己を愛するは、善からぬことの第一なり。

Saigo Takamori, the most powerful driving force behind the Meiji Restoration, was one of the great leaders in Japanese history. Saigo’s biographer Kaionji Chogoro wrote that he “was physiologically unable to bear” even being suspected of any sort of underhandedness. And as I wrote in Samurai Revolution, he had a deep-seated repugnance of “self-love,” which he described as “the primary immorality. It precludes one’s ability to train oneself, perform one’s tasks, correct one’s mistakes [and] . . . engenders arrogance and pride.” Would that a moralist of Saigo’s caliber emerge amid the abject corruption of America’s 2016 presidential election.

Part I of this series is here.

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Read more about Saigo Takamori in Samurai Revolution.

Katsu Kaishū, “the shogun’s last samurai,” was a great statesman, an accomplished swordsman, and a national hero for his all-important role in averting civil war in the spring of 1868, soon after the fall of the shogun’s government. He was also a philosopher, which is apparent in the collection of interviews he gave during the 1890s, the last decade of his life. The following, which I translated from the Japanese, is one of my favorites:

“Perseverance is the foundation of everything. It’s strange that while people nowadays make a big deal about [nourishing their bodies], they don’t know how to persevere.… Since human beings are living things, the most important thing [for a human being] is to nourish ki.* As long as a person’s ki is not starved, it doesn’t matter what he eats.”

* Ki (気): May be translated here as “vital energy.”

[From Hikawa Seiwa (Katsu Kaishū Zenshū 21) Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973 (pp. 182-183), from a December 6, 1895 interview with the newspaper Kokumin Shinbun.]

[Photo: Katsu Kaishū standing beside a chair in the garden of his Hikawa estate, Tokyo, photographed in the 1890s during the final years of his life.]