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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.
Now, what has never been properly insisted upon, in any of the books treating of ancient Japanese customs, is the originally religious significance of the kataki-uchi.
The sense of justice satisfied, there is no need of kataki-uchi. If this had meant that "hunger of the heart which feeds upon the hope of glutting that hunger with the life-blood of the victim," as a New England divine has described it, a few paragraphs in the Criminal Code would not so entirely have made an end of it.
The kataki-uchi was essentially an act of propitiation, as is proved by the rite with which it terminated, the placing of the enemy's head upon the tomb of the person avenged, as an offering of atonement. And one of the most impressive features of this rite, as formerly practised, was the delivery of an address to the ghost of the person avenged.
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