Everyone knows, or thinks they know, that bushido is the code of honor of the samurai warriors of Japan. It might surprise most people, then, to hear that the word “bushido” was not widely used by anyone until 1899- thirty years after the end of the samurai era!

Does this mean that there was really no such thing as bushido? Is the concept a fraud? No, not exactly. The bushi or samurai class of feudal Japan had certain traditional values and a way of looking at the world that glorified death in battle and demanded intense loyalty between warrior retainers and the warlords they served. In earlier times, though, these values were probably more ideal than actual. During Japan's Warring States era, samurai often betrayed their overlords, switched sides or surrendered in order to fight another day. Every once in a while, a warrior would commit some amazing act of heroism or loyalty and everyone would admire him for it- but that doesn't mean most samurai lived up to the same standard.

After the Tokugawa clan unified the country, the samurai were theoretically the dominant class- but they no longer had any wars to fight, and most of them could more accurately be described as bureaucrats than warriors. At this point, a few influential writers of the samurai class tried to articulate the traditional samurai values as a guide and inspiration for young samurai bureaucrats whose ancestors had fought on the battlefield. Such works as “Hagakure” or the “Budoshoshinshu” were written during this time period. They presented an idealized version of samurai values in order to justify the position of the samurai at the top of the social order while encouraging them to continue thinking of themselves as warriors even though there was no one to fight.

After the final abolition of the samurai class in the 19^th century, a writer named Inazo Nitobe tried to articulate the same idealized samurai values in order to explain them to Western people. Nitobe didn't make up the word “bushido,” but he was the first person to codify bushido concepts as a set list of specific virtues, and the word “bushido” was never widely used before Nitobe. In the years leading up to WWII, the word came to refer to ideas of emperor worship, imperialism and right-wing politics, which really had nothing to do with the now-extinct samurai class.