In both Yvain and the Heike Monogatari bases of motivation and the identification of warrior acts as being unique or specific to class begins to take shape out of a hazy semiotic mist. For simple lack of terminology we use words like “chivalry” and “bushido” to describe warriors and warrior conduct. These words can only be understood as suggestions of the rich multi-layered subtleties that lay behind and between them. They are vague smudges of self-identification in a quagmire of definitions and doubled meanings. Nevertheless, these terms manage to represent, to some degree, socially recognizable codes of how fighting men ought to behave. They represent the identity, culture, and spirituality of fighting men. Nitobe, a twentieth- century apologist for the samurai ethic and an authority on the question of “bushido,” addresses this question to some degree in his own dramatic fashion:

What Japan was she owed to the samurai. They were not only the flower of the nation, but its roots as well. All the gracious gifts of Heaven flowed through them. Though they kept themselves socially aloof from the populace, they set a moral standard for them and guided them by their example. I admit Bushido had its esoteric and exoteric teachings; these were eudemonic, looking after the welfare and happiness of the commonalty; those were aretaic, emphasizing the practice of virtues for their own sake. (160)

Virtuous conduct for its own end is the driving motivation of the true warrior. These samurai were, according to Nitobe, divided between heaven and earth; they served virtues but also served temporal masters with worldly needs and objectives. In this regard, temporal conduct is ultimately the manifestation of the practices of bushido. Although “the gracious gifts of Heaven” flow through the samurai, Yuuzan Daidouji, a sixteenth-century writer and author, makes the ethereal presentation a little more tangible in the temporal world:

One who is a warrior should have a thorough understanding of these two qualities. If he knows how to do the one and avoid the other then he will have attained Bushido. And right and wrong are nothing but good and evil, for though I would not deny that there is a slight difference between the terms, yet to act rightly and do good is difficult and is regarded as tiresome, whereas to act wrongly and do evil is easy and amusing, so that naturally most incline to the wrong or evil and tend to dislike the right and good. But to be thus unstable and make no distinction between right and wrong is contrary to reason, so that anyone who understands this distinction and yet does what is wrong is no proper samurai but a raw and untaught person. (30)

Indeed it is “easy and amusing” to do evil things but to Yuuzan Daidouji, it is ultimately “unreasonable” to behave in such a manner. A lack of understanding in this “reason” results in producing an uncouth wild man. The true warrior who understands bushido takes the more difficult road when serving his temporal master. It is easy to do whatever one pleases but the act of restraint is one which Yuuzan Daidouji argues forms the man and makes him distinguishable from commoners. Yuuzan Daidouji distinguishes between civility and boorishness as he does between right and wrong. Perhaps that is also why he encourages the warrior to take up aesthetic endeavors in addition to his physical training:

Though Bushido naturally implies first of all the qualities of strength and forcefulness, to have this one side only developed is to be nothing but a rustic samurai of no great account. So a samurai ought certainly to be literate, and, if he has time, should take up verse-making or Teaism to a certain extent. (105)

To Nitobe, the samurai is a pristine vassal of heavenly virtues, of the Chinese “Chi, Jin, Yu, respectively, Wisdom, Benevolence, and Courage” (94). To Yuuzan Daidouji, the Japanese warrior is of a more tempered and civilized manifestation of etiquette and restraint. In either case, one can make a clear distinction that bushido represents a call to higher purposes and better conduct than that which is expected of ordinary men. We may also begin to distinguish that the true samurai is one who is also associated with the nobility, where verse-making and tea ceremony were more commonly practiced.

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