by scores of native poets,
authors, artists, sculptors and dramatists, and told in English by
Mitford, Dickens and Grecy.[16]

These forty-seven men hated wife, child, society, name, fame, food and
comfort for the sake of avenging the death of their master. In a certain
sense, they ceased to be persons in order to become the impersonal
instruments of Heaven's retribution. They gave up every thing--houses,
lands, kinsmen--that they might have in this life the hundred-fold
reward of vengeance, and in the world-life of humanity throughout the
centuries, fame and honor. Feeding the hunger of their hearts upon the
hope of glutting that hunger with the life-blood of their victim, they
waited long years. When once their swords had drunk the consecrated
blood, they laid the severed head upon their master's tomb and then
gladly, even rapturously, delivered themselves up, and ripping open
their bowels they died by that judicially ordered seppuku which cleansed
their memory from every stain, and gave to them the martyr's fame and
crown forever. The tombs of these men, on the hillside overlooking the
Bay of Yedo, are to this day ever fragrant with fresh flowers, and to
the cemetery where their ashes lie and their memorials stand, thousands
of pilgrims annually wend their way. No dramas are more permanently
popular on the stage than those which display the virtues of these
heroes, who are commonly spoken of as "The righteous Samurai." Their
tombs have stood for two centuries, as mighty magnets drawing others to
self-impalement on the sword--as multipliers of suicides.

Yet this alphabetic number, this _i-ro-ha_ of self-murder, is but one of
a thousand instances in the Land of Noble Suicides. From the
pre-historic days when the custom of _Jun-shi_, or dying with the
master, required the interment of the living retainers with the dead
lord, down through all the ages to the Revolution of 1868, when at
Sendai and Aidzu scores of men and boys opened their bowels, and mothers
slew their infant sons and cut their own throats, there has been flowing
through Japanese history a river of suicides' blood[17] having its
springs in the devotion of retainers to masters, and of soldiers to a
lost cause as represented by the feudal superior. Shigemori, the son of
the prime minister Kiyomori, who protected the emperor even against his
own father, is a model of that Japanese kun-shin which placed fidelity
to the sovereign above filial obedience; tho