The first real public outcry about Japanism and the way Japanese were being indoctrinated came from B.H. Chamberlain, who translated
The Kojiki. He sounded the alarm at a lecture in London in 1912. He was outraged by the cavalier fashion with which mid-Meiji power elites treated Japanese history. Samurai “traditions,” for example, were being portrayed as an ancient moral system, but in fact no one had even heard of bushidô until around 1900.
Bushidô is best understood as blind obedience to one's feudal Lord, a pervasive and dominant mode of thought which had never been codified. Rather, the most psychotic elements of Japanese warlord behavior were later drawn together and popularized in the late 19th century to assist in indoctrinating the new Imperial Japanese Army.
Thanks fo rthe background, Mortimer Snavely. I know very little about Japanese history before the 2nd World War.