Bushido - 新渡戸稲造の武士道

1月にサンフランシスコに行った折、書店で新渡戸稲造のBushidoに出くわして、思わず買って読み始めた。この本は100年も前に英語で書かれたもので、日本人の美徳、道徳観の軸となっているいくつかの要素について、おそらく彼なりにそれらが失われつつあるという危惧を抱きながら考えをまとめたものだ。「宗教なしにどうやって道徳教育ができるのか」とラヴレーに質問されたことが事の始まりと彼は書いている。
「武士道」の原書に接するのは初めてだ。正直、新渡戸の格調高く古風な英語には難儀した。挫折したと言っても良いだろう。帰国後しばらくして、三笠書房の対訳版を買い足して、読書を急ぐことになる。それにはいろんな解説が含まれていて読み物としては大いに役立った。
新渡戸が論じた日本人の倫理観の基礎となっていた古い武家体制そのものが崩壊し、さらに戦後は米国型価値観の移植に奔走してきた日本が行き着いた現状を見ると、それが一人一人の積み上げで作られる道徳だけに、日本は修復不能なところに来てしまったというのが読後の感想だった。たまた今朝のサンデー・プロジェクトで日本の現状をテーマに議論があり、櫻井よしこが「武士道」精神を立て直しのキーワードにあげていた。


In January when I was in San Francisco, I encountered with “Bushido” by Inazo Nitobe in a bookstore, and I immediately took it to the cashier. It was a book written around 1900 and discussed a few elements that formed the core of Japanese virtues, perhaps with a sense of anxiety losing them with time in his mind. It all started from a question raised by Belgian jurist, M. de Laveleye: “How do you impart moral education with no religious instruction in your schools?”
I struggled with his classy, century-old English, and almost wrecked frankly, as I later bought another book back in Japan that consisted of English text on the left and Japanese translation on the right in spread pages which was actually very good with lots of auxiliary explanations.
The foundation of Japanese ethics that Nitobe discussed was the ancient regimes of Samurai which had already diminished, and with all the effort to follow American value system after the World War II in Japan, I felt we had come too far to recover our virtues particularly when the moral is something that is accumulated by each one of individuals. Coincidentally, the TV program “Sunday Project” this morning discussed what was missing in Japan now, and Yoshiko Sakurai pointed Bushido as the keyword for the nation’s recovery.