The Way of the Warrior: Hagakure

I want to repost one of my first columns, written about eleven years ago. Reading Hagakure, a book I stumbled upon by chance at the time, proved to be a pivotal moment for me, so much so that I decided to dedicate a paper to it. An Italian version of it can still be found on the web, in some blogs.

I recently felt the need to reread the original article, to correct some typos and add paragraphs to it, but its substance has not changed.

What has changed, however, is our society, which in the past eleven years, with the Covid pandemic recoiling, has become in my eyes something even more frightening and repulsive. It is not that the process was not already underway in 2013, but it is evident, it should be evident, the acceleration it has undergone in the present day, to the point that I would without hesitation agree with the thought of the Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila when he said that the Western world would not be punished because it was itself its own punishment.

What would the ancient samurai, the ancient warriors, and the men all who lived their lives in centuries so far removed from ours think of a society like ours (only Western?) steeped in wokism, gender, cheap feminism, which even now boasts of having reached the end of History and of being a garden on Earth?

Here is my rewrite....

I have found that the Way of the Warrior consists of death. When the time comes to choose between life death, it is best to choose death right away. It is not that difficult: you just have to decide and move on. Those who claim that it is vain to die without having achieved one's goal are practicing a merchant's way.

This is the awful beginning of Yamamoto Tsunetomo's Hagakure: a book that in the form of precepts, rulings, maxims but also very short stories, has for generations been a kind of spiritual breviary for all Japanese who embraced the Way of the Warrior. Or who intended to do so.

A cursed book, according to the American occupation forces in Japan. A book so hated and feared by Westerners that the Americans worked zealously to remove its memory, burning thousands of copies in fire. The Americans blamed the Hagakure for the fiery nationalism that the Japanese had manifested until their searing defeat in World War II. To the Hagakure and its teachings was traced the phenomenon of kamikazes and mass suicides in lieu of surrender, even among civilians.

The victors thus tried to burn every existing copy of the book, to erase every last memory of it, but they failed in their purpose and the book survived by becoming known worldwide, studied, even now loved or hated by those who read it.

The Hagakure was not written by Tsunetomo himself but by his only pupil Tashiro who contradicted the master's wishes and did not destroy the transcript of the conversations the two had between 1710 and 1716. The result was a book that was immediately considered a valuable treasure by the samurai of the clan to which Tsunetomo belonged and centuries later became one of the cornerstones of samurai literature.

In the years when Hagakure was written, the samurai class was already manifesting the decadent traits of peacetime because the unification of Japan had been completed for more than a century. Indeed, generalized peace brought with it stability and prosperity and thus the need for competent administrative officials rather than legions of warriors always ready for battle. The closing of borders, decreed by a government that feared (not entirely wrongly) the political and religious interference of Spain and Portugal, also prevented the launching of military campaigns abroad so that many samurai found themselves in the contradictory situation of warriors who were only potential combatants. Many of them lost their employment, becoming ronin, masterless samurai forced into a very harsh wandering life that could result in overt criminality. Others resorted to death by suicide, the only means of escaping the dishonor of misery and the hardships that accompanied it. Emblematic in this regard is Harakiri, a 1962 film by Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi, which features an immense Tatsuya Nakadai playing the part of Hanshiro Tsugumo, a wealthy and respected samurai who suddenly plunges into a maelstrom of misery with his entire family because his lord has fallen into disgrace in the eyes of the Shogun. The death in quick succession of his newborn grandson who became ill from the cold, that of his son-in-law who had naively tried to arrange a mock hara-kiri in order to be hired by a local feudal lord, and the subsequent suicide of his beloved daughter, torn by the two sudden deaths, eventually sets off in Nakadai/Tsugumo what Ivan Morris would call centuries later the “nobility of defeat.” With a ferocity that is bloody but at the same time devoid of the slightest possibility of success and redemption, Nakadai tries in vain to punish the system that has turned him into an outcast, meeting his inevitable death.

Tsunetomo teaches by looking to the future because he fears the decadence he sees meandering in the present and remembers with regret the glories of a vanished period, which he, however, never experienced. A time when men could confront each other on the battlefield and each looked their truth in the face without being able to lie. But he himself was a samurai of modern times: he had never participated in any war or battle or duel and, outside of his training, had never known the harshness of real wartime military life.

He had, however, always been a faithful vassal of his Lord, embodying the ideals of loyalty and dedication that were deeply rooted in the Confucian and Buddhist culture that Japan had borrowed from China. But Tsunetomo was so far out of historical time that he could not even practice junshu when his feudal lord died. That is, he could not carry out the suicide by fidelity that he had set out to do since his youth and that had always been allowed to those samurai who had vowed not to survive the death of their daimyō: in fact, a law had been passed a few years earlier forbidding such acts because of past excesses. As an alternative he was allowed to take religious vows and become a Buddhist monk until the end of his earthly days. He himself acknowledges this in the book, stating that he would rather be reincarnated seven times as a samurai from his clan than achieve enlightened nirvana.

What is the Hagakure about? It talks about loyalty. Of dedication. About courage. About ethics. About living one's life by serving one's Lord in a decent way. But not only that. It speaks of a concept typical of Japanese culture at the time and, to a very different extent, contemporary: that of giri, the moral debt one owes to those who have come before us and before us have been able to accomplish great things. Giri is an idea present in other cultures as well but not always as markedly as in samurai Japan. Needless to mention how in the contemporary world, Western and otherwise, dominated by consumerism and lust for money, such a concept sounds outdated and anachronistic to many people's ears. Even funny, to the ears of fools.

The Hagakure talks about death and how to deal with it on a daily basis, for example by urging one to look at oneself daily as if one is already dead: acceptance of this fact, according to Tsunetomo, leads to the ability to live in a balanced and ethical manner. This is an interesting point because there are Christian religious orders whose monks are in the habit of greeting each other by explicitly reminding each other of the inevitability of death. The reminder of the transience of human existence should lead people to act righteously and with balance in their daily lives. This book is also a continuous exhortation to moderation: of senses, feelings, expectations, words, acts, gestures. For while it is easy to fall into a critical situation because of a word spoken lightly or a gesture made even without ill intentions, it can be very difficult to get out of it. And the only way to remove oneself from a critical situation may be seppuku, the ritual suicide of which junshu was one of the variants.

Tsunetomo was steeped in Buddhist sentiment, and this shines through in his exhortations to respect for all living creatures. This may seem like contradictory behavior, but the samurai is a complex figure, and the demise of a state of continuous warfare between feudal clans had fostered the emergence of different characteristics in the same warrior figure. Not incorrectly, some Western readers have picked up on assonances between certain teachings recalled in the samurai epic and those, for example, of the Desert Fathers, the early Christian monks who inhabited the desert areas of the Middle East when Christianity was in its infancy.

The Hagakure is a work written in a bygone era and some cultural references are difficult for contemporary man to understand, but in its essence it remains a work that offers much food for thought. It can be an excellent tool for daily life by knowing how to choose and adapt it to the spirit of our times.

Indeed, there are some parts of it that cannot be transposed directly to the deformed and warped society in which we live today but others can be adapted to it. Courage, loyalty, respect, commitment, continuous and precise attention to the moment we are living: these are all characteristics that contemporary man can cultivate as the samurai of ancient Japan cultivated them. They are actually timeless qualities with no specific affiliation because they belong to human nature; they are the foundation of the rule of law and of a society that respects its citizens.

The figure of the samurai, the warrior willing to make the supreme sacrifice out of loyalty to his Lord, has seen a large and varied film production.

Leaving aside films from the boundless Japanese production such as the aforementioned Harakiri, it is interesting to point out Jim Jarmusch's fine film Ghost Dog in which an eclectic Forest Whitaker plays the part of a contemporary, black samurai, curiously in the pay of an Italian-American mob boss.

Whitaker's is a character with negative traits and in some ways doomed-vowed to the inescapable end, but not without his own morals and ethics. It is precisely from the reading of the Hagakure, excerpts of which are heard recited in the film, that one senses the effort of self-construction of his own personality that Whitaker-Ghost Dog carries out. Almost as if the realization of the samurai epic in his daily life was for him the only escape from the oppressive and futureless environment of the ghetto in which he was born and raised and in which he still lives.

As in the best samurai tradition, an unintentional mistake in the fulfillment of a task results in a chain of events that inevitably lead to the death of the film's character. The black samurai rebels against the unjust manner in which he is eventually treated by the very one to whom he has consecrated himself and explodes in all his murderous fury, as mighty as it is useless. Inevitable death seals the end of the Whitaker-Ghost Dog samurai rebellion: once again, it is the nobility of defeat that leads to the inevitable ending.

As old Tsunetomo teaches us, in the end you may well make decisions contrary to those of your Lord but you must always be prepared to answer for their consequences.

I want to mention in conclusion, the last known junshu: upon the death of Emperor Hitohito in 1989, a Japanese citizen performed seppuku leaving a brief explanation. The man wrote, “I was a soldier, many years ago I had sworn to give my life for the Emperor”.