Word: harakiri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Methods. Japanese suicides gouge their bellies (harakiri) or hang or drown themselves. Roman officers used to place the haft of their swords on the ground and fall upon the upturned point. Gaius Petronius cut his wrists before company. Nero's other exquisites got into warm baths before they cut theirs. The warm water was to prevent the final chill of death. The Greeks drank hemlock. Chinese spite their neighbors by drowning themselves in the neighbors' wells. Other Chinese methods: over-smoking opium, sucking in a sheet of gold leaf to clog the windpipe...
...mold his mind into stern channels the young Prince received as his first tutor General Nogi, famed for his bloody capture of Port Arthur. When Emperor Meiji died, Tutor Nogi impressed his pupil by reviving the custom of junshi (''following in death"). He and Mrs. Nogi committed harakiri. Two years later the Crown Prince received a: tutor the resolute Admiral Togo who had destroyed the entire Russian fleet at the Battle of the Sea of Japan and who remains alive to this day, telling the tale...
...until he woke up in a Chinese hospital. The Japanese courtmartial, when these facts had been established, complimented Major Kuga and dismissed him with all honor-but his hero's brain throbbed with the madding, ignominious fact that he had been "captured." Major Kuga wished to commit harakiri-to disembowel himself with his sword-but his own sword had been broken in the battle, an aggravation of his shame. Brooding and white-lipped Major Kuga walked last week to the exact spot on Shanghai's battlefield where the hand grenade had knocked him unconscious. There, putting his service...
...clasped hands on the rear seat of their automobile in a tightly closed garage until asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from the exhaust. For 32 years the Colemans had been Quaker missionaries in Japan. They had steeped themselves in Japanese Bushido, the ethical code of the samurai which prescribes harakiri for those facing shame. Learning that Clara B. McGill, a destitute young girl whom the Colemans had sheltered, had made a complaint that Horace Coleman Jr. had betrayed her, they left a note: "This way accords with our peculiar ideas in cases where conditions warrant it." In Mrs. Coleman...
...excitement in Manhattan's Raw Silk Exchange where trading reached almost 4.000 bales a day after being at 80 a few weeks ago. Startled pages and clerks hurried to put their summer linen-suits on a fortnight ahead of time. In Tokio, Japanese bears talked of harakiri. On the Coffee & Sugar Exchange, Manhattan, coffee continued its recent rise which had begun to die out; sugar started its first rally in months. Some $25,000,000 was added to the value of sugar supplies. Along the Gold Coast native farmers gathered in British villages to receive cable despatches which told...