Tsurushi-zeme 釣責
Hanging torment, the gravest of the four interrogation methods of late Edo law and the only one formally called gōmon (torture); it was reserved for serious crimes and rarely used.
Tsurushi-zeme was the last of the four methods of interrogation recognized by late Edo shogunate law. The Heibonsha encyclopedia on Kotobank notes that it alone was formally termed gōmon, torture, while the other three were grouped as rōmon, and that it was limited to serious crimes. Japanese Wikipedia describes it as the final step, carried out in a separate torture chamber only when a suspect had still not confessed after the rōmon methods, and says it was rarely applied in practice. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten entry on rōmon draws the same line: unlike hanging, rōmon could be applied at will to a suspect whose guilt seemed clear but who would not confess. Torture was abolished in 1879. The word is a historical legal term; for suspension in modern rope, see tsuri.