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Hara-kiri is a Japanese reading or Kun-yomi of the characters; as it became customary to prefer Chinese readings in official announcements, only the term seppuku was ever used in writing. So hara-kiri is a spoken term, but only to commoners and seppuku a written term, but spoken amongst higher classes for the same act.
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 ...
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] 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 ...
In Buddhism, there is the Mara that is concerned with death, the Mrtyu-mara. [3] It is a demon that makes humans want to die, and it is said that upon being possessed by it, in a shock, one should suddenly want to die by suicide, so it is sometimes explained to be a "shinigami". [4]
A kamikaze aircraft crashes into a U.S. warship in May 1945.. Kamikaze (神風, pronounced [kamiꜜkaze]; ' divine wind ' [1] or ' spirit wind '), officially Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (神風特別攻撃隊, ' Divine Wind Special Attack Unit '), were a part of the Japanese Special Attack Units of military aviators who flew suicide attacks for the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels ...
In 1657, when the Lord Nabeshima Katsushige died, twenty-six of his samurai committed suicide. A late example is General Nogi Maresuke, hero of the Russo-Japanese War. As the Meiji emperor's funeral cortege was leaving the imperial palace in Tokyo, the country was jolted by the sensational news that Maresuke had committed suicide along with his ...
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.