Articles
Steadfast Resolve : Stoicism, the Way of the Samurai, and the Struggle over Japan’s National Character
Abstract
During the late nineteenth century, Christian missionaries and scholars in Europe and the United States expounded upon the inferior character of Japan and other nations in part to justify the dominant position of the West in the imperialist world order. In 1895, when prominent Yale professor George Trumbull Ladd described the Japanese people as fickle and immature, philosopher Ōnishi Hajime responded by holding up bushido and its practice of suicide as analogous to the Stoicism of ancient Greece. In doing so, he suggested the existence of a Japanese ethic of perseverance comparable to one of the philosophical foundations of Western civilization and established a set of talking points that would be picked up by later writers. In the early 1900s, Inoue Tetsujirō expanded upon Ōnishi’s argument, contrasting bushido with Stoicism to suggest the superiority of the Japanese national spirit over the West. As the comparison between bushido and Stoicism became a topic of study for aspiring teachers of the national moral (shūshin) curriculum, members of the Teiyū Ethical Society built upon this comparison to debate the status of bushido and promote competing priorities for moral education. Through such comparisons and contrasts, qualities associated with Stoicism—including self-discipline, perseverance, and the practice of suicide—became integral to conceptions of bushido and Japanese national character in the twentieth century.