Guru Seppuku

I've done this before, in order to SurvivingGuruStatus, I basically had to quit my job and train a replacement. GuruSeppuku is evocative of the rite of hari-kiri, ritual suicide. Basically, you disembowel yourself and then someone else cuts your head off. I suppose it's effective, but remember: "it takes two to seppuku."

Very amusing as a metaphor. However, your "second" cuts your head off only if you fail to make the third ritualized motion which slices open your own heart. Project managers in feudal Japan noted that even the strongest and most courageous of Samurai often experienced so much pain from the first two disemboweling short-swort seppuku motions, that they usually passed out before they could take the final step with their heart, to end their project involvement, and it became a matter of merciful pragmatics to allow the Samurai's closest friend to spare them the embarrassment of that missed 3rd and final WaterfallModel step, by taking off their head, conceded by all to be fully honorable.

The metaphorically similar practice in the modern U.S. is, by twisted fate, reserved for Ronin of high honor, while their former warlords have literally no honor whatsoever.

-- DougMerritt, in a more bitter mood than usual.

You know, I always wondered who decided which particular rituals were honourable and which weren't. Suppose, for example, that the Shogun or his decreed arbiter of honour (The Kogi Kaishakunin natch - OgamiItto?) declared that the cutting off of the head itself was a dishonour worthy of sepuku. So you get this long line of samurai each hoping the bloke in front of him can just get in that 3rd cut ... perhaps this is how the samurai died out in the end?

Perhaps it was the Americans who did that. The honourable Japanese soldiers of WW2 seem remarkably like samurai. Faced with the global shima hinted at by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and realized by the rise of the superpowers, perhaps the samurai tradition experienced cultural sepuku. The samurais seem to have taken up the industrial way of the peasants, and made that a new basis for their honour. Or so it seems to this little black gaijin.

As Doug observes, however, karma has a way of balancing. I was struck by how very formalized and stratified business hierarchies seem in America. Nowhere near so much as the exponents of bushido ... perhaps in a generation or two ...