Apparently February 4 is a day to be proud of in Japan because 46 guys killed themselves as a reward for a good deed. I have to say it’s not my idea of a red-letter day.

The story is that in 1703 in what is now Tokyo and was then Edo, all but one of the "Forty-seven Ronin" committed seppuku not because they had failed to avenge their master’s death but because they had succeeded. The "Akō incident" became a "national legend" in Japan, even the national legend, a shining example of the samurai code of honour. And yes, I do have to explain it if you’re not Japanese. Or rather describe it. I do not think it can be explained in the sense of being defended.

We’re not sure the details as it was not written up in reliable detail for nearly a hundred years thanks to censorship laws. But the basic story is as follows: These samurai were left leaderless, or "ronin," after their lord Asano Naganori was forced to kill himself for attacking a wretched court official named Kira Yoshinaka. So the ronin spent a year working out a plot to kill Kira, after which they had to kill themselves because of the shame of committing murder.

As you already sense, I find the whole thing unspeakably weird. It begins with the key fact that Kira was abusive and corrupt. Two hapless local officials, Lord Kamei and Asano himself, were ordered to prepare a reception for the Emperor’s envoys and were given etiquette lessons by Kira. But they didn’t give him sufficient bribes so he abused them so badly that while Asano kept his cool Kamei lost his and was going to do Kira in.

To save Kamei’s life, his own advisors quickly hustled up a major bribe for Kira who then began treating their master better. But he kept taunting Asano and when he ridiculed him as an ill-mannered rustic, Asano snapped and went after him with a dagger, giving him a minor scratch on his face. (Not exactly what one would hope from a samurai, I note in passing; I thought these guys could kill you with a greeting card.)

Despite the feeble nature of the attack, the very fact of drawing a weapon within Edo Castle was fatal and Asano had to kill himself, his family lost his possessions and lands, and his followers were made outcasts. And so everybody went along with it because I mean what’s blatant injustice when honor is involved or something.

Except there was this group of 47 who took a secret oath to get revenge even though they’d been ordered not to. They went underground as traders, laborers or drunken debauchees. And after several years they managed to infiltrate and storm Kira’s home, overcome his retainers abetted by the silence of his neighbours who all hated him, caught him and respectfully besought him to kill himself like a true samurai.

He chickened out, wuk wuk, betrayer of the code, so the ringleader sawed off his head with a dagger. Then the ronin carefully extinguished all lamps and fires so the neighbours’ houses were not in danger from a general conflagration, and left with the head.

One of the ronin was either sent to report the success of their mission to Asano’s old domain of Akō or else ran away. Either way he apparently came back much later, was pardoned, and lived to a ripe old age before being buried with the others. The rest went to the temple where their master was buried, washed the head carefully, then put it and the dagger on his grave, offered prayers, left the abbot money for their own funerals, and turned themselves in.

The situation was awkward for the shogun, given general approval of their deed plus its fairly obvious justification under almost any meaningful moral code. So he couldn’t just execute them. Instead he ordered them to execute themselves and they did.

So popular is this tale in Japan that the temple where the ronin’s remains are interred holds a festival every December 14, the successful attack having occurred on the 14^th day of the 12th month in the old Japanese calendar. But it was on the 4th day of the 2nd month that they all cut out their guts and had a second behead them, the final and apparently crowning act of the drama. And one I flatly admit I cannot sympathize with or support.

Were the ronin right or wrong to kill Kira? And if they were right, why celebrate their being put to death for it? Surely they should have gone down fighting. It is simply not possible to imagine the surviving Magnificent Seven ending the film by simultaneously raising their revolvers to their heads and blowing their brains out in unison and making the classic American film in the process.

"The 47 Ronin" a beautiful and picturesque story, to be sure. And apparently Asano’s brother did get his title and a bit of his land back. But it’s also very disturbing. And not least because ordering them to commit suicide, when they apparently had or felt they had no choice, is not an alternative to executing them. It’s just a hypocritical fiction, a way for the shogun to be, as Orwell put it, somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.

Even more baffling to me, in a moral sense, is the lack of concern with right and wrong, indeed the failure to see them as necessarily separate and opposite qualities. The whole story seems to hinge on the ronin’s actions being simultaneously both right and wrong.

I think they were just right. The guy who taunted their lord was no paragon of virtue attacked by mistake. He was a crooked wretch who deserved to be horsewhipped on the steps of his club or gunned down by John Wayne in a classic Western quick-draw showdown. And there’s no suggestion in the story of a kind of Shakespearean scenario in which Asano had a better course of action. Kamei’s men you recall had simply bribed Kira. The emperor or shogun was not, one feels, likely to render justice.

So where’s the vindication of right conduct? Instead there’s something fatalistic, even fey, about a group of such dedicated men bent on making a ritually beautiful bad end for doing a good deed.

To me this story makes no sense. If a particular act of revenge is wrong, don’t do it. And don’t later celebrate those who did. But if it is right, stand by it. There is a weird excluded middle here, where an act is simultaneously right and wrong and ritual rather than moral judgement determines action.

It is not a direct line from the "Akō incident" to Pearl Harbor. But the two are connected by a peculiar, ornate, gorgeously perverse refusal to put individual conscience ahead of "the code", a determination to reject principle on principle.

In my latest National Post column, I say the mass murder in a Quebec mosque should remind us to seek compassion in our hearts and a civil tone in public debate on difficult issues.

On January 31 of 1801, lame-duck U.S. President John Adams appointed John Marshall Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Such appointments often backfire; Eisenhower would later bitterly regret elevating Earl Warren to Marshall’s old job. And at the time it was largely seen through the partisan lens of Adams’ effort to stack the judiciary against his hated rival Thomas Jefferson. But it turned out to be one of the greatest appointments in American history.

Adams had originally offered the job to another leading member of what was fast becoming the Federalist party, John Jay. But Jay turned it down partly on the grounds that the Supreme Court had insufficient "energy, weight, and dignity." Which might sound like a weird thing to say given the importance of the judiciary in the American system of checks and balances. But it was in fact not clear in 1801 that the Court was an equal branch or that it could, in fact, invalidate statutes as unconstitutional.

It was Marshall himself, whose skilful and congenial guidance included changing the practice of each judge issuing his own opinion to the presentation of a majority or even unanimous consensus, who made the Court what it has been since. And the critical turning point was Marbury v Madison in 1803 in which a unanimous Court struck down portions of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as unconstitutional.

It was, interestingly, the only time in his 35 years as Chief Justice that the Marshall Court declared an Act of Congress unconstitutional. And it was one whose practical impact pleased the incumbent President and Congress even though they were Jeffersonian Republican foes of the Federalist Party, which probably helped it avoid becoming a focus for partisan wrangling. But however that may be, it was a crucial step in the evolution of the American system to the point that one prominent constitutional scholar declared that only when Marshall finished reading the court’s opinion in Marbury v Madison was the Grand Convention that wrote the Constitutional entirely adjourned.

As for John Adams, who spent a long and productive life in service of his country, he later said "My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life." It may also have been his most effective.

In my latest National Post column I denounce the legal Juggernaut that has rolled over a blameless Ontario couple and increasingly menaces us all. (My bad: In the piece I misnamed the outrageous Ontario law in question; its actual Orwellian title is the Civil Relief Act.)

In my latest National Post column, I object to people imposing facile negative gender stereotypes on the men's rights movement.

The Washington Post reports from Dhaka, Bangladesh that “Twenty foreigners were killed by six heavily-armed militants at an upscale restaurant in the diplomatic quarter of Dhaka early Saturday after an hours-long siege was ended by Bangladeshi forces. Sharp weapons were used to kill the victims, with local media reporting that some were beheaded. Thirteen other foreign captives were rescued by paramilitary forces who killed all the attackers, Brigadier General Nayeem Ashfaq Chowdhury told reporters. Some police officers were also killed…. Gunfire was heard as troops moved to end the standoff more than 10 hours after the attack began…. At least four security personnel were killed responding to the attack, a senior police official, Assistant Superintendent Fazle-e-Elahi told NBC News…. He described the assailants as "heavily armed and equipped" and "tactically sound." "The attackers are not identified. They were shouting 'Allah Akbar' when they entered the restaurant," Fazle-e-Elahi said.” So once again all the usual elements are present, from Islamist anti-Western motivation to the ability to acquire weapons regardless of legal restrictions (in Bangladesh legal firearms are scarce and tightly regulated; for instance no one under 30 may possess a rifle or handgun) to the helplessness of the victims until good guys with guns do arrive… hours after the ordeal begins and too late for dozens of victims.

The recent terrorist attack in Orlando has prompted some people to call for Americans to surrender their right to bear arms. It’s understandable that they would try to exploit the tragedy. But it is not a rational response. We see that particularly by comparing the Pulse nightclub massacre to the November 15 terrorist attack in Paris, where firearms and explosives were used to kill over 100 people including 89 at the Bataclan theatre. France has strict gun control laws. They didn’t keep the bad guys from getting guns. But they did keep the victims from fighting back. And at the Pulse nightclub, for whatever reason, no patrons seem to have been armed.

Then there’s the June 28 attack at Istanbul airport, using explosives and, again, firearms that Turkish citizens and residents are emphatically not allowed to own. And a correspondent has also noted that the murder, apparently an act of insanity rather than terrorism, of British MP Jo Cox, involved a firearm in a nation that in recent years has brought in very strict gun control.

Cox was shot using a weapon that was by various reports either an antique or improvised. But she was also stabbed. And the knife wounds alone would very probably have proved fatal; London has seen a gruesome jihadi killing using a car, knives and a cleaver. In any case there are also millions of illegal guns in Britain readily available to criminals and maniacs. But no law-abiding citizen present when she was attacked was armed and able to shoot the attacker before he could stab Cox repeatedly and fatally.

The notion that stricter gun control will prevent or reduce terrorist incidents, or acts of insane murder, simply doesn’t fit the facts. Terrorists can use explosives, as in the 7/7 attacks in London. And both they and thugs can easily get firearms even when ordinary citizens cannot, because of the by now familiar point, at least it should be familiar, that criminals don’t obey the law.

When trying to explain similar events, it is important to focus on the elements they have in common especially if we are the sort who boasts of “evidence-based decision-making”. And what we find in these attacks is jihadist motivations and the ability of bad guys to get weapons including firearms regardless of local laws. Yet people were also quick to attribute the Pulse nightclub shooting to Western homophobia, very curious given that the assailants were adherents of an austere, nihilistic and ferociously anti-Western brand of Islam. Oddly, there was little attempt to link the Bataclan attack to dislike of cosmopolitan or hedonistic lifestyles, even though that was an important aspect of the Paris terrorists’ choice of target. And it’s hard to see how homophobia could have motivated the Istanbul attack.

To exploit such incidents to push arguments against gun control or social conservatism is understandable, even predictable. But it’s not rational. And it’s not very nice either.

Today I got this envelope from Statistics Canada saying "2016 Census: Complete the census - it's the law." (Equally rude in French: "Recensement de 2016: Répondez au recensement - c'est la loi".) I am told the government is the servant of the people. But this peremptory tone, giving orders without even a pretence at "please," is not how a servant speaks to a master. Quite the reverse. Remember how all the right people were shocked and appalled when the Harper Tories got rid of the long form census? Without accurate data, they complained, social scientists would find it hard to engineer satisfaction of the human units to a sufficient number of decimal places. Which I always found rather an odd conception of the proper role of government and of its abilities. And look how they talk to us now that it's back.

The smart set make a lot of fuss about "evidence-based decision-making". But a decision to trust the intelligence or benevolence of government doesn't seem to me to be based on much sound evidence. Not even the personal stuff I have to provide or else, according to this envelope that just marched into my house, waved a pair of handcuffs at me and started shouting questions.