This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In 1899, Inazo Nitobe published a book in English called "Bushido: The Soul of Japan." Nitobe was born into a samurai family and later became a Christian. He wrote the book after a Belgian legal scholar asked him how Japan taught morality without religious instruction in its schools.
Nitobe came to realize the answer was the samurai ethics he had grown up with. He described them through seven virtues: rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, veracity, honor and loyalty. "Bushido" became an international best-seller, with U.S.
President Theodore Roosevelt counting it among his favorite books. More than a century later, two psychologists at Nagoya University in Japan, Ryota Takano and Minoru Karasawa, have used computational language analysis to study the book. They examined how its moral values are structured and expressed, and how the book compares with hundreds of other English-language moral and cultural texts.
Psychology has relied heavily on Western populations, and this study asks how values from elsewhere are understood. A common psychology framework groups moral values into six basic concerns, including care, fairness and respect for authority. The researchers found that, among the seven virtues in "Bushido," honor is tied to more of these concerns than any other.
They also compared "Bushido" with 30 other English-language books about Japanese culture. The more closely a book's mix of moral concerns matched that of "Bushido," the more widely it tended to be published, translated and cited in the West. The study, published in PNAS Nexus, shows how a psychology-based method can measure the values expressed in writing.
It suggests that Japanese values may have reached Western readers partly because of how Nitobe expressed them, not only because of what they were. Psychologists often measure a person's moral values with a questionnaire. One widely used example is the Moral Foundations Questionnaire.
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