Harakiri (Japan, 1962)

Years ago, I was sitting in the university library. I wasn't a student and couldn't check out books, so I sat a table and read the novel Compulsion based on the 1924 Leopold & Loeb case. When I was done, I wanted to read more about it. I put in a request that the library buy a copy of Nathan Leopold's memoir, Life Plus 99 Years, and they ordered the book for $50---about $100 today.

The library had no Chicago newspapers, so I read about it in the New York Times on microfilm.

Leopold & Loeb were boy geniuses. The newspapers back then didn't know how to refer to them except as "advanced thinkers". When a reporter asked them for some other term they could use, Nathan Leopold suggested "Nietzschean Colossus".

It was interesting, but I got distracted and started reading other news from that time.

Even a respectable newspaper like the New York Times still hated Germans. They ran an adorable picture of naked four-year-old German boy sitting in a little chair. He had won a child beauty contest. The newspaper dismissed this as a German trick to appear less evil.

Mussolini had a socialist leader murdered, a New York City cop chased children out of an abandoned building by firing his gun and killed a six-year-old. A group of children took a car on a joyride and ran over another cop's foot. They also reported the murder of a young boy. They didn't catch the killer at the time, but I recognized the case. The murderer was serial killer/cannibal Albert Fish who was executed twelve years later.

A French inventor was sailing to America to sell the U.S. military a Death Ray. This was big news for several days. French officials had already passed on it. I realized I had seen the Death Ray at "The Museum of the Fantastic" in eastern Oregon when I was nine. If you pushed a button it would blow warm air you. The museum no longer exists.

The U.S. banned Japanese immigration to the United States in May, 1924. In protest, a man wearing a business suit and no shoes climbed over the wall of the U.S. embassy in Tokyo and committed seppuku----harakiri---on embassy grounds.

If you're going to kill yourself as an act of protest, that might not be a bad way to do it. It had to be traumatic for the people working there.

Which brings us to this. HaraKiri (Japan, 1962). Starring Tatsuya Nakadai.

Set in 1630. Japan is at peace and full of unemployed samurai. Tired of living in poverty, a middle-aged samurai comes to what they call a castle and asks for help committing ritual suicide. They tell him about he last guy who did that----a young samurai asked for a place to commit suicide but really just wanted a hand-out so they forced him to kill himself anyway.

It turns out the older samurai is there for revenge.

I found the harakiri scene in flashback too hard to watch.

I saw this movie at the university back then. It was only about 20-years-old at the time. They were apparently showing it for a film class. They handed out a photocopied flier as you went in. The professor wrote that the movie was a little slow but had an ending worth waiting for.

I don't know if the samurai code of honor was a real thing. In the end, it shows the futility of violent individual action, even if you're very, very good at it. You want to change anything, it takes mass organization.

Available now on the Criterion channel.