Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The word jigai (自害) means "suicide" in Japanese. The modern word for suicide is jisatsu (自殺); related words include jiketsu (自決), jijin (自尽) and jijin (自刃). [14] In some popular western texts, such as martial arts magazines, the term is associated with the suicide of samurai wives. [15]
Honor suicide has deep roots historically in Japanese society, most famously in the form of harakiri (also known as seppuku). The 1962 film Harakiri directed by Masaki Kobayashi gives a direct and coherent portrayal of the act, involving ritualistic suicide by disembowelment. This would be voluntary and most often carried out by samurai who had ...
[a] Sometimes they are written in the three-line, seventeen-syllable haiku form, although the most common type of death poem (called a jisei 辞世) is in the waka form called the tanka (also called a jisei-ei 辞世詠) which consists of five lines totaling 31 syllables (5-7-5-7-7)—a form that constitutes over half of surviving death poems ...
The complete cut-slash-withdraw motion is called daki-kubi. After the dead samurai falls, the kaishakunin, with the same slow, silent style used when unsheathing the katana, shakes the blood off the blade (a movement called chiburi) and returns the katana to the scabbard (a movement called noto), while kneeling towards the fellow samurai's dead ...
A samurai became a rōnin upon the death of his master, or after the loss of his master's favor or legal privilege. [2] [3] In modern Japanese, the term is usually used to describe a salaryman who is unemployed or a secondary school graduate who has not yet been admitted to university. [4] [5]
A woodblock print depicting the wife of Onodera Junai, one of the forty-seven rōnin.She prepares herself to follow her husband into death. Junshi (殉死, "following the lord in death", sometimes translated as "suicide through fidelity") refers to the medieval Japanese act of vassals committing suicide for the death of their lord.
The ritual suicide was in accordance with the samurai practice of following one's master to death . [15] In his suicide letter, he said that he wished to expiate for his disgrace in Kyūshū, and for the thousands of casualties at Port Arthur. He also donated his body to medical science.
Katsumoto's anguish after the fall of the Toyotomi clan was later dramatised in kabuki theatre where Katsumoto cut a tragic figure in Hamlet's mould. In Tsubouchi Shōyō's play Kiri-hitoha, which describes the fall of the house of Toyotomi, Katsumoto, the main character, is a faithful servant with good intentions and keen sense of reality but rendered powerless caught in the whirlwind of ...