“Bushido is found in dying” — the most misread sentence in Japanese history. The line comes from the Hagakure, an […]

The soil, not the tree. Note on Samurai I ended with a question: how does a person become capable of

Two filters. The same distance from the original. The most widely read book on Bushido in the Western world was

Kotodama is the word Western scholarship reached for when Japanese language did something that existing linguistic frameworks could not explain.

14,000 years is a number that requires a moment to absorb. Modern nation-states measure their continuity in centuries. Ancient Rome

What you have seen in the movies is not what happened. In Japanese cinema, samurai duels are choreographed spectacles —

The word “philosophy” is the first mistake. Western observers call it the “philosophy of the Japanese craftsman.” The Zen of

The word is usually translated as “harmony.” This is not wrong. But it describes the result, not the cause. Western