Review: "Harakiri"

As you probably know, harakiri (or seppuku) is a gruesome form of ritual suicide. It was practiced by the samurai in Japan and was perceived as an honorable death, preferable to being executed, or continuing to live in dishonor. The samurai would sit down, cross-legged, and disembowel himself with a knife or his short sword (his wakisashi). Another samurai (the second) decapitates him with a katana (the long sword of a samurai) once the messier work is done.


The ritual of harakiri is a key part of bushido, samurai code, as romantically recorded in the Hagakure, which encourages samurai to live as if they are already dead, to help them be ready and willing to die at any moment in order to be true to his lord. A samurai might commit harakiri to avoid being captured by the enemy, or as compensation for some crime, or after the death of his liege lord.

The film Harakiri (1962, directed by Masaki Kobayashi) is set in the 1600’s in Japan, a time of peace, where many samurai found themselves without any work (ronin). It became a common tactic for ronin to visit the compound of powerful noble families and ask for permission to commit harakiri in the courtyard. Often the family would offer the ronin employment, or at least a few coins, to discourage him.

The film opens with a lone samurai, Hanshiro Tsugumo, approaching the fortress of the Iyi clan. He is a ragged looking fellow, with a scruffy beard and the wide expressive eyes of a simpleton. He asks permission to commit harakiri in the courtyard. Kageyu Saito, counselor of the clan, warns him that the Iyi clan is strict and harsh, and the last samurai to try this trick was compelled to go through with the ritual. Hanshiro is unconcerned, and makes it clear that he has no intention of leaving the fortress alive.

As later events reveal, this is absolutely true. But once Hanshiro has sat down on the little white mat in the courtyard with his sword in front of him on a small table, the vacant, almost foolish light drains out of his eyes, and is replaced by something hard and entirely there, and it becomes swiftly apparent that before he dies, he has a few things to say.

As I get older I think I have stopped expecting to see really great movies. Sure, there are a few masterpieces out there I have not got around to, but I feel confident that I know what they are, and what they can expect from them. It is such a pleasure to stumble upon a movie I’d never heard of before that I am now convinced is one of the greatest films of all time.

Part of the reason this film spoke to me was because I am a lawyer. I’m involved in disputes over rules all the time, many of which are petty and bitter. I know what it is to insist on the strict application of a rule in circumstances which might lead to an unfair result. But I also know that such arguments are unsuccessful more often than laymen might believe. The law is, at bottom, not technical, but moral.

When are you responsible for an accident? When you didn’t act like a “reasonable” person. How do you interpret a contract? You look at the “reasonable” expectations of the parties. When does an advertisement fall afoul of the Competition Act? When it is false or misleading in a “material” respect. These ambiguities are not exceptions; they are the beating heart of our legal system.

I think part of the message of Harakiri is that the samurai code, as backwards as it is, also needs to have such a heart. Towards the end of the movie, Hanshiro says to Kageyu that he needs to bring something with him to the other world: an admission from the Iyi clan that it acted improperly. Surely it is wrong for a samurai, no matter how poor, to insincerely ask permission to commit harakiri, but will the Iyi clan not acknowledge that they could have handled the situation better? Kageyu, of course, refuses, insisting on a strict, unyielding interpretation of bushido. He believes this will justify the actions of his clan, not knowing that it has already lost, that it had lost before Hanshiro sat down on his little white mat, and that every word he speaks makes its eventual humiliation that much more complete.

I imagine Harakiri’s ending (which I will endeavor to describe with as few spoilers as humanly possible) would be unsatisfying to some. Clan Iyi is not, perhaps, punished as thoroughly as we might like. But remember when Hanshiro walked into that fortress he had to know he would never walk out alive. And I also think he had to know his story would probably never be told. He was, after all, telling it in the heart of a heavily guarded fortress, to men who had every interest in protecting the honor of the Clan. And yet he made the conscious decision to tell his story in there, instead of spreading it around in public. Now why is that?

First of all, I think we need to distinguish between being “well-known” and being “meaningful.” For example, the Kardashians’ every exploit will be recorded for all of posterity, and will be remembered long after many humble, useful lives have been completely forgotten. Why then should being “well-known” be a meaningful goal? If you have no respect for society’s value judgments, why should you seek its approval? Or fear its censure?

Because make no mistake, although I believe this film makes it clear there is room for humanity in the samurai code, it is a savage attack on the myths of martial virtue in Japan. Kobayashi was a famous contrarian who demonstrated his opposition to WWII by declining an officer’s commission and joining the ranks. Think about that for a second. On the one hand, it was not a particularly harmful gesture, as far as the authorities were concerned. But it was a tremendously expressive one. Rather than actively disobey his superiors, which would have given them an excuse to punish him, he chose to fling his defiance in their face in a method calculated to deny them the satisfaction of reprisal. His very death would communicate his contempt for them. Think of the power in a gesture like that.

Similarly, by the end of the film, the viewer can feel the power emanating out of Hanshiro, cross-legged, on his little mat, politely defiant against the dozens of well armed and armored warriors that surround him. Like a good lawyer, he knows how to use the rules, he has no mercy, and he will not leave until he has accomplished exactly what he came for.

So what did he come for? Simply this: to show Clan Iyi that in the right situation, they too would act the same way as the ronin begging at their door. The only difference is that those poor ronin compromise their honor to save their lives, or the lives of their family, and when Clan Iyi eventually compromises its own honor (as inevitably it must) it does so to preserve the appearance of its honor. What clearer evidence could you ask for that the Clan's honor is just a facade? And if its honor is insincere, what was the justification for its unyielding treatment of those less fortunate than itself?

Hanshiro does not publicize Clan Iyi’s hypocrisy because he has nothing but contempt for society’s judgments. What he is striking at is something more secret, and personal. He did not want the foolish mob to condemn the Clan. Nor did he even really want or expect the Clan to condemn itself; men always find a way to justify their actions. Rather, he wanted to attack the real, as opposed to the apparent, honor of the Clan. Whether anyone ever knows it or not, every time Kageyu kneels before that hollow set of armor in the centre of the fortress, he is doing nothing more than proving the ultimate emptiness of everything for which he stands.

Hanshiro's revenge strikes at the Clan’s values, more than his own life, or the lives of the Clan’s followers, or reputations or material wealth. And that unyielding focus on the moral aspect of the Clan clearly and ironically shows that Hanshiro is a much truer samurai than anyone in the Clan. Harakiri brings out the contradictions at the heart of a system that has been glamorized for hundreds of years, by everyone from Yamamoto Tsunetomo to Akira Kurosawa and Tom Cruise. Perhaps the highest praise I can give Harakiri is that I don’t know if I will be able to watch Seven Samurai (my favorite movie) the same way again.