Last year some friends and I wrote this book called How To Avoid Hara-kiri: A Guide To Surviving Anime Conventions; the joke (for the few of you that don’t get it) behind the title being, if you don’t buy this book you’ll go crazy and commit hara-kiri.
Hara-kiri is the Chinese term for ritual suicide to restore one’s honor; it’s seppuku in Japanese.
So the other day, I came across this article on PolitiFact which briefly mentioned hara-kiri/seppuku. Suffice to say, it made me smile (because of the allusion, not my twisted sense of humor…this time). The article talked about this congressman who wanted AIG to take a page from the Japanese and resign because of the millions in bonuses they decided to pay themselves recently.
“But few expressed their outrage with AIG officials as starkly as Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa.“I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed,” Grassley said. “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”
“And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.”
The next day, Grassley specified that he was not suggesting AIG executives should kill themselves, though he did say he wanted an apology.”
Now the practice of ritual suicide has been outlawed for decades, but it’s still practiced today in some Asian countries by individuals few and far between.
