Samurai vs. Viking — A Comparison

The Hagakure vs. the Havamal

Mar 26, 2024

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With that, on to the article.

Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one’s self;
But a noble name will never die,
If good renown one gets.
— Havamal 77
A man’s life may end, but his legacy endures forever.
— Hagakure 1218

Normally we keep the Imperium Press release schedule tightly under wraps, but in this article we are going to do something different and announce the next release while offering some analysis of the text. The next Imperium release will be a brand new translation of the Hagakure, a series of orations delivered by the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo on bushido or the way of the samurai. I won’t dwell on the reasons for translating anew, nor on the superiority of our translation, because that will become obvious when you read it.

We have wanted to do a book on bushido for a long time, but translation is very expensive work unless you’re a university publisher with endowments. But the worldview and ethic of the samurai demands more attention than it receives in our sphere, so we went ahead with the translation. The feudal Japanese were a singularly impressive people, possessed of a way of life which seems oddly familiar to us, at least those of us who take folkishness seriously.

Folkishness is not simple “racism”. It is not just a prefix for anything specific to one people and not another. It is about much more than that. The particularity that makes something for this people and not for that, grows out of a much deeper worldview. It grows out of a brutally consistent deference to authority, a rigorous commitment to the principle that one cannot be one’s own master, but that such self-legislation destroys all possibility of authority whatsoever. One always has a lord.

The samurai always has a lord. If his lord should die, it is incumbent upon him to commit seppuku, the ritual act of self-disembowelment, and follow his lord into death. If he does not, he brings deep shame upon himself and his clan. If the samurai should disgrace himself while his lord still lives, he may be dismissed from service. Whether coward or disgraced, the samurai without a lord becomes a ronin, literally a “drifter”, a masterless samurai with much-diminished dignity, but perhaps not without any dignity whatsoever.

The author of the Hagakure, Tsunetomo, was put into an impossible position by his lord Nabeshima Mitsushige. Whereas a samurai was honour-bound to follow his lord into death, Mitsushige explicitly forbade this of his own retainers. Bound by his lord’s command, when Mitsushige died, Tsunetomo went into seclusion as a monk, taking the temple name Jocho.

The samurai wishes always to die in battle, or else by seppuku, to maintain his honour. As if being denied an honourable end was not bad enough, Jocho suffered a series of tragedies, leaving him bereft of family. Late in life, a samurai from the Nabeshima clan came to him, asking advice on bushido, and Jocho delivered a series of orations on how he should acquit himself as a proper samurai. These orations were duly recorded and became the Hagakure.

Reading this book for the first time is like being jolted by a cattle prod. So much in it is utterly, diametrically opposed to modern liberal sensibilities, that to the ordinary reader it might as well have been written by an extraterrestrial. The feudal Japan whose worldview it so beautifully captures, could hardly be more different from ours today. Even the chivalric knight of the European Middle Ages would have found much in here alien. The only worldview that is truly akin to it that we have access to is that of the archaic Indo-European. The world of Homer is much closer to Tokugawa-era Japan, but even that is somewhat different. The closest we can come is in the ancient North, among the Germanic peoples in their heroic age.

In this blog we have constantly stressed—sometimes to the point of exhaustion—how the ethos of the clannish warrior-aristocracy is not dead in us, not nearly. This has met with a baffling amount of resistance. We have internalized the progressive, linear view of history inherited from liberalism and struggle to free ourselves from it. And yet, in the Scottish highlands not three centuries ago, the heroic spirit lived in us, as it lived in the Japanese of the same time. So persistent was the spirit of bushido that in 2005, two Japanese WWII soldiers hiding in the Philippine jungle could think the war was still going on because surrender was unthinkable, and Japan still existed. In the 21st century, the spirit of drengskapr is as much alive in Germanic peoples as that of bushido is in the Japanese.

The Hagakure is the essential statement of bushido. Distilled down to its absolute core, bushido is as follows:

But what of life? And why, indeed – why live?
Hear me now: One lives to do what samurai
Require of samurai.
To honor one’s lord;
To pay one’s ancestral debt,
And to love one’s ancestors;
To fight courageously;
To readily bid farewell to life.1

The samurai is absolutely devoted to his lord; devotion is the virtue that enables all other virtues.

Devotion such that he is ever ready
To die in the service of his master.
This is the essential virtue.
When you possess it, then cultivate the others:
Wisdom, compassion, and courage.
With devotion, these three are within reach.
Wisdom is gained by heeding those around you –
Your elders, your superiors, your companions,
Scrolls, folkways, old books.
Compassion must be nurtured over time,
In the performance of selfless deeds for others.
Bravery is forged in the endurance of trials,
In that moment where you grit your teeth,
And charge ahead without hesitation –
Without fear of future consequence.
These are the highest qualities.2

We have described in various articles how under folkishness authority is the absolute foundation of all other epistemic virtues. In a liberal and still quasi-Christianized world, this is nigh-incomprehensible. Where are we getting this from? Is truth not higher than authority?

The samurai implicitly understands the folkish privileging of authority above propositionality. Devotion to one’s lord is so ironclad and absolute that even the evidence of the senses must bow to it.

A true retainer is one who is, in a word,
Devoted.
Devoted to his lord, whom he follows,
Without question, without second thought.
“Should his lord give him water,
and tell him that it is wine,
our retainer would get drunk.”
As for judgement in moral affairs:
What his lord says is “good,” is, and
what his lord decrees is “evil,” is.
A house with but two or three such men
Serving it – its future is assured.3

Jocho is not being merely figurative or hyperbolic here. The master’s word is the moral law, not because his judgement answers to some abstract conception of “the good”, but because if we would have “good” at all, it must be accepted with complete subservience, as the retainer is subservient to his lord.

As a man thus honors his lord, devotedly,
So should a woman revere her husband.4

That even moral propositions must bend to authority is perhaps the harshest pill of all in folkishness—few indeed are ready for this. It cuts through all Axial ideas of morality. It explodes the Euthyphro dilemma. It is the anti-logos. It turns the performative contradiction of “anti-realism” against itself. No longer is it contradictory to argue that morality is relative, because morality is not a kind of proposition—what is contradictory is arguing against traditional authority on the basis of assumptions deriving ultimately from that authority.

This may all seem like postmodern, abstruse theorizing, but this “anti-realism”,5 this skepticism of natural law, is to be found in bushido as well.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum –
To hate injustice above all else,
To strive, though the skies fall,
For perfect moral purity –
This is itself a source of error.
Further than morality,
(Good and evil)
Far beyond man’s justice,
(Right and wrong)
Past augury and sorcery,
(Intuition and folkway)
Above the distant circling eagles,
(Nature itself)
Is the Divine Truth of the Way.
This highest wisdom
Can be attained by men,
But only the best of men.
Ordinary minds cannot see it.
When one has grasped it –
Has ascended to its height,
And given himself over to it
– These other notions fall away,
And the justice of man,
And the justice of the Gods,
Fall as scales from one’s eyes.
Enlightenment such as this
Ever and always requires great effort,
And sacrifice to heaven.
It is not “natural,”
It is not of the soil, and
Society will not guide one to it.6

Neither society, nor nature, nor even reason itself will guide one to the source of morality, because morality is always in place before any of these things appear on the scene. Morality—in the form of commands issued by an authority—is simply primordial, because authority is primordial. Anyone who understands what Japanese do (or the Chinese dao), the “Way”, means, understands that the term “truth” is simply too small to contain it, whether it has a capital-T or no.

This rejection of morality, of Weber’s “ethical” worldview born in the Axial age, has a positively modern ring to it, echoing Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil”.

The meaning of service is to be found here;
The ancient relation between a Lord,
The inheritor of a clan,
And the samurai of that clan,
Is to be found here
In this simple ethic of fealty
Which is beyond all morality
Beyond notions of “right” and “wrong.”7

Of course, folkishness is neither modern nor ancient, but simply the default state of affairs, punctuated by a relatively short interregnum of logocentrism, the abstract loyalty to principle above concrete loyalty to a man. Jocho echoes this when he describes the simple act of filial piety as above scruples and strictures.

That Kyoto monk, Gensei,
Was of Nichiren’s sect
And, like his brothers
In the lotus sutra,
Abstained from all flesh.
No meat, nor fish, nor
Cup of bone broth,
Ever passed his lips.

Every day
This monk would travel,
In secret, at dawn,
To the fish market.
Would buy a fish,
Hide it in his robes,
And take it to his mother.
A dear son – and such virtue,
To place love and duty
Above scruples and strictures.8

For the samurai, the master is the issuer of commands, the source of moral ends, and the role of the samurai is to act as the tool of the master in achieving those ends. The retainer is, in a very real sense, not so much a person as the sword-arm of his master.

Retainers bereft of talent become peerless
The moment they resolve to live as though dead;
The moment they resolve to trade their lives
For something of higher value: The Way itself.
They become one with their lord, an instrument;
A herald, or a sword in his hand, or his flying arrow.9

There is an amateur understanding of the Germanic spirit that sees our forefathers as prototypes of the modern libertarian, in love with his “freedom” and independence, taking orders from no one, his own master. The historical reality is quite different. Our Germanic forefathers did not understand “freedom” as we understand it. In fact the term “free” derives from the same root as the term “friend”. The status of “free” man did not mean unbound from obligation, but precisely the opposite—one was free only in that one was bound to a clan, that is, to a father, to a lord, to a founder.

The extreme duty and unfreedom of the Germanic can be seen in Njal’s Saga, where retainers Thiostolf and Glum come to blows, not because the two men have any personal animosity, but because their lords do. After Thiostolf slays Glum, he goes to his mistress for instruction, and she tells him to deliver himself up to the slain man’s household to tell of his deed. Thiostolf doubts her judgement but submits anyway; he obeys her command and goes to his death. Does this sound like the action of a free man? This is much closer to the absolute subservience of our samurai than to the modern libertarian. The idea of Germanics as proto-liberal is based on caricature, not fact.

The samurai himself is subject to caricature as well. He is popularly depicted in the West as a sour-faced prude, eager to kill himself since he lives a life of duty, not joy. The Hagakure does away with this caricature.

A man who cares nothing for wealth, titles,
Honor, and the other trappings of worth
Is the most conceited type of man, and,
Vain, will be quick to slander his fellows.
As retainers, such men will prove worthless –
Always inferior to those driven by
Lust –
For glory,
For wealth,
For honors.10

Our samurai and our Viking see eye-to-eye on this too: wealth is good, the mark of divine favour. The samurai is not a grim, buttoned-down puritan, but the cultured thug, a cultivated barbarian, exquisitely groomed and yet rough-hewn.

“The valiant warriors of old were uncouth,
Their roughness a mark of courage,
Heralding a spirited boldness.
They were not normal men, and therefore could act
In ways heroic and shocking,
Ways normal men would not consider.”11

The broad outlines of bushido that we find in Hagakure echo the Germanic drengskapr. But we find very specific parallels as well.

A man “too clever by half”
As the saying goes
Will, in dealings, combine truth
With artfully concealed deceit:
The true will be mixed with fabricated
False “wisdom,” and clothed in
What he calls “reason.”
“Rationality.”
Swallow it; you’ll find it is poison.
Sincerity is everything.12

Can anyone doubt the similarity with Havamal?

A measure of wisdom each man shall have,
But never too much let him know;
The fairest lives do those men live
Whose wisdom wide has grown.
A measure of wisdom each man shall have,
But never too much let him know;
For the wise man’s heart is seldom happy,
If wisdom too great he has won.13

After the first two books of Hagakure, we get a chronicle of the house under which Jocho served, where he relates many stories and pieces of advice.

Silence is preferable to speech. Embracing this principle, one can choose to remain silent when dealing with others, allowing attentiveness and observation to guide interactions. When speech is necessary, it is essential to be concise and focused, using as few words as possible to convey your message clearly. Loquaciousness makes you seem clownish and lacking in dignity. Thoughtful silence and pointed speech can be powerful tools in maintaining dignity and commanding respect in conversations.14

This will sound awfully familiar to Germanic pagans.

A witless man, when he meets with men,
Had best in silence abide;
For no one shall find that nothing he knows,
If his mouth is not open too much.
But a man knows not, if nothing he knows,
When his mouth has been open too much.
Wise shall he seem who well can question,
And also answer well;
Nought is concealed that men may say
Among the sons of men.
Often he speaks who never is still
With words that win no faith;
The babbling tongue, if a bridle it find not,
Oft for itself sings ill.15

For all these similarities, there are of course differences between the Germanic and feudal Japanese worldview. For example, Hagakure 1028 relates a situation where the lord demands that his retainer change his name to avoid the appearance of nepotism, something that would have been totally unthinkable in any branch of the Indo-European world. For the samurai, devotion to one’s lord is total; for the Indo-European it is no less total, but the father or clan chieftain takes up this position as lord, so such a conflict does not normally arise.

But it illustrates the difference between Japan and the Indo-European world that it did arise in feudal Japan. The retainer must simply hope that his lord proves merciful, such as in Hagakure 1134 where a retainer’s oath to his lord conflicts with his duty to his wife, and he opts to commit seppuku instead. The lord releases him from this oath owing to his exemplary character. In bushido, loyalty to family can and does conflict with loyalty to authority—which differs from the Indo-European world since in it, family and authority are one thing.

There are many other differences, quite naturally, since the common root between Japanese and Germanic culture is highly remote. However, there does seem to be some influence from the Indo-European world on Japanese culture,16 which may help to explain the parallels. In the Kojiki, one of the oldest Japanese chronicles we have, there appears the myth of Izanami and Izanagi which so strikingly parallels the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that it cannot be coincidence. Some sort of cultural transmission is certain, perhaps ultimately from the Eastern Scythians whose cultural and genetic influence also marked the Mongols.

In the end, bushido differs from drengskapr in important ways, but the two share a fundamentally archaic outlook that finds a modern parallel only in folkishness. All three cut through the Axial worldview that privileges loyalty to abstract good above loyalty to a man or a people. The Hagakure is the Easternmost expression of this archaic worldview, a worldview that survived so long that it post-dates the American civil war. This book is an immensely valuable treasure, and frankly I am jealous that it came from a non-European.

The Hagakure also puts the lie to some pernicious myths in right-wing circles that need to die. First is the idea that only Indo-Europeans could conceive of individual heroism and glory. Reading through our translation of the Hagakure you will find dozens of figures seeking kleos aphthiton and finding it in the immortalization of their deeds. Second is the idea that we can’t “go back” to a traditional worldview. We have analogous expressions of honour culture in recent European history. There is nothing to go back to because we are still those people. If we can’t cultivate something we had 300 years ago, what hope do we have of fixing any foundational problems at all? This is not a serious position.

But the ultimate reason to read Hagakure is because it is unfathomably based. It’s not our thing, but it is a noble expression of a great people, and we can learn a thing or two from them. It will be interesting to see how our guys respond to it.