More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 9, 2018 - January 26, 2019
“Whatever quality drew those dogs to him is sure to be felt by men as well. That guy is destined for great things.”
“I don’t believe in ‘the Way of the Samurai’ that says you should dare to do things you know are impossible and then wallow in the tragedy of it all.
If the time’s right, Iwasaki Yatarō will take on a billion men. If he knows he can beat them, that is. If it’s a losing battle, I’ll run from even one opponent.”
“Any government that takes this much pride in a silly dress-up game is sure to self-destruct. And if the shogunate and daimyo don’t self-destruct, they’re sure to be destroyed by foreign forces,”
Turn your back on the current of the times, and you’re sure to lose out.
When an ignorant fanatic launches into a harangue about what’s good for the country, nothing good can come of it.
At that moment, both men were out for blood. And yet they didn’t hate each other. Both were samurai, both were loyalists, and what’s more, they were friends.
The political sense of people from Satsuma tends to resemble that of the British. Rather than sticking to ideology, they are practical, sizing up what is actually happening in each situation and acting accordingly.
Since ancient times, court officials have never really achieved much of anything, yet nevertheless, they wielded an odd sort of authority. They were high priests surrounding the living god who was His Majesty the Emperor. They were merely priests. Yet since His Majesty could not speak directly to the daimyo, it was the court officials who told the daimyo what His Majesty the Emperor had said, just as a priest would communicate a divine revelation to his parish. That is where their authority came from. Of course, should a court official alter the emperor’s message slightly to suit his own
...more
“You may laugh when I say this, but I seem to have been born again.” “At your advanced age?” “What has age to do with it? It seems human beings are reborn many times during their lives. I don’t know about others, but I have certainly been born again, into a completely different man than I was before. At least that’s how it seems to me.”
When one transcends such dichotomies as life and death or victory and loss, and all, including one’s own self, becomes dissolved in nothingness, one is said to have reached the ultimate state in swordfighting, or in Zen Buddhism.
Ikeda asked for details and discovered that Ryōma had started by picking several good men and putting them in charge of the others; he allocated specific duties to each one and then had them compete against each other.
My ears are so sharp I’m always way ahead of everybody else—I turn around and there’s no one behind me. Happens time and time again.”
“That’s just why I want to find something important to throw it into. You’ve only got one so you hang onto it like some nun clutching a pot of gold—is that what you call valuing your life?”
Always told me that a person’s life is meant to accomplish something. And that you can’t accomplish anything if you’re afraid of death. Whether you’re drawn and quartered, or crucified, or die in comfort it’s all the same, but a samurai should aim for excellence.
Boys—from the age of nine, leave all else and devote yourself to book learning. Day and night, practice the military arts. Read as many books as you can—better that than some half-baked learning…Strive to master one art in which you surpass all others.
Yet buried in this list of conventional virtues is something quite unusual for a man of Kokichi’s time, namely, “associate with friends in truth and sincerity.”
“There’s nothing more useless in this world than denouncing someone else’s religious beliefs.”
“But let’s forget about ambushing him. We’ll walk right up to his front door in the middle of the day, ask to be let in, meet with Katsu, and if he starts saying outrageous things, we’ll slice him in two right there. That’s the way a man should do it, don’t you think?”
I’d like to point out here that the Pacific War was truly one of the most bizarre events in the history of the world. Why did the militarist faction of the Imperial Army start a war that common sense must have told them they were bound to lose?
Heroes are nothing but poison when the country is safe and sound, but in times of crisis they’re absolutely necessary—a miracle drug.
Small-minded people are always picking through a man’s character trying to root out the poisonous bits, but a person of virtue has to look further, to see what good effect a man can have on this world.”
The life of a human being is fundamentally beyond his comprehension.
He always told himself he mustn’t get into an argument unless it was about something of earthshaking importance. Even if he were to win, he would only succeed in dishonoring his opponent. Besides, losing an argument rarely leads people to change their opinions, much less their ways of life, so in the end, all that would be left was resentment at having lost.
He found world history—the way things fit together and what happened as a result—fascinating. More than the chemical properties of saltpeter, the course of events surrounding it captured his imagination.
“How can this be?” she snapped. “The son of a samurai bawling over a little thing like losing an eye!”
“Itagaki may perish, but freedom will never die.” These words of his, spoken when he was stabbed at the foot of Mt. Kinka in Gifu Prefecture during a lecture tour in 1882, have become legend. He died in 1919 at the age of eighty-three.
None of them could believe it. They couldn’t bring themselves to believe it, for to Tosa samurai their domain, worth 240,000 koku, was the entire world. The same was true of the retainers of the three hundred lords. For people’s consciousness to transcend the boundaries of their environment is extremely difficult. Impossible, perhaps.
Katsu was partial to men he respected. Yet his standards were so high that until his death in 1899 at seventy-seven he met very few men he considered worthy of respect. Everyone else he thought of as dumb potato heads.
“Ryō-san, I haven’t given up on ‘Expel the Barbarians,’ you know. I don’t like it when Katsu says we should open the country.” “Even so, I’m asking you to look out for him.” “Guess I’ll just have to then. When I’m with you, Ryō-san, I lose track of who I am.”
Not only that—because Iwasaki Yatarō used funds from the Tosa domain when he founded the Mitsubishi Company, he used a more stylized version of the three oak leaf crest for the company’s symbol. Readers may have seen those three diamonds on Mitsubishi appliances in their homes. The diamonds originated in the Yamauchi family crest, of which Tosa samurai used to say, “I want to die gazing at those three oak leaves.”
Among all the lords, I rate him as one of the finest. He seems to think that most other people are fools, and that no one other than himself is worth a single coin.
Ryōma himself always figured that without strength in his legs, a man wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything.
When you judge a man, you have to take the long view.”
“If you know that much, then just let it flow, naturally. Don’t try to force things. Then, at just the right moment, you can break the embankment, or shore it up—do whatever it takes to cause the great flood that will change the world. But you mustn’t break the dike before the right time.”
‘There really aren’t any high or low human beings. The rank and status that seem so important in our world are all on the outside—just decoration. And people only pay attention to decoration in peaceful times. When there’s trouble brewing that fancy stuff on the outside peels right off. If you want to accomplish something, what you really need are wisdom, courage, and virtue.’”
“Don’t do anything crazy like that ever again, you hear? There’re plenty of short swords for sale. People who go on about a piece of metal like that being your father’s keepsake or a samurai’s soul are just fools who don’t know their own minds. You are your father’s keepsake.”
Following the correct path doesn’t necessarily mean holding with beliefs that are most popular in a particular time.
“I hate people who see what a man’s worried about and then lay the blame for it on him,”
I’m afraid I’ve already given the reader too much useless information, but while I’m at it, just one or two more things.
“Tōbei, do you know what a man’s life is for?” asked Ryōma as he sat down to eat. “To achieve something. But when you decide what you want to achieve, you can’t just copy what someone else does.”
The purpose of a man’s life is achievement. But you mustn’t admire another’s achievements or try to imitate them. Shakyamuni Buddha, Confucius, and the great emperors who created China all forged their own paths, for which there was no model.
Once you have found a goal, you must concentrate only on finding the means to achieve it and never waver in your purpose. If you do not reach your goal, you must die on the way to achieving it. Life and death are natural phenomena and must not enter your calculations.
“When Westerners want to do something big,” he told Ryōma, “the guys with money provide the funds, and the guys who know how to handle things do the work—that’s the way they make an organization.”
“In the United States, the president uses politics to make life easier for the guy who makes wooden sandals. That’s because the sandal maker and people like him choose the president. I’m going to make Japan like that too.”
“You never know how a fight’ll turn out until it starts.”
They were convinced they were in the right, which made their actions even worse than ordinary crimes.
In turbulent times, one couldn’t tell what would happen even in the immediate future. The leader of a domain in such a period had only two roads open to him: to become a man like Oda Nobunaga, who, not caring if his body became covered with wounds, would brandish his sword and, never looking back, take the lead in creating a new state of affairs; or, contrariwise, to become a man who allows himself to drift with the current. However, if one were the leader of a domain and not simply an ordinary gentleman living in retirement, then to look askance at the current and go against it, and to cling
...more
“In an age like this, what good is knowledge and wisdom that is only a little superior to those of others?
They say that a lamp lit by En no Ozunu in that hall has been kept alight and never allowed to go out for well over a thousand years now—it’s an eternal lamp. It’s the same when a person has some work to do, whether great or small: if you do work that somebody will carry on, keeping it alight and not letting it go out, you’ll be an eternal person.
