Like if you walked up to a cliff and think I’ll jump off this but can’t. ( Not suicidal just an explanation) .
I’m astounded that samurais could commit seppuku so easily
In: 3
Billions of years of evolution have resulted in a whole bunch of both mental and physiological safeguards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Creatures without those safeguards died out long ago. You have to consciously override them to do so.
But let’s talk about seppuku.
Samurai do not commit seppuku so easily. If they did, there would be have been no samurai in short order. Samurai died out because they were made obsolete, not because they all committed seppuku, so you can tell it’s not such an easy thing.
The main, real reason they committed seppuku was social pressure and fear of torture. Contrary to the romanticized depiction of samurai that arose from WWII propaganda, they were not chivalrous or honorable. Samurai were very often brutal and abusive to the peasant class under them. **In fact, the idea that the Japanese (or even any Asian culture) care about “honor” is almost entirely a Western conceit.** The best translation of the concept is not “honor”, but “face”. Westerners don’t understand how important “face” is to East Asia and how it drives almost every interaction that the West misunderstands. Fuck honor. Face is what matters. And I have to admit that samurai were among the best at it.
Seppuku is serious – Samurai didn’t kill themselves willy-nilly out of shame and it was not something that happened very often. You had to ask permission from your lord to do it (unless you’re captured, in which permission is automatically implied) and part of the idea is that the lord would often refuse permission so that the samurai could retain both his face and his life. The main thing that Westerners may not understand is that face is **not personal**. Everyone is considered an extension of their family, so the real motivation for committing seppuku (or offering to commit seppuku) is to protect the reputation (and hence wellbeing) of your family, clan, and lord, who could be made to suffer for your mistakes. East Asia is big on communal punishment. I ask you, would you sacrifice your life to save your family or community? That’s what the samurai did.
Committing seppuku voluntarily (as opposed to having it forced on you if you commit serious crimes) was considered a way to wash away all loss of face. If you are willing to take your own life over it, everyone was obligated to assume you had the noblest of intentions. This is why captured samurai committed seppuku – it’s to make sure no one could possibly accuse them of cowardice and surrendering to save their own life.
But there’s an additional dimension: the Japanese (all of East Asia really) had no cultural prohibition in that era against torture or mistreating prisoners – witness how they treated the Chinese in WWII. If you didn’t commit seppuku, you would be considered a worthless, selfish wretch with no face and the enemy had full rights to torture you. Lots of samurai preferred to die than suffer torture and humiliation.
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