Self-inflicted Violence

While the samurai were famous for their ability to kill with their long swords, they also turned violence inwards on themselves, sometimes at their own initiative and sometimes by compulsion, through the practice of seppuku.

Prior to the Tokugawa period, samurai most often committed seppuku to avoid the disgrace of falling into enemy hands. For example, in the twelfth­century war chronicle The Tale of Hogen, the exiled Minamoto Tametomo withdrew into his private room and disembowelled himself in a standing position rather than yield to the 300 warriors sent to kill him; he then proceeded to throw his intestines at the enemy before collapsing. Many samurai committed seppuku during the Mongol invasions of the late thir­teenth century in order to show their valour in the face of the foreign enemy, to avoid capture and to assume responsibility for mistakes in battle or for local defeats. During the civil war of the Sengoku period (1467-1600), seppuku remained a form of suicide practised by samurai on the battlefield to demon­strate their valour and to avoid capture. A samurai might also be ordered by his lord to kill himself to atone for some offence. Similarly, a defeated daimyo might be called upon to commit ritual suicide as part of a peace agreement, as was the case in 1590 when the lord Hojo Ujimasa was instructed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi to take his own life after the Hojo's defeat at Odawara in 1590.

During the peaceful Tokugawa era seppuku was variously institutiona­lised, ritualised and standardised. Before carrying out seppuku the samurai bathed, dressed in white (death) robes and ate a final meal which included sake (white rice wine). He was also given the opportunity to write a death

28 K. W. Nakai and F. Miyazaki, Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, trans. M. Teeuwen et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 73.

Samurai, Masculinity and Violence in Japan poem prior to carrying out the ceremony before what was generally a small number of official spectators. The samurai was assisted in this act by a second, ideally a close friend or someone who excelled as a swordsman, namely someone able to cut the neck in such a way that a small band of flesh kept the head attached to the body, hanging in front, rather than rolling unceremo­niously away. In reality, few had such skills, which meant that typically the principal was decapitated.

An agreement was made beforehand by the principal and his second as to when decapitation would take place. This often occurred when the short sword (wakizashi) was plunged into the abdomen, rather than waiting for complete disembowelment to take place; but as the practice became even more ritualised, it could take place as soon as the principal reached for the sword. In some cases the sword was done away with altogether, replaced with a symbolic object such as a fan.^{[403] [404]}

A samurai without a second might remove the blade from the abdo­men after an initial thrust and slash his own throat or stab his heart, as otherwise death could take a long time to come. It required much more fortitude to carry out a full disembowelment by performing a cross­shaped cut: after cutting a straight line across the belly, another cut was made from the upper centre of the rib cage straight down to the navel. According to Alessandro Valignano, the head of the Jesuit mission in Japan in the late sixteenth century, ‘The braver type make the cut in the form of a cross and demonstrate their courage by pretending not to feel any pain.

Seppuku also underwent a basic change in purpose during the Tokugawa period, as under conditions of extended peace its use became largely limited to a type of capital punishment imposed by political authorities exclusively on male samurai bodies. Under the Tokugawa regime, punishments varied according to social status. For members of the other status groups (i.e. peasants, artisans and merchants), those convicted of a capital offence were put to death by beheading or crucifixion. Murder of one’s master was the most serious crime, for which the criminal merited nokogiri (the con­demned was buried in the ground up to the neck and passers-by were invited

to cut at the neck with a bamboo saw) and then crucifixion, followed by the public display of the corpse for several days.^[405]

Seppuku was the most severe of the various grades of penalties to which samurai were subject (others included banishment and house arrest). As befitting their position at the top of the status system, samurai were given the privilege of committing seppuku for their crimes rather than being executed. It was thus a type of ‘conferred death' (ishi). The forty-six former retainers of Lord Asano Naganori, who was forced to commit seppuku for drawing his sword in the shogun's palace in an attempt to kill the Tokugawa retainer Kira Kozunosuke in 1701, were also granted permission to commit seppuku, as samurai, even though they were ronin (masterless samurai) and therefore technically not qualified for the privilege.^[406]

The practice of seppuku thus can be divided into two main categories. It was practised as an act forced upon an individual for criminal punishment (tsumebara) or as a voluntary act of self-destruction (jijin). Foreign observers were able to witness seppuku inflicted as punishment in mid-nineteenth­century Japan, after the opening of the country to Western powers.

The second category of seppuku, as a voluntary act of self-destruction, included the practices of junshi (seppuku performed to follow one's lord in death), memboku (seppuku performed to prove one's innocence), kanshi (seppuku in protest against some action taken by a samurai's lord) and inseki (seppuku performed to assume responsibility for some mistake). Of these four practices, junshi was particularly notable during the early Tokugawa period. Deprived of the means to show their bravery and loyalty on the battlefield, some samurai felt the need to demonstrate their loyalty when their lord died, either of natural causes or illness, by committing ritual suicide. Perhaps the first mention of this practice was by the Portuguese Jesuit priest Luis Frois (1532-97), who wrote: ‘In Europe when the master dies, his followers weep and send him to the grave, while in Japan some people cut their stomach and many people cut off the tip of their little finger and throw it into the fire which is burning the corpse'.^[409] In fact, junshi became something of a fad at this time. For example, when the lord Date Masume died in 1636, fifteen samurai followed him in death by their own hands.

Since the practice of junshi resulted in death and hence meant the loss of valuable retainers who could be of use to the new lord, it came to be viewed as an obstruction to orderly government, leading several daimyo to ban the practice. The Tokugawa shogunate itself moved to ban the practice in 1663, and it was rigorously enforced when, for example, Sugiura Uemon, a vassal of Lord Okudaira Tadamasa, committed junshi in 1668. The heirs of both the lord and his vassal were punished. The prohibition was further rein­forced through its inclusion in the ‘Laws for the Military Houses' of 1683. Both codification of the law and active enforcement served to stymie this samurai custom. Accordingly, the abolition of junshi is interpreted by many historians as an important sign of a shift from a military-based society to a more civil-based one.

During peacetime samurai served their lords in a variety of ways and when they failed to perform their job properly they often took responsibility for it by committing seppuku. One notable example of this type of seppuku (known as inseki seppuku, or ‘responsibility-driven suicide') occurred in 1754, when a group of fifty-one samurai from Satsuma killed themselves to take responsibility for a delay in completing a riverine flood control project in central Japan (Mino province) that Satsuma domain had been ordered to undertake by the Tokugawa shogunate.^[411] Another example involved the Nagasaki magistrate Matsudaira Yasuhira, who committed seppuku in 1808 after failing to prevent the entry of the British frigate Phaeton into Nagasaki harbour.

Seppuku was formally abolished in the Meiji era (1868-1912), but not without some difficulty. When a Japanese politician first proposed a ban of the practice before the Japanese parliament in 1869, a year after the Meiji Restoration, he was cut down by a former samurai. It would be four years before the bill to ban seppuku was successfully passed, but the practice was still carried out occasionally thereafter by military officers and ultra­nationalists during World War II, and most recently and infamously by the writer Mishima Yukio in 1970.