Quote Originally Posted by Soukyuu View Post
Alpha is not a big deal anyway, most people are just bored and don't know how to waste their time (just look at the forums)


切腹　= seppuku, ritual suicide
腹切り = harakiri, "stomach cutting"

As my teacher explained it, when the Americans were translating this for the first time, the just took the 2 kanji and read them as if they were written as 2 words (the reading changes when 2 or more kanji are written together), so they read it as "harakiri" instead of "seppuku". Don't ask me how they managed to swap the kanji order, it's what I've been told. Fact is, no one corrected them (maybe they thought it was rude, maybe people didn't listen or maybe they were laughing about foreigners being too dumb to read), so it is now a legitimate word in English, but doesn't have a special meaning in Japanese (contrary to seppuku). There is a similar story about "kamikaze" too, but I don't remember what the correct reading was...

/JP trivia
Could be read as shinpuu?