Fencing, while an art susceptible of high development and valuable for both
pose and poise, and requiring great quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is unilateral
and robbed of the vest of inflicting real pain on an antagonist.
Bushido,[13] which means military-knightly ways, designates the Japanese
conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. The youth is inspired by the
ideal of Tom Brown "to leave behind him the name of a fellow who never
bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one." It expresses the race ideal of
justice, patriotism, and the duty of living aright and dying nobly. It means also
sympathy, pity, and love, for only the bravest can be the tenderest, and those
most in love are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art of poetry.
Honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the bushi is truthful without
an oath. At the tender age of five the samurai is given a real sword, and this
gives self-respect and responsibility. At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long
and short, are given him, which must be his companions for life. They were
made by a smith whose shop is a sanctuary and who begins his work with
prayer. They have the finest hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with
a charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they must never be
drawn lightly. He is taught fencing, archery, horsemanship, tactics, the spear,
ethics and literature, anatomy, for offence and defense; he must be indifferent to
money, hold his life cheap beside honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry is
called the soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgarised. It is a code of ethics and
physical training.
Football is a magnificent game if played on honor. An English tennis champion
was lately playing a rubber game with the American champion. They were even
and near the end when the American made a bad fluke which would have lost
this country its championship. The English player, scorning to win on an
accident, intentionally made a similar mistake that the best man might win. The
chief evil of modern American football which now threatens its suppression in
some colleges is the lust to win at any price, and results in tricks and secret
practise. These sneaky methods impair the sentiment of honor which is the best
and most potent of all the moral safeguards of youth, so that a young man can
not be a true gentleman on the gridiron. This ethical degeneration is far worse
than all the braises, sprains, broken bones and even deaths it causes.
Wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in antiquity reached a high
development, and which, although now more known and practised as athletics of
the body than of the soul, has certain special disciplinary capacities in its various