Inventing the Way of the Samurai is an exhaustive study of how the concept of bushidō, typically translated as “way of the samurai,” has changed from its modern conceptual beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century to the early 2000s. The seven chapters are divided chronologically by the waxing and waning of bushidō’s salience within textual discourse at a given historical moment. Not surprisingly, bushidō boomed when public support for the military was high and dipped when public support for the military was low. But what makes this study particularly valuable is Oleg Benesch's ability to describe the contentious ways in which bushidō was appropriated by a broad range of groups with opposing political agendas. Benesch does so, without reducing bushidō to an empty signifier where meaning everything equates to meaning nothing at all. This exploration is coupled with a simple but non-trivial question: why was bushidō accepted as a real samurai ethic despite repeated deconstructions of the concept by Japanese and Western scholars alike? As early as 1912, Basil Chamberlain Hall criticized the bushidō concept as being what we call today a “construct.”

Some of the biggest surprises come in the beginning of the book, where Nitobe Inazō, author of the famous Bushido: The Soul of Japan, is demoted from his position as the putative inventor of bushidō. About a decade before Nitobe's work, the journalist and politician Ozaki Yukio wrote extensively about bushidō as Japan's parallel to Europe's chivalry, not of the martially inflected type, but an ethical “gentlemanliness.” This was consumed by progressive elites rather than rank-and-file military men. Ozaki's bushidō emphasized long-lost warrior values of fair play, quick mindedness, generosity, and thriftiness; he said nothing about loyalty or self-sacrifice, qualities that would become attached to bushidō during the Russo and Sino-Japanese wars.

Ozaki's bushidō differed from articulations by his contemporaries like Fukuzawa Yukichi and the Christian intellectual Uemura Masahisa. They had distinct vehicles for promoting bushidō (trade for Ozaki and education for Uemura), and different audiences. Ozaki, Fukuzawa, and Uemura's bushidō, which were influenced by Western concepts of chivalry, never gained as much influence as that of Suzuki Chikara, who articulated the more popular version of bushidō, which celebrated martial exploits and supported Japan's military expansion. Not surprisingly, this martial-focused bushidō grew alongside support for Japan's victories over China and Russia. Westerners looked to bushidō as one explanation for Japan's emergence as a militarily successful nation. It was not until well after those wars that Nitobe, the odd man out in Japan's domestic discourse on bushidō, finally received greater attention, but his approach was immediately deemed anachronistic. Even Nitobe himself felt his work would not satisfy a Japanese audience. Instead, Inoue Tetsujirō emerged as the watershed figure of the early twentieth century. He connected bushidō to the imperial (emperor) institution, lectured widely about bushidō, and edited a multivolume bushidō series that gave bushidō historical legitimacy. From the early twentieth century onward, scholars debated interpretations of bushidō but no longer questioned its historicity.

The first six chapters are a whirlwind of detail, but fortunately Benesch's chapter summaries are a helpful way to keep track. He is careful to point out the historical dead ends, versions of bushidō that faded away but were nonetheless vital for pushing other bushidō narratives to the fore. Regarding the issue of reception, Benesch notes that before the mid-1920s young people might have been exposed to bushidō, but, for most, bushidō was not a salient force. Japanese were ambivalent towards bushidō at best. At worst, such as after General Nogi's suicide, they were hostile. Even during bushidō’s highpoint in the 1940s, its influence as a motivator for soldiers' actions was not as great as one might assume; bushidō was used more as a top-down justification for violence than a source of inspiration.

A final chapter attempts to cover postwar bushidō to the early twenty-first century. Certain patterns were repeated, such as a suspicion of bushidō after Yukio Mishima's suicide that paralleled Nogi's suicide, and the various bushidō appropriations in sport and film. But it would take another volume to adequately cover that time period.

Benesch achieves his goal of exploring bushidō over time. At times the monograph seems more like a reference work rather than a deep analysis of bushidō, but this is to be expected when writing the first book on such a huge and important topic. He alludes to the many directions future bushidō studies might take, such as bushidō in Chinese intellectual discourse, bushidō in Nazi rhetoric, et cetera. Benesch has done the East Asian field a great service in starting such conversations.