Note 211 — Chapter VI · JAPANESE MORALS: AN IDEAL OF LOYALTY

Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 4th ed., p. 220. By “the ancient way” is meant hara-kiri, or disemboweling. The death by his own hand of General Nogi, the hero of Port Arthur, during the funeral of his departed sovereign Mutsuhito (September 13, 1912), reveals another motive for suicide which is wholly foreign to our modes of thought and feeling. “In very early, almost prehistoric, times the custom of jun-shi, or dying with the master, led to the interment of living Japanese retainers with their dead lord. The custom gradually died out, but voluntary suicide as a means of showing personal devotion or attachment to a master or superior persisted for many centuries” (George Kennan, “The Death of General Nogi,” New York Outlook for October 5, 1912). It was this ancient custom that Count Nogi followed. “When all was over”—such is Mr. Kennan’s interpretation of his act—“he ended his own life as an expression of his boundless devotion to the man whom he had loved. It was in the spirit of Old Japan, but Nogi was a man of that era, and lived in the mental and moral atmosphere of that time.”