Word: harakiri
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Mounted Policeman Olaf Wieghorst showed a picture of his favorite horse, and Poet e. e. cummings exhibited a blue moonlight scene. The Rev. J. Cole Mc-Kim, missionary and jujitsu expert, offered a startling canvas called Surprise Harakiri. It showed an impetuous Japanese gentleman suddenly ripping his stomach open with a dagger before the eyes of his assembled guests...
...telephone for instructions; sailors, protected by masks and helmets, staggering about in fume-filled turrets, loading the guns (see cut, p. 44). The battle is bitter and bloody. When it is over and victory has been won, the commander retires to his quarters, dons the ceremonial robes for harakiri, slices his belly open. Another officer administers the coup de gráce with a full two-handed sword stroke...
...saying, both drew their daggers, bared their stomachs, made clumsy efforts to commit harakiri. Pouncing police grabbed both bunglers before they had much harmed themselves, bundled them off to jail, announced, "they will both recover." Meanwhile a party of friends of the two men (whose names police kept secret) were busy with a hunger strike against the income tax evasions, had not eaten for more than a week...
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...