HAPUR  , a

town of British India in the Meerut district of the United Provinces, 18 m . S. of Meerut . Pop . (1901) 17,796 . It is said to have been founded in the loth century, and was granted by Sindhia to his French general Perron at the end of the 18th century . Several fine groves surround the town, but the wall and ditch have fallen out of repair, and only the names of the five gates remain . Considerable trade is carried on in sugar, grain, cotton, timber, bamboos and brass utensils . HARA-KIRI (Japanese hara, belly, and kiri, cutting), self-disembowelment, primarily the method of suicide permitted to offenders of the noble class in feudal Japan, and later the national form of honourable suicide . Hara-kiri has been often translated as " the happy dispatch " in confusion with a native euphemism for the act . More usually the Japanese themselves speak of hara-kiri by its Chinese synonym, Sep puku . Hara-kiri is not an aboriginal Japanese custom . It was a growth of medieval militarism, the act probably at first being prompted by the desire of the noble to escape the humiliation of falling into an enemy's hands .

By the end of the 14th century the custom had become a much valued

privilege, being formally established as such under the Ashi-Kaga dynasty . Hara-kiri was of two kinds, obligatory and. voluntary . The first is the more ancient . An official or noble, who had broken the law or been disloyal, received a message from the emperor, couched always in sympathetic and gracious tones, courteously intimating that he must die . The mikado usually sent a jewelled dagger with which the deed might be done . The suicide had so many days allotted to him by immemorial custbm in which to make dignified preparations for the ceremony, which was attended by the utmost formality . In his own baronial hall or in a temple a days 3 or 4 in. from the ground was constructed . Upon this was laid a rug of red felt . The suicide, clothed in his ceremonial dress as an hereditary noble, and accompanied by his second or " Kaishaku," took his place on the mat, the officials and his friends ranging themselves in a semicircle round the dais . After a minute's prayer the weapon was handed to him with many obeisances by the mikado's representative, and he then made a public confession of his fault . He then stripped to the waist . Every movement in the grim ceremony- was governed by precedent, and he had to tuck his wide sleeves under his knees to prevent himself falling backwards, for a Japanese noble must die falling forward .

A moment later he plunged the dagger into his

stomach below the waist on the left side, drew it across to the right and, turning it, gave a slight cut upward . At the same moment the Kaishaku who crouched at his friend's side, leaping up, brought his sword down on the outstretched neck . At the conclusion of the ceremony the bloodstained dagger was taken-to the mikado as a proof of the consummation of the heroicact . The performance of hara-kiri carried with it - certain privileges . If it was by order of the mikado half only of a traitor's property was forfeited to the state . If the gnawings of conscience drove the disloyal noble to voluntary suicide, his dishonour was wiped out, and his family inherited all his fortune . Voluntary hara-kiri was the refuge of men rendered desperate by private misfortunes, or was committed from loyalty to a dead superior, or as a protest against what was deemed a false national policy . This voluntary suicide still survives, a characteristic case being that of Lieutenant Takeyoshi who in 1891. gave himself the " belly-cut " in front of the graves of his ancestors at Tokyo as a protest against what he considered the criminal lethargy of the government in not taking precautions against possible Russian encroachments to the north of Japan . In the Russo-Japanese War, when faced by defeat at Vladivostock, the officer in command of the troops on the transport " Kinshu Maru " committed hara-kiri . Hara-kiri has not been uncommon among women, but in their case the mode is by cutting the throat . The popularity of this self-immolation is testified to by the fact that for centuries no fewer than 1500 hara-kiris are said to have taken place annually, at least half being entirely voluntary . Stories of amazing heroism are told in connexion with the performance of the act .

One noble, barely out of his teens, not content with giving himself the customary cuts, slashed himself thrice horizontally and twice vertically . Then he stabbed himself in the throat until the

dirk protruded on the other side with the sharp edge to the front, and with a supreme effort drove the knife forward with both hands through his neck . Obligatory hara-kiri was obsolete in the middle of the 19th century, and was actually abolished in 1868 . See A . B . Mitford, Tales of Old Japan; Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (1898) .