Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/212

 tastes inconsistent with acts of high courage and great endurance. The bushi's mood, therefore, was not a product of semi-barbarous conditions, but rather a protest against emasculating civilisation. He schooled himself to regard death inflicted by his own hand as a normal eventuality. The story of other nations shows epochs when death was welcomed as a relief and deliberately invited as a refuge from the mere weariness of living. But wherever there has been liberty to choose, and leisure to employ, a painless mode of exit from the world, men have invariably selected it. The euthanasis of the Romans was achieved by the opened vein or the numbing herb, and only the barbarian captive who had to resort to any available weapon and to seize the earliest opportunity, displayed contempt of physical suffering in the hour of death. The bushi, however, deliberately adopted a mode of suicide so painful and so shocking that to school the mind to regard it with indifference and resort to it without flinching was a feat not easy to conceive. His method was to plunge a short-sword into the left side of the abdomen, swop it across to the right, giving it a sharp upward turn at the end of the gash; then to withdraw it, thrust it into the back of the neck, and cut toward the throat. Assistance was often rendered by a friend, who, sword in hand, stood ready to decapitate the victim immediately after the stomach had been gashed; but there were innumerable