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; though even yet Shigemori’s name is the synonym of both virtues.  Kusunoki Masashige,[18] the white flower of Japanese chivalry, is but one, typical not only of a thousand but of thousands of thousands of soldiers, who hated parents, wife, child, friend in order to be disciple to the supreme loyalty.  He sealed his creed by emptying his own veins.  Kiyomori,[19] like King David of Israel, on his dying bed ordered the assassination of his personal enemy.