Makoto — often written with the character for truth and read as sincerity — is the closest thing to an ethical first principle in a tradition that declines to write ethics down. It does not mean intensity of feeling; it means the absence of a second, hidden intention behind the first. Norinaga made much of it, arguing that the native Japanese way consisted in responding truly to things rather than in following imported Chinese moral systems, and setting it against what he considered the calculating quality of Confucian and Buddhist ethics. The practical consequence is that a rite performed exactly but with a divided heart is held to be worth less than one performed clumsily and wholly, which is a claim nobody can verify from outside, and that is precisely the point. It is also the concept that gets stretched thinnest: makoto has been invoked to praise self-sacrifice and single-mindedness in contexts, including the war, where the sincerity of the agent was not the morally relevant question.