Hagakure ( meaning Hidden by the Leaves or hidden
leaves), or Hagakure Kikigaki is a practical and
spiritual guide for a warrior, drawn from a collection
of commentaries by the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo,
former retainer to Nabeshima Mitsushige, the third ruler
of what is now Saga prefecture in Japan. Tsuramoto
Tashiro compiled these commentaries from his
conversations with Tsunetomo from 1709 to 1716; however,
it was not published until many years afterwards.
Hagakure is also known as The Book of the Samurai,
Analects of Nabeshima or Hagakure Analects. The book
records Tsunetomo's views on bushido, the warrior code
of the samurai. Hagakure is sometimes said to assert
that bushido is really the ''Way of Dying'' or living as
though one was already dead, and that a samurai must be
willing to die at any moment in order to be true to his
lord. His saying ''the way of the warrior is death'' was
a summation of the willingness to sacrifice that bushido
codified. After his master died, Tsunetomo himself was
forbidden to perform junshi, a retainer's ritual
suicide, by an edict of the Tokugawa Shogunate combined
with his master's disapproval of the tradition. Hagakure
may have been written partially in an effort to outline
the role of the samurai in a more peaceful society.
Several sections refer to the ''old days,'' and imply a
dangerous weakening of the samurai class since that
time. The Hagakure was written approximately one hundred
years after the start of the Tokugawa era, a time of
relative peace. With no major campaigns to fight, the
samurai were transforming from a warrior to an
administrative class. His work represents one approach
to the problem of maintaining military preparedness and
a proper military mindset in a time when neither has
much practical application. |
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