Junshi

Under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), 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 the esteem in which he was held by his followers, and the manner of his death.

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.

On another occasion, when Lord Tokugawa Tadakichi, the fourth son of Ieyasu, died in 1607, it was reported that five of his men chose death by junshi.

As the Meiji emperor's funeral cortege was leaving the imperial palace in Tokyo, the country was jolted by the sensational news that Maresuke had committed suicide along with his wife.

What made the news sensational was that Maresuke had disemboweled himself in the ancient samurai tradition of junshi to follow his lord in death.

Inoue Tetsūjirō considered Maresuke's suicide as a cause for celebration, despite the fact that, from the vantage point of society, it meant a loss of a great man and sadness to many.

In 1701, the daimyō of Akō, Asano (Takumi-no-kami) Naganori, attacked the Master of Ceremonies (Kōke) at the shōgunal court, Kira (Kōzuke-no-suke) Yoshinaka, drawing his sword in one of the corridors of Edo Castle, residence of Tsunayoshi, the fifth Tokugawa shōgun.