Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren regarded the bushido promoted by the military as a corruption of a noble and ancient tradition. He discussed the act of seppuku and the importance of old samurai practices in his 1935 essay series, "Riben guankui". He named the story of the Forty-seven rōnin of the Akō Domain, who were sentenced to seppuku after avenging their daimyo, and their legacy in the story Chūshingura (A Treasury of Loyal Retainers). He discussed the Sakai incident, in which 20 samurai from Tosa Domain committed seppuku in 1868 for attacking French sailors. These examples were compared with the soft punishment given to the soldiers who assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in 1932. Zhou condemned them for not taking responsibility by committing suicide like traditional samurai. In 1936, Zhou wrote about the loss of humanity and empathy of traditional bushido during the deterioration of the Second World War. He pointed to the samurai novel by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki as an example where victors of a battle treated enemy corpses with dignity.