Bushido

"About ten years ago, while spending a few days under the hospitable roof of the distinguished Belgian jurist, the lamented M. de Laveley, our conversation turned during one of our rambles, to the subject of religion. 'Do you mean to say,' asked the venerable professor, ' that you have no religious instruction in your schools?' On my replying in the negative, he suddenly halted in astonishment, and in a voice which I shall not easily forget, he repeated, 'No religion?  How do you impart moral education?' The question stunned me at the time. I could give no ready answer, for the moral precepts I learned in my childhood days were not given in schools; and not until I began to analyze the different elements that formed my notions of right and wrong, did I find that it was Bushido that breathed them into my nostrils.

 Bushido has been variously defined, but it would seem that the definition most generally accepted is that it is the unwritten code of laws governing the lives and conduct of the nobles in Japan, equivalent in many ways to the European chivalry. The knights and nobles of feudal Japan were the samurai, retainers of the daimyo. Thus, Bushido was the conduct of the samurai, the aristocratic warrior class which arose during the wars of the twelfth century between the Tara and Minamoto clans - and came to glorious fruition in the Tokugawa period. The samurai cultivated the martial virtues and were indifferent to death and pain in their loyalty to their overlords." 

(BUSHIDO, The Soul of Japan,  by Inazo Nitobe)