Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/156

 Japanese habit of anticipating surrender by suicide. If a creed which divests death of all terrors by representing it as a prelude to apotheosis ought to have helped to make suicide easy, it should also have tended to impart to death the character of emancipation from the body's thraldom, whereas the history of the Japanese people does not show that escape from life ever presented itself seriously to cultured minds as euthanasia, a means of eluding the pangs of disease or preventing the dotage of age. Japan never had a Seneca or a Hegesias. A man did not abandon life because he counted the loss a blessing or a boon, or because he regarded the grave as a place of rest. When existence became an intolerable punishment, the victim of destitution or cruelty sometimes chose the last road to freedom, and it was a common habit of lovers, when all hope of union in life had disappeared, to die in each other's arms. Doubtless, also, during the long centuries of warfare described in previous chapters, a certain indifference to death must have been educated by the constant necessity of inflicting it, and, as in Rome before the time of Domitian, so in Japan before the Meiji era (1867), suicide secured a political offender against an ignominious fate and the confiscation of his goods. But the influence of Shintō in this matter does not appear to have been appreciable, except in so far as it taught that death was only