>>122649634Pst, hey!
The Japs didn't really kill themselves a whole lot all the time!
At least not much more than other cultures.
Ritual suicide was more of a thing that the ruler forced onto a vassal when they fucked up.
Generally, the whole bushido-nonsense was as made up as European chivalry. That is, the fanciful projections of court nobility into previous centuries.
The actual birth of the Samurai as a ruling class goes back to the Sengoku where they had to be effective warriors for a century. The following 250 years of relative peace were where the metropolitan art and lifestyle of Edo was born, and the climate in which the narrative of the Samurai as noble and wise warriors was produced and sold.
However, the codification of the Bushido was a product of the Meiji Restoration and the swell of ultranationalism in a backwards Japan reaching for a seat among the great powers.
The idea that they would jump on a blade at the drop of a hat is like three layers of exaggeration couched in the death-culty undertones of Zen Buddhism, and Meiji-Era State Shinto being little more than a cult of personality for a totalitarian war machine.
