Giri (義理): A uniquely Japanese sense of justice and integrity integral to bushido. Accounted to a great extent for the harmony in samurai society, and was an inherent element of both the aesthetics and the moral courage of the samurai caste (Samurai Revolution, Chapter 5).
Read more about bushido and girl in Samurai Revolution.
This is the first entry of a series of key Japanese words in my books. Each entry will include a brief definition as I understand it.
Bushido (武士道)
General definition: “Way of the warrior,” a direct translation by which bushido is widely referred to in English (“bushi” (武士) is a synonym of “samurai; “do” (道) is a suffix meaning “way”).
My brief definition: A moral philosophy partly based on Confucianism, whose cardinal virtues were loyalty, courage, and sincerity, developed throughout the peaceful 18th and 19th centuries, during which the samurai class, originally consisting of professional warriors, gradually lost its raison d’etre. Since there were no wars to fight, the samurai had plenty of time on their hands for philosophical and literary pursuits, including bushido, which was given new life as an actual “samurai code” during the violence and tumult of the final fifteen years of the Tokugawa Bakufu (1853-68), generally referred to as the Bakumatsu (to be defined in a separate entry).[1]
[1] Also see Samurai Revolution, Chapter 8: A Brief Discussion on Bushidō.
The Japanese warship Kanrin Maru arrived in San Francisco on March 17, 1860, as the first Japanese vessel to reach the United States. The captain, Katsu Kaishu, “marveled at the industrialization of the town,” including “the San Francisco Branch of the United States Mint, comprising a three-story red brick building on Commercial Street . . . ,” I noted in my book, Samurai Revolution, based on a March 21, 1860 article in the local San Francisco newspaper, Daily Alta California..
When the mint moved to a new location in 1874, its building was used by the US Subtreasury for a year, after which it was demolished and replaced by a four-story red brick building, which was gutted in the fire resulting from the 1906 earthquake. It was rebuilt at the same spot on Commercial Street, as the single-story red brick building shown in the photograph above, which I took recently during one of my frequent walks through this district in San Francisco, just east of Chinatown and southeast of North Beach – the old Barbary Coast, a district of “Low drinking and dancing houses, lodging and gambling houses of the same mean class” where “No decent man was in safety to walk the streets after dark,” reports an early history of San Francisco published in 1854,[1] six years before the arrival of the Kanrin Maru. The current building, which houses the Pacific Heritage Museum of San Francisco, retains some of the ambience, I think, of the one that Captain Katsu and company observed. And a cut-away section of the original structure is used as part of the exhibit of the history and significance of the old mint. I’ll say more about Katsu Kaishu and the mean streets of Old San Francisco in future posts.
[1] Frank Soulé, et al. The Annals of San Francisco, pp. 565-66.
Read more about Katsu Kaishu, “the shogun’s last samurai,” in my book Samurai Revolution, the only full-length biography of the great man in English.
It is generally thought that this sword, forged by the sword smith “Yoshiyuki,” was the one that Sakamoto Ryoma had with him when he was assassinated in Kyoto on the evening of his thirty-third birthday. Even so, it has long been a point of controversy whether or not this was actually the same sword. It is housed at the Kyoto National Museum. When I first visited the museum years ago, while researching my novel Ryoma Life of a Renaissance Samurai, I was allowed to take it in my hands. At any rate, I was thrilled!
According to a May 10, 2016 article from NHK News, the Museum more or less confirms that this was indeed Ryoma’s sword.
“A hero is fond of the sensual pleasures,” goes an old Japanese saying. It has been suggested that Katsu Kaishu had numerous “concubines” precisely because he was a hero.[1] About such things, Kaishu had the following to say:
“Most of the mistakes a man makes in his youth come from sexual desire. . . . But try as he might, sexual desire is not something that a young man can easily suppress. On the other hand, the most vigorous [driving force] in a young man is the ambition to achieve greatness. It is extremely admirable if he can use the fire of his ambition to burn up his sexual desire. It is a true hero who can calm himself when his passion is aroused. Before he knows it, he will be driven by his ambition to achieve great things . . . no longer thinking of anything else.”[2]
Katsu Kaishu was certainly ambitious. And it is unarguable that he achieved greatness and that he was a hero. But it seems questionable that he ever burned up his sexual desire. He had multiple mistresses even into his old age. Nonetheless, he seems to have respected his wife, Tami. According to one writer, he once said, “Had Tami been born a man, she would have certainly made a fine politician. It is much to her credit that she never quarreled with any of the women I bedded.”[3]
Some of those women were live-in maids at the Katsu residence, including Masuda Ito, the master’s favorite. Ito was “graceful and attentive to detail,” Katsube Mitake reports in his biography.[4] Kaishu had two children with Ito. One died very young; the other one, Itsuko, grew up in the same house as Tami’s children.
Tami’s outward acceptance of her husband’s penchant for other women was probably not indicative of her true feelings, which are perhaps better demonstrated by her reported last words: “Don’t bury me next to Katsu. I want to be next to Koroku,”[5] their son who had died thirteen years earlier in 1892.[6] Tami’s request was not honored. She and Kaishu were buried side by side near Senzokuiké pond in Tōkyō.
[The photo was taken at the gravesite of Katsu Kaishu and his wife Tami in November 2015. With me are two of Kaishu’s descendants: Professor Douglas Stiffler and Ms. Minako Kohyama. Prof. Stiffler is the great-great grandson of Kaishu and his “Nagasaki mistress,” Kaji Kuma. Ms. Kohyama is the great-great granddaughter of Kaishu and Masuda Ito.]
[1] Katsube Mitake. Katsu Kaishū. Vol 1 (Tokyo: PHP, 1992), p. 44.
[2]Hikawa Seiwa (Katsu Kaishū Zenshū 21; Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1973), p. 295.
[3] Hiyane Kaoru, “Katsu Kaishū wo Meguru Onnatachi,” in Konishi Shiro, ed., Katsu Kaishū no Subeté (Tōkyō: Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha, 1985), p. 155.
[4] Katsube. Katsu Kaishū. Vol 1, p. 434
[5] Katsube, Katsu Kaishū, Vol. 2, p. 438.
[6] Tami died in Meiji 38 (1905), six years after Kaishū. (Takahashi Norihiko, “Henkakuki wo Ikita Josei 75-nin,” in Bakumatsu Ishin wo Ikita 13-Nin no Onnatachi (Bessatsu Rekishidokuhon, October 20, 1979; Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha), p. 290)
Read more about Katsu Kaishu, “the shogun’s last samurai,” in my book Samurai Revolution, the only full-length biography of the great man in English.