The Concept of Bushidō in Manga ''One Piece''

Bushid is one of the value systems rooted in Japanese culture.It is embedded in Japanese society of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) whose roots grew in the Kamakura period .Bushid denotes a standard of ethical conduct that was applied to the samurai class, an elite group in society in the Tokugawa period (Pyle 1996: 32).The samurai constituted a social class in Tokugawa society which was allowed to wear weapons for the purpose of killing.The samurai indeed enjoyed the highest status during the Tokugawa reign.Only samurai got the privilege of wearing two swords as a symbol of the "soul of the samurai."Members of the samurai class accordingly had a code of ethics to guide their behavior, and that was bushid.These guidelines were not written down, but passed from mouth to mouth, learned through the examples of behavior of earlier historical figures, such as Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Uesugi Kenshin, Oda Nobunaga, and so forth.Bu-shi-do can be understood literally as Military-Knight-Ways. Nitobe Inaz in his book Bushid:The Soul of Japan (1969: 4-5) defines bushid as "the precepts of Knighthood, the noblesse oblige of the warrior class, ... the code of moral principles the which the knights were the resource persons required or instructed to observe."According to Nitobe, bushid code consists of the following eight grades.