"BUSHIDO"
Sir,-I evidently owe you an apology for my bad handwriting which has caused you to quote me on page 4 of your issue of January 9 as saying "bushido’ means the war or road of the warrior." What I wrote, or intended to write, was "the way or road of the warrior." I am sorry I can see neither point nor meaning in your editorial note to the letter. Of course, the farmer would be primitive to take his family to church in the sledge he uses for other very practical purposes. So he would be if he took them on stilts, or roller skates, 6r in a wheelbarrow. But what has all this to do with the use of horse-drawn sleighs in regions which are covered with feet of snow for months every winter? I am sure many of your readers could supply better examples of Japanese primitiveness: open sewers and drains in big cities, the collection of night soil at all hours of the day, slopping over pavements and streets, and poisoning the air for hundreds of yards; the conditions in which girls and women work and live in silk-reeling factories; the selling of daughters to houses of ill-fame, etc. There is no doubt the Japanese are primitive, but the most primitive rat of a gangster is a menace to society
if he has a tommy-gun, and the Japanese have armed themselves with all the most scientific inventions of the genius of other races. I think it is dangerous to have any idea that there is any analogy between "bushido" and European "chivalry." This idea of " bushido" was largely the invention-for foreign consumption-of Dr. Inazo Nitobe, former editor of the Osaka Mainichi English language newspaper. It is also dangerous to comfort ourselves with the thought that they are primitive unless we realise that primitive peoples in possession of deadly weapons are very dangerous. In point of fact, the primitiveness of the Japanese nation-the feet of clay-that Freda Uttley writes of-will be plainly evident just as soon as the Allies are in a position to strike back.
ALEX
ASHTON
(Hataitai).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 136, 30 January 1942, Page 4
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352"BUSHIDO" New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 136, 30 January 1942, Page 4
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