YMMV / The Hagakure

• Awesome, but Impractical: A lot of Yamamoto's advice is actually this.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A fragment states that Yamamoto believes that any man is senile when he reaches the age of sixty, and any who do not think so already are. Fittingly, the man himself seemed to thought that wasn't for him and died only six months into the age of sixty.
• Ho Yay: Love between men is "the purest love."
• Values Dissonance: Yamamoto was viciously misogynistic, going as far as to say that simply raising daughters was "shameful" or that women had no sense of moral compass, able to be "pushed" in any direction.
  • Also on the Meta level: the set of values promoted in the book are the very idealised image of what perfect samurai ought to be. Actually trying to apply them in practice would almost certainly bring ruin and dishonor on their adherents and their family, and has virtually nothing to do with the real samurai lifestyle in the times Yamamoto longs to. A strong case can be made that this book is directly responsible for Japan plunging into total insanity and disaster culminating in World War II, as Hagakure was the cornerstone to write the infamous Bushido: The Soul of Japan, a Propaganda Piece that "updated" made-up "eternal" codes of proper conduct and in turn became a cornerstone for the Japanese militarism.

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