Samurai Warriors and Suicide Bombers

Peter Fraenkel, BBC World Service Controller for Eastern European Services (retired), delivered at the end of October the 2007 Professor Bill Epstein Memorial Lecture entitled ‘The German-Jewish Consul and the Samurai’. The lecture, given in memory of my husband at the University of Sussex, was sponsored by the University’s (Centre for German-Jewish Studies. Peter Fraenkel discussed the ideologically motivated murder in August 1874 of Ludwig Haber, a 32-year-old German-Jewish trader and acting German consul in the Japanese port of Hakodate. Our twenty-first century is familiar with suicide bombers; the nineteenth and the earlier twentieth centuries were not. But even in the nineteenth century there was in Japan a series of assassinations by killers determined to die along with their victims. Haber’s murderer, Hidechika Tazaki, 23, a Samurai from Akita on the main island of Japan, was steeped in Shinto texts and prepared to give his life in order to rid Japan of foreigners. The economic and political background of this event is that Japan had remained virtually isolated until the 1850s, when American ships with superior weaponry forced her to sign treaties opening the country to foreign trade. This humiliation lingered on and may even have helped to motivate the admiral who led the Pearl Harbour attack. It certainly caused tensions between Japanese factions. In 1868 a group of Samurai used these tensions to dislodge the shogun in a palace coup. They succeeded in the Meiji Restoration, bringing back to power the long sidelined emperor. A state Shinto religion was then used to deify the emperor, to counter the spread of Christianity, and to fuel agitation against Buddhism. The Samurai assassin had never met his victim, the German-Jewish, liberal-minded trader-consul. But he was determined to kill at least one foreigner. He followed Haber out walking and hacked him to pieces with a sword. He then gave himself up to the police, knowing he would be condemned to death. He explained that he had been ordered in a dream to get rid of these heinous foreigners so as to pacify the mind of the Founder God and let the light of Japan shine throughout the world. He was executed six weeks later. Can an analogy be drawn between what motivated the Samurai and what motivates present-day suicide bombers?