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忠義礼誠名誉仁勇義 chūgi rei makoto meiyo jin yū gi Seven Virtues of Bushido

忠義礼誠名誉仁勇義 (chūgi rei makoto meiyo jin yū gi) is a modern list of the seven virtues of bushidō, in nine characters. The seven are the chapters of Nitobe Inazō 新渡戸稲造's English book Bushido of 1900, which gives them no Japanese form. This study follows the Japanese names his translators gave them, from 1908 to 1938, and where this list's order comes from.

Japanese Scroll of Seven Virtues of Bushido (chūgi rei makoto meiyo jin yū gi) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Seven Virtues of Bushido忠義礼誠名誉仁勇義chūgi rei makoto meiyo jin yū gi

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

忠義礼誠名誉仁勇義, chūgi rei makoto meiyo jin yū gi, is a modern composite: nine characters read as seven virtue-words, one of them, 義, appearing twice. Its source is an English book, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) by Nitobe Inazō 新渡戸稲造, which never gives the seven a Japanese form; his translators did, as chapter titles, with 忠義 the chapter's title first in 1935 and the single characters in Yanaihara Tadao 矢内原忠雄's Iwanami translation of 1938, and in the books the National Diet Library's full-text indexes reach no one sets the seven in one line before 1961. The house sold the seven in Nitobe's order from August 2000, and the loyalty-first order read here is first seen on its pages in September 2011; the full-text indexes searched find it nowhere else.

Overview

The sense. Nine characters read as seven virtue-words: 忠義・礼・誠・名誉・仁・勇・義, with 義 appearing twice, bound in 忠義 at the head and alone at the foot. They are the seven virtues a Japanese scholar chose to explain his country to the West, given their Japanese names afterward by his translators.

The words. 忠義 chūgi, loyalty: the dictionaries say 私欲をさしはさまないで、まごころを尽くして主君や国家に仕えること, to serve one's lord or country wholeheartedly, without self-interest, first attested in the 続日本紀 for the year 783 [1]. 礼 rei, propriety, the modern form of 禮. 誠 makoto, sincerity. 名誉 meiyo, honor, the modern form of 名譽. 仁 jin, benevolence. 勇 yū, courage. 義 gi, rectitude: 五常の一, one of the five constant virtues of Confucian ethics, 仁・義・礼・智・信 [1]. Two of the seven are compounds and five are single characters, so 義 stands twice. The reading follows the order of the head; Nitobe's order, which is also Yanaihara's, is gi, yū, jin, rei, makoto, meiyo, chūgi.

The text in English. Nitobe's own chapter titles — Rectitude or Justice, Courage, Benevolence, Politeness, Veracity or Truthfulness, Honor, The Duty of Loyalty — are the English original; every later list translates back and forth from them [2][3]. The house's own English keeps three of his chapter words, Rectitude, Benevolence and Honor, takes Loyalty from his The Duty of Loyalty, and chooses Valor, Respect and Honesty for the rest.

The historical record

1899 to 1900, Nitobe Inazō, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, an English book. Nitobe signed his preface at Malvern, Pennsylvania, in the Twelfth Month of 1899, and the Leeds & Biddle Company of Philadelphia printed Bushido: The Soul of Japan: An Exposition of Japanese Thought in 1900, copyright 1899. Its contents, from the first edition's own page: Bushido as an Ethical System · Sources of Bushido · Rectitude or Justice · Courage, the Spirit of Daring and Bearing · Benevolence, the Feeling of Distress · Politeness · Veracity or Truthfulness · Honor · The Duty of Loyalty · Education and Training of Samurai · Self-Control · The Institutions of Suicide and Revenge · The Sword, the Soul of the Samurai · The Training and Position of Woman · The Influence of Bushido · Is Bushido Still Alive? · The Future of Bushido [2]. The book prints no Japanese script. Where Nitobe gives a Japanese word he romanizes it, and the one list of virtues he does give is not this one, in the chapter titled Education and Training of Samurai in the first edition and Education and Training of a Samurai in the tenth, revised edition — the sentence is the same in both [2][3]:

The tripod that supported the framework of Bushido was said to be Chi, Jin, Yu, respectively Wisdom, Benevolence, and Courage.

That is the Confucian triad 智仁勇, and it has three members. The seven are chapters three to nine, which Nitobe brings in as the essential principles which Bushido imbibed from its sources, few and simple; he does not number them. Each chapter opens out of the one before: courage was scarcely deemed worthy to be counted among virtues, unless it was exercised in the cause of Righteousness; veracity is that without which Politeness is a farce and a show; and loyalty, last, is the key-stone making feudal virtues a symmetrical arch [2].

1905, the seven as a list in an English sentence. Five years after Nitobe, Okakura Yoshisaburō, lecturing in English, set the seven in one line without naming him, and moved honor to the end [4]:

Rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, veracity, loyalty, and a predominating sense of honour—these are the chief colours with which a novelist in the days of yore used to paint an ideal Samurai

1908, Sakurai Ōson 櫻井鷗村, 『武士道』, the first Japanese translation. 丁未出版社 gave the seven chapters Japanese titles, two characters each, with small-type subheads:

第三章 正義 · 第四章 勇氣 ⟨敢爲堅忍の精神⟩ · 第五章 仁愛 ⟨不忍の心⟩ · 第六章 禮儀 · 第七章 至誠 ⟨信實⟩ · 第八章 名譽 · 第九章 忠節

Two-character words, every one, and for loyalty 忠節, not 忠義. The body of the translation uses both words, 忠義 twenty-four times and 忠節 thirty [5]. The design's seven are not yet here.

1935, Kondō Harusato 近藤晴郷, 『邦文武士道』. A second translation, from 慶文堂書店, titles the chapters, as the National Diet Library indexes its digitized copy [6]:

義(正義) · 勇氣(敢爲堅忍の精神) · 慈悲(惻隱の感情) · 禮節 · 至誠(信實) · 名譽 · 忠義

Here 義 first stands alone, with 正義 beside it, and the chapter on loyalty is titled 忠義 for the first time; the 1908 translation had used the word in its text. Benevolence is 慈悲, and three of the seven are still compounds.

1938, Yanaihara Tadao, the translation Japan reads. Yanaihara's translation appeared as 岩波文庫 1795 in 1938, 148 pages. Its contents, as the National Diet Library catalogues its digitized copy of that printing:

第三章 義 · 第四章 勇・敢爲堅忍の精神 · 第五章 仁・惻隱の心 · 第六章 禮 · 第七章 誠 · 第八章 名譽 · 第九章 忠義

Here the seven become the seven of the design: single characters for five of them, 名譽 and 忠義 for the other two, in Nitobe's order. The Iwanami edition was revised, the Japanese Wikipedia reports, by his son Yanaihara Isaku in 1974, and it is in print as 岩波文庫 青118-1 [7].

Japanese print to 1945. Before 1945 the seven stand in sequence as chapter titles: the design's seven, to the character, in the contents of the 1938 translation, and other words for them in 1908 and 1935. Neither of the National Diet Library's full-text indexes finds a book before 1945 that sets them in one line. The Lab's search of the public-domain books, run on eleven spellings, finds none in the design's order and none in Nitobe's, in either character form [8]; the Digital Collections' search, which also reaches the books it serves only in Japan or in its own reading room, the three translations among them, finds none in the design's order at any date, and its earliest book with Nitobe's seven in one line is of 1961 [9]. What the searches do find is a homonym: a search for 七徳, the seven virtues, returns 9,531 books in the Lab, and among its first hits are the seven martial virtues of the Zuo zhuan, the Tang court dance named for them, 七德舞, and misreadings [8]. The dictionaries give that sense first, 武の七つの徳, ahead of the seven virtues of a poem and of the udumbara flower, and spell it out: 暴を禁じ、兵を治め、大を保ち、功を定め、民を安んじ、衆を和せしめ、財を豊かにすること, to forbid violence, lay up arms, keep the great, fix merit, settle the people, harmonize the many, and enrich the treasury [10]. The Zuo zhuan gives them to King Zhuang of Chu: 夫武，禁暴、戢兵、保大、定功、安民、和眾、豐財者也 [11]. When the Buddhist scholar Nanjō Bun'yū 南条文雄 headed a sermon 武士道の七徳 in 1915 and again in 1928, it was those seven he meant: 武には七つの徳がある, and the first is 暴を禁ずる [12]. An Edo anthology of good lords' deeds, 『武家七徳』 by Shōji Kōki 正司考祺, prefaced 1845, sorts them under the same heads, 禁暴 and 戢兵 among them [13].

1961 onward, the list in Japanese print. From 1961 the Digital Collections' index carries Nitobe's virtues in sequence in sixty-nine dated books and journals: textbooks of physical education and ethics, dictionaries of thinkers, business books. Of the thirty-seven in which the library's text shows the list, some of them one sentence in two books, thirty add the title of his eleventh chapter, 克己, self-control, most of them ending on など, and so on: 義・勇・仁・礼・誠・名誉・忠義・克己 [9]. Others stop at the seven, and from 1972 some name them as a set: 義、勇、仁、礼誠名誉、忠義の七章が著者によれば武士道の「特性」であり, the seven chapters … are, by the author's account, the characteristics of bushidō, set against the five on education, self-control, suicide and revenge, the sword, and women [9].

1981 to 2011, the phrase in English print. The Internet Archive's full-text index finds seven virtues of the samurai in a 1981 novel, Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Tomoe Gozen, which in the index's window does not list them, and the seven by their Japanese names in a French novel of 1986, Paul Ohl's Katana: Gi, Yu, Jin, Rei, Makoko, Melyo, Chugi, as the index's text layer reads them (for Makoto, Meiyo), in Nitobe's order [14]. It finds the phrase seven virtues of bushido first in a 1998 novel, where a character promises to bore his listener with them later, and its first English appearances with the Japanese names in two children's series of 2008: Sandy Fussell's Samurai Kids, which prints the list GI YU JIN REI MAKOTO MEIYO CHUSEI, its seventh the romaji of 忠誠, another word for loyalty, and Chris Bradford's Young Samurai, where a master recites rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect and the rest [15]. After 2008 the phrase is a commonplace of martial-arts writing, self-help and fiction. The English Wikipedia article on bushidō carried a list headed Seven virtues, with the Japanese names, by February 2007, and counted eight by February 2015 [16]; it now counts eight as defined by Nitobe Inazō, adding 自制 jisei, self-control, the subject of his eleventh chapter, and its list otherwise matches Yanaihara's seven [17].

2000 to 2011, this house's own pages. The Wayback Machine has the house's martial-arts gallery from February 1999 with no seven in it, and a page titled Bushido: Seven Virtues from August 2000: There are seven virtues associated with Bushido (the way of the Warrior). These are depicted in Block Script below, then Gi, The Right Decision, Rectitude · Yu, Valor · Jin, Benevolence · Rei, The Proper Behavior, Courtesy, Respect · Makoto, Complete Honesty · Meiyo, Honor and Glory · Chugi, Devotion and Loyalty — Nitobe's order [18]. The 2004 page adds a credit carried to 2011, For an excellent book on the subject see Bushido, The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe, with the wrong year, 1908; the book is 1900. A round design image from September 2000 sets the seven in a circle, 仁 at the top, 忠義 and 名誉 in the center, and writes 真 for makoto, a form later dropped for 誠 [18]. By 2006 the seven were tattoo designs, four of them the whole set. The page still ran Nitobe's order in March 2009; by September 2011 the single designs were listed loyalty first, Loyalty, Respect, Honesty, Honor, Benevolence, Valor, Rectitude, and the scrolls were sold as chuugi rei makoto meiyo jin yuu gi, the order read here [18]. The designs themselves set the seven in two columns, not in a line. Today's pages keep the loyalty-first order. Neither the National Diet Library's full-text index nor the Internet Archive's finds this order anywhere else, in characters, in romaji or in the house's English [9][19].

What is not a source. The 七徳 of the Chinese classics is a homonym, seven martial virtues from a speech in the Zuo zhuan [10][11]. Nitobe's own triad 智仁勇 is a different list with three members [2][3]. The five constants 仁義礼智信 give the design its 仁, 義 and 礼, but as members of a list of five [1]. The Hagakure and Yamaga Sokō, whom the Japanese dictionaries name as the two poles of the word 武士道 [20], are not named in Nitobe's book [2]. No source read sets these seven as a list before Nitobe's.

Today. The house's seven English words are Rectitude, Valor, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor, Loyalty. Wikipedia's list shares five of them, with Righteousness and Heroic Courage for the first two and Duty and Loyalty for the seventh, and adds an eighth [17]; in the window the full-text index shows, Bradford's master recites rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect [15].

A reading

The nine characters are Yanaihara's seven, in an order that is not Nitobe's and is first seen on the house's pages in September 2011 — seven virtues drawn from the chapters of Nitobe Inazō's Bushido (1900), in the Japanese of its 1938 translation.

Nitobe's order carries an argument, and this one does not follow it: he ends on loyalty, the keystone of his arch, and this order sets the keystone first.

Nine characters, seven labels, one character repeated — 義 bound in 忠義 at the head and standing alone at the foot — for virtues a Japanese scholar first wrote for a Western reader, in words that were his translators', not his own.

Notes

The 1938 contents are known from the National Diet Library's catalogue record of the digitized copy, and the 1935 contents from the same library's index of its copy; neither copy has been read at the page. Whether the 1974 revision changed a chapter title is unknown.

Fussell's 2008 Samurai Kids prints CHUSEI, the romaji of 忠誠, where Nitobe's chapter is The Duty of Loyalty and Yanaihara's is 忠義. Both words mean loyalty; 忠義 as the chapter's title is his translators', Kondō's in 1935 and Yanaihara's in 1938, not Nitobe's own.

The Japanese dictionaries date the book to 1899, its copyright year, and the デジタル大辞泉 adds that it was published in Japan the following year [20].

Sources not seen

The 1935 and 1938 translations at the page, and the books of 1961 onward that the full-text index shows; served to readers in Japan only. They would settle the chapter titles as printed, where the catalogue's index could differ.

『英文武士道評論』 (裳華房, 1902), a commentary on the English book; not in the National Diet Library's digital collections. It would settle whether the chapters had Japanese names before 1908.

Salmonson's Tomoe Gozen (1981) and Ohl's Katana (1986) at the page; lending copies. They would settle whether Salmonson lists the seven and how Ohl's print spells the names.

The 1974 revision of Yanaihara's translation. It would settle whether any chapter title changed.

A reader with access to any of these is invited to write to Takase Studios at Tim@Takase.com.

References

  1. 「忠義」・「義」, 精選版日本国語大辞典 · デジタル大辞泉, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/忠義-567299
  2. Nitobe Inazō, Bushido: The Soul of Japan: An Exposition of Japanese Thought, first edition, Leeds & Biddle, Philadelphia, 1900, copyright 1899, at the Internet Archive text layer. https://archive.org/download/bushidosouljapa00nitogoog/bushidosouljapa00nitogoog_djvu.txt
  3. Nitobe Inazō, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, tenth revised edition, at Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12096/12096-h/12096-h.htm
  4. Okakura Yoshisaburō, The Japanese Spirit, James Pott & Co., New York, 1905, p. 93. https://archive.org/details/japanesespirit00okakrich/page/93/mode/1up
  5. 新渡戸稲造著・櫻井鷗村訳, 『武士道』, 丁未出版社, 1908, scan 12–13. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/758905/1/12
  6. 新渡戸稲造著・近藤晴郷訳, 『邦文武士道 附・武士道と北条時宗』, 慶文堂書店, 1935, National Diet Library Digital Collections, the item's contents index. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1235697
  7. 新渡戸稲造著・矢内原忠雄訳, 『武士道』, 岩波文庫, 1938, National Diet Library catalogue record (contents field; copy reading-room only). https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000000706001
  8. National Diet Library, NDL Lab (次世代デジタルライブラリー), full-text search of the public-domain books on eleven spellings of the design's seven and Nitobe's order, zero hits before 1945 for either. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
  9. National Diet Library Digital Collections, full-text search over every access tier, oldest first: 義勇仁礼誠名誉忠義, 69 dated items, earliest 1961, each in snippet view; 忠義礼誠名誉仁勇義, none. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=%E7%BE%A9%E5%8B%87%E4%BB%81%E7%A4%BC%E8%AA%A0%E5%90%8D%E8%AA%89%E5%BF%A0%E7%BE%A9&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC
  10. 「七徳」, 精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank · 辞林, 1907, scan 341. https://kotobank.jp/word/七徳-520881
  11. 『春秋左氏傳』, 宣公十二年, at Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E6%98%A5%E7%A7%8B%E5%B7%A6%E6%B0%8F%E5%82%B3/%E5%AE%A3%E5%85%AC
  12. 南条文雄 述, 『心の安住菩提心を求むる道』, 中央出版社, 1928, scans 55–56; 南条文雄, 『同情の力』, 弘文館書店, 1915, contents, scan 7. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1188549/1/55
  13. 正司考祺, 『武家七徳』, preface 1845, afterword 1852, 国書データベース work 54240; 佐村八郎, 『国書解題』, 1904, scan 902. https://kokusho.nijl.ac.jp/work/54240
  14. Internet Archive full-text search: Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Tomoe Gozen, Ace Books, New York, 1981; Paul Ohl, Katana, Québec/Amérique, Montréal, 1986, p. 448. https://archive.org/details/katana0000unse
  15. Internet Archive full-text search, "seven virtues of bushido", 74 hits, earliest 1998; Sandy Fussell, Samurai Kids, 2008; Chris Bradford, Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior, 2008. https://be-api.us.archive.org/fts/v1/search
  16. "Bushido", English Wikipedia, revision of 8 February 2007 (§ Seven virtues); revision of 15 February 2015 (§ Eight virtues of Bushidō). https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=106546462
  17. "Bushido", English Wikipedia, § Eight virtues of bushido. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido
  18. Takase Studios, MartialArts/Bushido/Bushido.htm and TattooDesign/images/SevenVirtues_00A.gif, at the Wayback Machine, captures 17 August 2000, 2 September 2000, 5 June 2002, 4 December 2004, 15 August 2006, 13 March 2009, 16 September 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20000817201004/www.takase.com/MartialArts/Bushido/Bushido.htm
  19. Internet Archive full-text search, "chugi rei makoto", "chuugi rei makoto", "loyalty respect honesty honor benevolence" and "loyalty, respect, honesty, honor": no hits, against 74 for "seven virtues of bushido" in the same index. https://be-api.us.archive.org/fts/v1/search
  20. 「武士道」, 精選版日本国語大辞典 · デジタル大辞泉 · 改訂新版 世界大百科事典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/武士道-124463

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios, LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Checked · Grok 4.6 (xAI), 2026-09-06, citations — the cited paragraphs checked at their addresses with web search on; two contradicted (an OCR form silently repaired, Etishido; the first edition's chapter title quoted in the tenth edition's form), both corrected in the open; the NDL Lab search and a by-eye image are beyond the checker; the rest confirmed. GPT-6 Astra refused the probe, HTTP 429 insufficient_quota (the s47 draft of that date; superseded by the s258 gate and the ten-s734 coding)

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 忠義礼誠名誉仁勇義 (chūgi rei makoto meiyo jin yū gi)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/chugi-rei-makoto-meiyo-jin-yu-gi.