Ok so i just finished this movie- First off- AMAZING.
slight spoiler ahead:
second off- i have a question regarding seppuku- Does he die from the disembowelment or does he get beheaded? It looked like one of the men in his army was ready to behead him after he cut his belly... I was under the impression that the first cut was the ritual and the sword behind him is meant to take his life? anyone know how it actually went down?
-d
As I understand seppuku, the disembowelment is intended to end the life of the person doing it, whereas the beheading is just to make sure. Both are part of the ritual.
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The beheading by an assistant is only performed when the person is about to lose his dignity, i. e. showing signs of suffering, losing composure, giving in to pain...
You may try to find Mishima's film "Yûkoku", where he himself enacts a seppuku in the style of a traditional Nô theater piece (this short film also figures in the Mishima movie). Warning:Very graphic.
Well, Mishima was beheaded, it took a couple of try from his friend, Morita, he was too emotional (you see in the movie that he is shaking, but luckily not all the gory details that followed are shown)and managed to hack at Mishima's neck and jaw. Another of the group, Furu-koga, had to finish Mishima. According to the autopsy Mishima did wound himself quite deeply, while Morita just managed to scratch himself before being beheaded too.
Abdominal wound were almost always fatal in the past, today (and in 1970) it should be possible to save somebody attempting seppuku if he does not cut a major artery (think abdominal aorta) and rescue is fast enough. So in the case of Mishima beheading was indispensable for his plan to be completed.
The coup-de-grace by beheading was introduced since disembowelment is not a fast way to go: it showed that you were "clean inside" meaning sincere, and had lots of courage, but lead to a lingering and very painful death. If there was nobody available for kaishaku (the beheading) another cut, usually to the throat, was needed to avoid a long agony.
On the battlefield "friendly" beheading made also impossible for the enemy to collect your head and expose it as a trophy, as was current practice.
The procedure was highly codified and made very bureaucratic in the Tokugawa period, when it was used as alternative to death sentence for warriors, usually "simple" beheading (common people were killed usually by a form of crucifxion, or burned at the stake for arsonists). All steps were ritualized precisely, from the clothing to be worn to the number of tatami mats on the scene, to the position of each participant. Sometime the "suicide" did not even get a knife but a fan: pointing it to the abdomen was the signal for beheading, to be performed according to a precise tecnique too, of course.