Seven Virtues of Bushido

They are 忠義 Loyalty (chūgi), 礼 Respect (rei), 誠 Honesty (makoto), 名誉 Honor (meiyo), 仁 Benevolence (jin), 勇 Valor (yū), and 義 Rectitude (gi); two of the seven are compounds and five are single characters, so 義 stands twice, once inside 忠義 at the head of the list and once alone at its foot. The list is younger than it looks.

Nitobe Inazō wrote Bushido: The Soul of Japan in English, in Pennsylvania, in 1899, to explain to the West how a country without a church taught right from wrong; he never wrote the words seven virtues, but seven of his chapters treat one virtue each, and every list of the seven, in any language, is a reading of his table of contents.

The Japanese words came from his translators: these seven are the chapter titles of Yanaihara Tadao's 1938 Iwanami translation, the one Japanese readers know, to the character. No Japanese book before 1945 prints them as a list, and the English phrase is in print only from 1998. In Nitobe's order rectitude comes first and loyalty last, the virtue that binds the rest; the designs set the seven in two columns, or in a ring, rather than in a line, and this page lists them with loyalty first.

Every design brushes the modern forms 礼, 誠 and 名誉.