There were those who saw the suicides as a heroic affirmation of the samurai code others found them a cause for embarrassment, a sign that Japan had not yet crossed the cultural line separating tradition from modernity. What had impelled the general and his wife, on the threshold of a new era, to resort so drastically, so dramatically, to this forbidden, anachronistic practice? The nation was divided. The violence of their double suicide shocked the nation. The revered military hero’s wife joined in his act of junshi (“following one’s lord into death”). It was an act of delayed atonement that paid a debt of honor incurred thirty-five years earlier. On September 13, 1912, the day of Emperor Meiji’s funeral, General Nogi Maresuke committed ritual suicide by seppuku (disembowelment).
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