Hara-kiri - the spirit of Japan :: essays research papers

Almost one billion people flush it in Japan every year. In former(a) words, people die every 31 seconds. Some people die because of illness. Some people die because of car accident. Some people consecrate suicide. There are many kinds of terminal in this world. I call up most of those deaths are disconsolate and absurd. However, the honorable but unbelievable death existed in Japan in the middle ages. We call that hara-kiri. harikari is essentially an act of killing your self by cutting open your comport with a sword, performed especially by the warrior, to avoid shame or losing honor. originally I start talking about hara-kiri, I need to explicate about the history of Japan. Japanese society has a history of except 120 years since shedding its feudal corpse. The origin of feudal system is more than 1,000 years ago, so it is still underlying thought of Japanese. Hara-kiri performed especially by the warrior called samurai as indicated above. The samurai were the members of the military class, the Japanese warriors. Samurai employed a range of sleeves such as bows and arrows, spears and guns, but their most famous weapon and their symbol was the sword. Samurai were supposed to lead their lives according to the ethic code of bushido ("the fashion of the warrior"). Strongly Confucian in nature, Bushido stressed concepts such as fealty to ones master, self discipline and respectful, ethical deportment. There are many reasons to yield hara-kiri. For example, after a defeat, some samurai decide to commit hara-kiri earlier than being captured or dying a dishonorable death. Japanese shade sometimes called shame culture as oppose to the Western wrong culture. According to this thought in western countries, the absolute moral measurement of guilt is the principle of peoples behavior, but in Japan, the behavior is ruled by the external feeling of shame. Particularly for samurai in the feudal period, being put to shame in public was as intima tely as being dead. These are examples of hara-kiri from Japanese history. In 1580, Bessho Nagaharu who governed southern part of Japan and his men were cut off from their food issue in a beleaguered castle by their enemy for 20 months. At last, Bessho ran out of provisions. The longer he stayed, the more men were starved to death, and it was a taboo to surrender at that period. However, there was one way to remedy his men and avoid shame of surrender.