Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan

Oleg Benesch's Inventing the Way of the Samurai is a scholarly historical study demonstrating that bushido, now popularly imagined as an ancient warrior code, was substantially a modern intellectual construction assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to serve Japanese nationalist and international identity needs. Its authority rests on close archival tracing of when and by whom specific bushido texts and ideas were actually written, work respected in Japanese history for correcting a widely held popular misconception. Because the book's central finding runs against a still-common popular assumption about samurai antiquity, it is worth reading Benesch's own careful distinction between genuine premodern warrior ethics, which did exist in varied and regional forms, and the codified, nationally unifying bushido narrative, which did not predate the Meiji era.