【英文原声版05】David Howell：Bushido：The Soul of Japan

一共是100集中文，100集英文节目
每周更新一集中文一集英语，已经买过就可以永久收听

英文文稿+中文翻译 

对东方的误解

A misunderstanding to the East

Zachary Davis: Nitobe Inazo had a goal when he sat down to write his book: He wanted to explain Japanese culture. Specifically, he wanted to explain Japanese culture to his Western friends.

新渡户稻造坐下来写书时怀揣着一个目的，那就是解读日本文化。准确来说，他要向西方朋友阐释日本文化。

Zachary Davis: Nitobe Inazo was born in Japan in 1862, but at the age of 22, he left his home country to live and travel in the United States and Europe. He came to understand these other countries well, but he found that his Western colleagues and friends didn’t quite understand Japan. He told the story of one such misunderstanding in the introduction to his book.

1862年，新渡户稻造在日本出生。22岁时，他离开故国，远走重洋赴欧美游历生活，对西方风土文化日趋了解。然而与此形成鲜明对比的是，他发现自己的西方同事朋友对日本所知甚少。在《武士道》的序言中，他提到了一次令人啼笑皆非的误会。

David Howell: He was taking a walk one day in Belgium with a noted Belgian jurist, and the jurist was stunned to hear that in Japan there was no mandatory religious education in the schools. And he said, you know, how can that be? Do you people have no morals or no sense of moral education?

在比利时的时候，新渡户稻造有天与一位比利时著名法学家一起散步。在得知日本学校没有开设宗教必修课时，这位法学家大为震惊。他说，怎么会这样？你们日本人难道没有道德准则，没有培养民众道德感的意识吗？

Zachary Davis: Nitobe was surprised by this question.

法学家的问题让新渡户稻造深感意外。

David Howell: You know, he had of course learned morality as a child and a young man.

要知道，他自己从小到大一直学习着道德规范，这点毋庸置疑。

Zachary Davis: So he decided to write a book to explain the moral basis of Japanese society.

所以他决定写一本书来阐述日本社会的道德基石。

David Howell: And he said that he thought that the best way of conceiving of that was through the prism of the way of the warrior—Bushido.

他在序言中说，他认为从日本武士道入手，介绍其方方面面，可以最完美地阐述这一点。

新渡户稻造为什么写这本书

Why Nitobe wrote the book

Zachary Davis: In 1900, Nitobe published Bushido: The Soul of Japan. In the book, he explained the moral foundations of traditional Japanese society, and he used samurai ethics to do it. This made a certain kind of sense, as Nitobe was a samurai by birth.

1900年，新渡户稻造出版了《武士道：日本人的精神》。他在书中解释了日本传统社会中的道德内核，并以日本武士的道德规范为例加以佐证。新渡户稻造为什么会这么写？当我们发现他出身于武士后，这一切似乎都能说得通了。

David Howell: His father was a retainer of the Nambo domain, a semi-autonomous domain in the northeastern part of the main island of Honshu. But the Tokugawa period in which he was born ended in 1868, and soon thereafter, samurai a kind of social status category disappeared. So although Nitobe was a samurai, he was only a samurai for the first few years of his life, technically speaking.

新渡户稻造生于江户时代（1603年-1868年）末期，他父亲是本州岛东北部一块半自治的南部领地的藩士。1868年，江户时代结束。不久后，武士阶层消亡。所以尽管新渡户是武士出身，但严格来说他的武士身份只维持到他的幼年。

Zachary Davis: When he was a young man, Nitobe was sent north to the island of Hokkaido, which was Japan’s agricultural frontier at the time. He studied at the Sapporo Agricultural College, and while there, he converted to Episcopalian Christianity. In 1884, he moved to the United States and enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied agriculture and economics.

后来，新渡户年纪轻轻就北上前往当时日本的农业边陲北海道岛。他在札幌农学校（今北海道大学）学习，并在那儿皈依了圣公会。1884年，他移居美国，赴约翰·霍普金斯大学学习农业和经济学。

Zachary Davis: While in the United States, Nitobe converted again. This time, he converted to Quakerism, a kind of Christianity that values nonviolence. But even as a Quaker, he believed the warrior ethic to be a valuable one.

留美期间，新渡户再度皈依。这次他皈依的是贵格会，其教义主张非暴力。尽管新渡户身为贵格会教徒，他仍然非常推崇武士道。

David Howell: It's so interesting that a Quaker, a Japanese Quaker writing for an English language audience would be talking about the way of the warrior in the first place as his way of explaining Japanese society.

《武士道》有趣之处在于，它是本由日本贵格会教徒为英文读者写的、把武士道看作日本社会第一精神要旨的书。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about books that changed the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk to one of the world’s leading scholars about the impact one book had. In this episode, I spoke with Harvard history professor David Howell about Bushido: The Soul of Japan, a 19th century book that introduced traditional Japanese morals to a western audience for the first time.

欢迎收听Writ Large【本课程英文版名称，为喜马拉雅官方自制】，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者探讨某一本书带给世界的影响。在本集中，我将和哈佛大学历史教授大卫·豪威尔讨论《武士道：日本人的精神》。这本书写于19世纪，它向西方读者首次介绍了日本传统道德。

Zachary Davis: So, why did Nitobe—a Quaker—want to write a book about the Samurai?

新渡户稻造既然是贵格会教徒，为什么会去写一本有关日本武士的书呢？

David Howell: In the book, he says that his wife's and other acquaintances' questions about, you know, basically, what's the story with Japan? What makes you people tick? Were a big inspiration.

新渡户在书中提到，自己的妻子和周围人都在问日本是什么样的、日本人的言行模式受何影响。这些问题促使他决定写这样一本书。

武士道的原则

The  principles of Bushido

Zachary Davis: Bushido was a major part of the answer, but it wasn’t the only one. The book also talks about Buddhism, Confucianism, and the native Japanese religion of Shinto.

他在书中给出了一个重要答案——武士道。但这绝非唯一的答案，书里还谈及了佛教、儒家思想和日本本土的神道教。

David Howell: And so the picture he paints through the book, sort of tacks back and forth between general moral principles that presumably were held by people throughout Japan and then other things that were more particularly connected to the samurai class, whom he presents as the exemplars of this moral behavior and ethical thought.

所以可以说，他在全书中勾勒的道德图景由两部分交织而成。一部分是日本全社会普遍遵循的总的道德准则；另一部分是以武士阶层为代表，形成的一套独特的道德观念和行为，也就是他所说的武士道。

Zachary Davis: The text is organized as a long essay, around 120 pages.

《武士道》全书约120页，内容架构类似于一部论文专著。

David Howell: It's not divided up into chapters so much as sort of section headings with big concepts—love, rectitude, morality, loyalty, things of that sort. And then he's got other sorts of added sections about the place of women, the current state of Bushido—that is current in around 1899, 1900—the future of Bushido looking forward. But the main bulk of the text is a series of discussions of various keywords about what is Bushido, what are the main ethical principles.

全书没有按章来切分，而是划成了十几个小节，每小节以仁、义、诚、忠等此类大概念为题。在书的后小半部分，作者还追加了几小节，探讨女性地位、武士道在当时（1899-1900年）的处境和武士道的未来。不过全书的主体部分还是在讨论武士道的几个核心概念和核心美德。

日本的骑士精神

The chivalry in Japan

Zachary Davis: What is the best translation for Bushido?

“武士道”在英文中翻成什么最合适呢？

David Howell: The conventional translation nowadays is the way of the warrior, and it is a reasonable translation. Bushi means a warrior and do is the way. And so Bushido, the way of the warrior is how it's almost always translated. He actually starts with the term chivalry, and I think one of his starting points was thinking that his readers would not think that there were ideas about chivalry in the kind of medieval European knight sense of the term in Japan. And so he says that actually, yes, we do have our idea of chivalry and that is Bushido.

如今最普遍的一个翻译版本是“战士的行事之道”，我觉得很合理。“武士”是指日本旧时的战士，而“道”是指行事的道德准则。这个译法基本上被广为接受。新渡户在阐释时以骑士精神来类比切入，我觉得他的出发点之一是，他认为他的西方读者觉得日本文化中没有与欧洲中世纪的“骑士”相类似的概念。所以他在书中告诉大家：看，我们也有骑士传统，我们的骑士精神就是武士道。

Zachary Davis: What is the way of the warrior then? You mentioned a couple of virtues that it's associated with. Is that how he defines it, as a kind of collection of virtues?

那“战士的行事之道”，或者说武士道是什么呢？您提到了它涵盖的一些美德，所以新渡户是将武士道看作一系列美德的统称吗？

David Howell: Yeah, I think that's a fair way of putting it. He sees it as partly a way of comportment that a man who is practicing Bushido—or I should correct myself because it's not something that one's self consciously practices, but it's something that learning and growing and being part of this ethical world, one is supposed to naturally have. Not everyone lives up to the standard, but ideally it’s something that one doesn’t need to be too self conscious about. But behaves with rectitude and honor, puts his duties, whether it's to his lord or his responsibility to be benevolent to those who are weaker than he is, before his own selfish desires. But also has a sense of pride. But pride is a funny concept because if you're too proud, that can be counterproductive, it can be kind of narcissistic. So he doesn't want people to be proud in that way, but self-conscious about how those around them see them.

嗯，我觉得可以这么说。他认为从某种意义上讲，附和武士道就是在附和一种修身行事之道。其实我不应该说“附和”，因为武士道不是某种强作履行的东西，而是学习之后自愿接纳并投身其中的道德体系，这个接纳的过程应当是自然而然的。并非每个武士都能达到武士道的标准，但理想情况下，武士们无需刻意纠正，便可自然行之。他们忠义行事，珍视名誉，效忠主公，履行关怀弱者的职责，将一己之欲置于最后。当然他们也对自己深感自豪。不过自豪这种情感值得玩味。水满则溢，人满则骄，过于自豪容易适得其反，转而自恋。新渡户希望人们不要过犹不及，要清楚自己在外人眼中的形象。

David Howell: And there, I think one of the really interesting terms that he brings out is honor. And the idea that Japan is a culture that's it takes honor very seriously, is very worried about shame, bringing shame onto oneself or onto one's house. And the idea that it's better to, even if it's against your own personal self-interest, to act in a way that won't cause you to lose face or, you know, besmirch your name. I think, actually, those are ideas that in the context of the Victorian age, that the ladies and gentlemen who he envisioned as his readers would have understood, maybe more than we do nowadays.

书里有个地方我觉得很有意思。作者提到了一个概念——名誉，说日本文化中非常看重名誉，人们极度害怕让自己或家族蒙羞，即便所行有违个人利益，也胜过丢脸和玷污名誉。我觉得其实新渡户的预期读者，也就是维多利亚时期的人们，会理解这种想法，至少可能比我们当代人要更为理解一些。

Zachary Davis: So is Nitobe saying these are the values that characterize the warrior ethic? Or is he advocating for these to be applied in any situation? Like is he saying that these are qualities everyone should aspire to?

所以新渡户认为这些价值观仅仅是武士们遵循的，还是说主张将武士道用于规范各种情景？比如他说了每个人都应当追求这些美德吗？

David Howell: I don't read him as advocating that others adopt Bushido. I think he sees himself as explaining a worldview to others. In his explanations of Bushido in the context of Japanese history and society, he is a little bit cagey in that on the one hand, it is the ethic of the samurai class who made up maybe six percent of the Japanese population at the time of the fall of the Tokugawa regime in 1868. But he also—I mean, he calls it the soul of Japan, not the soul of a small portion of Japanese society. So he does want his readers to think that it characterizes the particular characteristics of Japan.

我认为他并非主张大众遵循武士道，他认为自己只是在向外界阐释一种世界观。考虑到他当时所处的日本社会背景，在解释武士道时他有些讳莫如深。1868年德川幕府垮台时，日本只有约6%的人口属于武士阶层，遵从着武士道。不过另一方面，他又将武士道称为日本人的精神。所以他也确实希望读者将它看作日本的一个特殊文化符号。

David Howell: He doesn't talk about China or other East Asian countries, but he would have been keenly aware that people were sort of lumping all of East Asians and beyond into the general category of Oriental. And so I think he wanted to find a way to sort of pull Japan out of that mix and have his readers see it as a unique and certainly special culture and society.

他没有提及中国或其他东亚国家，但他已经敏锐地察觉到，西方人在把整个东亚乃至更多地区纳入“东方”这一笼统概念。我认为他想设法让日本在其中脱颖而出，让西方读者将日本看作一个独特别致的社会与文化。

Zachary Davis: Nitobe understood how his western readers saw Japan— and how Japanese people saw Christians like him.

新渡户知道他的西方读者如何看待日本，也知道日本人如何看待他这样的基督徒。

David Howell: I think probably in his mind—and it comes out here and there a little bit in the book—is a keen awareness that Japan is not now and as he could see, very unlikely ever to become a Christian nation. There were critiques of Japanese Christians within Japan saying that they couldn't be loyal to the modern Japanese state, headed by the emperor, if they had these divided loyalties. How can you be served God ahead of your sovereign? And he argues that actually there is no contradiction.

新渡户敏锐地看出，日本现在以及在他目所能及的将来都完全不可能变成一个基督教国家。书中也处处流露出这样的想法。日本国内的日本基督教批评者称，如果人们既追从上帝，又追从天皇，那他们就不可能忠于天皇领导下的日本现代政权。怎么可以将侍奉上帝置于侍奉一国之君之上呢？针对这些观点，新渡户反驳说二者其实并不矛盾。

David Howell: But I think he's very aware of that, that he's an unusual Japanese person for being a Christian. And I think he's probably keenly aware that many of his readers will automatically heavily discount the virtues of any society if it's not Christian and shows no interest in becoming Christian.

不过我觉得他很清楚自己身为一名基督教徒，与一般的日本人稍有不同。他也清楚若是他讲述的社会不以基督教为主流，也没有这样的趋势，那他的西方读者会严重低估这个社会所尊崇的美德。

熊谷直实的困境

Heike’s dilemma 

Zachary Davis: So by the end of it, the reader has learned about what Nitobe sees as core values of Japanese life. Are there are other aspects to the text that are notable?

读完全书，我们会了解新渡户口中日本文化的核心价值观。除此之外，书中还有哪些点值得我们关注呢？

David Howell: Yes, I think he does a really interesting job of taking things from Japanese literature and Japanese history that would seem bizarre to his readers and explaining them in a way that makes sense. 

嗯，我觉得这本书非常有意思。新渡户从日本文学历史中抽取了西方人难以理解的内容，却用他们熟悉的方式阐释清楚。

David Howell: There's a very famous story from the medieval war tale, The Tale of the Heike, which was passed down as a kind of oral tale, that he relates in which a middle-aged warrior and his opponent are facing off on the field of battle. The older man has sort of vanquished the younger one, but has—no blood has been shed yet. He pulls off his opponent's helmet and sees that his opponent is this adolescent boy. You know, maybe 14, 15-years-old. And he feels really bad because his duty at this point is to cut off the boy's head and take it back as a kind trophy. 

比如他谈到了日本镰仓时代的著名军记物语——《平家物语》。这个小说以说唱本的形式广泛流传。其中一处情节是一位中年武士和敌人在战场上对峙。武士已经差不多完全占了上风，却没见到对方流血。他扯开对手的盔甲，却发现对方只是个十四五岁的少年。他痛苦纠结，因为他受令割下对手的头颅，将其作为战利品带回，他必须履行职责。

David Howell: But the trophy aspect of it makes sense only if the opponent is somebody of higher rank or of noted valor as a warrior. So there isn't much for him to gain by killing someone who's much younger and much weaker than he is. Though he does realize that the boy is of high rank and so actually there is some incentive there. But he tells the guy, “No, no, run away. The rest of my army isn't here yet. No one will know. It's fine.” But the boy insists that his head be cut off, that it would bring dishonor to him if he were not duly decapitated at this point. And so he does it and duly takes the head and is duly recognized for his achievement, but then renounces his practice as a warrior.

但作为武士，只有杀死高一级的武士或是名震八方的猛士，才会为自己赢得名誉。杀死一个如此虚弱的年轻人只会有损名节。其实这个少年的武士级别很高，按武士道来讲，杀死他并非全然无道。但他只是说了句：“走吧，离开这儿。我余部尚未赶到，此事只有你知我知，放心。”但少年坚持让他砍下自己的头颅，因为他若有违军令，将会因此蒙羞。他听从了，杀死了少年，带着他的头颅班师回府，功绩加身，可武士道在他身上却荡然无存。

Zachary Davis: At the end of the story, the older samurai is filled with remorse. He’s not guilty. He knows that he had to kill the boy. But he’s so upset that he had to do it that he leaves the military and becomes a monk.

武士最终深怀悔恨，倒不是负罪，因为自己也是受命所驱，无法抗旨不遵。但他对此耿耿于怀，意志消沉，最后脱盔摘甲，遁入空门。

David Howell: It's kind of a strange story. A sad story. Why would the young man be so insistent that the older man kill him when he has a chance to run away without any kind of public dishonor but Nitobe uses that to argue for the deeply ingrained sense of honor on the adolescent’s part and benevolence and mercy on his opponent's part. He gets no pleasure from killing this even though he's a professional warrior. He’s killed many people. But they come to a kind of understanding between them that the best result, for both of their sakes, is for him to kill the boy. And so he does.

这个故事离奇而又悲伤。少年明明有机会逃跑，也不完全违背武士道，不会太有辱名节，可他为何一再坚持让武士杀死自己？新渡户认为这体现了少年内心深深的名誉感和武士心底的悲悯与仁慈。即便武士以刺杀敌手为业，杀敌百万，也不会从一味嗜血中得来半点乐趣。但当他们二人都发现，只有杀死这个少年，于命于名他们才都能拥有最好的结局，他就不得不这样做了。

David Howell: I think the way that he walks the reader through the story is really interesting. It makes it compelling. It takes something that seems like a very strange and inexplicable anecdote and makes it noble somehow, which was what the tellers of the tale of Heike were no doubt hoping for.

我认为新渡户讲述这个故事的方式很有意思，一下子说服了自己的读者。他挖掘了这个看似怪诞费解的故事中闪闪发光的精神内核，这无疑也是《平家物语》的作者想要传递的。

Zachary Davis: The story might have been hard for Nitobe’s readers to understand, but American readers had their own stories of sacrifice, whether they were the stories of knights charging into battle or the Christian story of Jesus, the son of God, sacrificing himself on the cross.

新渡户的读者也许会对这个故事感到不解，不过话说回来，美国文学中也有关于牺牲的故事，比如骑士参战，又如圣子耶稣被钉在十字架上，牺牲自我拯救苍生。

武士并非杀人机器

ethical warriors are not killing machines

David Howell: So he does like to come back and say, you know, we're not really all that different after all. We frame things differently. But behaving honorably is something that we understand and you understand.

所以他想回过头告诉读者，看吧，我们两个文化也没有那么大相径庭。虽然我们构建世界观的方式不同，但其中的内核，比如尊崇荣誉，你我都能理解。

Zachary Davis: I guess what's interesting is when I was first thinking about the way of a warrior, well, in some senses you think of it's precisely not honorable. I mean, they're killing machines. And yet it seems like many cultures have tried to reign in, you know, the impulse of utter destruction with codes, cultures, stories, et cetera, so that, you know, there's some constraint. And that seems to be partly what this is. This is not how to be the greatest killing machine. This is a culture of ethical warrior.

我感觉有意思的是，“武士的行事之道”乍一听似乎不是什么光彩的事，像是什么杀人不眨眼的行径。不过似乎许多文化都在靠一种彻底打破行为准则、文化传统、故事叙事冲动来赢得主导，所以需要对其加以约束。或许这也是武士道形成的原因之一。它不是在讲武士要如何杀敌百万，而是在讲他们需要遵从的道德体系。

David Howell: Yes. That's a very good point. And as I said earlier, technically he was a samurai, but never had any kind of traditional military training. He never served in the military himself, in Japan or elsewhere. And his codification or his explanation of the way of the warrior is interesting also because during the time when the samurai really did run Japan, there was no set of precepts that correspond to a way of the warrior. There were some people who wrote about it and thought about it, and then the actual behavior of Japanese samurai when they did engage in battle was often far below the lofty standard that Nitobe portrays. 

嗯，这观点不错。就像我之前说的，新渡户出身于武士，但没接受过任何传统武士训练。他也没在日本或其他地方入过行伍。他梳理整合并阐释了武士道，这点也很有意思，因为此前武士阶层尚存于日本时，反而没有明确的武士道规范守则。人们对武士道有过所思所著，但在现实中，很少有人能达到新渡户所说的那种崇高标准。

David Howell: Even in the medieval era, when he talks about these two men facing off one on one, deciding whether they're worthy of being opponents or not, that kind of thing just didn't happen. Or if it did happen, it happened after people were shooting at each other with the arrows from far away. And then when they got close enough that the only thing they could do is hand-to-hand battle, then maybe they would chat before fighting each other. But in general, the idea of war was to kill the other guy, take the territory, or whatever it's that you're after.

即便是在中世纪，像《平家物语》中所说的两人对峙，纠结是否要刀下留情的情况，在当时也很少发生。即便有过类似情况，也是两个人相距一段距离，互相拉弓射箭，只求飞矢长眼。而只要拉近些，两面相对，不是你死就是我亡，哪怕决斗前二人还曾把酒言欢。总而言之，战争就是为了消灭敌手，攻池掠地，凡此种种，都是为自己谋利。

David Howell: And it's only after Japan becomes peaceful, after a long parade of civil war in the 17th century, that you see the first efforts to codify a way of the warrior—written often by men who themselves were samurai in social class but had never fought in a battle and never would fight in a battle. And writings about the way of the warrior were often almost kind of like elegies for a bygone way of life.

日本在经历17世纪的漫长内战后终于恢复和平，直到那时才有人试图整理编写武士道。这些人往往曾跻身武士阶层，却从来没上战场打过仗。他们的这些著作更像是对旧时生活的追挽留恋。

Zachary Davis: Well, it doesn't seem that surprising to me that I think part of the romantic movement was a kind of longing for a heroic age. And so Western romantic poetry and paintings often do figure the knight. So it seems of a piece of this kind of this same impulse.

嗯，我对此倒不怎么惊讶。我觉得浪漫主义运动从某种程度上也源自对英雄时代的追忆憧憬。所以西方浪漫主义诗歌和绘画中经常会塑造骑士形象。讲述武士道的作者可能也受到了这种强烈情感的驱使。

David Howell: He was a man of his times and was, as I've already said, extremely cosmopolitan. So, yes, of course, it totally figures.

新渡户正逢其时，而且我也说了，他显然具备跨文化经验和国际眼光。

这本书为什么魅力无穷

Why this book attracted celebrity

Zachary Davis: The book was an immediate hit and attracted some high profile readers, including American president Theodore Roosevelt.

《武士道》一炮走红，吸引了美国总统西奥多·罗斯福等大批精英。

David Howell: The first copy that Roosevelt got was actually given to him by a Japanese man, Kaneko Kentarō, who became an important government official, a jurist, kind of a legal scholar, who was the first Japanese person to attend Harvard and was part of the class of 1878. Roosevelt himself was part of the class of 1880. Apparently the two didn't know each other while they were at Harvard but were introduced later on. And so Kaneko sent Roosevelt a copy of Bushido and some other books introducing Japan to Roosevelt. Roosevelt read it and was greatly impressed. This is around 1904. And the story is that he ordered 60 copies of Bushido and then distributed them to friends and family. Apparently Roosevelt also took up sumo wrestling and would have like sumo match in the White House.

罗斯福收到的第一本《武士道》赠自金子坚太郎，他是日本政府的重要官员，也称得上是位法学家。他是第一位就读于哈佛大学的日本人，是哈佛1878级学生，比罗斯福高两级。不过显然这两位在哈佛期间未曾谋面，后来经人介绍才相识。金子坚太郎赠予了罗斯福一套介绍日本的书籍，其中就有《武士道》。罗斯福读完此书深受触动。1904年前后，他订购了六十本《武士道》送给亲朋好友。他甚至还学习了相扑，想在白宫开展相扑比赛。

Zachary Davis: Something else happened to drive Bushido’s success. In 1904 and 1905, the Japanese were fighting in the Russo-Japanese War. 

《武士道》的传播还得益于其他事情。1904年初日俄战争爆发，直到1905年9月才结束。

David Howell: No one, maybe not even the Japanese government itself, really expected Japan to win that war. 

没有人，甚至日本政府自己都没料到日本会赢得这场战争。

Zachary Davis: But Japan did win. Decisively. 

事实就是日本赢了，大获全胜。

David Howell: The victory in the Russo-Japanese War put Japan on the map, so to speak, for Western observers. But it was also hugely influential in other places as well. In Cairo, when news of the victory came, there were rumors going around intellectuals in Cairo who were, of course, Muslims, but also influenced by French and other European thought. And rumors went around that the emperor of Japan was about to convert to Islam, and then Japan would become the beacon of Islam in the east. 

这次胜利让西方观察者开始将目光投向日本。受震动的不仅仅是西方。当日本战胜的消息传到开罗时，开罗的知识分子间传闻四起。这些知识分子是穆斯林，同时也深受法国等欧洲思想的熏陶。当时有谣言称日本天皇即将皈依伊斯兰教，日本将成为伊斯兰世界在东方的灯火。

David Howell: That did not happen, but still, it gives you a sense of the great excitement. The Japanese victory In the Russo-Japanese War caused all this excitement because it was the first time an Asian country had beaten a European country in war. And it came also 10 years after the Japanese had beaten the much bigger and, on paper, more powerful Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War. But really, the idea of an East Asian country beating a European, one of the great European powers was just beyond belief for people.

尽管传闻并未成真，却让这些知识分子为之一振。日本获胜之所以鼓舞了这些人，是因为这是历史上第一次亚洲国家在战争中击败了欧洲国家。数十年后，日本发动侵华战争，侵略了更为强大、幅员更为辽阔的中国。说回到日俄战争，一个东亚国家竟然会打败一个欧洲强国，这在当时简直让人难以置信。

Zachary Davis: Japan was already on the minds of many Europeans and Americans at this point, but not for its political power.

其实当时许多欧美人士都对日本留有印象，而且这种印象并非源于政治。

David Howell: So in the latter part of the 19th century, there was a lot of interest in Japanese culture and visual culture and things like that. In the 1870s and 1880s and beyond, in Western art, that was the Japonism movement. Van Gogh, and Monet, and many other Western artists were impressed by Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and things like that, so there was a great fascination with Japan in the world of art and aesthetics. Okakura Kakuzō, another very cosmopolitan Japanese writer, wrote The Book of Tea in English for a Western audience and helped to introduce Japanese aesthetics, and he also sort of helped to invent the idea of art history in Japan. 

在19世纪后半叶，西方人对日本文化、视觉艺术等兴趣浓厚。这就是19世纪七八十年代以及之后西方艺术中的日本主义风潮。梵高、莫奈等西方艺术家深为浮世绘等日本艺术所打动，艺术圈和美学界都对日本深感迷恋。冈仓天心是另一位具备国际眼光的日本作家，他用英文写了《说茶》一书，向西方读者介绍日本美学，并在本国开创了艺术史这一概念。

David Howell: But the idea of Japan as a power, an international power, was still relatively new at the beginning of the 20th century. Japan got treaty equality with Western powers only in 1899. In 1902, the British and the Japanese signed the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Again, the first military alliance between a non-European or non-Western power and a Western Power—Britain, in this case. And I think Bushido helped in some ways to sort of change the conversation from Japan as the land of exotic art and, sort of, beautiful woodblock prints and the exotic orient to something much more formidable, closer, in many ways, to the West, a western power in its own right, an industrializing power in its own right. It didn't start interest in Japan, but I think it changed the tenor of interest in Japan.

不过20世纪初期，若是将日本看作国际强国，似乎还为时略早。日本直到1899年才废除西方列强的治外法权，1902年，日本与英国签订《日英同盟条约》，这是历史上第一次英国与非欧美国家结为军事同盟。我觉得武士道某种程度上影响了日本与西方的交流方式，让西方对日本的印象从一个孕育异域艺术和精美版画的东方国度变成一个在方方面面与西方旗鼓相当、令人敬畏的国家，成为了一个凭借自身努力实现工业化、实现兵强国富的强国。让西方开始关注日本的并非武士道，但它改变了人们对日本的关注点，也提升了人们的关注度。

一些日本人不看好《武士道》？

Not every Japanese loved the book

Zachary Davis: These political and military achievements shifted the view of Japan from a fascinating but inconsequential foreign land to an impressive player on the world stage. Bushido helped accelerate this shift. But in Japan, not everyone loved the book.

这些政治军事成就改变了人们对日本的印象，使之从从迷人却无足轻重的弹丸之地，变成国际舞台上的夺目新星。武士道加速了这一转变。但在日本，并不是每个人都喜欢《武士道》这本书。

David Howell: When it was finally translated into Japanese in 1908, it got very mixed views in Japan itself. Some people liked it. Others thought it was fine, but it was a superficial view for Western consumption. And then some people were really angry because it not just downplayed but basically ignored the imperial institution. And this is a time when in Japan, it's the beginning of a new kind of nationalism focused on the emperor and the imperial institution, still relatively new, actually, in Japan itself. And so some of those folks, the more nationalist folks, were angry with Nitobe, and suspicious of him anyway because he was a Christian. So it was one of those things was more popular away from Japan than in Japan itself.

《武士道》于1908年被翻译成日文时，当时日本国内的评价毁誉参半。有些人很喜欢；有些人觉得马马虎虎，认为书里只是些迎合西方读者的肤浅言论；有些人极为愤慨，认为它贬低乃至无视了天皇制度。当时日本国内开始兴起了一股以天皇和天皇制度为中心的爱国思潮，一些爱国人士对新渡户极为恼火，并因为他的基督教徒身份对他各种怀疑。可以说《武士道》在西方比在日本国内更受欢迎。

变质的武士道？

“Bushido gone bad”？

Zachary Davis: Bushido continued to influence the way Europeans and North Americans saw Japan for decades—especially in war.

数十年来，武士道继续影响着欧美人对日本的看法，尤其是在战争中。

David Howell: Even during the World War Two period, the willingness of Japanese troops to die rather than surrender, things like the so-called kamikaze pilots who crashed airplanes into American or other naval vessels, the sort of suicide missions, were extremely shocking at the time. Unfortunately, in the last couple of decades, we've gotten used to that kind of thing, but until fairly recently, the idea of deliberately committing suicide as part of a mission like that, with no hope whatsoever of survival, was quite shocking. And I think there was a tendency to attribute that to a kind of “Bushido gone bad” ethos.

在第二次世界大战期间，日本军队宁死不降，如神风敢死队飞行员驾驶飞机撞上美国或他国海军舰艇，执行自杀式任务，这着实令人震惊。在过去的几十年中，我们对这类事习以为常，直到近年来才意识到，执行这种毫无生还几率的自杀式任务是多么惊天骇地。而且越来越多的人觉得这一行为受“武士道变质”思想的影响。

David Howell: In the modern and contemporary world, there's no doubt that Western popular understandings of traditional Japanese society remain influenced by the idea of the way of the warrior. I can't be entirely critical because it's that draws some of my students into my classes. They're impressed by the willingness for self-sacrifice and the, you know, high moral and ethical standards that they think characterized the samurai historically. And so I, in my teaching, I try to work with that, but also sort of let them down gently that, that real life was rather more complicated.

在现当代，武士道也无疑影响了西方人对日本传统社会的主流印象。对此我不好完全批驳，不然会把有兴趣听我讲课的学生吓跑。他们被这种殉道精神、崇高道德等武士道的精髓深深吸引，所以在教学中我也会顾及这一点，但也会稍稍打消他们的幻想，告诉他们现实情况更为复杂。

娱乐界的武士形象

Samurai in popular culture

Zachary Davis: Many Americans get their ideas about samurai from popular culture. In the early years of the comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live, the actor John Belushi had a set of sketches in which he played a samurai with a contemporary American job, like being a hotel clerk.

许多美国人是从流行文化中了解武士思想。在喜剧小品综艺《周六夜现场》早期的节目中，演员约翰·贝鲁什在小品中扮演一名武士，而他所做的工作则是酒店店员，一个当代美国人做的工作。

David Howell: He commits some small error and then is ready to commit suicide to take to make amends for that. The first book I read about Japan that I can remember was Shogun, published in 1975, hugely, hugely popular as a book and mini-series in a movie. I haven't read that book in a long time, but my memory of it was a kind of over-the-top, Bushido-influenced view that loyal retainers look forward to the day when they would be able to commit suicide or otherwise die for their lord. I've since learned that,I mean, it’s just a novel: very entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously.

他犯了一些小错误，准备通过自杀来弥补自己的错误。我记得自己读的第一本关于日本的书是《幕府将军》，这本书是1975年出版，无论是书还是它的迷你剧都广受大众喜爱。我已经很久没有再读过这本书了，但是我对它的印象是书中所传递的思想深受武士道影响，即忠诚的随从期待有一天以自杀或者其他方式为主人效忠。从那时起，我就明白，这只是一本有趣的小说，但是别太当真了。

Zachary Davis: And then there was the 2003 American movie The Last Samurai. The movie is set in the 1870s, and in it, Tom Cruise plays a US Army Captain who is sent to Japan. He begins to train the Japanese Imperial Army to fight against a samurai-led rebellion, but he later abandons the Imperial Army and joins the samurai. In the end, Tom Cruise’s character convinces the emperor that the samurai were right all along, and that he should remember the country’s traditions.

还有2003年美国电影《最后的武士》。电影背景设定在十九世纪70年代，剧中汤姆·克鲁斯饰演一位被派往日本的美国陆军上尉。起初，他的任务是训练日本帝国军以对抗武士们领导的叛乱，但之后他离开了帝国军，加入武士阵营。影片结尾，汤姆·克鲁斯扮演的角色说服天皇，令他深信武士们始终坚守着正道，一国传统也不应被遗忘。

David Howell: I remember when that film came out, I was a participant in various listservs and things like that. And many of my colleagues who were specialists in Japanese history were, you know, upset about some of the historical infelicities. Nowadays, we talk about whitewashing and the white savior complex, and the idea that a white man like Tom Cruise would come and save the Japanese from this themselves seems insulting as well as unlikely. 

记得那部电影上映时，我参加过一系列邮件讨论活动。我有许多同事是日本历史专家，他们对电影中的历史错误颇有微词。现在大家对这部电影的批评主要有两方面，一是粉饰历史真相，二是“白人救世主”情结。汤姆·克鲁斯一个白人跑到日本去救国救民，这样的情节其实有点冒犯性质，而且也不现实。

David Howell: But in Japan, the movie was actually pretty popular, and people didn't worry too much about that stuff. I think that ordinary viewers in Japan felt that Japanese culture and the behavior of the Japanese in the movie was portrayed in a positive way. They were, you know, honorable men acting honorably, and if Tom Cruise was necessary to bring the crowds in, then that's fine. 

不过在日本，这部电影却很受欢迎，人们对这些问题也并不太在意。原因在于，以日本普通观众视角来看，电影中刻画的日本文化和日本作风是正面的。你看，电影中角色一个个形象高大，行为高尚。

David Howell: Whatever. I think it's the attitude of most people. But there's some over-the-top-stuff that I think ultimately can be traced back to the influence of Bushido. Maybe more the influence of people who have heard of Bushido but haven't actually read the book, but that's often the case with many important books, I think.

如果说塑造汤姆·克鲁斯这种角色对吸引观众是必要的，那无所谓，大家也都认同。但是电影中的一些刻画有过于夸张的嫌疑，我认为可能是受了《武士道》一书的影响。还有些人，听说过《武士道》但没有亲自读过，他们对这部电影影响可能更大。不过，许多名著也都是这种情况。

Zachary Davis: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I mean, one way to read that film in my memory is that you have a kind of dissolute, useless, industrialized American who is actually rejuvenated by integrating values from Japanese culture, traditional values. So in some ways, the appeal of Bushido is in the figure of someone like Tom Cruise, where he needs these ethical and moral guidelines to be whole.

一知半解确实害人不浅。我还记得有一种解读这部电影的方式，认为它描述的是一个工业化时期放荡、无用的美国人，通过汲取日本传统文化中的价值观而重获新生。所以说，武士道精神对汤姆·克鲁斯扮演的那类人有吸引力，就在于他需要吸收这些道德准则以成为一个完整的人。

David Howell: Yeah, he does. He comes in a kind of loser and goes out in glory as a winner because he has learned to embody these ethics. And we see that a lot in various iterations, whether it's Bushido per se, or Zen Buddhism, or other sorts of things. It's complicated because it sort of reduces the East into a kind of caricature, but it is an enduring, enduring trope, I think.

没错。他这个角色以失败者形象出现，最后成了光荣的胜利者，就是因为他学会了按那些道德准则行事。而且电影反复突出了一些内容，比如武士道精神，禅宗佛教，或者其他此类事物。这些之所以复杂，是因为电影将“东方”这个大概念缩成了一幅小漫画，这种表达方式影响将很深远。

光荣之死

glory in death

Zachary Davis: I hadn't considered until now, but I wonder if part of the appeal of Bushido for Western—or you know, for anyone; it sounds like this is a global phenomenon—is it takes some of the best qualities of maybe traditional Asian philosophical traditions, Buddhism and Confucianism and kind of family devotion, and marries it to an ethic of action and glory. And like trying to resolve those tensions of, like, self-renunciation and kind of strict adherence to an ethical code along with the dynamism of a warrior. Do you think there's something to that? Can you see that maybe that's part of the appeal?

还有一个问题我之前没有考虑过。武士道精神现在有点要传遍全球的意思，那么它对西方人乃至所有人的吸引力，是不是在于它从传统东方哲学中，吸取了最精华的部分，比如佛教教义、儒家思想，还有奉献家庭之类的精神，又把这些与行动派思维、荣誉感相结合？就像是一次和解，把舍生取义的气节、伦理信条的坚守、战士拼搏的精神三者相调和。您怎么看这种说法，您认为这是武士精神的吸引人之处吗？

David Howell: Yeah, I think that's a very interesting point. So there are various ways of attaining this kind of rectitude and, sort of, renunciation of worldly things, but one major way is to leave society entirely, maybe shave your head and go up and live as a hermit in the mountains, which is not something that most people would want to do. And so I think, yes, the way of having that kind of control over yourself while also being a participant in society, contributing to society, however it's configured around you and, you know, being willing to die if that's what's called for, but not, and Nitobe says this frequently, that saying that there's glory in death and then just sort of running out with your sword waving is not an honorable death. 

嗯，这个观点确实很有趣。实现所谓大义，远离世俗纷扰的方式有很多，其中比较常见的就是完全脱离社会，可能再把头发一剃，然后隐居山林，不过多数人肯定不愿意这么做。我认为更好的方式，是既对自我有完全的掌控，同时又以参与者的身份为社会做出贡献，即便身处社会的条条框框内，也有时刻为之赴死的觉悟。这种方式不同于盲目求死，就像《武士道》作者新渡户说的一样，满口“有死之荣”，冲出去胡乱挥刀，这样的死并无荣誉可言。活着就好好活着，直至了断之日来临，出于必要，方才慷慨赴死。

David Howell: You live when you need to live, and then when it's time to die, then you die, and you do it, you face up to what you need to do. But it's not just, you know, death for its own sake or death for some kind of trumped-up glory. But it's you know, it's the necessary result of these other factors relating to your place in the world. And so, yeah, I think that it is appealing the idea of having a higher purpose while also being a contributing member of society. Having that kind of control, agency over yourself, you're not just at the whims of others or supernatural forces, but it's really up to you. That it is appealing, I think.

不应该为死而死，为虚妄之荣而死，而是深感与自身相“羁绊”的世界有此需要，才做出死的选择。我认为这才是武士道精神的动人之处，心怀大义，身为社会所驱。有了这种程度的自我掌控力，你就不会被他人或超自然的力量随意操纵，真正成为了自己。我想，这就是其吸引力所在。

武士道的现实意义

Bushido in today

Zachary Davis: Does this book still matter today? Should people still read it? Does it still have something to say to us?

《武士道》这本书今天仍然有价值吗？人们是否还应该读它？我们又能从中学到什么呢？

David Howell: That's a very interesting question. As a historian, I'm trained to think in terms of contextualizing things, to fighting against essentialism. And so, you know, my instinct for a book like that is to note, you know, how much after the age of the samurai in which it was written, how it would have struck probably readers if it could have been taken back 100 or 200 years as this bizarre thing that they may not have recognized as an accurate description. Many things they would have recognized, but in its whole, they might have thought that it was a very strange portrayal of their society. So in that sense, I don't want people to read it and say, okay, now I get Japan any more than you might want to read Dickens and say now, oh, I get contemporary U.S. society. There are connections, but it's a long way. 

这个问题也很有意思。作为一名历史学家，我受过训练，以整体的、历史的思维为指导想问题，排除本质主义的思考方式。因此面对这样一本书，直觉会使我思考：现在距离此书描述的武士时代过了多久？一两百年前的读者如何看待它？他们是否会觉得书中描写的情形有不实之处？许多书中内容可能会得到他们的承认，但放在一切来描绘整个社会，或许就显得有点奇怪了。从这个方面来说，我不希望人们读了它之后，就觉得自己懂了日本社会，因为这相当于一个人读了狄更斯写过去英国的小说，就号称懂了当代美国社会。其中确实有联系，但仍然有很大区别。

David Howell: But I think as a way of thinking about issues like cosmopolitanism, about dialogue between belief systems that on their surface seem to be quite opposed or quite far apart, a kind of respectful dissent to the eurocentrism that Nitobe encountered around him. It's not pedantic. It's very learned, but not pedantic. It's not fighting back against eurocentrism, but it is a critique of it. And so in that sense, I would like people to continue to read it today.

但是，如果把它视作一个窗口，去思考世界主义，去考量表面大相庭径的信仰体系间的对话，去质疑新渡户曾面对过的欧洲中心论，那么此书中的学问不可谓不精深，而且很有趣。从这一点来说，我希望今天的人们继续阅读这本《武士道》。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is an exclusive production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Galen Beebe and me, Zachary Davis, with help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu, Wendy Wu, and Monica Zhang. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Don’t miss an episode, subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening! 

Writ Large是喜马拉雅旗下的独家播客节目。Writ Large由本人Zachary Davis和Galen Beebe制作，Feiran Du、Ariel Liu、Wendy Wu和Monica Zhang为本节目提供了大力支持，背景音乐由Blue Dot Sessions提供。节目集集精彩，不容错过，快来喜马拉雅app订阅吧。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！