Show Notes

Content Warning: Suicide.

"What do you mean 'she has lost the will to live?'"

This week, we recap and review Mobile Suit Gundam episode 11, "Icelina - Love's Remains," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: suicide in Japanese culture, the proper way to get vengeance, meaningful character names, how to roll your Rs, and saying goodbye to the most fabulous characters so far.

- A longer definition of shinjū.

- More information about the life and works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon.

- Detailed synopses of the plays Sonezaki Shinjū and Shinjū ten no Amijima.

- Additional explanation of giri and ninjou and their place in Japanese society during the Tokugawa Shogunate.

- Journal articles about interpreting shinjū in plays and in society, and discussing the Buddhist influence on Japanese attitudes toward suicide and euthenasia:

Heine, Steven. “Tragedy and Salvation in the Floating World: Chikamatsu's Double Suicide Drama as Millenarian Discourse.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 53, no. 2, 1994, pp. 367–393. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2059839.

Becker, Carl B. “Buddhist Views of Suicide and Euthanasia.” Philosophy East and West, vol. 40, no. 4, 1990, pp. 543–556. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1399357.

- Books and articles about Kataki-uchi (the rule-bound and later beaurocratized revenge from medieval and Tokugawa periods):

Varley, H. Paul. Japanese Culture. Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004.

Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 2003.

The Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku Oukagami) Stanford UP, 1990, Trans. by Paul Gordon Schalow.

Jasmin M. Curtis (2012). Drops of Blood on Fallen Snow: The Evolution of Blood-Revenge Practices in Japan. University of Massachusetts Amherst (Masters Thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1963&context=theses

Mills, D. E. “Kataki-Uchi: The Practice of Blood-Revenge in Pre-Modern Japan.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 10, no. 4, 1976, pp. 525–542. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/311761.

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The intro music is WASP by Misha Dioxin, and the outro is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, both licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license