Death Before Dishonor

The Japanese phrase 不名誉より死 is composed of the words 不名誉 fumeiyo meaning "dishonor", より yori meaning "more than; rather than" and 死 (read shi) meaning "death". Japanese has the verb at the end of the sentence (see the Wikipedia article Japanese Language for more information) which is why this appears to be backwards when translated word for word. With this in mind, a literal translation of the Japanese is "rather than dishonor, death".