I thought Harakiri was going to be a samurai film. Swords, honor, noble deaths. The stuff of legend.
Instead, Masaki Kobayashi made a film that systematically dismantles every romantic notion about the samurai code and shows you the cruelty underneath.
The film opens with a ronin—a masterless samurai—arriving at a powerful clan’s estate and requesting permission to commit ritual suicide in their courtyard. It’s 1630, and Japan is at peace, which means thousands of samurai are unemployed and starving. Some have been showing up at clan estates, threatening suicide, hoping the clan will pay them to go away.
The clan leader thinks this ronin is running the same scam. So he tells him a story about the last ronin who tried this. A young man, desperate and poor, who made the same request. The clan called his bluff and forced him to go through with it. And because he’d sold his real swords and replaced them with bamboo, they made him commit seppuku with a bamboo blade.
Kobayashi shows us this scene in excruciating detail. The young man trying to cut his stomach with a dull bamboo sword. The pain. The humiliation. The clan members watching, unmoved. It takes forever. He doesn’t die cleanly. He suffers.
I had to pause the film. Because this isn’t honor. This is cruelty disguised as honor. This is a system that values appearance over humanity, that would rather watch a man suffer than show mercy.
And then the ronin reveals: that young man was his son-in-law. And he’s not here to scam the clan. He’s here for revenge.
What follows is a masterclass in storytelling. The ronin tells his story—how his daughter and son-in-law were driven to poverty, how they sold everything they had, how desperation led the young man to that fatal decision. And as he talks, we realize: the samurai code didn’t protect these people. It destroyed them. It demanded loyalty and honor but offered nothing in return. It was a beautiful lie that crushed anyone who couldn’t maintain the performance.
The film’s climax is brutal. The ronin fights the clan’s samurai, defeats them, and exposes their cowardice. The three best swordsmen of the clan had their topknots cut off in a previous encounter with him—a deep humiliation—and they’ve been hiding ever since, too ashamed to show their faces. The clan has been lying about their honor, performing strength while hiding weakness.
And in the end, the ronin is killed. The clan covers up everything that happened. They restore their reputation. The truth is buried. The system continues.
I finished Harakiri feeling angry. Because Kobayashi is showing us how systems of honor and tradition can be weapons. How they can be used to justify cruelty, to maintain power, to silence dissent. The samurai code looks beautiful from the outside—all that talk of loyalty and honor and noble death. But from the inside, it’s a cage. A trap. A way to control people by making them complicit in their own oppression.
The film is gorgeously shot, all stark black and white compositions. But that beauty is part of the critique. Kobayashi is showing you how aesthetics can mask violence, how formal elegance can hide moral rot.
I think about Harakiri whenever I encounter systems that demand loyalty without offering support. Workplaces that talk about “family” while exploiting workers. Institutions that demand sacrifice while protecting their own power. The language changes, but the structure is the same: perform your role, maintain the appearance, and if you fail, you’ll be discarded. And the system will call it honor.
Harakiri is a film about the violence of tradition, the cruelty of rigid hierarchies, and the courage it takes to expose the truth even when you know it will destroy you. It’s a masterpiece. It’s also deeply uncomfortable. Because it asks you to look at the systems you’re part of and ask: what am I performing? What am I pretending? What cruelty am I complicit in?
I don’t have good answers. But I’m glad the film asked the questions.
