"I must now commit suicide."

The best passage I've read in quite a while, in the book, Emperor of Scent, about how people smell things. In this case, they're discussing a certain kind of very pungent cheese:

"Americans think, 'Good God!' The Japanese think, 'I must now commit suicide.' The French think, 'Where's the bread?'"

Unpasturized cheese is, of course, illegal in this country, because among urban poverty, illegal wars, a president who came to power through illegitimate means and who should be hung as a war criminal, I for one sleep better at night knowing that my government is protecting me from eating cheese that actually has flavor.

But that's a rant for another day. More, I was thinking about suicide.

When I lived in Japan, I studied iaido, which is an obscure and utterly pointless martial art, sort of like pantomime with fake swords. I used a real sword once, on old tatami that had been soaked in a bathtub for several days. They say that after the tatami is properly soggy, it has the same consistency of a human body.

The sword went right through it. Zip.

My teacher, who spoke no English at all, was getting up in years, sort of stuck in those glory day reminiscences you expect at a VFW post.

And, one of his stories went, he once was the second on a seppuku. Forget the word "hari-kari." Never once heard that in four years in the country. Seppuku.

So, the deal is this: the man (or woman, although it was traditionally more common for women to simply walk into the ocean) kneels, picks up a knife, and makes two cuts, one vertical, one horizontal, through the guts.

This, as you might expect, kind of hurts.

However, since we're talking a country with more than a minor death obsession, and that whole samurai ethic, you can't really show it hurts. You make the first cut, you make the second cut, you keep your face as calm as if you're watching a really, really boring television show.

Meanwhile, the second stands behind and just a bit to the side, sword poised. And it's his job to watch the face of the guy with the knives. At the first clue the soon to be dead person is showing pain, the second, in one cut, lops off the suicide's head.

Which may or may not make the whole thing suicide, but that's a different point.

Lopping off someone's head is not as easy as it sounds, not even with the best swords the world has ever known. If the cut isn't exactly right, the blade could deflect on a vertebrae, and with improper force, it could even get stuck.

Then there's the whole issue of the last flap of skin.

When I was in high school, my English teacher, Mr. Estrem, liked to discuss ways of killing oneself. He tended to do this during tests. His favorite, the one he always returned to, was jumping off something very high, because then "only the last inch hurts."

The second did not lop off the suicide's head. The second lopped off the suicide's head, stopping just short of a full cut. Ideally, a thin flap of skin was left, leaving the head attached to the body.

For some reason, they didn't bother to include this in the movie version of Shogun.

There's an article currently making the rounds of the travel writing community, written by Robert Kaplan, who says that in order to understand a place--and this, he says, is the failing of TV news and newspapers today--is that nobody stays around long enough to see what's actually going on. You go in for the sound bite, you get back out.

When we were upstairs in the dojo, the cicadas going off full blast, so loud it was almost impossible to think, there was all the time in the world.