by Hiroaki Sato
Still, Hiraoka’s reply surprised Funae. At that juncture, the life-or-death question for any student in higher school was: In which way to take part in the war? Student mobilization had started in the previous year, in October 1943, and the choices were stark. You could apply for “short duty” or the officer-candidate course or else you waited to be drafted as a regular soldier. Evidently, Hiraoka had decided not to pursue the officer-candidate route, either.
There was a vast difference between going to war as an officer and doing so as a regular soldier summoned by an akagami, “red paper,” as the draft card was called. The difference was as between heaven and earth—in food and all other matters. True, in some ways, in the Japanese military at the time, the officers’ chances of getting killed in battle were greater than those of regular soldiers in proportion to their numbers. But making it through as a private second class, which was what you would be if drafted by an akagami, was another matter. It required greater stamina, a greater ability to put up with all the abuses that the draftees were subjected to. By simply looking at Hiraoka, Funae could tell he’d never make it as a private second class. Either way, there was no way of avoiding the military machine unless you were found ill.
His application accepted, Funae went to Tokyo in September 1944—September, because, though the normal school year in Japan starts in April and ends in March, the war had shortened the higherschool term by six months. The Tsukiji branch of the Navy Accounting School was near the Kachidoki Bridge that spanned the Sumida River. His class had nine-hundred students. These were divided evenly into ten units. Each unit was given a large room where double-bunk beds were built like silkworm shelves. A bunk near his was occupied by a man who had come from the Imperial University of Tokyo. He was small, quick, and aggressive. If Funae were to carry an indelible impression of Hiraoka at the draft screening in Shikata for the rest of his life, he was destined to do likewise with this man.
“In physical education, the navy focused on sumo wrestling and boat rowing,” Funae explained. “As you know, in sumo utchari”—throwing your opponent sidewise—“is a legitimate technique, but not in the navy. If you did that, you lost. They wanted to emphasize the aggressive spirit, so they encouraged you to concentrate on pushing and shoving, not sophisticated techniques.” The man occupying a bunk near Funae’s took this navy approach to heart. In sumo, he simply dashed into his opponent with amazing ferocity. Funae remembered him as having firm muscles and a healthy, lustrous skin. His name was Nagaoka Minoru—the one who would go on to be called The Don of Finance.
Nagaoka excelled academically. He had finished the five-year middle school of those days in four, enabling him to go to higher school, then to university, one year earlier than his fellow students. That was why he was a freshman at the Imperial University of Tokyo when Hiraoka, of the same age, was still a third-year student in the Higher School Division of the Peers School. By the time Hiraoka got into the Imperial University of Tokyo, in October 1944, Nagaoka was in the Navy Accounting School. He graduated from the university the same year Hiraoka did simply because his demobilization was delayed.
The Will He Left
On February 4, 1945, Sunday, Hiraoka Kimitake came home expecting to spend a few days with his family. In the previous month, as part of the student labor mobilization program, he had been assigned to the Koizumi plant of the Nakajima Aircraft Manufacturing Company in Gunma. It was, as he put it in Confessions, “a mysterious factory”: “Modern scientific techniques, modern management methods, the precise, rational cogitations of many a superior brain—all these were together devoted to just one thing: to wit, ‘death.’ This giant factory geared to the production of Zero fighters for ‘special attacks’ itself felt like a dark religion, which rumbled, groaned, wept and shrieked, and roared.”
Around ten in the evening that day, Hiraoka received a telegram: an akagami ordering him to enlist at once at the place of his family domicile. On the sixth, he wrote to his classmate Mitani Makoto, who had become his weekly correspondent since the latter’s induction into the officer-candidate course in the preceding fall: “The induction notice that I had eagerly awaited came on the fourth.”6 This was an addendum to one of the letters that the two called “Saturday communications,” and he may well have been truthful in that sentiment. He had expected the notice by January and had, somehow, even learned that he’d be assigned to the infantry, but January had come and gone.
Having received the induction order, Hiraoka wrote a will in ink with a brush, cut his nails and some hair, and put them in an envelope, according to custom. The will read in its entirety:
Will
Hiraoka Kimitake (seal)
Item: Father
Mother
Professor Shimizu and
other teachers
who gave me such kindly tutelage
while I was at the Peers School and at the Imperial University of Tokyo
I hereby express my gratitude to your large-hearted generosity.
Item: My classmates and seniors at the Peers School
I shall be hard put to forget your friendships
May your futures be full of glory!
Item: Younger sister Mitsuko, and Younger brother Chiyuki,
do your utmost on your older brother’s behalf in serving
Father and Mother in filial duty
Chiyuki in particular: Follow his older brother to become as soon as possible
a panther in the Imperial Army
so he may return a smidgen of the Imperial Favor
Long Live the Emperor!
The will may appear formal and formulaic to a fault, though written by someone highly educated. Not many ordinary persons would have been able to use classical Chinese words so freely, even words such as the one translated here as “panther” (hikyū; pixiu in Chinese), although official pronouncements from government and the military in those days were laden with such ancient Chinese vocabulary. The word hikyū comes from Sima Qian’s history, and refers to the legendary ferocious animal deployed to fight human soldiers in battle. Later it became a metaphor for a strong army.
Two decades later, when the monthly Bungei Shunjū asked him for something unpublished, Hiraoka—by then few would have recognized Mishima Yukio’s real name, so here we will begin using the penname where appropriate—pulled this out and offered it as part of an essay reflecting on what could have prompted a twenty-year-old youth to compose such a will. New draftees were expected to go to the military with a will like that, and it may be, Mishima thought, that he did not want to incur unnecessary ire by writing something out of line, should the will fall into the hands of the military censor. There may also have been a touch of dandyism in this “impeccable impersonality.”
“At the same time, you can’t really explain the whole thing by resorting to worldly considerations or dandyism,” he continued. There must have been something, “a separate, large hand,” that made a young man—even one who had already published a novel, as he had—come up with a composition like this with ease. It was “neither the nation’s iron hand nor militarism, but something that had seeped into my heart, was it not, and that something made another heart of a different dimension live even in me”?
Reflecting further on the matter, Mishima wondered if something akin to the Catholic Church may not have been at work in Japan during the war. There must be “another heart”—emphasis his—“that represents us that works as our agent and our surrogate. Only the Protestant-style conscience helped form the modern self and severely narrowed our heart, our conscience, did it not?”7 The induction order, in any event, was to report to the designated base on February 15. So, on the tenth, Mishima headed back to Shikata, Hyōgo, this time accompanied by his father, Azusa. His mother, Shizue, took it hard.
“When I left home, because she did not think I’d come home right away, mother kept standing at the gate as she saw me off, her hair wild, weeping,” Mishima said, recalling years later his mother’s appearance tha
t day “with extraordinary clarity” on a TV program, Talking about Mother. Shizue was suffering from a cold. “If I had gone off as a soldier [and never returned], I think the impression that I was just a lovely son would have remained with her.” Chiyuki, Mishima’s younger brother, remembered her as looking “so thoroughly beaten that she did not appear to be a person of this world.”8
It was not an exaggerated reaction on Shizue’s part. B-29s had begun bombing Tokyo itself the previous November. “The 20th Year of Shōwa opened with air raids,” Mishima noted in his brief New Year greetings to Mitani, adding, “This is a felicitous year that I, too, join the military.”9 The situations for Japanese soldiers in combat zones overseas had become so bleak that some committed suicide upon receipt of the induction notice. Even as the government called for the readiness of the entire populace to die—ichioku gyokusai, “the 100 million to shatter like a jewel”—the military tried to be circumspect in certain cases. It would notify a university of an impending induction telegram so the student might be with his family when the telegram arrived. In Mishima’s case, the Imperial University of Tokyo made up an errand for him to run. That explains why he was home when the akagami came.10
Mishima himself had a slight fever when he left Tokyo, having gotten it, he thought, from a fellow at the factory. By the time he and his father reached Shikata, his fever had become pretty bad and he could hardly stand on his feet. The Kōta family, the same people with whom he had stayed nine months earlier, took very good care of him, but the fever would not subside until, finally, on the morning of physicals, the febrifuge he had taken showed some effect and Mishima felt more or less all right. The regiment to which he was to be inducted was in Kasai County, north of Innami County where Shikata was located. A dilapidated wooden structure—Mishima called it “a real barrack,” using the English word,11 a point to be noted here because English was an “enemy language” and frowned upon—stood on a barren hill covered with withered pampas grass.
In Confessions Mishima condensed what happened the previous May and that February, so the reader not paying close attention may fail to distinguish the two, but here’s what happened in the barrack: “While we wandered about, stripped naked like animals for the induction checkup, I sneezed a number of times. Not only did the callow army doctor mistake the rustling sound in my bronchi for Rasselgeräusch”—crackles, crepitations; German medical terms were routinely used at the time—“but he confirmed his misdiagnosis from my own illness report and went on to have my blood precipitation measured.” The upshot: the doctor diagnosed it as “amyloidal infiltration of the lungs” and ordered Mishima home right away. “Once out of the gate of the military compound, I started to run. A bleak wintry road descended toward the village.”
Mishima wrote as if he was alone, but Azusa was with him, and he described this run in far greater detail. “The moment we stepped out of the gate I grabbed my son by the hand and we started to run blindly,” Azuza recalled, with obvious pleasure. “We were so fast, so fast, we truly ran. I no longer remember what the distance was, but it was considerable. And all the way we kept turning back to look. We were mortally, yes mortally, afraid that a soldier might run after us and bark, ‘That was a mistake, your rejection was canceled, you passed fine, congratulations!’” Azusa even compared themselves to jailbreakers seen on TV, a term that didn’t exist in Japan in 1945. When the two finally got on the train, “Gradually, joy brimmed up in me, and I didn’t know what to do with it.”
For Azusa, the army’s rejection of his son as unfit for service was something he, like every member of his or any family, had hoped for but had scarcely expected to come true. The letter of joy and relief that Shizue’s mother, Tomiko, then a seventy-year-old widow living in Kanazawa where she’d been evacuated, wrote Mishima on receiving his card bringing the news that he wasn’t inducted after all, attests, endearingly, to how ordinary citizens felt about losing any of their kin to the military service.
When she first heard he was finally going to the front, she accepted the fact, Tomiko wrote, though she also wished he’d get sick on the military food and come home quickly, as she spent several days “agitated as my heart was in a thousand ways.” Then she received the card. She at once prostrated herself and offered prayers of gratitude to it. So she composed two “clumsy tanka” (koshiore) and appended them “for laughs,” she said. The first of the two poems uses traditional puns (kakekotoba) and related words (engo) and, in the guise of describing the bamboo branches outside the window sagging under the snow, was congratulatory, in essence saying: “May you live for a long, long time.” The second one was consolatory, saying simply this: “There are ways of serving His Majesty as innumerable as grains of sand that are in the end inexhaustible.”12
But what about Mishima himself? He explained his shifting feelings in Confessions. When the order actually came, he didn’t really feel sanguine about joining the army. On the other hand, he had “some expectations for a spirited way of dying.” But once he was let go the same day, he ran “toward something that was not ‘death’ in any case, something that was not ‘death’ whatever it might be.”
It was not black and white. Azusa, though he remembered all the outpourings of relief and joy when they returned to Tokyo, found he had no memory of his son’s reactions. Much later he would be surprised to learn from Shizue what he had told her: “I wish I had passed the checkup, been sent to the front, and made to join the special attack corps.”13
Mrs. Kōta remembered seeing a disheartened young man return from the barracks. Only some hours earlier, well past midnight, the Kōtas had summoned a doctor for him. As a result, Hiraoka appeared to feel better toward morning. And he, with his father, had gone off to the enlistment checkup, but came back and said it didn’t work after all. “We were surprised. We didn’t know how to console him.” Was the young Mishima acting?
“Still, when they went back to Tokyo, we gave them rice, miso, and vegetables,” Mrs. Kōta recalled. Rural areas had enough to eat even as cities were suffering from severe food shortages. “I think Kimi-chan carried them on his back. I still remember they looked heavy on him as they left our house.”14
Hiraoka Sadatarō and His Ancestors
The question is: Why did Mishima not visit with his grandfather’s relatives—or why did Azusa not arrange for that? Mishima went to Sadatarō’s hometown only twice in his life, once for the physicals for draftees, once for induction, to take advantage of the Hiraoka domicile. He says in Confessions that there was not a piece of property left there after his grandfather went bankrupt, but that was not entirely true. The Hiraoka domicile was not far from the Kōta house, and relatives still lived there, in Kamitomiki Yokoyama.
The question is worth asking. Evidently proud of his paternal grandmother Natsuko’s lineage, Mishima explored it and wrote about some of the people on that line, including Natsuko, but he seldom, if ever, talked about his paternal grandfather Sadatarō or his ancestors. This is odd. If Natsuko’s forebears, the Nagais and Matsudairas, included men who played notable roles during the upheaval as Japan was forced, with the 1853 visit of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, of the US Navy, to discard the isolationist policy that had lasted for more than two centuries, Sadatarō’s forebears, the Hiraokas, employed wit and talent to deal with the sweeping social change inevitable as the new era arrived.
The simple explanation of the discrepancy may well be that, whereas his grandmother came from illustrious samurai families, his grandfather was of peasant/merchant stock. Even so, the disparity has puzzled many and put some off. It has even provoked the suggestion that the Hiraokas may have been from the untouchable class and that Mishima did not want to be reminded of it.
One story told in that regard is what Azusa called “the Akamon (Red Gate) Incident.” When Azusa’s great grandfather Tazaemon learned that one of the wealthiest daimyo, the Maeda, built an extravagant red gate at the entrance of his Edo mansion to welcome a bride from the shogunate, Tazaemon built a similar
gate for the family temple, Shinpuku-ji. But apparently the temple itself has no record of such a gift from a parishioner.15
A variant of this story has it that Tazaemon was punished because his son Takichi killed a crane or secretly hunted pheasants when the hunting of either bird was the prerogative of the lord-president of the fiefdom. Either act was judged to be lèse majesté, and he was subjected to the penalty known as tokorobarai, a ban on living in the area of one’s residence. The penalty was tantamount to class downgrading. Tazaemon in any event was deprived of whatever holdings he may have had and had to start anew elsewhere.16
Mishima Yukio committed suicide on November 25, 1970. Shocked by his manner of death—by disembowelment (seppuku) and decapitation—Azusa decided to look into his own paternal genealogy. He asked his cousin, Ono Shigeru, to do the work. Ono was a son of Sadatarō’s younger sister, Mume. He at once went to Shikata and examined the death registers at the Shinpuku Temple. He also collected information on local history and put together a report in February of the following year. He made a copy of the handwritten report for himself and sent the original to Azusa. To paraphrase somewhat, Ono said the following in his report:
Genealogical research going far back in history is difficult when the family temple is of the Zen sect. At Zen temples resident monks are not hereditary, so each time a new monk is appointed some documents tend to be lost. There is also the fact that during the Edo Period most commoners did not have surnames. But some of the prosperous class adopted ‘store names’ in lieu of surnames to indicate their higher social status. In the case of the Hiraoka family, the store name Shioya [Salt Dealer] begins to appear in the death register with Magozaemon during the Genroku Era. It appears that this area prospered in salt production, its reputation second only to that of Akō.17
The Genroku Era (1688–1704) was one of the cultural high points of the Edo Period. It was toward the end of that era that Akō, about twenty-five miles west of Shikata, suddenly attracted national attention as the fiefdom that produced the spectacular vendetta carried out by forty-seven samurai. As Ono noted, it was also well known for its salt farms. But this knowledge may have led him to misread the store name or, rather, the type of business the person engaged in, which may have been shiomonoya, “dealer of salted foods.” If Magozaemon was a “salt dealer,” he probably started out on a small scale and would have needed to do other things to make a living, unless he was a “salt headman” managing a sizable salt farm as the owner of the land. If he were a “dealer of salted foods,” he definitely would have needed to do other things to survive.18