Why Italian Fascists Saw Themselves in the Samurai
Michele Monserrati, a scholar of modern Italian studies, writes that Italian Fascists were obsessed with samurai — an odd enthusiasm for a movement built on nationalism. Monserrati traces much of the European image of the samurai to a 1900 book by Japanese diplomat Nitobe Inazō, which presented the samurai as similar to the chivalric knights of European legend, propelled to victory by honor, courage, and loyalty. That is the interesting part. The samurai being admired were not an alien alternative to European warrior myth so much as the same virtues in different armor, which is exactly the kind of ancestor a martial nationalism can adopt. The version of the samurai Europeans took up turned out to be a mirror held up to the importer.
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Bushido: The Soul of Japan was written in English to convey a vision of Japanese culture to a Western audience, and it framed the samurai as chivalric knights of European legend — a portrait already translated for European eyes.
It fits a wider pattern: mid-twentieth-century right-wing movements were highly nationalistic and also willing to work across borders.
Borrowed heroes still look strange for a movement of national purity. Maybe what mattered was the aesthetic of discipline and sacrifice, not the passport.