In Dazai Osamu’s story Hashire Merosu (Run, Melos!), published in 1940 in the magazine Shinchō, Melos asks for three days to attend his sister’s wedding. He offers his close friend Selinuntius as a hostage. If Melos is not back by sunset on the third day, his friend will be executed in his place.
The story was included in Japanese school textbooks.
Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain), published by Ueda Akinari in 1776, contains the story Kikka no chigiri (The Chrysanthemum Vow). Akana Sōemon promises his friend Samon to return on the day of the Chrysanthemum Festival, the ninth day of the ninth month.
Held captive in his home domain, he cannot leave. On the promised day, he kills himself, and his spirit returns to keep the promise.
Japanese children seal a promise by hooking their little fingers and chanting: Yubikiri genman, uso tsuitara hari senbon nomasu. “Cut the finger, ten thousand blows. If you lie, you swallow a thousand needles.”
Genman means striking someone ten thousand times with a fist. Yubikiri, cutting the finger, is said to go back to Edo-period courtesans, who cut off a fingertip and gave it to a man as proof of lasting love.
Bushi ni nigon wa nai (武士に二言はない): a samurai does not speak twice. Once something has been said, it is not taken back.
Ichidaku senkin (一諾千金): one promise is worth a thousand pieces of gold. A promise is to be kept at any cost.
Japan’s national curriculum for moral education sets out what elementary school children learn. For the first and second grades, one item reads: Yakusoku ya kimari o mamori, minna ga tsukau mono o taisetsu ni suru. Keep promises and rules, and take care of things that everyone uses.
For the third and fourth grades, it reads: keep promises and the rules of society, and have public spirit.
In Bushido, Nitobe Inazō wrote that the word of a samurai, bushi no ichigon, was a sufficient guarantee of the truth of what he said. Many stories were handed down, he wrote, of men who atoned with their death for having spoken with a double tongue.
On November 14, 2017, a Tsukuba Express train left Minami-Nagareyama Station about 20 seconds before its scheduled time. The operating company published an apology: “We deeply apologize for the great inconvenience caused to our customers.”
In the folk tale Tsuru no ongaeshi (The Crane’s Return of a Favor), a young woman comes to live with an old couple and weaves cloth for them. She asks: “I will now weave cloth. While I weave, never look into the room.”
Worried about her, the old couple look into the room anyway. She is a crane. “I have been seen, so I can no longer stay here,” she says, and she flies away.
Hagakure collects the sayings of the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo, as recorded by Tashiro Tsuramoto. Some manuscripts date its completion to 1716. Its best-known line reads: Bushidō to iu wa shinu koto to mitsuketari. The way of the samurai, I have found, is dying.