Inazo Nitobe (1862-1933) wrote this book in English in 1900, while convalescing in California, as an answer to the Belgian jurist Émile de Laveleye, who had asked how Japanese could possibly be moral without religious instruction in schools. The dedication to his uncle Tokitoshi Ota signals what is otherwise easy to miss: Nitobe was born into a samurai family in Morioka, then converted to Christianity (Quaker) at university, then studied at Johns Hopkins, then went on to serve as Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations. The book is the work of an insider who learned to translate his own tradition into a Western register, which is both its strength and the point modern historians press on hardest.