斬捨て御免 kirisute gomen Kirisute Gomen

Cut down, and pardoned for it: a samurai's license, under the shogunate, to cut down a commoner for outrageous insolence and go unpunished, provided the circumstances were clear and witnessed, and a word whose second life has outlasted the first: since the license was abolished it has been the Japanese figure for power that cuts and is excused, an official's hand on a commoner's life as light as tofu or a daikon. The institution was narrower and stranger than its reputation, codified, limited, witnessed and restrained, never a license to kill at will. 御免 is pardon, the honorific license, and also the everyday excuse me, which is the joke a modern ear hears in it. There is no English for it, and the page leaves it untranslated. Which life of the word you take, the samurai's or the satirist's, is yours.

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