The sixth of Inazo Nitobe's seven bushido virtues: honor, the vivid consciousness of personal and family dignity that a samurai was to guard even at the cost of his own life, with a shameful act held to stain not only the individual but his household's name. Nitobe treats seppuku, ritual self-disembowelment, as honor's most extreme expression, a death chosen and carried out according to strict form to restore a stained name rather than an act of simple despair.
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 meiyo, honor or reputation, the sixth of the seven virtues Inazo Nitobe names in Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900). 1 Attributed Author / CompilerNamed and defined by Inazo Nitobe in Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), who links it directly to the practice of seppuku as its most extreme ritual expression. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1 Doctrinal Status DetailThe sixth of Nitobe's seven bushido virtues; guarding one's own and one's family's name from shame is, in Nitobe's account, weighed as heavily as guarding one's life, with seppuku held as honor's formal and most extreme restoration. 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe vivid consciousness of personal and family dignity, guarded even at the cost of life. 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 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
Originates in Language
Source Bushido: The Soul of JapanInazo Nitobe
Related To
Chugi (Loyalty), Virtues Both named among Inazo Nitobe's seven bushido virtues.
Source Bushido: The Soul of JapanInazo Nitobe
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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