A review of Bushidō: The Creation of a Martial Ethic in Late Meiji Japan, by OLEG BENESCH. Bushidō, the vaunted “way of the warrior” ascribed to various demographics in Japanese history and mobilized productively throughout the modern world, is a tricky subject. On the one hand, bushidō–variously and creatively imagined and mobilized–constitutes a central theme of modern Japanese constructions of historical identities and social realities. On the other, its image as a legitimate object of inquiry has suffered from enthusiastic appropriations in popular studies of Japan, samurai, and...