SOURCE: “The Heike Monogatari and the Japanese Warrior Ethic,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 29, 1969, pp. 93-108.

In the following essay, Butler argues that the code of the Japanese warrior as presented in the Heike Monogatari is more a creation of the tellers of the tales than historic fact.

The Heike monogatari has exerted a strong influence on many aspects of the later development of Japanese society. In the political sphere, it is well-known that the accounts of warrior battles contained in the Heike provided a model for the attitudes and standards of conduct of the warrior class until the nineteenth, and even into the twentieth, centuries.¹ The degree of historical validity of these accounts, and their relationship to the actual battles themselves, is less well-known. The present article is an attempt to outline briefly the process by which the narrative passages, which taken as a whole...