To kill myself : The ritual of suicide in Japan’s culture
Let me ask you this: what do you wish for more than anything else?
When he spoke, though his voice stammered slightly, his words were bold:
Before the sun… at the top of a cliff before sunrise, while paying reverence to the sun… while looking down upon the sparkling sea, beneath a tall, noble pine… to kill myself.
Thus wrote Yukio Mishima through the characters Lieutenant Hori and Isao of Runaway Horses, the third book in Mishima’s tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. Mishima gave the last chapters of its final book to his editor on November 25th, 1970, shortly before committing seppuku or ritual suicide after a failed coup d’etat. The narrative of Runaway Horses is very focused on the subject of seppuku, and to me as a Westerner, it is hard to understand why someone would value ceremonial death over life. In order to understand the significance of suicide for Mishima and modern Japan, I must firstly look at the cultural legacy of seppuku.
In the West, a better-known word for seppuku is hara-kiri. However, it is rarely used by the Japanese themselves as it is a vulgar, colloquial word for suicide, and none of these qualities belong with seppuku. The privilege of committing seppuku was reserved for the elite military class, the samurai.
The first ever seppuku is considered to be Minamoto Yorimasa’s suicide during the opening battle of the Genpei War in 1180. According to the historian Stephen Turnbull, Yorimasa’s way of taking his own life was done with such fluidity that it became the only way for a samurai to die. Whether it be in a battle-field or as a capital punishment, each honourable samurai deserved to end his life with seppuku, which would become their biggest achievement in life. Zen, a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism, also came to influence the samurai way of thinking about life and death, and mentally prepared them for seppuku at any given moment.
During seppuku, a samurai would plunge a short sword into the left side of his stomach and then draw it across to the right. For those who possessed an incredible amount of will-power, the ritual would continue with drawing the blade in the cut and driving it upward. Then, a kaishakunin (a master swordsman, chosen by the samurai) would cut off the samurai’s head, leaving a tiny piece of skin attached to the neck, since it was disgrace to the deceased to have his head rolling around after the act. In some instances, a samurai would instead perform jumonji giri, where no kaishakunin was present, and thus bleed to death. The general Nogi, who’s case I am going to look at later in the article, buttoned himself up after committing jumonji.
Gruesome as it sounds, a well-performed seppuku was a samurai’s main goal to strive to. The way a samurai committed seppuku would determine how he was remembered after death. Obviously, such a hard task involved a lifetime of preparation, both mental and physical. Arguably, such a determined mind-set was very useful to rulers, since there was nothing more valuable than a warrior who was not afraid to die. Though samurai were only human, it was a disgrace if one failed at the task of taking his own life. The longer a samurai could prolong his agony without showing any signs of pain, the more honourable his status became.
It is rather clear from Runaway Horses, that seppuku was on Mishima’s mind constantly at least for the last few years of his life. Though he was married, his wife’s well-being after his death was not important in the face of seppuku. The book’s main characters are the judge Honda who’s best friend Kiyoaki had died in the first book, The Spring Snow; and Isao, an exceptional young student whom Honda believes to be a reincarnation of Kiyoaki. Isao gives Honda a pamphlet, entitled The League of the Divine Wind, which took up 53 pages of the book. It is a story of a league of men, ranging from late teens to late fifties, who commit ritual suicide when their attempt to restore the old order in Japan fails. It describes their each individual case of seppuku, and women are praised for supporting their sons’ and husbands’ decisions of suicide. For example, when one of the elderly members of The League, Masamoto Aikyo, apologises to his mother “for the grief he would cause her.” Surprisingly to me, “she had only praise for him.”
Although this pamphlet is merely fictional, with some basis in Japanese folklore and resemblance to times of political upheaval, it does represent a mindset which is very alien to me. In the West, where the dominant Christian theology condemns suicide, it is almost impossible to imagine a mother giving praise to her son who is just about to take his own life. It is enigmatic to discover that for the Japanese, at least in the past, suicide was something perfectly acceptable, even a privilege, though they know as little about afterlife as any other culture. It must be stated, however, that by law seppuku was banned as practice in 1663.
In the past, there were several reasons for suicide, such as regaining honour or making a point to a lord where all other means had failed. Junshi, for example, meant following one’s lord in his death. The biggest junshi was committed in the 14th century. The ruler Kojo Takatoki, who had not lived by the samurai values and enjoyed a very pampered lifestyle, took his own life through seppuku when he was surrounded in the siege of Kamakura. 1,150 of his vassals, friends and relatives followed his example, by braking off into pairs to commit seppuku after their lord. For the unlucky few, there was no other choice but a jumonji giri. Later, a throng of headless corpses were found in the yagura cave above Toshoji Temple, where Takatoki had chosen to commit the act.
The best-known recent example of junshi is the general Maresuke Nogi’s and his wife’s death after the Emperor Meiji’s funeral on September 13th, 1912. Despite defeating the Russian army in 1905, Nogi felt responsible for the 50,000 casualties, of which two were his own sons. He had asked the Emperor for permission to commit seppuku during his lifetime, but had been refused. Hence, Nogi waited until the Emperor’s funeral to complete his planned suicide. Similar to Mishima’s case in 1970, such a sudden display of archaic samurai values really shook Japan’s sense as a modernised country.
No doubt, Japan is a modern country and until the recent tsunami, it also held one of the world’s strongest economies. However, there has been a worrying increase in suicide rates since the 1990s. The widespread of Internet has enabled websites to be developed, where people would look for other people to die with. These ‘Suicide clubs’ are mainly popular with young Japanese adults. Whereas some people would see them as inhuman websites which persuade people into taking their own life, others say that in Japanese culture this concept has always existed and Internet is just another way of expressing it. As samurai used to write death poems before the act of seppuku, people nowadays post Internet adverts to look for someone to die with.
Reasons for suicide in modern Japan are various, but mainly concerned with job loss or social and economic pressures, which can be argued, go back to the feudal ideas of regaining one’s honour through seppuku. Even failing university examinations is often a trigger for suicide, since it brings shame upon the family.
Although suicide nowadays cannot be considered to be the same as the seppuku ritual, the physical outcome is identical – the voluntary death of a human being. It seems that the notions of preserving honour and nobility that to me seem enrooted in Japan’s sub-consciousness (and please do correct me, if I’m wrong) have intertwined with inability to cope with life’s pressures, such as aftermath of a disaster. General Nogi and Mishima’s cases of seppuku show that the concept of seppuku can still be found in modern Japan, though ritual suicide was a product of feudal Japan.
By Ieva Lākute
