On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced his surrender, and the next day a Japanese lieutenant general committed suicide by seppuku in his apartment, and struggled for 15 hours before dying due to improper operation.
So, how did this perverted culture come about? Let's talk about it today.
Commanded the bombing of Chongqing and attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese lieutenant general died of seppuku for 15 hours
In August 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima alone directly killed nearly 80,000 people and injured 60,000.
On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced his surrender, and on August 16, a Japanese lieutenant general chose to commit suicide by seppuku, and this person was named Onishi Takijiro.
Many people are influenced by film and television works, thinking that seppuku suicide is a stab into their abdomen, and the person dies in an instant, in fact, this is an extremely painful way to die.
There is a profession in Japan called the wrong person, their main job is to help the seppuku commit suicide, Onishi Takijiro did not find the wrong person, wrote a suicide note and then cut his abdomen in a cross-cut way.
At this time, his consciousness was still very clear, and later he made up a few stabs on his neck, due to the great pain caused by seppuku, Onishi Takijiro had no strength, and the few stabs on his neck did not hurt the vital point.
Paramedics quickly arrived at the scene and found that Takijiro Onishi, lying in a pool of blood, was still breathing, but refused treatment, struggling for several hours to swallow his last breath, and tossed back and forth from seppuku until his throat for nearly 15 hours.
The whole suicide process was very tragic, but the experience of Onishi Takijiro was not at all worthy of sympathy, and it was he who ordered the long bombing of Chongqing during the Japanese invasion of China.
In 1937, when Japan invaded China in a full-scale manner, the 46-year-old Takijiro Onishi proposed to carry out strategic bombing of major cities in order to quickly invade China.
At the end of 1938, he was appointed commander of the air force, and immediately commanded the bombing of Chongqing, an indiscriminate bombing of civilians that lasted from February 1938 to December 1944.
In the first three years, the Japanese army flew more than 5,000 sorties and dropped 20,000 bombs. At that time, China did not have any air defense force at all, and the bombing of China by the invading Japanese army was completely crushing.
In more than 6 years, the Japanese army dispatched a total of 9,500 sorties, more than 200 air raids on Chongqing, carpet bombing caused nearly 40,000 civilian casualties, and with his "brilliant" record, Onishi Takijiro was directly promoted.
He was also involved in planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, and after the United States entered the war, it continued to advance the front to the Japanese mainland, and Japan was severely damaged in the Philippines, and at this time Takijiro Onishi has become one of the commanders of the air fleet.
He presided over the establishment of Japan's notorious "kamikaze special forces," which allowed pilots to fly planes directly into U.S. aircraft carriers, a kind of suicide-like attack that caused heavy losses to the United States.
The kamikaze was praised by the Japanese emperor, Onishi Takijiro was promoted again, and just when Japan thought it could turn the tide of the war in the Pacific, the brutality of the Battle of Iwo Jima completely irritated the United States.
The latter's dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki directly prompted Japan's surrender, and if Onishi had not committed suicide by seppuku, he would have been brought to a military court along with Hideki Tojo and other war criminals.
Looking back at the crimes committed by this Japanese lieutenant general against the Chinese people, he struggled for 15 hours after seppuku before he breathed, and it can only be said that he was too cheap.
Glorify the spirit of bushido, package seppuku behavior, and introduce people to help suicide operate
When it comes to Japanese culture, there are two representative words, one is the spirit of craftsmanship, which gives people the image of rigor, high quality, and full of details.
The other is the spirit of bushido, and it is only in recent decades that the practice of seppuku has gradually been packaged into a unique culture and spread around the world.
The origins of seppuku in Japan can be traced back to the farming period, with a special ritual of sacrificing animal hearts to the gods.
In 1156, during the Hogen period of Japan, the samurai Gen failed to fight for the throne for the dynasty, and chose to commit suicide by seppuku in order to avoid being captured by the enemy.
Since then, seppuku has become a way for many Japanese samurai to show their personal courage, and later the samurai clan gradually formed in Japan, and these people were mainly responsible for security work for the Japanese aristocracy.
Compared with the current security mercenaries, the samurai are more deeply involved with the nobles who serve, and they are attached to these powerful people to maintain their relationship with each other for generations, to be precise, it is more like a community of destiny.
This means that once the nobles he works for are lonely or defeated, the samurai will have no backers, and in this case, Hundred Years thinks that it is better to kill himself than to be killed by the enemy.
The members of the samurai order believed that seppuku was the most cruel and painful way to die, requiring strong mental strength, but at the same time they could also express their loyalty to defend the honor of the samurai order, and the most famous mass seppuku suicide in Japanese history occurred in the Kamakura period.
At that time, a samurai named Hojo Naka, along with 431 other comrades, defended the castle, but was eventually captured by the enemy.
432 samurai committed suicide en masse at a temple near the battlefield, and since then seppuku has gradually become a way for the Japanese to prove their innocence.
As the culture of bushido became more and more popular in Japan, it became clear that when many samurai plucked up the courage to cut open their abdomen, they were wried on the ground by the irresistible physical pain.
In order to make these people die more dignified and ensure that the sacrosity of seppuku cannot be desecrated, the system of intermediary people has emerged in Japan, and they are an indispensable part of the seppuku process.
To put it bluntly, it is to help the seppuku suicide end their lives more decently, as long as the seppuku will not allow these people to regret it, and they will die if they don't die, and it can be seen from here that this culture in Japan is indeed a bit perverted.
After the Meiji Restoration, Japan's national power grew stronger and its ambitions became more and more inflated, hoping to establish the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and even rule the whole world, so it began to package the spirit of bushido in an attempt to build Japan into the light of human civilization.
After World War II, in order to prevent Japan from starting another war, the "Potsdam Proclamation" demanded that Japan completely disarm its army, and until now Japan still does not have a real navy, land and air force, but its economy has taken off after World War II.
After appearing on the international stage, in order to make Europeans and Americans better understand themselves, they came up with various ways to promote Japanese culture, and seppuku suicide was packaged as a "great" act.
The Japanese believe that the abdomen is cut open to show the soul and leave it to the living to judge the innocence, and they also claim that seppuku is not a simple act of suicide, but a sign of atonement, repentance, or proof of loyalty.
Japan is very good at marketing itself, and a country heavily influenced by Confucianism has been packaged and beautified, and the spirit of bushido has actually become a representative of benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom and faith, and even compared bushido with the chivalry advocated by the West in order to cater to Europe and the United States.
Eating habits promote seppuku Japanese culture, and writers become the last seppuku
Although the mainland and Japan are neighbors, in the traditional concept of Chinese, suicide is the most cowardly behavior, and even if you choose to commit suicide, you are killing yourself rather than seppuku. So why did the Japanese samurai choose seppuku instead of killing themselves?
In addition to being related to the evolution of local culture and history, it is also influenced by eating habits. The Japanese eat rice as their staple food, and rice has an extraordinary place in their hearts, and it has a soul of its own.
Eating rice is not simply to satisfy hunger, but to exchange the soul of rice with the soul of a human being, and the soul of the person who enters the stomach is in the abdomen, and the abdomen is the place where the soul is shown to others.
The Japanese also developed different types and methods of seppuku, and they divided the motives of seppuku into different types, such as losing the war, taking faults, making sacrifices, dying, and preserving their reputation and loyalty.
There are two types of seppuku cuts, two-cuts, three-cuts, and cross-cuts, and the method used by Takijiro Onishi is cross-cut.
In addition to Takijiro Onishi, who single-handedly concocted the bombing of Nanjing, there is also a Japanese celebrity who also chose to commit suicide by seppuku, known as "Japan's last seppuku", he is Yukio Mishima, and is also called "a literary genius once in 200 years" by Kawabata Yasuki.
On November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima led his followers to deliver a speech to hundreds of officers and soldiers of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, calling on them to drive out the US troops stationed in Japan.
When he gave a speech, the officers and soldiers below erupted into a roar, and even ridiculed him for being a madman. Yukio Mishima, who is becoming more and more disillusioned with Japanese society, decides to commit suicide by seppuku when he returns home, and his friend Morita Bikatsu becomes the wrong person.
He first cut his abdomen with a short knife, and then Morita cut off his friend's head with a katana, and because it was the first time he did this kind of thing, he was very nervous, and he slashed three times without success.
In general, under the influence of the spirit of the katana, the Japanese view of life and death is very distorted.
As the saying goes, "It's better to die than to live", only by living can you have the opportunity to change everything, and when you die, sometimes it is more painful to live, and committing suicide by seppuku at every turn is an escape from reality.
Onishi Takijiro chose to commit suicide by seppuku not to interpret the so-called spirit of bushido, but to avoid becoming a Class A war criminal, and he was always unwilling to face his mistakes, and Yukio Mishima seppuku was just a helpless choice to face reality.
Japan's carefully packaged bushido culture is also not accepted by European and American countries, and the French writer Romain Ronald Lan has already given the answer: there is only one kind of heroism in the world, which is to recognize the truth of life and still love life......
It's easy to commit suicide by seppuku, but it really takes courage to live and face your mistakes, and the so-called heroism in Japan is not really heroic.
What do you think differently about this?