Junshi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A woodblock print depicting the wife of Onodera Junai, one of the Forty-seven ronin. She prepares herself to follow her husband into death.

Junshi (殉死, Junshi^?), sometimes translated as "suicide through fidelity", refers to the medieval Japanese act of vassals committing seppuku (ritual suicide) upon the death of their lord. Originally it was only performed when the lord was slain in battle or murdered.

The practice is described by Chinese chronicles, describing the Yamato people (the Japanese), going as far back as the 7th century. According to the Weizhi (Chronicle of Wei), a decree in 646 forbade junshi, but it obviously continued to be practiced for centuries afterwards.

Under the Tokugawa bakufu, battle and war were almost unknown, and junshi became quite popular with vassals even when their masters died naturally, or in some other way had not met a violent end.

One example is the 1607 suicide of seven pages upon the deaths of Matsudaira Tadayoshi and Hideyasu. This occurred even at the highest levels of power on occasion. Tokugawa Hidetada was followed into death by one of his Elder Counselors (Rōjū), and in 1651, when Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu died, thirteen of his closest advisors (including two Rōjū) committed suicide, dramatically shifting the balance of the council, as a result of the political views of those who remained. As a result of junshi being practiced so widely, it was outlawed by a number of daimyo, and then by the shogunate entirely in 1663. The practice continued, however. In 1668, when daimyo Okudaira Tadamasa died, one of his vassals committed suicide; by way of enforcement of the ban, the shogunate killed the vassal's children, banished his other relatives, and removed Okudaira's successor to a different, smaller, fief (han). Continued instances like these led to a redeclaration of the ban in 1683. This sort of re-assertion of laws, as seen in many other Tokugawa bans on a myriad of other practices, indicates that the ban was not widely followed, nor effectively enforceable.

A more recent instance of someone committing junshi occurred in 1912, when General Nogi and his wife killed themselves following the death of Emperor Meiji.

[edit] References

Frederic, Louis (2002). "Japan Encyclopedia." Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Sansom, George (1963). "A History of Japan: 1615-1867." Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.