Morrison: Seppuku

Sword, Bamboo, Death: An Analysis of 切腹 Seppuku (Harakiri) (1962) directed by

Masaki Kobayashi

Key words: Seppuku, Harakiri, Masaki Kobayashi, Toru Takemitsu, Jidaigeki,

The astonishingly lengthy and stable period of Japanese history known as the Edo
period (1603-1868) had come into being only twenty-six years before the time in which
this movie is set. In 1604, Ieyasu Tokugawa had won the battle of Sekigahara, finally
stabilizing the war ravaged country, sealing his authority over Japan, and ensuring that
the Tokugawa Shogunate would rule for the following two and a half centuries. For
services to his war effort, Ieyasu had granted the prestigious fiefdom of Hiroshima to
Masanori Fukushima.1 In 1619, however, the latter fell from favor. Ieyasu disapproved of
the substantial improvements to Hiroshima Castle Fukushima had undertaken, and
discord arose over Fukushima’s tolerance of Christians. As a result the daimyo was
demoted to a much smaller fief and most of his retainers had to become ronin (samurai
without masters), swelling the numbers of those who had already become so as part of the
1604 “peace dividend.” By 1630, impoverished ronin, men of extremely high ideals and
superior swordsmanship, unwilling to take less prestigious jobs and often turned away
when they tried, had become a nuisance. In particular, some worked a confidence trick in

1
No connection to the area devastated by the tsunami and following nuclear accident in 2011.

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which one would turn up at a wealthy mansion and ask to be allowed to commit seppuku
(the Japanese name of the movie and the more formal name for hara-kiri, which means
“to cut the stomach”) on the property. Rather than have a mutilated body on their hands,
mansion owners would usually give alms to such a man and sent him off happy to have
gotten some money. These ronin had never intended to carry out the act in the first place.
However, this practice became troublesome.
This black and white movie takes place in the Iyi Clan’s vast mansion in Edo, then
capital of Japan,2 May 13, 1630, beginning at 4 PM on a hot spring day and ending
sometime after dusk the same day.3 The man of the house, Bennosuke, is off overseeing
the delivery of fresh trout to another Daimyo’s mansion in the city, leaving his counselor
Saito (Rentaro Mikuni) in charge and responsible for all that follows. A sad-looking ronin
called Hanshiro Tsugumo turns up at the door asking for a place, he pretends, to commit
seppuku.
The story of Seppuku (1962) came from a novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi; Shinobu
Hashimoto wrote the screenplay. Of the latter Donald Richie says, “He stood up against
organized authority to an astonishing degree. […] No one in post World War II Japan
stood up in this way and refused to bow down to vested authority” (Richie. Criterion).
Hashimoto had written scripts for some of Akira Kurosawa’s greatest films—Rashomon
(1950), Ikiru (1952), and Shichinin no Samurai (The Seven Samurai, 1955)—and had
even, apparently, worked on the American Kurosawa copy, The Magnificent Seven
(1960). Kobayashi (1916-96), the director, was just as rebellious and anti-authoritarian as
his screenwriter. “All Kobayashi’s movies poke fun at established order” (Richie,
Criterion). Up to that date, the director’s most famous work was Ningen no Joken (The
Human Condition), an epic trilogy, which “depicts a young soldier […] who is appalled
by the conditions he finds in Manchuria, particularly by the brutal use of slave labor.4 He
fights against it and is sent into active duty, where he is killed” (Richie, Hundred Years
164). Not surprisingly, Seppuku, although set in the far past, is thoroughly against the
Japanese system as it stood in the early 60s.
A fourth member of the creative team involved in the movie was the incomparable
composer, Toru Takemitsu (1930-96). Although he wrote some ninety film scores, he is
better known in the west as Japan’s most famous twentieth-century composer. Orchestral
compositions such as November Steps (1967), A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal
Garden (1977), and Riverrun (1984), won Takemitsu accolades throughout the west. One
of his most compelling scores, written two years after Seppuku, is the atonal music he
wrote for the existentially disturbing Tsuna no Onna (Woman in the Sand, 1964), a movie
in which a schoolteacher/entomologist becomes trapped in a gigantic sand pit with a
strange woman. At the beginning of Seppuku, the devilish appearance of the empty suit of
armor that represents the Iyi Clan, the emptiness of the entire Tokugawa system, and, by
implication, all systems of hierarchy, is beautifully evoked by the atonal sounds on the
music track. When the ronin, Hanshiro (Tatsuya Nakadai), stands in front of the imposing
2
The area has long time since been subsumed into Tokyo.
3
All of the approximately 200 Daimyo, who each controlled a large tract of land somewhere in Japan, were
forced to maintain an expensive base in Edo. By this means, Tokugawa in effect held members of each
Daimyo’s family hostage, the intent being to prevent insurrection against the Shogun’s countrywide rule.
The strategy worked very well.
4
The Japanese had taken over Manchuria in the mid-30s and treated the Chinese and Russian inhabitants
with great cruelty.

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façade of the Iyi mansion, the music changes to a fast, aggressive strumming of the biwa
(see below), the traditional stringed instrument that Takemitsu made much of throughout
his career (for example in the “Hoichi the Earless” section of Kobayashi’s Kwaidan
(1964)).

The biwa

While at first blush this manic strumming appears to be (and is) entirely non-melodic
and atonal, it eventually makes use of fragments of two traditional songs as melodic
material (from 1:39 in this YouTube clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrxjc2RdIAs). This is important, because, as if the
craziness of the story has a certain native beauty or logic underneath, the same melodies,
or parts of melodies, return later in the film under different guises. These songs are
“Sakura” (Cherry Blossom) and “Kōjō no Tsuki” (Moon over the Ruined Castle). The
first is perhaps the most famous of all Japanese folk songs and links the idea of the
evanescence of life—represented by the short-lived cherry blossom, which the Japanese
celebrate every spring with alfresco parties under the pretty pink canopies—to the strict
samurai bushido (“way of the warrior”) ideal invoked in the movie. Its lyrics begin
“Cherry blossom, cherry blossom/Blanketing the countryside …”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK51LblcEOw. The second song “In spring, at the
tall tower …” captures the lost magnificence of feudal Japan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S14GepyIPs.
The plot is structured around the few hours before Hanshiro’s death at the hands of
the Iyi mansion’s retainers. The film POV is omniscient and is fleshed out with four
layers of flashbacks, many of which are segmented by returns to Hanshiro’s “present.” I
will deal with these layers in chronological order beginning with those that refer back the
furthest. First we have a scene generated by Hanshiro’s memory of Hiroshima Castle
eleven years before, when all was well and Hanshiro, his daughter Miho, his friend
Jinnai, and his son Motome, were all living perfectly happy lives in the months before
their master’s downfall. Next we have flashbacks originating from Saito revealing the
horrific fate of Motome when he came earlier to the same mansion to try to get a little
money to buy medicine for his sick son. Third, we have scenes from the current family

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life of Hanshiro and the now-married Motome and Miho. These also come from
Hanshiro’s memory and portray a gloomy, cramped, hand-to-mouth existence in Edo.
Lastly, we have the occasions when Hanshiro recalls the incidents of revenge he has
already (secretly) exacted on the three Iyi retainers who most abused Motome.
With three critically important exceptions, the camera work is somewhat given to
medium shots—both static and slowly tracked—all at right angles to the subjects, with a
sprinkling of closeups, zooms, and longish pans. Often when two men converse face to
face, we have an indirect, over-the-shoulder shot for at least one of them. To reflect the
impersonality of the Iyi mansion and its regime, the overall effect is of evenness, and
generally uninvolved coolness. This applies particularly to the serried ranks of faceless
retainers who line the mansion’s central courtyard where much of the story unfolds and
the coldness of the sparsely furnished corridors and screened rooms of the same building.
Of course the ghastly, blood-splattering attempt Motome is forced to make to insert his
bamboo sword, a sign of his humiliating poverty, into his gut and then to “slice” it across
his bowels is famously filmed close-up, extenuated, and horrifyingly nasty (from 3:00 in
this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdHwuUBrn00).
Cold as it all is, in the midst of all this square-on camera angles, we find three
occasions when this feature of the diegesis is broken very obviously and very
disturbingly. In these breaks lies an important key for understanding the film. Around
22:35, we go from a brief view of the mask of the same empty suit of armor to an
overhead, over-the-shoulder view of Motome sitting alone in a large, empty tatami
room.5 He is dressed in the formal, white robes he has been given in which to commit
seppuku. We can see by his slumped posture that he is defeated. He had tried to bargain
for a short respite in order to go and say goodbye to his wife and child, but his request
was refused. The camera is positioned so that, for the first time, we have obvious
diagonals made by the juxtaposition of the walls of the room and the lines of oblong
tatami sections. We cut to a close-up of Motome’s face, which is full of dread. His head
is half-slumped forward so that the head too is diagonal to the bottom of the frame. At
28:16 in the courtyard, Motome realizes for the first time that he is to commit seppuku
with his own bamboo sword, an act well nigh impossible due to the bluntness and
flimsiness of the material. The director cuts to a close-up of the sword in its scabbard
lying before Motome; it inscribes a dramatic black diagonal on a white background from
bottom left to top right of the frame. There is a cut to Hikokuro, the vilest of the
Daimyo’s retainers, standing over Motome and taking out his sword in anticipation of the
stroke he will make to sever Motome’s head. This represents the final, obligatory act of
the “ceremony,” which relieves the victim of his death agony. The camera returns to
Motome’s face and, as it zooms in, it cants and his body becomes diagonal within the
frame. We see the bamboo sword again from his point of view. It is now straight in the
frame as if, in his state of extreme anxiety Motome has internalized the sword’s
“diagonality.” There then follows Motome’s hideous, drawn out, self-mutilation and
beheading.

5
Tatami is the traditional rice straw flooring still common—although often made of other material—in
Japanese houses and apartments; it is highly respected and all who tread upon it must wear socks or be
bare-footed. In The Last Samurai (2003), to the horror of all Japanese viewers, Tom Cruise’s character,
Nathan Algren, walks across a tatami floor in muddy boots.

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In the climatic fight (in Hanshiro’s flashback) between Hanshiro and Hikokuro, this
canting of the camera returns and rules the diegesis for over a minute. As the canting
effect originated from Motome’s internalized fear, we must look for come connection to
him—dead though he already is—in the fight. In a charming flashback to ten years before
(39:49), we saw Motome as a fifteen-year-old in an open tatami room fondly
demonstrating his calligraphic skills to the eleven-year-old Miho. It is April and the
cherry trees are in full bloom, shedding their pink petals to the extent that the wind blows
them into the room.6 The camera pans to the youngsters’ fathers, Hanshiro and Jinnai,
underemployed soldiers in the garrison at Hiroshima Castle, who are practicing archery.
In their conversation, Hanshiro calls Motome a “magnificent young hawk.” Jinnai replies,
“He’s got a long way to go before you can compare him to a young hawk soaring freely
overhead.” From this metonymic connection to a fierce bird of prey, Motome is
associated later with a much lesser bird in ta scene where he dismisses schoolboys from a
class he has been teaching to make a little money. As they run out of the room, we hear
one of the boys say, “Let’s go sparrow hunting today!” Given the reduced circumstances
that Motome finds himself in, scraping a living teaching Chinese in a dingy house, there
is an inference here that the hawk has become a mere sparrow. Indeed, the archery scene
has a reference to the physical and metaphorical change of a bird: Jinnai jokes about a
kite changing to a hawk.
As Motome goes to his grave by means of bamboo, so, in the lead up to the climactic
fight, Hanshiro and Hikokuro retake this metaphorical journey to death by way of a
storm-tossed bamboo grove. Before explaining this, the reader should be aware of the
great significance of bamboo in Japanese culture. In a country’s whose homegrown
religion, Shinto (“the way of the Gods”), worships a pantheon of natural objects and
phenomena, the tree possesses great spiritual significance. Both living and cut as festive
decorations symbolizing prosperity, the plant, which grows profusely in the country’s
warmth and humidity, symbolizes purity and innocence. Its stems exhibit both strength
and flexibility, while short cross-sections of the thicker stems are cut at a slant to be used
as cups from which to drink sake during festivals, and the shoots, chopped as they
emerge from the soil in spring, are served as a delicacy with rice called takenoko (Abe).
In the scene where Hikokuro comes to Hanshiro’s workshop to invite him to a duel,
nature has taken a strong hand. The wind blows the shadows of leaves on the opaque
windows of the workshop and the light comes and goes as the clouds above scud across
the face of the sun. First the two walk through a graveyard and then through a roiling
bamboo grove. At this point, as part of the music score, a weird sound, not unlike some
sort of tormented bird, is heard. They arrive somewhere that looks like a world beyond: a
barren, storm-tossed moor, with unearthly monuments standing in dark silhouette on the
horizon, and the thick carpet of long grass bent into servitude by a howling wind. It is as
if they have come to a nether region, one where the spirit of Motome the hawk has a
chance to assert itself.
The sword fight begins with some standard passes as the two opponents size each
other up. After a while the camera pans on a close-up of the dry grass blustering in the
wind and the biwa music from the early scene outside the mansion—aggressive, agitated
and strumming—reoccurs. The sound matches the picture so well that one may easily
assume that Takemitsu composed the opening biwa music for the image of the grass,
6
The scene has echoes of the similar scene between Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest.

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rather than having merely recycled it from the earlier use.7 Thus at the opening of the
movie the music anticipates the complex meaning of the climactic scene. The diegesis
takes on an enormous dramatic energy as Hikokuro slowly approaches Hanshiro with his
sword held high over his head. We recall that the former is a master swordsman and, as
Hanshiro backs away, it looks like our hero will soon die. But then our protagonist does
something very strange: he opens his arms, pointing them diagonally toward the ground,
as if giving up. It seems at first like an acceptance of death. In a way it is. However, in
suggesting the outlines of a hawk’s wings, it is also the turning point of the fight.
In Kurosawa’s Sugata Sanshiro (1943), Sugata (Susumu Fujita) faces his opponent in
a similar manner near the end of the movie. The two meet to fight on a windswept moor
at midnight. After some preliminary exchanges, things look to be going badly for Sugata
until the moment he “sees” (probably imagines) a lotus flower in the sky. This recalls the
moment earlier in the movie when he is standing in a muddy pond and a sudden moment
of enlightenment—nature as an ego-free element where all share from the same life
force—emerges from the image of a lotus flower floating before him. Thus, the moment
in the later fight (in Kurosawa) means that when Sugata allows himself to embrace his
enlightenment he can win. He then defeats his master swordsman opponent.
What then is the meaning of the equivalent (arm-spreading) gesture in Seppuku?
Rushing in with the wind over the grass and the frantic biwa—ferocious, but having
underlying tradition roots—the spirit of Motome, the young hawk who never got to “soar
freely” in life “possesses” Hanshiro who assumes the shape of a soaring bird. Recall that
in the earlier scene with the cherry blossom, Motome had become metonymically
associated with the wind. Hanshiro’s billowing sleeves under his diagonal arms are his
“wings.” We see Hikokuro sensing something he doesn’t like. They clash swords again
and this time Hikokuro slashes off part of the fabric—the “wing”—of Hanshiro’s right
sleeve. As he regains his stance, Hanshiro adopts a diagonal posture (reminiscent of the
iconic dance pose John Travolta adopted a decade later in Saturday Night Fever) contrary
to the slope of the hillside behind him, which the canted camera has emphasized. Now,
by connection to the previous instances of “diagonality” in the movie, we have an
invocation of Motome’s inner feelings. The camera’s canting now alternates orientation
according to which man is in view. As Hikokuro readies his sword for a straight-on
charge, Hanshiro adopts another non-swordsman-like pose: he crosses his arms tight into
his chest with the hands clutched, pointing inwards on his shoulders. This appears to be
an imitation of the posture of a bird’s legs, possibly when it is dead. It also signals the
end of Hikokuro as a viable samurai; as soon as the fight is finished, we learn, but don’t
see, that Hikokuro’s topknot has been cut off, a defeat worse then death.8 Motome has
been avenged; indeed it may be that his spirit, or inspiration drawn from his spirit,
partook of the revenge. In contrast to Kurosawa’s obvious visual evocation of a lotus
blossom to indicate the source of spiritual strength of his hero, Kobayashi veils his
equivalent maneuver to the point of obscurity. Kurosawa’s main point in Sugata Sanshiro
was an emphasis on yamato damashii, 大和魂 the original spirit of Japan as the source of
spiritual and natural wholeness. He contrasted this with the foreign–derived form of
martial arts that his antagonist represented. Kobayashi, in contrast, is out to show the

7
Note that, although the first two syllables of Takemitsu’s name are homophonic with the Japanese word
for bamboo, take, his name makes no reference to the tree.
8
Later Hikokuro himself has to commit seppuku because of his shame.

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general corruption of a) the samurai code, b) the Tokugawa Shogunate, and c) organized,
hierarchical society in general. While taking a leaf from Kurosawa’s book on how to
organize a climactic sword fight, he was too much of a non-conformist to wish to
encourage any particular guide to spirituality. If one must take a spiritual meaning from
this film, it is no more than the wish that a young man might attain his true destiny
without the interference of corrupt society. Alongside this, one can detect a positive
feeling for wind and by implication nature. In fact, the wind that accompanies the
moorland fight “leaks” back to the courtyard where Hanshiro is retelling the story. By the
end, just before he takes on the entire entourage in a hopeless but satisfyingly vengeful
fight to the death, as he kneels on the platform on which he is supposed to kill himself,
his hair is fluttering almost as much as his flashback self’s hair. Indeed, the wind on
which the young hawk had finally soared pulls at the clothes of all the retainers gathered
to witness his father-in-law’s suicide/murder.
As to the political world in which the film was produced. In 1962, ten years after the
end of the American occupation, Japanese New Wave (Nuberu Bagu)9 filmmakers were
experimenting with handheld cameras and shocking subjects, such as sex, speed, and
thrills. The only direct sign of this in Seppuku is the detail and lingering intensity of the
death of Motome. The alienation of those in Japanese society who lacked power comes
through in the dejected faces of Motome and particularly Hanshiro. The latter has
absolutely nothing to live for—all his family have died due to lack of resources—and he
arrives at the Iyi mansion sure he will soon be dead. His only aim is revenge. Perhaps he
realizes that he can bring closure to the spirit of his dead son-in-law. But he seems more
intent on proving that the samurai code is worthless. In the twenty-six years since they
found peace and security under Tokugawa, members of the Iyi clan seem to have become
effete. The daimyo Bennosuke is off delivering fresh trout that fateful day, a highly
effeminate occupation for one so powerful—suggesting a misplaced expenditure of
energy for the sake of mere culinary taste—and their so-called master swordsman loses
his topknot to an ill-fed ronin. The movie was extremely successful, a fact which points
to it grabbing the jaded attention of the very people who were apparently sated or
demoralized with consumerism.
Despite the antiestablishment theme and sentiments of the director and others
involved in the production of this film, the end-result is depressing. All signs of the
bloodbath that ends the movie are soon cleaned up by lackeys; Saito, who has aged
twenty years in five or six hours, arranges the cover-up story so that no element of the
truth will ever see the light of day beyond the confines of the mansion. Despite the short-
term feeling of revenge, the Iyi Clan will go on as before for, we must assume, hundreds
of years. This is still typical of large organizations in Japan (I speak from experience).
The heap of metal and cheesy material from which the Iyi’s derive their spiritual strength
(the revered suit of armor seen at the beginning of the movie) is put back in place and
they will continue, we imagine, to worship it and ask its forgiveness for the next bloody
mess in the courtyard to be expertly covered up. And the next …

9
This is the French phrase nouvelle vague pronounced with a Japanese accent; the language has no v or l
sounds.

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Works Cited

Abe, Namiko. "The Role of Bamboo in Japanese Culture." Free Japanese Lessons –
Learn the Japanese Language. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.
<http://japanese.about.com/od/japanesecultur1/a/The-Role-Of-Bamboo-In-Japanese-
Culture.htm>.
Richie, Donald. Interview on Criterion Collection DVD, Harakiri. New York, November
2004.
----- A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. Revised Edition. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2005.