Word: kiri
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...most terrible dream. I had never before been responsible for the safety of a foreign sovereign. For any failure there could be but one expiation. Every night I dreamed that I was summoned by my chief, the Minister of Home Affairs, and ordered by His Excellency to commit hara-kiri...
Once morbid Japanese ripe for Death would dispatch themselves with a dagger, elaborately disemboweling themselves in a ritual of exquisite pain. Today such heroic acts of hara-kiri ("belly-cut") are rare. Suicide has gone cheap, and last week Japan's go-getting suicide tycoon, owl-eyed Jinnojo Hayashi, scored another coup. For the second time this year sensation-hungry tourists at his Suicide Point witnessed a triple plunge into the sulphur-stinking maw of Death...
Italians call their present Chamber of Deputies the "Hara-kiri Chamber" because it is slated to commit suicide at II Duce's invitation and be replaced by either the small National Council of Corporations or the large General Assembly of the Corporative State. Since Mussolini was believed to favor the Council, there was a rustle of Fascist surprise last week when he seemed to destine the Assembly to succeed the Chamber of Deputies. "This Assembly," said Il Duce, "will substitute for another institution which belongs to a phase of history now relegated to the past...
...Inouye (TIME, Feb. 22) and the Empire's No. 1 financier, Baron Dr. Takuma Dan (TIME, March 14). Most famed, almost deified in Japan, are the Forty-Seven Ronin, heroes of feudal thuggery who avenged the death of their daimyo (overlord) by slaying his enemy, then committed hara-kiri themselves, and are now buried around a Tokyo temple where pious Japanese keep incense ever burning before their tombs...
Such is war, as General Sherman said in 1864, and as Shanghai saw last week. The Japanese commander, General Uyeda, was personally desperate. He knew he might have to commit hara-kiri if his offensive got much further behind schedule, and during the first 18 hours he changed his General Staff Headquarters three times: 1) a Japanese cotton mill; 2) a Chinese cottage; 3) Ti Futan University...