The myth of Japan’s warrior spirit

Should we fear a new martial spirit in Japan? Is there a samurai lurking inside those armies of grey-suited corporate men waiting to spring forth?

Even though Japan’s constitution, drawn up by the Americans after the war, forbids military combat abroad, the fear of a Japanese militarist revival has never quite gone away, especially in China where memories of Japanese wartime atrocities are kept alive and easily manipulated for political ends.

One of the candidates to become the new Prime Minister of Japan, the former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, has promised to strengthen national security against China. He even hinted at the importance of defending Taiwan. Hawkish members of his conservative Liberal Democratic party (which isn’t particularly liberal at all) have expressed their wish to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution for many years already.

In fact, the Japanese martial tradition is a bit of a myth. Before the Meiji Restoration in 1867, only samurai, an exclusive social caste, were allowed to bear swords, and for a long time even they rarely used them. The warrior code of the samurai, laid down in Hagakure, a 17th-century text still revered by martial enthusiasts all over the world, was already a form of dandyism, a bit like knightly jousting in 16th-century Europe.

Japanese merchants cared more about money and sensual pleasures. The only martial spirit they knew was acted out in the kabuki theatre. And peasants had nothing to do with warfare at all. Like the American cowboys, whose glamorous image was invented in Hollywood long after the Wild West was tamed, the glorification of the samurai spirit began mostly after the samurai themselves had become obsolete.

When Japan rebuilt itself as a modern nation in the late 19th century, one of the great instruments of modernisation was the army.