The Journey, not the Destination

Politicians and celebrities using the media to downplay the shame of their misdeeds.   Fathers killing their children for choosing a different point of view.   Our culture’s understanding of honor – meiyo in Japanese – is seriously distorted and sullied.   It seems today that if we can get away with something or “sincerely apologize” if we get caught, then it’s ok to do whatever we want.   Our reputation, our family name, our honor doesn’t matter much anymore.   On the other hand, much arrogance and selfishness has been perpetrated in the name of one’s “honor”.   So what is it really? This is the 6 th virtue of Bushido.   Wikipedia states that honor is “a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both the social standing and the self-evaluation of an individual or corporate body such as a family, school, regiment or nation”.   The key word is perceived.   From multiple definitions of the word comes the idea that my honor is only as good as what other peo

Honesty – makoto in Japanese is the 5 th virtue of Bushido.   Defining honesty is kind of like throwing jello on a wall and expecting it to stick.   So much of what the word means depends on the context and culture in which the word is used, unfortunately. The quality of being honest; uprightness, fairness, truthfulness, sincerity, frankness.   This is what you see when you look up the word in a dictionary.   Looking up the word honest, though, you find a deeper attempt at definition: honorable in principles, intentions, and actions, upright and fair; gained or obtained fairly; genuine or unadulterated. Nitobe relates that a samurai could not even comprehend living a life that entertained anything but honesty.   He writes in ‘Bushido: The Soul of Japan’, “The bushi held that his high social position demanded a loftier standard of veracity than that of the tradesman and peasant. Bushi no ichi-gon --the word of a samurai […] was sufficient guaranty of the truthfulness o