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Ritual Suicides During feudal Japan (1192-1868) ritual suicides played an important part of the code of bushido and the discipline of the samurai warrior class. Seppuku is the Japanese formal name for ritual suicides and hara-kiri is the common language term. Hara-kiri, which literally means, "stomach cutting", is a very painful method of self-termination. This was an almost unheard of practice until the emergence of the samurai as a warrior class in Japan. The Japanese, …

…about seppuku is that it sounds like it took place more than it actually did. In the movies they show samurai performing this ritual all the time like it was no big deal. Hollywood stretched the idea of ritual suicides, but that does not change the fact that these samurai believed in something so much that they would take their lives to protect something or so that they could keep their honor instead on living.