These two pictures came to me from Perro Loco, who orginally published them in alt.necrophilia on Usenet. We were told that they showed the girlfriend of a member of the Yazuka (the Japanese Mafia) paying the price for some unnamed transgression. The girl is shown committing Seppuku, which is commonly called Hara-kiri in the United States, but she is performing a man's Seppuku, not a woman's; a woman normally performs Seppuku by plunging a knife into her throat, not by the "slitting of the belly."

At one time, I believed--based on a detailed analysis of these pictures, along with observations by Verity--that these might have been real. It turns out that they are not; thanks to Anju, we now know that these are pictures of Japanese stage performer Hiromi Saotome, who simulates Seppuku as part of her exotic dancing. At the moment, the pages once linked here to Hiromi's sites are no longer on the web. If they return, they will be linked in here again.

The two images on the next page are to an extent modified; they've been color-corrected and enhanced-enlarged. The originals appear at right (Copyright Hiromi Saotome, used with permission).