--'Certainly,' said the duchess. 'Let me see, it is only two yen per number, that is five francs per month; cheap enough. I will subscribe at once.'
The young nobleman now left our party, for he had another engagement. He has a talent for music, and when a private concert was given only a few weeks ago in the garden of an aristocratic family which I know, he was the conductor, although only an amateur. This the young ladies told me, and the circumstance led me to ask if they also were not musical. One of them, she told me, played the piano, and the other the violin, and I said I hoped that one day they would let me have the pleasure of hearing them. I further said that the piano was only known in Japan to a slight degree, and that only recently; but that we had always had an instrument much resembling the violin.
The duke held in his hand an English literary weekly of the highest repute. Turning to me he said:
--'Look! here is a review of two new books, one on the Bushido by a Japanese writer, and the other on Japan in general by an American, I suppose. It is a subject that interests me, as, indeed, it does many people nowadays. I have read it through and noticed that the reviewer speaks of Bushido very sarcastically. He says, among other things, that the discovery of Bushido is of quite recent date, and continues; but listen, I will read it:
'Neither Sir E. Satow nor Dr. Aston even mentions the word Bushido; Prof. Chamberlain in his _Things Japanese_ (1898) does not refer to it; the word is not contained in the admirable dictionary prepared by Captain Brinkley, the able but intensely Japanicised correspondent of the _Times_; nor is it to be found in the principal native dictionary, the _Kotoba no Izumi_ ("Source of Language").'
--'What nonsense,' I interrupted; 'by the same analogy one might say, because there is no compound noun Christian-morality in an English dictionary, there is no such thing as Christian morality.'
'Bushido, in literal Chinese,' continued the duke, reading, 'is the way of the executioner, and those who were eye-witnesses of the tyranny of the Samurai, in the last three years of the Bakufu [Shogunate], will not regard the name as altogether inappropriate. The Bushi (a Japano-Chinese, but not Chineseform), or Samurai, were neither knights nor knightly; they were "followers" merely; many, if not most of them, petty officials, few of them for two hundred and fifty years possessed any military experience whatever.'