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Updated: May 27, 2025
Shigémori, the son of the prime minister Kiyomori, who protected the emperor even against his own father, is a model of that Japanese kun-shin which placed fidelity to the sovereign above filial obedience; though even yet Shigémori's name is the synonym of both virtues.
All the terms which a foreigner might use in speaking of the duties of sovereign and minister, of lord and retainer and of master and servant, are comprehended in the Japanese word, Kun-shin, in which is crystallized but one thought, though it may relate to three grades of society.
In the place of filial piety was Kun-shin, that new growth in the garden of Japanese ethics, out of which arose the white flower of loyalty that blooms perennial in history. In Japan, Loyalty Displaces Filial Piety. This slow but sure adaptation of the exotic to its new environment, took place during the centuries previous to the seventeenth of the Christian era.
A thousand years of training in the ethics of Confucius which always admirably lends itself to the possessors of absolute power, whether emperors, feudal lords, masters, fathers, or older brothers have so tinged and colored every conception of the Japanese mind, so dominated their avenues of understanding and shaped their modes of thought, that to-day, notwithstanding the recent marvellous development of their language, which within the last two decades has made it almost a new tongue, it is impossible with perfect accuracy to translate into English the ordinary Japanese terms which are congregated under the general idea of Kun-shin.
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