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The mother scolds him in this fashion: "What a coward to cry for a trifling pain! What will you do when your arm is cut off in battle? What when you are called upon to commit harakiri?"
Then, having been themselves all sentenced to perform harakiri, the forty-seven retainers join their lord in death, and are buried in front of his tomb. Before their graves the smoke of incense, offered by admiring visitors, has been ascending daily for two hundred years.*
Such an instance occurred only last year in Tokyo, when the young lieutenant of militia, Ohara Takeyoshi, killed himself by harakiri in the cemetery of Saitokuji, leaving a letter stating as the reason for his act, his hope to force public recognition of the danger to Japanese independence from the growth of Russian power in the North Pacific.
It is laid upon the tomb together with the nine-inch sword, or dagger, originally used by the Lord Asano in performing harakiri at Government command, and afterwards used by Oishi Kuranosuke in cutting off the head of Kira Kotsuke-no-Suke; and the spirit of the Lord Asano is requested to take up the weapon and to strike the head, so that the pain of ghostly anger may be dissipated forever.
So when General Nogi did harakiri at Emperor Meiji's funeral, his wife, Countess Nogi, killed herself also with such a sword. I give you my sword because in the house by the river you will be lonely and things might happen. I can never use the sword myself now. It was the sword of my ancestors. I am not pure now. I cannot use the sword.
And it was yet more strange to find that in his eyes four Buddhas were reflected. "Musk-rat" is the translation given by some dictionaries. "Musk-deer" was suggested by my translator. But as some mythological animal is evidently meant, I thought it better to translate the word literally. The Chinese term for harakiri. It is thought to be the more refined word.
He might in silence disapprove and as far as possible he should then keep out of his lord's way; should he venture to think and to act contrary to his lord's commands, he must expect and plan to commit "harakiri" in the near future. Personal abdication and silent disapproval, therefore, were direct results of the social order.
Being of the class of nobles, the condemned had a privilege of the peerage, which insured for him the honorable death of the harakiri; a distinction apparently analogous to that which our soldiers of European tradition draw between hanging and shooting.
"I dropped my hands," he said, "but I never put them in my pockets. I felt a pressure there " He put the tip of his finger on a spot close under his breastbone, the very spot of the human body where a Japanese gentleman begins the operations of the Harakiri, which is a form of suicide following upon dishonour, upon an intolerable outrage to the delicacy of one's feelings.
It is said to have begun about 1333, when the last of the Hojo regents, Takatoki, performed suicide, and a number of his retainers took their own lives by harakiri, in order to follow their master. It may be doubted whether this incident really established the practice. But by the sixteenth century junshi had certainly become an honoured custom among the samurai.
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