The fifth of Inazo Nitobe's seven bushido virtues: sincerity and truthfulness, the plain correspondence between a samurai's word and his action, such that Nitobe holds a formal promise or a written contract beneath a samurai's honor, since his spoken word alone was to carry the full weight of a bond. Distinct from Xin, trustworthiness, the Confucian Five Constants entry already held on this axis: makoto is written with a different character, cheng, with its own deep roots in Neo-Confucian ethical writing on sincerity as the ground of the other virtues, rather than the Five Constants scheme's own term.
Facts
Origins
Place of OriginJapan; codified in Nitobe's English language text, written while he lived in the United States. 1 Origin of the NameJapanese makoto, sincerity or truthfulness, the fifth of the seven virtues Inazo Nitobe names in Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900); written with a character, cheng, distinct from the Confucian Five Constants' own xin. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerNamed and defined by Inazo Nitobe in Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), who holds a samurai's spoken word needed no written contract to bind it. 1 Disputed
Origin PeriodNitobe's codified seven-virtue scheme dates to his 1900 book; whether it reflects a continuous samurai ethic reaching back through Edo-period house codes and texts such as the Hagakure, or is substantially Nitobe's own Meiji-era synthesis for a Western readership, is a genuinely contested question among historians of Japan. 2 Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1 Doctrinal Status DetailThe fifth of Nitobe's seven bushido virtues; Nitobe holds that bushi no ichi-gon, a warrior's single word, needed no written bond or oath behind it, since a lie or a subterfuge was accounted equally cowardly and dishonorable. 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSincerity and truthfulness, such that a samurai's spoken word alone was held to bind as securely as a written contract. 1 Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Bushido, of which this virtue is a part, is already recorded as related-to Shinto; recorded here as its belongs-to-tradition anchor, alongside Bushido's own Zen Buddhist and Confucian influences which this single edge does not claim to exhaust.
In Language
Opposes
Originates in Language
Source Bushido: The Soul of JapanInazo Nitobe
Related To
Meiyo (Honor), Virtues Both named among Inazo Nitobe's seven bushido virtues.
Source Bushido: The Soul of JapanInazo Nitobe
Both named Sincerity or Trustworthiness in English translation, but written with different characters: makoto is cheng, xin's own character is distinct; a related but not identical Confucian-adjacent virtue rather than the same entry under a second reading.
Source Bushido: The Soul of JapanInazo Nitobe
Yu (Courage), Virtues Both named among Inazo Nitobe's seven bushido virtues.
Source Bushido: The Soul of JapanInazo Nitobe
Sources
1. Bushido: The Soul of Japan
Inazo Nitobe, Leeds and Biddle, 1900Originates in Language: Japanese, Stored language property on this entity, cited to this source: japanese
2. Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan
Oleg Benesch, Oxford University Press, 2014
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