Cultures of Death: Warrior Suicide in Medieval Europe and Japan

Abstract

In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the warrior elites of Japan and north- western Europe, despite many similarities in ethos and lifestyle, developed very different cultures of death. Japanese warriors sought battle, killed each other in battle, and killed themselves in ritual suicides. European warriors avoided battle, captured each other, and avoided suicide. This paper examines the origins of these different 'cultures of death.' While differences in religion played some role, they are found not to be deterministic. Rather, differences in symbolic political cultures, locations of political power, family structures, and relationships of the warrior classes to peasant production are shown to have created contexts in which suicide made sense for warriors in Japan, but was counter-productive in Europe.