and fiction alike during the Yedo period is not a little remarkable. It is conspicuously observable in the ethics of suicide. The moral code of this time contains no canon 'gainst self-slaughter. On the contrary, the occasions when a Japanese Samurai was bound to commit suicide were innumerable. Grave insults which it was impossible to revenge, unmerited disgrace, gross blundering, errors of judgment, or even simple failure in official matters, crimes not of a disgraceful character, all entailed the necessity of suicide, or at least made it the most honourable course to pursue. If a Samurai had occasion to remonstrate with his lord for some act of misgovernment, he frequently emphasised his appeal by suicide. The case of the forty-seven Rōnins who slew themselves in a body at the grave of their master after having executed a bloody revenge on his enemy, is known to all readers of Mr. Mitford's Tales of Old Japan. Another admired example is that of a governor of Nagasaki who in 1808 committed suicide in the approved manner because he was unable to detain and destroy a British man-of-war which had defied his authority. The case of the last of the Shōguns may also be quoted. On the downfall of his power in 1867 he was urged by one of his Council to save the honour of his family by a voluntary suicide. He flatly refused to do so and left the room, whereupon his faithful adviser retired to another part of the castle and solemnly performed the hara-kiri.[1] Of suicides, attempted suicides, or threatened suicides of men, women, and children, on the stage and in fiction, there is simply no end.
Human nature being the same everywhere, the duties
- ↑ Literally "belly-cut," a term which some English wag has thought fit to render by "happy despatch."
