Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/214

 sense of duty depriving the seppuku of all its horrors. There the Japanese bushi rose to a remarkable height of moral nobility. He had no assurance that his death might not be wholly fruitless. So, indeed, it often proved. If the sacrifice achieved its purpose, if it turned a liege lord from evil courses into the path of sobriety, the bushi could hope that his memory would be honoured. But if, in obedience to the common promptings of human nature, the lord resented such a violent and conspicuous method of reproving his excesses, then the faithful vassal's retribution would be an execrated memory and, perhaps, suffering for his family and relatives. Yet the deed was perpetrated again and again. The loyal servant committed to paper a last appeal to the better instincts of his master, and then calmly disembowelled himself.

If he was always ready to die for the sake of his master's fair fame, the bushi naturally counted suicide preferable to his own dishonour. Uyesugi Kenshin, feudal chief of Echigo, one of the greatest captains of the sixteenth century, enacted a code of regulations in which the heaviest penalty prescribed for a bushi was deprivation of his swords; the second, death; the third, banishment. It is recorded that one of his vassals, Nagao Uyemon, having committed a serious offence, Kenshin condemned him to forfeit the privilege of carrying a sword, and when strong intercession