A Samurai's Confessions: Death as a choice - I

By Eisuke Suzuki
08 October 2008
Business Recorder

This is the first of a two-part series on the question of death as a choice. In England a woman who is suffering from multiple sclerosis launched a High Court challenge last week over whether her husband could be prosecuted if he helps her to commit suicide. I think, as matter of analysis, the question should be posed not as committing "suicide," but as terminating one's participation in life.

The question of "abortion" was long debated from a "pro-choice" platform as the woman's freedom of choice in terminating an embryo in her body. Setting aside, for a moment, the fundamental difference of the beginning phase of life and the sunset phase of life, the question of "suicide" can be debated as a "pro-choice" platform.

Problems of euthanasia relate to the inevitability of involvement of a third party, be it a spouse, children, nurse or doctor, and it would be considered "assisted suicide," which is a crime punishable by up to 14 years' imprisonment in England and Wales. The 1961 Suicide Act makes it illegal to "aid, abet, counsel or procure the suicide of another." But the actual application of this law is akin to a lottery.

So, wheelchair-bound Debbie Purdy, 45, from Bradford, does not want to leave the eventual consequence of her husband's conduct in accompanying her to Switzerland's Dignitas clinic to the wide discretion of some prosecutor; she would rather know precise conditions in which her husband would be held criminally liable under the 1961 Suicide Act. So, she asked the High Court in London to clarify the law on assisted suicide.

If her husband was likely to be prosecuted, her mind is clear: she is much more likely to travel to the Dignitas clinic alone to terminate her participation in life sooner while she is capable of doing everything alone, and when her condition becomes unbearable, she wants to decide when she dies.

Now comes the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock, also known as "the philosopher queen," who said in a recent interview with the Church of Scotland's Life and Work magazine (current issue, October 2008) that pensioners in mental decline should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain, ie, they should be helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society:

"If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives-your family's lives-and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service. I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die.

Actually I've just written an article called 'A Duty to Die?' for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there's nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself."

In a famous 1996 science fiction blockbuster movie, Independence Day, there was a poignant scene where Russell Casse, played by Randy Quaid, sacrificed himself to save Planet Earth by crashing his F-18 jet fighter into the primary weapon of the extraterrestrials' humongous spacecraft la the Japanese Kamikaze pilot.

He died, so others may live. The 18th century Japanese samurai, Jocho Yamamoto, the famous author of "Hagakure," the book commonly known as the compilation of moral and practical instructions on the Samurai ethic, wrote:

"I discovered that the Way of the Samurai is death. In a fifty-fifty life or death crisis, simply settle it by choosing immediate death. There is nothing complicated about it. Just brace yourself and proceed. Some say that to die without accomplishing one's mission is to die in vain, but this is the calculating, imitation samurai ethic of arrogant Osaka merchants.

To make the correct choice in a fifty-fifty situation is nearly impossible. We would all prefer to live. And so it is quite natural in such a situation that one should find some excuse for living on. But one who chooses to go on living having failed in one's mission will be despised as a coward and a bungler. This is the precarious part. If one dies after having failed, it is a fanatic's death, death in vain. It is not, however, dishonourable.

Such a death is in fact the Way of the Samurai. In order to be a perfect samurai, it is necessary to prepare oneself for death morning and evening day in and day out. When a samurai is constantly prepared for death, he has mastered the Way of the Samurai, and he may unerringly devote his life to the service of his lord."

According to the commentary on "Hagakure" by Yukio Mishima, a Japanese novelist, playwright and poet, Hagakure's author, Jocho Yamamoto, "is concerned with death as a decision, not with natural death. He spoke not of resignation to death from illness, but of resolution to self-destruction. Death from illness is the work of Nature, whereas self-destruction has to do with a man's free will" (Yukio Mishima on Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, 1977, Penguin Books). Mishima continues:

"And if the extreme manifestation of man's free will is the free will to die, Jocho asks, then what is free will? Here is the typical Japanese view that being cut down in battle and committing ritual suicide are equally honourable; the positive form of suicide called hara-kiri is not a sign of defeat, as it is in the West, but the ultimate expression of free will in order to protect one's honour.

What Jocho means by 'death' is the deliberate choice to die, and no matter how constrained the situation, when one breaks through the constricting forces by choosing to die, one is performing an act of freedom. This is, however, inevitably an idealised view of death, and Jocho knows perfectly well that death does not often appear in such a pure and uncomplicated form."

Mishima says Hagakure's author, Jocho Yamamoto, is expressing his Utopianism, his principles of freedom and happiness by saying. "I found that the Way of the Samurai is death." His formula "death-equals-freedom" is the ideal formula of the Samurai, and Jocho Yamamoto knows that death is not necessarily like that. There is, says Mishima, "Jocho's deep-rooted nihilism."

Nihilism or not, it seems the notion of death as a choice reflects the extraordinary high rate of suicide among the Japanese youth. Unfortunately, their thinking process in making that choice is flawed.

A "decision" seems to have been made not as a result of the constant and careful evaluation and re-examination of options available to them in that particular context of decision, nor was advice/consultation from any parent or support group at school or workplace available to them. If they had any support group, it was a circle of acquaintances on the Internet who had been thinking about the same choice; it merely reinforced the initial inclination toward death and accelerated that process.