Japan, on the other hand, with its persistent and prolonged isolation from the international community, had neither been exposed to such ideas nor developed them independently. Clannish feudal customs and notions about the collective responsibility of the social unit were thus retained in modern Japan to a far greater extent than in Europe or even in Asia. The preservation of military tradition was also responsible, in large measure, for the continuing aversion to capture and the concomitant contempt for prisoners which was such a notable factor in Japanese behavior during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was also remarked that while the Japanese attitude toward alien prisoners of war was singularly contemptuous, their own reactions when captured ranged from extremes of sheer desperation (usually a prelude to self-immolation) to an eerie form of fatalistic relief often transformed into full cooperation with their captors, which, if not authorized by an immediate superior, was explained by scholars as being the result of resignation to disgrace and, therefore, to any degradation. Modern episodes drawn from the archives of World War II provide startling examples of the reactions of the Japanese military man (as well as those of great numbers of Japanese civilians) when faced with the possibility of capture. From the centuries-old performance of hara-kiri by numerous commanders who used their swords to make the traditional first cut before being shot in the head or beheaded by their lieutenants, to the less ritualized suicides of lower-ranking officers after they had beheaded their own soldiers; from the individual suicides of soldiers who pressed grenades against their bodies or balanced them on top of their heads, carefully replacing their caps before the explosion, to the mass suicides of Japanese soldiers and civilians—an orgy of self-destruction was the salient characteristic of Japanese behavior when confronted with defeat and the prospect of capture.
This orgy, sickening to Western troops, “who were powerless to halt it,” reached tragic proportions at Marpi Point on Saipan, where it was said to have expressed “the horror of Bushido” (Leckie, 354), but it was in evidence everywhere, from the islands of the Pacific to China, Korea, and even the Japanese mainland itself, where it continued for months after the defeat of Japan had been formally acknowledged by the emperor. In contrast to Western directives concerning honorable surrender, Japanese “battle ethics” commanded every soldier to “never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive” (Leckie, 348). In fact, any surrender terms offered by an enemy, even though intended to prevent useless bloodshed, were considered by most Japanese commanders as an insult, when not simply a hilarious notion. “How could a samurai surrender? A samurai can only kill himself” was the usual answer (Leckie, 518).
The entire body of Japanese military ethics, in fact, had been inherited from feudal Japan, where the bond of service and loyalty between a retainer and his master was so absolute that any attack on the latter was, in effect, an attack on the former, who was honor-bound to redress the wrong. All clan cultures contain the concept of institutionalized revenge, the official vendetta which, in the military culture of the Tokugawa, became a ritual with minutely organized norms and procedures. The warrior whose master had been, or considered himself, the victim of any type of offense, ranging from a procedural slight to a verbal insult, from an attempted assassination to an actual murder, assumed the obligation of avenging his master even if this took years to accomplish. Such a duty was particularly binding when a retainer’s master had either been killed or forced to take his own life. The ancient Confucian precept that no one should be willing to live under the same heaven with the slayer of his father was interpreted by Japanese law and custom in favor of one’s master, who, as head of the clan, was the father of all. Failure in this context could mean utter disgrace, “for not only was the man who revenged himself regarded as a man of honor, but further, the man who was weak enough not to try to put to death the murderer of his father or his lord, was obliged to flee into hiding; from that day, he was despised by his own companions” (Dautremer, 83). Vengeance (kataki-uchi) was considered complete according to ritual when the head of the enemy was placed at the master’s feet or, if he had died, upon his tomb.
As a man of war (bushi), the retainer usually had to be prepared to serve his master primarily in his capacity as a warrior. This obligation could be discharged in an absolute manner only if he had no reservation whatsoever about confronting the dangers intrinsic in the professional use of arms. His entire philosophy, accordingly, revolved around the concept of complete disregard for his own safety, even his own life, which, by oath, he had placed unreservedly at his master’s disposal.
His code of honor (Bushido) and all the classics related to it stressed the point of never pausing to ponder the nature, significance, and effects of a superior’s command. The Hagakure, a record (written at the beginning of the eighteenth century) of the words of Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a military retainer of the Nabeshima clan, was very specific in this respect and warned the warrior to carry out every order immediately, lest reasoning about it should make a coward of him or inhibit action in any way. The commentaries attached to this military classic were also explicit concerning the elimination of thought and mental discrimination from the process of reacting to and obeying a command. When the third shogun of the Tokugawa clan, Iemitsu, consulted military retainers in charge of the warriors’ formation in the Kii clan concerning the essence of successful strategy, their answer was one of pragmatic simplicity un-surpassed in any other military culture: “One should never ponder!” The decision, after all, had already been made elsewhere, by others. Their task was to obey. This reply, understandably, “pleased Iemitsu” (Norman, 111).
In order to enable the warrior to overcome any mental impasse precipitated by man’s natural fear of death, he had to be trained to think of himself as a man whose life was not his own—a constant theme in Japanese lore and literature where the samurai is often portrayed as a tragic figure caught in the web of a blind cult of death to which he adheres faithfully, whatever the consequences. The Hagakure itself stated quite clearly that the code of the warrior, the famous Bushido, was indeed a code of death. Hence, the warrior had to be always prepared for a sudden and violent end. His whole life as a warrior in the service of a military leader, in fact, was a constant reminder of this. “There is no nation in the world,” wrote Francesco Carletti in the sixteenth century, “which fears death less” (Cooper, 42). This conditioning, which made the Japanese warrior’s contempt for death renowned the world over, began in infancy. The child of a military household was exposed to cold in winter and expected to endure the heat of summer without complaining; he was often sent on difficult errands which were purposely prolonged. His fear of death and of the supernatural (to which all classes in Japan were prone during the feudal era) was substantially reduced, Nitobe tells us, by sending him to such uncanny places as cemeteries and places of execution at night, even while quite young, in order to familiarize him with and, in time, inure him to that chilling sensation which the presence of death usually elicits. Physical pain had to be endured without betraying the slightest emotion, and the young warrior’s conditioning reached its apotheosis in careful training intended to prepare him for the ceremony of self-destruction, that ritualistic form of suicide known generally as hara-kiri (“abdomen cutting”) or seppuku (a more refined rendition of the Chinese character expressing the same idea).
Ritualistic suicide, considered the highest manifestation of command over one’s own destiny and unflinching courage in the face of death, represented a privilege in the eyes of the Japanese warrior. It had begun as a simple act of lonely self-annihilation on the battlefield, performed to escape capture or destruction at the hands of the enemy. In time, it grew into a ceremony which could rightfully be performed only by members of the buke and in accordance with minutely described rules of etiquette, including the presence of an assistant and witnesses who evidenced the social rather than individual or private nature of the ceremony. The reasons for committing ritual suicide, once so directly related to the desire to maintain full command over one’s own destiny to the very last or the desire to follow one’s master in death, became somewhat diluted during the ages of comparative peace following the rise of the Tokugawa to power. Among the main voluntary forms of ritual suicide,