The seven virtues of Samurai: How a classic can revive through large language models

Recently, scholars have questioned the dominance of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)-centric values in shaping sociocultural systems. Addressing this requires reassessing instances where non-WEIRD values not only sustained but also influenced WEIRD paradigms. Advances in natural language processing now enable rigorous analysis of classical non-WEIRD texts to illuminate such contributions. This study examines Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe, a widely read classic that introduced Japanese moral values to Western audiences. Using Contextualized Construct Representations (CCR), we analyzed how Bushido conveys psychological constructs across cultural and historical boundaries referencing the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and HEXACO Personality Inventory. Bushido exhibited consistently higher CCR scores on both instruments compared to over 700 documents related to Christianity, the Bible, and Japanese culture, indicating closer semantic alignment with the target constructs. This suggests Bushido articulates moral values and personality traits rooted in Japanese cultural traditions, while exhibiting a cross-cultural psychological structure that transcends temporal boundaries. Multidimensional scaling further identified Meiyo (名誉) as the conceptual core among Bushido’s seven virtues, a construct distinct from Western pride-based honor. This study demonstrates that classical non-WEIRD texts can be quantitatively analyzed to reveal enduring moral frameworks that transcend the WEIRD paradigm.