Like westerns, we needn’t watch genre-reared samurai characters to understand and enjoy what makes them tick. They can enlarge to include tales of moral quandaries and human pitfalls. One of the best of these, “Harakiri,” concerns a down-and-out older itinerant samurai who presents an inescapable moral quandary to the headman of a formidable clan. He baited the high-profile leader into a scenario where strict adherence to Bushido Code, which is laws that preside over the behavior of all samurai, fails him so horribly in front of his retainers.
The time is 1630. Some of this is taken up by the unemployed samurai called ronin who wander the countryside. This Is Japan has peace, this is why they have unemployment. Their hearts, and the minds once upon their necks have been devoted to their masters, that now they are broken into a free orphaned, which will not be able even breadwinner his family. Same as when a corporation today “downsizes their loyal employee of 40 years. But they are loyal only upward.
A tattered ronin named Tsugumo Hanshiro demands an audience with the clan elder, Saito Kayegu (Rentaro Mikuni), at the gate of the official mansion of Lord Iyi. He has been released by Lord Geishu and is unemployed. He asks permission to perform harakiri in the forecourt of the clan. The ritual gesture is known as harakiri or seppuku-seppuku being the Japanese title of the film. It involves the use of a short blade for self-disembowelment. The blade goes in, cutting from left to right, then a master swordsman whom he has assigned waits to chop off the samurai’s head with one great stroke.
Tsugumo wants to kill himself because of shame over being an unemployed samurai. Saito tells him a story meant to dissuade this. In the district there have been many appeals like this, and in some cases the desperate samurais had their lives spared and were given work by the clan they appealed to. They didn’t really want to commit harakiri at all. However, Saito says, many clans have wised up to this tactic. He tells a story of Chijiwa Motome (Akira Ishihama), another cast-off from Lord Geishu.
He himself has been standing here in this very forecourt just a little while ago, applying for the very same permit. Saito allowed it-after one condition: he must perform the ritual on the spot. Motome gave his samurai’s word that he indeed would kill himself-but was allowed to make a short private visit first. Saito saw it for what it was: a stalling trick and ordered Motome to disembowel himself on the spot. This was not easy, because Motome had pawned his short sword, and had a cheap bamboo replacement. The man’s honor did not allow him to retreat; he fell on this blunt blade and caused great damage and pain before being beheaded.
And so, in effect Saito says to Tsugumo, “You’ve got to be sincere. I vow to you that I am perfectly sincere,” says Tsugumo, “but first, pray, ask my leave to tell a story”-a story that will be listened to by Saito and the retainers of the household, who sit with bated breath around the edges of the courtyard.
“Harakiri” was released in 1962, the work of Masaki Kobayashi (1916-1996), best known for “Kwaidan” (1965), an assembly of ghost stories that is among the most beautiful films I’ve seen. He also made the nine-hour epic “The Human Condition” (1959-1961) which was critical of the way the Bushido Code permeated Japanese life and helped create the state of mind which led to World War II. And he made “Samurai Rebellion” (1967), about a man who refuses to offer his wife to a superior.
His recurring theme, seen clearly in “Harakiri,” is that fanatic adherence to codes of honor, by granting them a value greater than life itself, sets up a situation where humanist values are forbidden. The samurai class, in the end, spawned the Japanese militarist class, whose followers were so enflamed with worship of their masters that the kamikaze pilot corps deaths and the massacre of the soldiers in futile charges under fire seemed, not military acts, but a search for honorable death.
The modern Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima was famously so devoted to the code that he saw its decay as the shame of Japan, and himself committed seppuku in 1970 after leading his small private army in an ill-advised uprising to restore the honor of the Emperor. The American writer-director Paul Schrader told his story in “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985).
Opening similar to “Rashomon,” where a man enters through a gate and begins telling one of four different versions of the same story, Kobayashi created a film in which there is only one correct version of the story but whose meaning depends entirely on whose point of view you take. Who is right? Saito, who doesn’t want the charity of the Iyi clan to be taken advantage of, or Tsugumo, who wants Saito and his household to hear the whole story of Motome which led to him falling on his pathetic bamboo sword.
It would be wrong of me to explain every detail in the story Tsugumo will tell. What I could say is that it’s heartbreaking. He says he is no one trying to get out of death with the alibi of asking for a delay. He is an honest man whose real honor humiliates Saito as well as other authoritarian bureaucrats. Sometimes it is more heroic to do what is right than to do what is traditional. The Bushido Code frees its adherents from doing their own right thinking, of course. “Harakiri” is a film that manifests situational ethics, where the better you know a man the more deeply you understand his motives.
There is a feeling of ritual about the narration of the story. Three times Tsugumo is given the privilege of choosing the master swordsman who shall behead him. Three times a messenger to send to fetch the man. Three times the messenger returns alone, with the news that the chosen man is feeling too ill today to survive. Tsugumo, who is obviously familiar with the retainers of the Iyi clan, doesn’t seem very surprised. He will eventually explain the absence of the “sick” men by producing in the courtyard dramatic symbols of their lack of inner strength. This provides one of the great dramatic moments of all samurai films.
It’s also interesting how the director Kobayashi’s own life reflects Tsugumo’s ideals. He was a lifelong pacifist, but his way of acting on his beliefs was not to avoid military service but to refuse promotion to the officer class, so that he would take his chances along with other conscripts.
This beautifully composed and photographed black-and-white film reflects the values it contains. The camera often takes the POV of Saito, who stands at the top of the stairs leading from the courtyard to the official residence, looking down from authority to Tsugumo, the lowly petitioner. Then it will take a reverse POV of Tsugumo looking up to the man with the power. Angular shots include the audience: a silent spectator nods to himself as he listens to his betters in the form of his leader and the defeated ronin spout off. Later, in the scene of swordplay, the hand-held camera work serves to underscore the breaking down of traditional patterns It would literally take a stone-hearted man not to be able to help but be stirred by Tsugumo’s tale of woe, but these men have been bred and born to have stone hearts.
The very first image in the movie leaves questions in the minds of viewers. We are looking at the symbol of the Iyi clan, the repository of its traditions and ancestors–an empty suit of armor. Eventually this symbol will be disgraced and exposed as the hollow man it is. It’s easy to cite those closed up, stiff economic theories of the left and of the right as good reason for disregarding human suffering when listening to the heartless reasoning of Saito.
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