Before You Start: Bushido, literally "The Way of the Warrior," is a philosophy and way of life practiced by samurai up until the abolition of the class system in Japan after the Restoration (though a modern form of it called, appropriately, modern bushido, is practiced in Japan and other parts of the world today). At its core are seven virtues: Rectitude, Courage, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor, and Loyalty. It also contains elements of certain facets of Japanese life, like Buddhism, from which comes an understanding of death as a gateway to other lives through reincarnation. The ideal samurai was a man whose word was his bond, who used his power and position at the top as a way to aid others, who always did what was right and good. I can see all these things in Yahiko—especially from having read the manga—which is why when I decided to do a piece on him, I chose Bushido. So here's my take on Yahiko via Bushido. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: Feh. I wish.
Bushido
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Yahiko was born a child of Bushido.
But he didn't actually learn what that meant until the world went mad.
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Myojin-san died as any respectable samurai did, fighting for his lord and master. And with Myojin-san's death, and the deaths of many other samurai, Bushido as it had lived for centuries died.
But a samurai never feared death. Buddha taught that there was life after death, and so there was nothing to fear. Yahiko learned this when Myojin-san died, and though he was very young, the lesson did not escape him.
He learned about other things, too. He learned about self-sacrifice and love by watching his mother work as a prostitute to care for him; he learned about honor and pride and dignity by listening to her tell him he was the son of a samurai and he'd been born into Bushido and he must live by its tenets.
But despite what he'd learned, he was still a small boy, and when his mother died of syphilis, he was a small orphaned boy with nothing but a family name and a huge hole in him, far too big for someone so young.
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Yahiko learned other things after his mother died.
He learned that the world was cruel to the weak, and if one wished to survive he must become strong. He learned that honor and dignity and pride couldn't fill an empty stomach or clothe a scrawny body or put a roof over an uncovered head. He learned that self-sacrifice and love got a man very little on the street, and it got a boy even less. He learned that death really was nothing to fear compared to his fellow human beings.
So he swallowed his pride and forgot about self-sacrifice and love and worked as a pickpocket for a band of third-rate yakuza, bitterness eating away at his gut and shame hounding his heels, because there was nothing honorable or dignified about his job, there was nothing honorable or dignified about his life, and there was nothing he could do about that.
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He lifted the wrong wallet one day.
Or perhaps, he'd think much later, he'd lifted the right one.
A red-haired man, with a well-worn sword and a cross-shaped scar on his cheek, who didn't look like much. A dark-haired girl, with sharp blue eyes and a quick, violent temper, who kinda pissed him off. They called him out on lifting the red-haired man's wallet, which wasn't unusual when he sometimes got caught, but then the red-haired man had to go and be…benevolent, another tenet of his long forgotten and buried past. He had to go and forgive Yahiko, he had to go and smile and generously suggest that perhaps Yahiko needed the wallet more than he himself did.
And he reminded Yahiko of what it meant to live and die by Bushido, and he reminded Yahiko of his father and mother and of his ancestors, who had all lived and died by Bushido, and he showed Yahiko, more starkly than he'd ever been shown before, that he had abandoned more than a way of life—he'd abandoned his soul. Because Bushido wasn't a way of life, it was his life.
And in that second he'd hated the red-haired man more than he'd ever hated anyone, and he'd yelled that he didn't need any hand-outs, he was a Tokyo Samurai. And later, he'd been grateful—so grateful—to the red-haired man for reminding him of what and who he was.
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Gratefulness was all well and good, of course, but that didn't make it any easier for Yahiko to accept that without the red-haired man's help—Kenshin, his name was—he never would have been able to leave the yakuza. Alive, anyway.
And again, Kenshin showed Yahiko the way: Kamiya Kaoru, his new sensei, who in turn showed him the Kamiya Kasshin-ryuu of kenjutsu, and restored Yahiko to the environment he'd been born to inhabit and grow within, and in doing so revived Yahiko's soul.
And Yahiko took hold of a shinai and practiced his katas, and in the dojo, all those tenets of Bushido he'd learned suddenly found expression; he wasn't a passive observer anymore.
He'd been born a child of Bushido, and he'd die a child of Bushido, like his parents and ancestors before him.