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I can do no better than quote in this connection a paragraph from the "Religions of Japan" by W.E. Griffis: "From the prehistoric days when the custom of 'Junshi, or dying with the master, required the interment of living retainers with their dead lord, down through all the ages to the Revolution of 1868, when at Sendai and Aidzu scores of men and boys opened their bowels, and mothers slew their infant sons and cut their own throats, there has been flowing a river of suicides' blood having its springs in devotion of retainers to masters, and of soldiers to a lost cause.... Not only a thousand, but thousands of thousands of soldiers hated their parents, wife, child, friend, in order to be disciples to the supreme loyalty.
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.
Though cases of junshi have occurred even within this present era of Meiji, the determined attitude of the Tokugawa government so far checked the practice that even the most fervid loyalty latterly made its sacrifices through religion, as a rule. Instead of performing harakiri, the retainer shaved his head at the death of his lord, and became a Buddhist monk.
They were buried in this place; and I believe that this is the last instance on record of the ancient Japanese custom of Junshi, that is to say, "dying with the master." At Uyéno is the second of the burial-grounds of the Shoguns.
Two events specially memorable in this reign were the transfer of the shrine of the Sun goddess to Ise, where it has remained ever since, and the abolition of the custom of junshi, or following in death. The latter shocking usage, a common rite of animistic religion, was in part voluntary, in part compulsory.
The custom of junshi represents but one aspect of Japanese loyalty: there were other customs equally, if not even more, significant, for example, the custom of military suicide, not as junshi, but as a self-inflicted penalty exacted by the traditions of samurai discipline. Against harakiri, as punitive suicide, there was no legislative enactment, for obvious reasons.
These laws were rigidly applied, the entire family of the suicide being held responsible for a case of junshi: yet the custom cannot be said to have become extinct until considerably after the beginning of the era of Meiji.
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.
His posterity shall be impoverished by the confiscation of his property, as a warning for those who disobey the laws." Iyeyasu's command ended the practice of junshi among his own vassals; but it continued, or revived again, after his death. In 1664 the shogunate issued an edict proclaiming that the family of any person performing junshi should be punished; and the shogunate was in earnest.
I have already mentioned how, after this abolition of obligatory junshi, or following of one's lord in death, the practice of voluntary junshi continued up to the sixteenth century, when it actually became a military fashion. At the death of a daimyo it was then common for fifteen or twenty of his retainers to disembowel themselves.
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