Bushido books: Budo Shoshinsu by Daidoji Yuzan, Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.

In reading of history, I prefer books from view of eyewitnesses. These three samurai code of honors are documents of past by which can look on tempers and life of never stop to be interesting Japan. Society became less harsh and followers of warrior’s way are gone since passed centuries, but I was founding a little similarities with nowadays in process of reading. I was thinking about Japanese corporations, where devotion of their workers to administration express in keep a low bow to leaving car of their boss until transport will disappear from a view. Of course, times are absolutely incomparable.

Budo Shoshinsu serves a guide on how to follow to way of warrior and knowledges need for learn. As any code of honor writes and makes pivotal attention – a full devotion to own daimyo, which must be radical. Yuzan describes it in examples as spearhead shouldn’t point on master and comes to funny absurd in his manual on behave in deathbed, where a first pronounced name must be daimyo’s. I’ve got funny about tea ceremony, which starts about obligation to learn, but in further thoughts he finds that it can bring to troubles and solutes that better don’t know it.

Hagakure filled of curious thoughts to which I came long time ago. Frequently I met phrases against logics of previous written. A book is subjective, because author of this bushido Yamamoto Tsunemoto praises house of own master, what is must to do a real follower of way of warrior, but it enhances in devastation of my interesting in reading. Hagakure also has stories, where can see how far from samurai’s honor in demonstration of betray, lie, set-ups and big part of tales where given power in some interpretation of license to kill for men with katana to misuse, which usually happens in taverns and after drunk in mostly cases. Tsunemoto found a mind harm in learning of strategy and saw a hampering in battles. Warrior must go straight to attack in his view, which gave a bad kamikaze inspiration for Japanese pilots in World War 2, what didn’t approve it as tactics.

Miyamoto Musashi had a different opinion on strategy and relied on it as on many aspects, what made him of greatest samurai warriors. One of common thing relates me and him is self-education. A man with biography of action film personage, who wasn’t only swordfighter, but artist and at least I saw him talented in writing. I like his comparisons for explanation, where no typical Asian metaphors and filling of quotations, where feels a demonstration of individuality. Musashi’s bushido centers on swordwieldings, which oriented on battle of one thousand against ten thousands and this offered learning claims achievement to invincibility, what is a normal feeling for a man who didn’t lose a fight (if everything is truth, because author’s biography fogged of mysteries.), but a self-made samurai thoughts wisely, what couldn’t be in dispute due of his experience. I read with hyping except awkward conclution in The Book of Void, where writer’s thoughts stop to keep rationale.