United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Even the street-children know this much, and mock the despondent victim of fortune; even the dogs seem instinctively to divine the change and bark at him as he passes by.... Such is the power of official displeasure; and the penalty of a blunder or a breach of discipline may extend considerably further but in feudal times the offender would have been simply told to perform harakiri.
Wherefore the lord, despairing because of the silence of the god, resolved to perform harakiri in the temple, and so to defile the sacred building. Moreover, he resolved that his spirit, after his death, should haunt the mountain of Kurama, to deter and terrify all pilgrims upon the nine-mile path of the mountain.
But it is tolerably certain that the more atrocious episodes of the persecution were due to the individual ferocity of local governors or magistrates as in the case of Takenaka Uneme-no-Kami, who was compelled by the government to perform harakiri for abusing his powers at Nagasaki, and making persecution a means of extorting money.
About the close of the fifteenth century, the military custom of permitting any samurai to perform harakiri, instead of subjecting him to the shame of execution, appears to have been generally established. Afterwards it became the recognized duty of a samurai to kill himself at the word of command.
Yet it must be borne in mind that the old Japanese religion of loyalty, which found its supreme manifestation in those three terrible customs of junshi, harakiri, and kataki-uchi, was narrow in its range. It was limited by the very constitution of society.
I have already said that among the highest class of retainers it was thought a moral duty to perform harakiri as a remonstrance against shameless conduct on the part of one's lord, when all other means of persuasion had been tried in vain.
Needless severity was a crime before the higher military law, which, in such cases, made no distinctions of rank. Although the ring-leaders of a peasant-revolt, for example, would be sentenced to death, the lord through whose oppression the uprising was provoked, would be deprived of a part or the whole of his estates, or degraded in rank, or perhaps even sentenced to perform harakiri.
These assembled their forces, restored the banished Emperor, and combined in a desperate attack upon the regent's capital, Kamakura. The city was stormed and burned; and the last of the Hojo rulers, after a brave but vain defence, performed harakiri. Thus shogunate and regency vanished together, in 1333. For the moment the whole power of administration had been restored to the Mikado.
It would seem that this form of self-destruction was not known to the Japanese in early ages; it may have been introduced from China, with other military customs. The ancient Japanese usually performed suicide by strangulation, as the Nihongi bears witness. It was the military class that established the harakiri as a custom and privilege.
All samurai were subject to this disciplinary law, even lords of provinces; and in samurai families, children of both sexes were trained how to perform suicide whenever personal honour or the will of a liege-lord, might require it.... Women, I should observe, did not perform harakiri, but jigai, that is to say, piercing the throat with a dagger so as to sever the arteries by a single thrust-and-cut movement.... The particulars of the harakiri ceremony have become so well known through Mitford's translation of Japanese texts on the subject, that I need not touch upon them.
Word Of The Day