From patriotism we naturally pass to the consideration of courage.  Nothing was more prized and praised in Old Japan.  In those days it was the deliberate effort of parents and educators to develop courage in children.  Many were their devices for training the young in bravery.  Not content with mere precept, they were sent alone on dark stormy nights to cemeteries, to houses reputed to be haunted, to dangerous mountain peaks, and to execution grounds.  Many deeds were required of the young whose sole aim was the development of courage and daring.  The worst name you could give to a samurai was “koshinuke” (coward).  Many a feud leading to a fatal end has resulted from the mere use of this most hated of all opprobrious epithets.  The history of Japan is full of heroic deeds.  I well remember a conversation with a son of the old samurai type, who told me, with the blood tingling in his veins, of bloody deeds of old and the courage they demanded.  He remarked incidentally that, until one had slain his first foe, he was ever inclined to tremble.  But once the deed had been done, and his sword had tasted the life blood of a man, fear was no more.  He also told me how for the sake of becoming inured to ghastly sights under nerve-testing circumstances, the sons of samurai were sent at night to the execution grounds, there, by faint moonlight to see, stuck on poles, the heads of men who had been recently beheaded.

The Japanese emotion of courage is in some respects peculiar.  At least it appears to differ from that of the Anglo-Saxon.  A Japanese seems to lose all self-control when the supreme moment comes; he throws himself into the fray with a frenzied passion and a fearless madness allied to insanity.  Such is the impression I have gathered from the descriptions I have heard and the pictures I have seen.  Even the pictures of the late war with China give evidence of this.

But their courage is not limited to fearlessness in the face of death; it extends to complete indifference to pain.  The honorable method by which a samurai who had transgressed some law or failed in some point of etiquette, might leave this world is well known to all, the “seppuku,” the elegant name for the vulgar term “hara-kiri” or “belly-cutting.”  To one who is sensitive to tales of blood, unexpurgated Japanese history must be a dreadful thing.  The vastness of the multitudes who died by their own hands would be incredible, were there not ample evidence of the most convincing nature.  It may be said with truth that suicide became apotheosized, a condition that I suppose cannot be said to have prevailed in any other land.