this analytical framework, however, it is overlooked that bushido is not only a consequence of contradictory trajectory of Japanese modernity but also a solution to and a source of it. It can be argued that Bushido was useful both for reproduction of old cultural order and for smoother transition of hegemony to the new one. It simultaneously played these seemingly contradictory roles. What I call hybridity of bushido is a result of this ambiguity.

This contradiction corresponds to double necessity of the newly established Meiji government. On the one hand, the project of modernization required it to be cut off from the feudal tradition, especially from that of the Tokugawa shogunate. On the other hand, for the new regime to be maintained, it was indispensable to establish legitimacy of the new order by relying on the continuing cultural tradition. This is especially true in the case that the dominant elites were mostly constituted by the former bushi class.

From this perspective, this paper examines the discourses on bushido, paying special attention to two groups of texts: the founding text of Nitobe(1899) and the related texts of his contemporaries such as Inoue(1901), Tsuda(1901), and Togawa(1906); the imperial rescripts to soldiers and their vulgarizing texts among the popular mass. The former are transcultural texts in the sense of Pratt(1992) since they represent mutually constitutive process between two cultures, the West and Japan, civilization and barbary, or modernity and tradition. The latter documents are worth of careful scrutiny because the contradicting necessity of the new regime was particularly acute in the military domain where the establishment of a unified national army was in urgent need.