 Bushidō philosophy is, therefore, a true hybrid of Confucian, Buddhist, Shintō, and European parentage. Ideologically it claimed to have been a philosophy of the Japanese people harking back to ancient times but its parentage is clearly nineteenth century. Because of its hybridity, however, its history was occluded and its tenets were couched in terms deemed traditional but often given nuances they had not had previously. Hence, bushidō was almost impervious to philosophical critique, especially when it was protected by government censorship and institutionalized in the mandatory national educational curriculum for school children called National Morality. In an important sense it is not at all a philosophical stream comparable to the others, but its impact should not be overlooked because it did affect the flow (and the stagnation) of the other streams for the first half of the twentieth century. That brings us to an overview of the eddies and cross-currents of the five streams in Japanese history.