Note (return) — Chapter IV · - THE CHINESE ETHICAL SYSTEM IN JAPAN

Yet this alphabetic number, this i-ro-ha of self-murder, is but one of a thousand instances in the Land of Noble Suicides. From the pre-historic days when the custom of Jun-shi, or dying with the master, required the interment of the living retainers with the dead lord, down through all the ages to the Revolution of 1868, when at Sendai and Aidzu scores of men and boys opened their bowels, and mothers slew their infant sons and cut their own throats, there has been flowing through Japanese history a river of suicides' blood17 having its springs in the devotion of retainers to masters, and of soldiers to a lost cause as represented by the feudal superior. Shigémori, the son of the prime minister Kiyomori, who protected the emperor even against his own father, is a model of that Japanese kun-shin which placed fidelity to the sovereign above filial obedience; though even yet Shigémori's name is the synonym of both virtues. Kusunoki Masashigé,18 the white flower of Japanese chivalry, is but one, typical not only of a thousand but of thousands of thousands of soldiers, who hated parents, wife, child, friend in order to be disciple to the supreme loyalty. He sealed his creed by emptying his own veins. Kiyomori,19 like King David of Israel, on his dying bed ordered the assassination of his personal enemy.