Seppuku

Minamoto Yorimasa's suicide during the opening battle of the Genpei War is regarded as having been the first instance of seppuku in Japanese history. He disemboweled himself in 1180, at the tail end of Japan's classical era, the Heian Period, and twelve years before the first shogun, Minamoto Yoritomo established the first in a long line of the military dictatorships that would rule Japan until 1867. During the centuries that followed the first act of seppuku, many samurai would be given the opportunity to prove their mettle by performing ritual suicide.

The following is a discription of Minamoto Yorimasa's seppuku by historian Stephen Turnbull, from his book, The Samurai: A Military History:

"Minamoto Yorimasa's suicide...was performed with such finesse that it served as a model of the noblest way by which a defeated samurai could take his leave of the world. While his sons held the gate the septuagenarian samurai calmly wrote a farewell poem on the back of his war fan, which read:

Like a fossil tree from which we gather no flowers
Sad has been my life, fated no fruit to produce

He then thrust the point of his dagger into his abdomen, and cut himself open. He was soon dead. A faithful retainer took his head, fastened stones to it and sunk it in the river where no Taira trophy hunter might find it. Yorimasa's elder son Nakatsuna then joined his father in a ritual suicide.

The Japanese tradition of hara-kiri, of which in Yorimasa we see the first example, is surely the only form of suicide that was deliberately intended to be extremely painful. So horrible was the idea of hara-kiri that even the samurai modified it in later years to a purely nominal stabbing, while a friendly second cut off the victim's head. It did, however, have a positive side, if such it may be termed, because it was believed that an incision of the abdomen released the samurai's spirit."

Lord Hojo Takatoki was the last shogunal regent of the Kamakura period. He was not what you would call a paragon of samurai virtue. In fact, he was a dissipate whose main interests in life were dog-fighting, revelry and debauchery. He spent profligately in his pursuit of pleasure. Just as an example, his many fighting dogs were housed in expansive kennels in which they enjoyed more pampered lives than the citizens of Kamakura ever could.

But when he was surrounded by General Nitta Yoshisada's forces during the siege of Kamakura, he decided to die like a samurai, even though he had never lived like one.

Along with over 1,150 of his vassals, courtiers, relatives and retainers, he made his way to a yagura cave above Toshoji Temple.

The following is an account of Lord Hojo's ritual suicide by author and long-time Japan resident Jack Seward :

"Takatoki did not hesitate. Resolutely he thrust his hara-kiri knife into the left side of his stomach, just below his waist line. Only a flicker crossed his features. Then he pulled the knife across to the right side. Only the knotting of his jaw muscles showed the excruciating pain he must have felt. At precisely that moment, another retainer, who had been standing ready behind him, lopped off the head of Lord Takatoki with one downward slash of his sword."

All of those who had accompanied Lord Takatoki Hojo to the cave followed his lead. They broke off into pairs, with one member disemboweling himself, while the other performed the role of kaishakunin, mercifully slicing off the head of his partner. The surviving member of each duo would then find a helpmate to serve as kaishakunin to his own act of seppuku. Finally, an unlucky few committed seppuku without the services of a kaishakunin, their lives ebbing away slowly from their self-inflicted wounds.

I wonder what the victorious General Nitta felt when he heard his men's reports of the grisly scene they had witnessed: over 1,000 headless corpses lying in and around the cave behind Toshoji Temple.

On a beautiful snow-blanketed night in 1702, forty-seven samurai disguised as fire brigade members made their way through the streets of Edo to the mansion of Kira Yoshinaka. When they reached their destination, they stealthily scaled the walls and silently killed the guards that stood between them and the goal they had been contemplationg for nearly two years--killing Kira Yoshinaka to avenge the death of their former lord, Asano Naganori. With the element of surprise on their side, Lord Asano's former retainers were able to vanquish all who opposed their progress into the inner rooms of Kira's mansion without a single loss to their number.

They finally found Kira cowering in a wood shed. The Leader of the 47 Ronin, Oishi Kuranosuke, beheaded him with the same dagger that Lord Asano had used to commit seppuku. One Terasaka Kichiemon was sent to their home province, Ako Domain, to relate the news of their succcessful revenge, and the remaining 46 ronin marched to Sengakuji Temple to lay Kira's severed head before the tomb of their Lord Asano. Having done what they could to assuage Lord Asano's spirit, they sent a messenger, a man named Yoshida Kanesuke, to deliver a report of all they had done to Lord Sengoku, the shogun's inspector general. They then went inside the temple to wait for the shogun's men to come and arrest them.

So, how had they come to such an impasse? It had all started nearly two years earlier, in March of 1701, when the Daimyo of Ako Domain, Lord Asano Naganori, was in Edo for his sankin kotai service. He had been ordered by the shogun to arrange a fitting reception for some of the Emperor's envoys who were coming to Edo. This duty required a detailed knowledge of the arcane rules of court etiquette, which is where Kira Yoshinaka enters the picture. He was the court Master of Ceremonies at Edo Castle and had studied ceremonial procedure at the imperial palace in Kyoto. It was his role to instruct Lord Asano on the intricacies of court etiquette. According to legend, or more accurately the demands of the dramatic portrayal of the story, Kira was a cowardly, greedy and villainous man who tried to extort a bribe from Lord Asano. When he realized no bribe was forthcoming, he goaded Asano with an attitude of intolerable disdain and insolence (in some versions of the story he caused Asano to make an embarrassing gaffe by intentionally giving him bad advice) to the point where Lord Asano had no option but to retaliate.

There is no evidence in the historical record supporting the theory that Kira was a villain, though there is evidence suggesting that Lord Asano was something of a hothead. At any rate, it is a historical fact that inside Edo Castle on April 21, 1701, Lord Asano drew his sword in anger and struck Kira Yoshinaka. Kira was injured, but not seriously. Regardless of the amount of damage Lord Asano was able to inflict, drawing one's sword inside the confines of Edo Castle was a capital offense, and Asano was sentenced and put to death by seppuku on the day of the attack. His property was confiscated, his heirs lost all rights to his ancestral lands, and his samurai retainers suddenly found themselves unemployed.

Punishing Oishi and his followers posed a problem for the Tokugawa government because they had carried out a personal vendetta without being granted official permission, which was against the law, therefore, the proper sentence was execution for murderer. But, rather awkwardly for the shogunate, the 47 Ronin had become instant popular heroes who the populace saw as exemplars of the finest virtues of samurai honor. Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi did the politically astute thing by permitting Oishi and the other forty-five ronin (Terasaka Kichiemon, the messenger who had been dipatched to Ako Domain was pardoned and buried beside his comrades when he died at the ripe old age of 78) to die honorable deaths by committing seppuku, which they did on February 4, 1703 (by the Gregorian calendar), five days after their raid on Kira's mansion. The graves of the 47 Ronin can be seen today at Sengakuji Temple, where their bodies were laid, alongside that of their lord, Asano Naganori.

The story of the 47 Ronin resonated with the Japanese of the time, in no small part due to the fact that by 1702 ,Japan had enjoyed a century of peace under the Tokugawa hegemony. In the old days, a samurai warrior could darn well expect to do some warrioring over the course of his career, but now that peace had broken out across the land, he had few opportunities to test his mettle against the martial traditions that had developed over the centuries. Against such a backdrop, the exploits of the 47 Ronin seemed a true expression of the samurai spirit. Even today, it is one of the most familiar and often interpreted stories--in the theater, movies, and television--in Japan.

During the 1868-1869 civil war called the Boshin War, a group of twenty teenage samurai boys committed seppuku on Mount Iimori, which overlooks Tsuruga Castle, the ancient stronghold of Aizu Domain. The boys, aged 15 to 17, were soldiers of the the Byakkotai, a group of around 340 young samurai who were only meant to be a reserve unit due to their tender years. During the Battle of Aizu, these twenty boys, when they were cut off from the rest of their unit, retreated to Mount Iimori. From their vantage point, they could see the smoke and flames of a fire raging in the plain below. The castle town surrounding Tsuruga Castle had been set on fire and, from the boys position, it appeared that the castle itself was ablaze. Thinking that the castle had been sacked and they had lost the war, the boys sat down where they were and committed seppuku, though one of their number lived to tell their tale as he was unsuccessful in his suicide attempt. The other nineteen boys are all buried at the site of their seppuku, where a memorial honoring them also stands.

Unbeknownst to the boys, the castle had never been on fire, so there had been no reason for them to commit harakiri. The war was eventually lost though; one month later, on November 6, the daimyo of Aizu Domain, Matsudaira Katamori surrendered the castle to the victorious imperial forces.

Lord Matsudaira wrote a commemorative poem for the 19 Byakkotai samurai who had needlessly thrown away their lives:

"Though the tears of multitudes may wash over these stones, these names will never fade from this world."

General Nogi Maresuke shocked modern Japanese society when he committed seppuku on September 13, 1912, the date of Emperor Meiji's funeral, and also the day that he had this photo of himself standing infront of his home in dress uniform taken.

General Nogi was a war hero who had defeated the Russian army in the Siege of Port Arthur in 1905, thereby playing a pivotal role in Japan's becoming the first Asian nation to defeat a Western power in war. The victory had been costly though. The lives of over 50,000 Japanese soldiers had been sacrificed to win the five-month-long battle, including those of General Nogi's two sons.

General Nogi and his wife killed themselves at their home while Emperor Meiji's funeral procession was wending it's way to the funeral hall, the general by seppuku, and his wife by jigai, a more lady-like version of seppuku in which a woman of the samurai class killed herself by cutting her jugular with a dagger, first taking the precaution of tying her legs together to prevent her body from assuming an indecent posture in death.

General Nogi's suicide was an instance of junshi. After the Russo-Japanese war, he had asked Emperor Meiji for permission to kill himself to atone for the huge number of casualties his troops had suffered, but Meiji had refused to grant his permission, saying that the General would have to remain alive at least during the emperor's own lifetime.

General Nogi followed the emperor's words to the letter. In his suicide note, he gave as reasons for committing seppuku the large loss of life among the men under his command in the Siege of Port Arthur, and an incident that happened during the Satsuma Rebellion, in which he had lost the 14th Infantry Regiment's banner to Saigo Takamori's men.

General Nogi's act of junshi was a shock to Japanese society as a whole, and to two of it's greatest writers in particular. The practice had been outlawed way back in 1663, and Japan had for more than a generation (since the Meiji Restoration of 1868) seen itself as a modern nation state which had left behind archaic practices such as seppuku and junshi long ago.

The novelist, poet and Surgeon General of the army, Mori Ogai, knew General Nogi well--they had both been sent to study in Germany by the army. Mori was deeply shocked by the news of his friend's death. According to Yosiyuki Nakai, Mori Ogai had "a deep respect and admiration for this archetypical samurai born in the wrong century." After Nogi's suicide, Mori wrote four historical novels that all took as their subject actual instances of junshi from the past. The suicide of General Nogi also inspired the Meiji period's preeminent novelist, Natsume Soseki, to write his masterpiece: Kokoro. The story is set in 1912 and the protagonist, who is struggling with his own sense of honor and guilt, is prompted by General Nogi's suicide to end his own life.

General Nogi's decision to commit junshi in order to join his emperor in death was more than just a personal choice. It was an event that shocked the nation and prompted two of the greatest thinkers of the Meiji period to deeply ponder Japan's cultural identity as it was undergoing it's transition from feudalism to modernity.

World War II saw a perverse application of the tenets of bushido; now, the ultimate aim was to sacrifice oneself not for one's feudal lord, but for the Emperor, and ultimately for the state. And this did not only apply to samurai (who at any rate no longer existed) but to all Japanese. The boys who were sent off to war were not really supposed to come back: survival was considered to be shameful. Self immolation was very much in vogue. An obvious example is the kamikaze pilots; another famous example is the banzai charge, or gyokusai, literally "shattered jewel."

After World War II, there was a strong reaction against the martial values and mind control that had held sway during the war. For example, a number of revisionist samurai movies were made in the 1960s, the most famous example being Masaki Kobayshi's 1962 film Harakiri, that took an unromanticized and critical look at bushido and attendant ideas such as makoto because of the way they had been used for control of the individual by the state. The following is excerpted from an excellent review of Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri:

"Based on a novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi, Harakiri is a scathing indictment on the hypocrisy, repression, and barbarism of codified behavior. Using rigid rectangular framing against fluid tracking shots and exquisitely composed long shots that delineate class station and social disparity, Masaki Kobayashi visually reflects the oppressive confinement and regimentation of the samurai bushido (code of conduct): the title sequence presented against shots of the empty passageways that lead to the sacred chamber of the Iyi clan's ancestral armor; the isolating, diagonal shots of Saito's interviews with Tsugumo and Chijiwa; the repeated image of Tsugumo on a ceremonial mat encircled by retainers. By illustrating the class stratification and imposed social conformity fostered by the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1867) as a means of retaining and centralizing authority, Kobayashi presents a harrowing indictment of the ingrained cultural legacy of coercive, outmoded rituals, chauvinism, and blind obedience that resulted in the inhumanity and senseless tragedy of the Pacific War."

This is the kanji for "harakiri." The character on the left, "hara," means stomach and the character on the right, "kiri," means cut, so together they mean "stomach-cut." "Seppuku" is written with the same kanji, but in reverse order.

"Harakiri" is the Japanese reading, or kun yomi of the kanji, and "seppuku" is the Chinese reading, or on yomi of the characters (both expressions are Japanese words, not Chinese). "Harakiri" is the vernacular expression and is used more in conversation, while "seppuku" is a more formal word used more often in writing.

Anyway, this is not a subject that much comes up in conversation. The last documented case of seppuku was Yukio Mishima. Seppuku or harakiri, or whatever you want to call it is part of Japanese history, not of modern-day Japan. It's something that the Japanese of today feel distanced enough from that they can joke about it. The samurai below is saying:

"Damn, I forgot my friend's birthday... Well I guess there's no other way..."