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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.
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 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 ...
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 ...
Armoured samurai with sword and dagger, c.1860 Because the right was defined as a part of self defence, kiri-sute gomen had a set of tight rules. The strike had to follow immediately after the offence, meaning that the striker could not attack someone for a past grievance or after a substantial amount of time.
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]
Five Modern Japanese Novelists. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-12610-7. The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima by Jerry S. Piven. (Westport, Connecticut, Praeger Publishers, 2004 ISBN 0-275-97985-7) [308] Mishima's Sword – Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend by Christopher Ross (2006, ISBN 0-00-713508-4) [309]
[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 ...