Why does Japanese have so much severed head vocabulary? It’s got to be the fault of the samurai somehow.pic.twitter.com/HyKk29dQzr
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Why does Japanese have so much severed head vocabulary? It’s got to be the fault of the samurai somehow.pic.twitter.com/HyKk29dQzr
I can help with a few of those. Going back to the Heian period, when warfare was thought of as a series of duels between individuals, the victor would decapitate the loser to prove that he had triumphed and present the head to his lord as a show of valor.
The practice continued through the Sengoku period, although as the scale of warfare increased it was no longer practical to display each head individually, so they were mounded up before the lord.
In feudal Japanese law, condemned criminals were decapitated and had their heads mounted on platforms along major roads with plaques indicating their crimes.
To falsely or criminally expose a severed head, then, was to take unlawful vengeance and present your enemy’s head to the public in such a manner as though he were a criminal. This was common in the Bakumatsu period when Imperialists would assassinate Shogunate officials.
Incidentally, the act of "head-stealing" was considered a capital offense - it was to go to a battlefield and claim the heads of enemies that you did not actually slay yourself. Feudal kill-stealing was a real problem in Japan.
Thanks for the information! If I recall correctly, wasn't there something about attacking unsuspecting people with a blade to test its cut or something?
There was a set phrase for that, although I don't know how much it happened in practice. Usually, samurai would pay the local executioner a few mon to use their swords for execution in place of the "official" executioner's sword, to see how well it worked.
I researched this again, it's tsujigiri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsujigiri
It was more common to have 試し斬り (tameshigiri) as a practice than tsujigiri. They would draw ink lines on prisoners or corpses and try and cut through that line to practice technique. Especially during peaceful eras.
Interesting. So is tsujigiri on live people and tameshigiri on dead? Or is tsujigiri just a specific (extra-brutal) type of tameshigiri?
According to the links, tsujigiri was done on random unsuspecting commoners, while tameshigiri was done in a more controlled environment (with dummies, cadavers or convicted criminals that would be executed anyway).
Japanese wiki says that this happened from Sengoku to Edo Period, being banned in Tokugawa, with death penalty for those who did it. They would do this to test the blade, for fun or for money purposes.
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