Hari-Kari, called also a “happy despatch,” a form of suicide, now obsolete, permitted to offenders of high rank to escape the indignity of a public execution; the nature of it may be gathered from the name, “a gash in the belly.”
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Hargreaves, James * Häring, Wilhelm