斬捨て御免 kirisute gomen Kirisute Gomen

Word for word, 斬捨て is to cut a person down and leave him, and 御免, in the デジタル大辞泉's first sense, is a formal license, said in honor of the one who grants it. The privilege had limits: a samurai who killed wantonly, or could not show proof of the insolence, was punished. Hurst, writing in 1998, says historians have identified no more than a handful of cases. The oldest print of the name found in the books searched for our history is Fukuzawa Yukichi's, in 1873, when the rule had already ended: under laws such as kirisute gomen, he wrote, a commoner's life was no different from a thing on loan. A book of 1876 said officials thought cutting one of the people down was like cutting tofu or a daikon, and one of 1881 that a commoner's life had been light as a hair. The oldest English book found that carries the word is of 1916, and later glosses include permission to cut down and leave (Norman, 1940) and exemption to cut down and discard (Hurst, 1998). Which side of the word you take, the samurai's or his critics', is yours.

An Edo-period rule carried in the shogunate's criminal code, dated to 1742; the name 切捨御免 is first found, in the printed books searched for this study, in Fukuzawa Yukichi's pamphlet of 1873.

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