Nitobe’s Bushido begins with a question he could not answer, not with a list of virtues.

Inazo Nitobe's Bushido: The Soul of Japan opens with a conversation that is easy to skip on the way to the famous chapters.

Staying with the Belgian jurist M. de Laveleye, Nitobe says the talk turned to religion, and de Laveleye asked whether Japanese schools had no religious instruction. Told they had none, he asked how moral education was imparted. Nitobe writes that the question stunned him and that he could give no ready answer, because the precepts he learned in childhood had not come from schools. Only on analysing what had formed his notions of right and wrong did he arrive at Bushido. He also credits his wife's repeated questions about Japanese customs as the book's direct inception.

The framing follows from the occasion. He writes in English and explicitly says he used parallel examples from European history and literature to help foreign readers understand the subject. The opening chapter likewise explains Japanese chivalry in comparison with European chivalry.

Nitobe presents Bushido as the name he found for the moral ideas he says he had received in childhood.

The larger history is not as simple as Nitobe's book alone. Oleg Benesch's study traces the development of modern bushidō through late-19th-century Meiji discourse and examines the influence of European chivalry and gentlemanship on its early formulations.

What I am still trying to understand is how these older warrior ideals and the modern Meiji formulations should be separated when we use the phrase “samurai code.”

The first-edition preface is dated Malvern, Pa., Twelfth Month, 1899. The text is public domain, Project Gutenberg ebook 12096.

Some things you only find out you believe when a stranger asks.