In the long story of the Honorable Country, there are to be found many
shining examples of loyalty, which is the one theme oftenest illustrated
in popular fiction and romance. Its well-attested instances on the
crimson thread of Japanese history are more numerous than the beads on
many rosaries. The most famous of all, perhaps, is the episode of the
Forty-Seven R[=o]nins, which is a constant favorite in the theatres, and
has been so graphically narrated or pictured by scores of native poets,
authors, artists, sculptors and dramatists, and told in English by
Mitford, Dickens and Grecy.[16]
These forty-seven men hated wife, child, society, name, fame, food and
comfort for the sake of avenging the death of their master. In a certain
sense, they ceased to be persons in order to become the impersonal
instruments of Heaven's retribution. They gave up every thing--houses,
lands, kinsmen--that they might have in this life the hundred-fold
reward of vengeance, and in the world-life of humanity throughout the
centuries, fame and honor. Feeding the hunger of their hearts upon the
hope of glutting that hunger with the life-blood of their victim, they
waited long years. When once their swords had drunk the consecrated
blood, they laid the severed head upon their master's tomb and then
gladly, even rapturously, delivered themselves up, and ripping open
their bowels they died by that judicially ordered seppuku which cleansed
their memory from every stain, and gave to them the martyr's fame and
crown forever.
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