immediately after the ceremony carried away to the grave.  At night two lights were placed, one upon either side of the two mats.  The candles were placed in saucers upon stands of bamboo, four feet high, wrapped in white silk.  The person who was to disembowel himself, entering the picket fence by the north entrance, took his place upon the white silk upon the mat facing the north.  Some there were, however, who said that he should sit facing the west:  in that case the whole place must be prepared accordingly.  The seconds enter the enclosure by the south entrance, at the same time as the principal enters by the north, and take their places on the mat that is placed crosswise.

[Footnote 105:  No Japanese authority that I have been able to consult gives any explanation of this singular name.]

[Footnote 106:  White, in China and Japan, is the colour of mourning.]

Nowadays, when the hara-kiri is performed inside the palace, a temporary place is made on purpose, either in the garden or in some unoccupied spot; but if the criminal is to die on the day on which he is given in charge, or on the next day, the ceremony, having to take place so quickly, is performed in the reception-room.  Still, even if there is a lapse of time between the period of giving the prisoner in charge and the execution, it is better that the ceremony should take place in a decent room in the house than in a place made on purpose.  If it is heard that, for fear of dirtying his house, a man has made a place expressly, he will be blamed for it.  It surely can be no disgrace to the house of a soldier that he was ordered to perform the last offices towards a Samurai who died by hara-kiri.  To slay his enemy against whom he has cause of hatred, and then to kill himself, is the part of a noble Samurai; and it is sheer nonsense to look upon the place where he has disembowelled himself as polluted.  In the beginning of the eighteenth century, seventeen of the retainers of Asano Takumi no Kami performed hara-kiri in the garden of a palace at Shirokane, in Yedo.  When it was over, the people of the palace called upon the priests of a sect named Shugenja to come and purify the place; but when the lord of the palace heard this, he ordered the place to be left as it was; for what need was there to purify a place where faithful Samurai had died by their own hand?  But in other palaces to which the remainder of the retainers of Takumi no Kami were entrusted, it is said that the places of execution were purified.  But the people of that day praised Kumamoto Ko (the Prince of Higo), to whom the palace at Shirokane belonged.  It is a currish thing to look upon death in battle or by hara-kiri as a pollution:  this is a thing to bear in mind.  In modern times the place of hara-kiri is eighteen feet square in all cases; in the centre is a place to sit upon, and the condemned man is made to sit facing the witnesses; at other times he is placed with his side to the witnesses: