nothing more to do. Do thou now slay me." So the Grandee Tsubura thrust
the Prince to death with his sword, and forthwith killed himself by
cutting off his own head.'

Thousands of equally strong examples could easily be quoted from later
Japanese history, including many which occurred even within the memory
of the living. Nor was it for persons alone that to die might become a
sacred duty: in certain contingencies conscience held it scarcely less a
duty to die for a purely personal conviction; and he who held any
opinion which he believed of paramount importance would, when other
means failed, write his views in a letter of farewell, and then take his
own life, in order to call attention to his beliefs and to prove their
sincerity. Such an instance occurred only last year in Tokyo, [1] when
the young lieutenant of militia, Ohara Takeyoshi, killed himself by
harakiri in the cemetery of Saitokuji, leaving a letter stating as the
reason for his act, his hope to force public recognition of the danger
to Japanese independence from the growth of Russian power in the North
Pacific. But a much more touching sacrifice in May of the same year--a
sacrifice conceived in the purest and most innocent spirit of loyalty--
was that of the young girl Yoko Hatakeyama, who, after the attempt to
assassinate the Czarevitch, travelled from Tokyo to Kyoto and there
killed herself before the gate of the Kencho, merely as a vicarious
atonement for the incident which had caused shame to Japan and grief to
the Father of the people--His Sacred Majesty the Emperor.

3

As to its exterior forms, modern Shinto is indeed difficult to analyse;
but through all the intricate texture of extraneous beliefs so thickly
interwoven about it, indications of its earliest character are still