332 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
Samurai culture required the willingness to follow one’s lord into death, as
we saw in The Tale of the 47 Loyal Ronin; in the face of defeat, pride in name
required a death made heroic by the ritual of suicide. Lord Asano, the 47 ronin,
the Shinomiya lord, and finally Yakushiji Motoichi “cut their bellies.”
Often, as in the cases described above, seppuku or hara kiri (the latter term is
considered vulgar; both mean disembowelment or “cutting the belly”) was a
spontaneous act of the autonomous samurai. In Tokugawa times it also
became an elite mode of execution for a member of the samurai class to spare
him the humiliation of a common public beheading. In the nineteenth century,
there were occasional European witnesses, such as the execution described by
A. B. Mitford in Kobe in 1868. The condemned man had purified himself and
dressed in white, the color of death, and then was ushered into a sand-covered
room in a Buddhist temple. He knelt before a tray containing a sharp, 12-inch
knife, and his kaishaku knelt beside him with a sword. The charges were read by
an official, and the samurai said: “I, and I alone, unwarrantedly gave the order
to fire on the foreigners at Kobe, and again as they tried to escape. For this
crime I disembowel myself, and I beg of you who are present to do me the
honor of witnessing this act.” Then:
Bowing once more, the speaker allowed his upper garment to slip down to
his girdle, and remained naked to the waist. Carefully... he tucked his
sleeves under his knees to prevent himself from falling backward; for a
noble Japanese gentleman [samurai] should die falling forward.
Deliberately, with a steady hand he took the dirk that lay before him; he
looked at it wistfully, almost affectionately; for a moment he seemed to col-
lect his thoughts for a last time, and then stabbing himself deeply below the
waist on the left hand side, he drew the dirk slowly across to the right side,
and turning it in the wound, gave it a slight cut upward. Through this sick-
eningly painful operation he never moved a muscle of his face. Then he
drew out the dirk, leaned forward and stretched out his neck [for the
swordsman to strike]; an expression of pain for the first time crossed his
face, but he uttered no sound. At that moment, the kaishaku, who, still
crouching at his side, had been keenly watching his every movement,
sprang to his feet, poised his sword for a second in the air; there was a flash,
a heavy, ugly thud, a crashing fall; with one blow the head had been severed
from the body. (King 1993:152)
Seppuku continued in the twentieth century to be a rare, shocking, yet still
heroic act carried out by individuals. When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, on the
final day of his funeral ceremonies, just as the cortege was preparing to leave
the palace, the hero of the Russo-Japanese War, General Nogi Maresuke, and
his wife Shizuko seated themselves in front of the emperor’s portrait and com-
mitted suicide, he by disemboweling himself and she by stabbing herself in the
heart. The act shocked the Japanese nation; it aroused tremendous controversy,
and it was said of the event: “Nothing has so stirred up the sentiments of the
nation since the vendetta of the forty-seven ronin in 1703” (Gluck 1985:221).