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How have modern Japan's inner worlds shaped its outer worlds? For anyone in search of the answer, Inazo Nitobe's "Bushido: the Soul of Japan" is a good starter. It was written at the turn of the 20th century. Never mind. In Japan, Heisei Japan is Heian Japan; 2009 is still 1909.

Nitobe's "Bushido," a work on samurai warrior ethic and aesthetic, was a romantic attempt to reshape samurai folklore into a state folklore, at a time when Japan was reinventing itself in emulation of Western imperial aspirations, in the midst of the age of invented traditions, which included Victorian morality and royalty, America's Manifest Destiny, Hindu Renaissance and the Meiji Restoration of Japan itself, where young samurai wonks recycled the long-forgotten imperial divinity by painting a halo over his head.

Nitobe's "Bushido," gave birth to a samurai-faced knightly superior-man, whose existential priority was loyalty and duty, who practiced justice, decency and fairness, with high cultural sensibility as to care for mind-tuning tea ceremony, to rejoice at the seasonal view of cherry blossom and even to feel the inanimate spirit of the sword, and more important, with a heart of steel, well disciplined, well poised, to sacrifice himself for a cause larger than life, much like a Victorian gentleman who assumed the nobility of noblesse oblige.

Too beautiful to believe, this Nitobe's samurai discourse reads more like a self-ingratiating Machiavellian scheme, ingratiating himself to Japan, while ingratiating Japan to the West, particularly the Anglo-Saxon West, then bent on reinventing itself with the romantic ideals of medieval knighthood, while exercising asymmetrical violence on colonial subjects in the name of civilizing mission, with much social Darwinian preoccupation with fitness and superiority, all of which Japan and Nitobe himself, as a scholar and a colonial planner, learned and emulated - with a great degree of craftiness and craftsmanship.

Nitobe's "Bushido" was an illicit attempt, like matching a dovetail with a dog tail; he tried to match the unidimensional samurai principle with the multidimensional Western military culture and philosophy by stretching the samurai template thin and wide until it covered all aspects of Japanese tradition and society, ending up with a confusing message: that the bushido is about all the admirable things Japanese. To connect Japan and the West, his glue was the power of association, not necessarily scholarly insight, as in his comparison of the rose and the cherry blossom.

Further, his method of textual reinforcement was an excessive, almost compulsory, use of namedropping, revoking more than 140 names of Western cultural eminence, plus 20 Japanese names, including government big wigs. The overall effect is the appearance of dazzling endorsement from Western intellect, contemporary and classical, over a decontextualized, dehistoricized discourse on samurai culture and philosophy - the genesis of a modern myth of samurai's international stature and his high moral sensibility, complete with a selfless, self-immolating resolution.

In reality, samurai's moral history is one of self-deception and self-veneration, part of the larger millenniums-long history of contact and conquest, where hunter-gatherer prequel lost to soldier-farmer sequel. Throughout premodern eras, there had always been a rice-growing, land-stealing, sword- and law-brandishing moral ecosystem, with bloody frontier moving from west to east to north, along with temples and shrines of embattled religions, all on civilizing mission. Its moral authority, first the emperor, later the shogunate, had never renounced its "barbarian-subduing" tradition; the imperial law-code that defined unruly natives as traitors remained unquestioned from ancient times on.

The conquered landscapes were further pacified with beautiful and "auspicious" language - the origin of the warrior-poet tradition and the landscape-internalizing literary tradition that were passed down, century after century, as far as Basho's "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" and beyond. The stolen land, consecrated in the name of the emperor, was christened Bird-Soaring Asuka Capital, Great Harmony Yamato State, Sun Origin Country of Japan, and much later, Divine Kami Country, complete with a state ritual of purification that fancied on pure and impure realms on a cosmic scale, while demonizing others, deifying conquerors. The worship of martial prowess, in the form of cultic veneration of bladed weapons, from archeological stone daggers to state of the art steel swords, was the core principle of a bloody-minded soldier-farmer society.

In fact, there had not been much ethical consideration on the conduct of war. Predatory warfare, the kind reminiscent of the WWII Japanese program of "kill-all, steal-all, burn-all" atrocity, was the norm well into the medieval eras; head-hunting brutality overshadowed self-immolating nobility; tricky foul play prevailed over "fair play." For the most part, beautiful samurai stories were later peace-time embellishment, through the mouths of samurai-turned storytellers. Similarly, the teachings of samurai philosophy and swordsmanship secrets were the morning-after sophistication through Zen-driven brainstorming, mind-emptying, mind-mastering, masterminding strategy. The reality was that samurai warriors had been such beastly creatures as to slaughter and behead war-stricken commoners to show the ill-gotten trophies as evidence of good fight to be rewarded with one rank up.

History shows that samurai top dogs were both controlling and difficulty to control - a gangsta culture that sought after, above all, their three R's: Recognition, Reputation, Retaliation. This is a culture of shame upended, where name and fame came first; shame and infamy were there to be whitewashed and glossed over; accountability to community and humanity was of secondary importance; responsibility was not among their three R's. Put differently, it was a culture of extortion, exploitation, extirpation and expansion. Yes, the bushido was a moral system to justify injustices.

Nitobe's "Bushido," still celebrated with overt canonization and retro-publication, is a living evidence of the inner history of modern Japan, where the soul of a nation was invented more than once, on the hazy ground of semi-fiction, by reference to the past, by comparison with the west, to conform, not to history, but to the needs of the moment, with high ideals and aesthetic sophistication, but, alas, without serious soul-searching. This is a story of window shopping and window dressing, ending up yet again with a soulless nation still dreaming: We are Samurai Japan.