Word: seppuku
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Japanese have traditionally viewed suicide as an honorable way of responding to failure or showing devotion to country; witness the phenomenon of seppuku, or ritual disembowelment, in the 17th to 19th centuries, and the kamikaze pilots of World War II. Assuming the blame and resigning is also a deeply rooted practice, even when the person in charge may not have made the mistake. In 1985, for example, Yasumoto Takagi stepped down as president of Japan Air Lines after one of his company's jets crashed into a mountainside, killing 520 people...
Mishima's abrasive career ended in seppuku (disembowelment, then decapitation by a member of his private "army"). Kawataba and Dazai were not given to such self-dramatization, but they too died by their own hands. Indeed, it is no mere verbal swagger to define contemporary Japanese writing as a matter of life and death. In the '70s one Tokyo scholarly journal devoted an entire issue to "The Writer and Suicide." There is a death wish operating through Japanese literature. Says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese lit erary scholar (Accomplices of Silence...