On November 25, 1970, in protest against the decline of Japanese society, Yukio Mishima, an internationally renowned novelist, publicly committed hara-kiri (Sepuku). This ritual suicide horrified the world and Japan:not only had the country just lost one of its best writers, but the event showed that, alongside Japan's remarkable material prosperity, the austere values of the ancient samurai survived. Mishima's blood was a sign of reproach for a whole generation of Japanese.
But who were these proud warriors who forged the character of a nation? For many centuries, Japanese society had been made up of local clans, fabrics of ancestral loyalties. The nation had united under one emperor, possibly as early as 300 CE, but imperial authority remained tenuous. A certain number of emperors were in reality only the puppets of noble warriors who fought among themselves for power. By the 10th century, the Fujiwara held the reins of power and the emperor was no more than a toy in the hands of this powerful family.
Under the Fujiwara, the Japanese nobles gathered in the cities and at the imperial court of Kyoto, leaving a void in the provinces which was filled by new clan leaders, who, like the barons of Middle Europe Age, surrounded themselves with their private armies. These warriors were called bushi, and later samurai, a word of Chinese origin meaning "one who serves". At first, the samurai were "the fangs and claws of the Fujiwara". But they eventually fought their way to power until one of the leading samurai families, in 1156, took advantage of the disputes that were tearing the imperial family apart to supplant the Fujiwara. For almost seven hundred years, the life of Japan was to be completely dominated by the warrior class.
The notion of absolute loyalty was central to the samurai tradition. Any warrior worthy of the name, illustrious knight or simple runner of fortune, was bound by oath to his lord. The clan leaders themselves pledged allegiance to the emperor, whose title and divine origins they still venerated, even if the monarch lived reclusive to his court, reduced to powerlessness. Obedience was the absolute ideal. No samurai could challenge an order, or even pause for a moment to think about it. The young warriors learned that their life belonged entirely to their master, who could dispose of it as he pleased. And when the master died in battle or in his bed, the people in his retinue sometimes thought they had to commit suicide to accompany him to the afterlife:a classic of Japanese theatre, Chuchingura, tells how forty-seven samurai did harakiri in 1703 rather than remain without a master.
The word hara-kiri means "opening of the belly", and this form of suicide was the exclusive privilege of warriors (women could open their throats, and merchants poison themselves). The belly being considered as the very center of man, its mutilation was the object of elaborate rules:the gash with a knife, for example, had to be done horizontally, from left to right, and the fatal blow in the direction vertical. But it was difficult to find certain death in this way, and the decapitation was finally carried out. A samurai would perform hara-kiri to escape shame, out of devotion to his master, or - like Mishima - as a sign of protest. On the battlefield, suicide was a common way to avoid capture because, for a samurai, death was preferable to the humiliation of surrender. Before samurai became so powerful, elegant courtiers considered them bandits and barbarians. Later in some samurai were treated as god-like heroes. Neither of these two images is completely true. Undoubtedly, the arrogant and lawless samurai caused difficulties, especially during somewhat long periods of peace. They were a class apart, totally unproductive, which despised commerce. For example, it was a mark of good education on the part of a warrior not to know the value of the coins in circulation in the country. If a merchant seemed suspicious of the coins given to him by a samurai, it was perfectly legal for the warrior to slaughter him on the spot. No one could intervene. On occasion, an unsuspecting commoner might have his head cut off by a samurai who only wanted to “get his hands on”:the blow would go off like lightning, with a single mournful cry of warning.
But all was not all violence in the samurai code, for the warrior's life was also a slow progression on the path to moral perfection. In fact, the samurai were heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, a belief that taught respect for all living beings. These are the same warriors who popularized the famous tea ceremony, a calm ritual intended to make people appreciate the simple things better. And it is probably the concern for purity and simplicity of the Zen cult that attracted these fierce warriors. However ascetic or noble the samurai was, he remained above all a war machine. His favorite weapons were his sabers, one long, the other short, razor-sharp. High-ranking horsemen were also armed with bows and arrows, while at the lower end of the scale, lesser samurai fought mostly with spears.
In 1600, the samurai class made up some six percent of the population and things had changed a lot from the early days. For example, a brave soldier could no longer climb the ranks of the military hierarchy, which had become much more rigid than before. Luxury and corruption also degraded the martial tradition. Yet the great samurai houses continued to dominate national life until the reign. of Emperor Meiji (1867-1912). A great reformer, the emperor restored the authority of the imperial throne and transformed Japan, almost overnight, into an international power to be reckoned with. Even so, the samurai tradition survived in military and cultural life. During World War II, for example, Japanese officers preferred to commit hara-kiri rather than surrender, as suicide bombers rushed unhesitatingly at convoys of American boats. Mishima's suicide in 1970 was followed by an equally sensational event four years later. In 1974, Hiroo Onoda, a lieutenant in the imperial army of World War II, emerged at the age of fifty-two from the forests of an island in the Philippines to finally surrender his sword, twenty-nine years after the end of the war. He had taken up his post on the island in 1944 and, having received no direct orders to surrender, had continued to fight by hiding deep in the jungle. Onoda only surrendered when his former commanding officer (turned bookseller, then retired) flew to order his former subordinate to cease fire. It was neither fear nor eccentricity that had inspired this long tragedy, but simply the spirit of courage and loyalty of the samurai.