Junshi

Junshi (殉死^?) (following the lord in death, sometimes translated as "suicide through fidelity") refers to the medieval Japanese act of vassals committing seppuku (ritual suicide) upon the death of their lord. Originally it was only performed when the lord was slain in battle or murdered.

The practice is described by Chinese chronicles, describing the Yamato people (the Japanese), going as far back as the 7th century. According to the Weizhi (Chronicle of Wei), a decree in 646 forbade junshi, but it obviously continued to be practiced for centuries afterwards.

Under the Tokugawa bakufu, battle and war were almost unknown, and junshi became quite popular with vassals even when their masters died naturally, or in some other way had not met a violent end. There were no fixed rules for junshi, and to some extent it depended on the circumstances, the importance of the lord and esteem in which he was held by his followers, as well as the manner of his death. Junshi could also be carried out irrespective of whether the lord had died of an illness, fallen on the battlefield, or committed seppuku.

One example is the 1607 suicide of seven pages upon the deaths of Matsudaira Tadayoshi and Yūki Hideyasu. This occurred even at the highest levels of power on occasion. Tokugawa Hidetada was followed into death by one of his Elder Counselors (Rōjū), and in 1651, when Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu died, thirteen of his closest advisors (including two Rōjū) committed suicide, dramatically shifting the balance of the council, as a result of the political views of those who remained. As a result of junshi being practiced so widely, it was outlawed by a number of daimyo. It was outlawed by the Saga clan in 1661, and then entirely in the version of the Buke Sho-Hatto (The Law for Military Houses) by the fourth Tokugawa Shōgun Ietsuna (1651-1680) in 1663; Junshi was seen by the bakufu to contain certain elements of sedition. The enforcement of this law was strict, and worked in the customary Japanese way by laying the blame for an instance of junshi on the son or successor of the deceased lord whose death had occasioned it. While showing loyalty to their dead lord by following him to death, retainers could at the same time seriously jeopardise the career of his successor, and quite possibly ruin his entire house through the confiscation by the authorities of the fief. The practice continued, however. In 1668, when daimyo Okudaira Tadamasa died, one of his vassals committed suicide; by way of enforcement of the ban, the shōgunate killed the vassal's children, banished his other relatives, and removed Okudaira's successor to a different, smaller, fief (han). Continued instances like these led to a redeclaration of the ban in 1683. This sort of re-assertion of laws, as seen in many other Tokugawa bans on a myriad of other practices, indicates that the ban was not widely followed, nor effectively enforceable.

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