Persona

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Persona Page 5

by Hiroaki Sato


  So Hiraoka Takichi, the “rural intellectual with a poetic bent,” left two strands of descendants. One was urban and elitist. It started with Sadatarō and led to Azusa, then to Kimitake or Mishima Yukio. The other was rural and far from elitist. It started with Hisatarō and led to Yoshio, who went bankrupt, and Yoshikazu, who was an eccentric ne’er-do-well. When Azusa made the arrangement for his son’s visit to his father’s hometown, he evidently did not want to bring him face to face with his cousin, who was, in his eyes, a failed rustic. And Mishima Yukio apparently tried to avoid as best he could anything associated with Shikata. There is a telling episode.

  In the spring of 1951, Mishima, by now a writer of considerable repute with the burst of fame his Confessions had earned him, was visiting Fuji Masaharu in his home in Ibaraki City, Osaka. Fuji, whose life as a writer was jolted forward by his reading of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, had helped Mishima publish his first book and a collection of five stories, The Forest in Full Bloom (Hanazakari no mori), during the war, in 1944.

  When the two of them were chatting, a young man came to visit. As soon as Fuji introduced him to Mishima as “someone from your hometown,” Mishima frowned as if he had seen something distasteful, quickly rose to his feet, and, without saying a word, left.

  Looking back on the incident more than forty years later, Matsumoto Mitsuaki, who was the young visitor, could still not hide his incredulity. “It was as though he regarded my presence itself as odious,” he said. An aspiring writer at the time, he later concentrated on the knitwear factory he inherited in Shikata.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Samurai Ancestors and Grandmother

  In me flows the blood of a distant samurai, and the steely blood of a Mito man at that, though only a little.

  —Letter to Hayashi Fusao, November 4, 1947

  Nagai Naomune,1 the paternal grandfather of Natsuko, the seventeen-year-old whom Hiraoka Sadatarō married, in 1893, was a son of a distinguished Matsudaira family who was adopted by the Tokugawa hatamoto Nagai Naonori. The Matsudairas were prestigious because it was the family into which the founder of the Tokugawa government, Ieyasu, was born. It necessarily produced a number of branches over the years, but its status remained special in the hereditary samurai system.

  The hatamoto, “bannerman” or shogunate aide-de-camp, on the other hand, was not that special. The samurai under that nomenclature were the Tokugawa shogun’s direct vassals whose annual income, measured in rice, was above five hundred koku but less than ten thousand. (One koku is about five bushels.) Someone with the assessed income of ten thousand koku and above was a daimyo. There were eighty thousand hatamoto.2 Still, despite his relatively low rank, Naomune was chosen to serve a round of important posts during the last tumultuous phase of the Tokugawa government because of his brilliance and would be later counted among “the three outstanding Tokugawa vassals” of the period.3

  With mounting foreign pressure, the government had to decide what to do with its isolationist policy that had been instituted in the mid-seventeenth century. The policy was partial, in that trade with Korea, China, and Holland had continued, but one important aspect of it was a total ban on the construction of ocean-going ships. The ruling class, the samurai, was martial, but Japan had no navy as a result. So, Naomune, while visiting Nagasaki as inspector-at-large in the mid-1850s, set up a college to study naval matters and train in handling large ships with the Dutch and started a shipyard with Dutch material and equipment that later developed into Mitsubishi Shipyard.4 In 1858, he was appointed magistrate for foreign affairs, thus Japan’s first foreign minister—although, to be exact, to put it that way misleads: Naomune assumed that position with another brilliant samurai, Iwase Tadanari. As Britain’s first Consul General to Japan, Rutherford Alcock caustically observed, “the whole administrative machinery [of the Tokugawa shogunate] is in duplicate”;5 two or more men were put in the same position simultaneously.

  In that capacity, in any case, Naomune dealt with some of the foreign diplomats as the country started to abandon its isolationist policy and open, negotiating with Iwase a treaty of amity and commerce with the first US Consul General Townsend Harris, in 1858. The two were duly chosen to head Japan’s first embassy to the United States to exchange the ratified treaties. That opportunity never came, however, in part because of the same treaty.

  In 1859, Naomune was appointed to another newly created position of magistrate for warships, this time alone, in effect becoming Japan’s first navy minister.6 The Great Ansei Persecution—the consequence of the clash between those who opened the country without the Tennō’s consent and those who thought that was wrong and the shogunate succession schism that came to the fore about the same time—found Nagai and Iwase under house arrest. Then in 1860, while the embassy was visiting the United States, sans the two men, Grand Administrator Ii Naosuke, who instigated the persecution and forcefully carried it out, was assassinated.7 In 1862 Naomune regained the shogunate’s good graces and became magistrate of Kyoto. In that position he associated with Kondō Isami, who led a shogunate guard unit, a group of swordsmen licensed to kill those who might bring danger to the shogunate. Naomune also negotiated with anti-Tokugawa groups that included Sakamoto Ryōma, who gained extraordinary fame as a farsighted man following his assassination.

  In 1866 when Yoshinobu became the fifteenth and last Tokugawa shogun, he appointed Naomune first inspector-general, then deputyadministrator. These were the kinds of promotion that were difficult to achieve in a shogunate that stressed status and precedent, as the shogun himself later recollected.8 After Tokugawa forces were badly beaten in the Toba-Fushimi Battle, in January 1868, that touched off the sixteen-month-long civil war, Naomune joined the Tokugawa fleet commanded by one of his students, Enomoto Takeaki, and escaped aboard a Dutch-built warship named Kaiyō (Voorlichter) to Hakodate, in Hokkaidō.9 With Enomoto’s defeat imminent, Naomune surrendered and was jailed. But in 1872 he was recalled to serve the new Meiji government. First, he was appointed secretary to the commissioner of Hokkaidō colonization. He later became acting secretary for the Council of Elders, comparable to the US Senate.

  An adopted son, Naomune himself adopted a descendent of another Nagai branch who would become Natsuko’s father, Iwanojō. Iwanojō fought by his adoptive father’s side during the Battle of Hakodate, in May 1869. He later chose law for his career, in the end serving as associate justice of the Supreme Court. One of Iwanojō’s six sons, Ōya Atsushi, recalled his father when he was asked to contribute to the famous “My Resumé” series of the Japan Economic Journal (The Nikkei).

  “My father was sternness itself, with no flexibility whatsoever,” wrote Mishima’s granduncle who, among his many industrial posts, became president of Sumitomo Chemical Industries and served the Bank of Japan as governor of policy. “He would not touch on any aspect of his children’s education, but his everyday demeanor was that of an ancient samurai. I never saw him sitting informally, legs crossed—not even once. In those days judges’ salaries were paltry in comparison with those for government administrators.” Ōya, himself adopted out, added: “He nevertheless had to take care of his twelve children. Naturally, the family was downright poor.”

  Yakuza Ancestor and Great-granduncle’s Seppuku

  The woman who became Iwanojō’s wife, that is, Natsuko’s mother, Taka, was born to a secondary wife of Matsudaira Yoritaka, lord-president of the Shishido fiefdom. Secondary wives and concubines of fief lords routinely came from the commoner class. Taka’s mother was a niece of the commoner Shinmon Tatsugorō, the legendary head of a firefighting group in Edo, hence a yakuza boss. The “beloved concubine” of the last shogun, Yoshinobu, was one of Tatsugorō’s daughters. Katsu Kaishū, another low-ranking hatamoto who played a crucial role in the transition from the Tokugawa government to the new, Meiji regime, counted Tatsugorō among the lawless men he admired. He described Tatsugorō as someone who “would not be intimidated by money or authority but dealt with you only on the gut level.�
��10 Katsu captained the Dutch-built warship Kanrin Maru that escorted the USS Powhatan—Perry’s flagship when he visited Japan seven years earlier—that carried Japan’s first embassy to the United States, in 1860.11

  Ōya was proud that he had Tatsugorō’s blood in him, beside the fact that his grandmother, whom he had met, was “very beautiful.”12 So probably was Mishima Yukio proud. Though he does not seem to have left any word on Tatsugorō in his writings, Mishima was a great fan of yakuza; he loved to dress like one and had a couple among his friends.

  Shishido, the fief with the minimum annual rice income for the daimyo category of ten thousand koku and, like most other 260 fiefs, insolvent, was a subsidiary of the Mito, one of the Three Tokugawa Houses set up to buttress the shogunate.13 The second and most influential head of the Mito House was Mitsukuni (1628–1701). Mitsukuni embarked on an extensive scholarly enterprise of compiling a history of Japan on the subversive premise that Japan’s sovereign was the Tennō and the shogun was nothing more than his “head flag bearer.”14 That culminated in the ninth, fiery head of the house, Nariaki (1800–1860)—the father of the last shogun, Yoshinobu—advocating sonnō jōi, “Revere the Tennō, Expel the Barbarians.” This was the slogan that, in the end, helped to bring down the Tokugawa or samurai rule in the turmoil created by foreign threats.15

  Mitsukuni’s enterprise also led, in its last phase, to a strong emphasis on the Wang Yangming ideal of “to know is to act” and the credo that a proper samurai must be accomplished in both literary (bun) and martial (bu) arts (bunbu ryōdō). The two would profoundly affect Mishima.16 But, long before then, the slogan sonnō jōi changed the fate of Matsudaira Yoritaka’s children.

  His first son, Yorinori, was forced to disembowel himself, along with fifty (or seventy) of his vassals, in 1864, precisely because of the argument of the Tennō-as-legitimate-sovereign. The foreign menace had become a pressing issue since the Opium War or the Anglo-Chinese War, from 1839 to 1842, but especially since Perry forced Japan to open in 1854. The rapid developments following Perry’s deed intensified the political schism between the two factions that had come into being under Nariaki after he became lord-president of the Mito fiefdom, in 1829.

  In March 1864, the more radical of the two groups that advocated an absolute expulsion of the foreigners revolted against the more moderate “reform” group that had taken over the Mito government, and set up camp on Mt. Tsukuba, southwest of Mito. Yorinori was asked to be the emissary to allay the internecine conflict, but the reform group would not allow him into the Mito Castle. In the end, Yorinori was entrapped into armed skirmishes and, judged to have moved against the Tokugawa government, was condemned to death. That was in August. The rebels themselves, who marched toward Kyoto in order to appeal to the Tennō directly, finally surrendered toward the end of the year, in Tsuruga, northeast of Kyoto. The Tokugawa government was pitiless and executed almost four hundred of them. Worse, all that while and for some years afterward the reform group carried out reprisals against the families and relatives in Mito. The number of people who were killed, put to death, or died in prison is estimated to have totaled two thousand.

  With Yorinori’s disembowelment—his farewell-to-the-world poem read: “Had I ever expected to end up a paddy-field scarecrow that perishes without a shot from his bamboo bow?”—the Shishido fiefdom was abolished,17 and his family members were put in “house prison,” which meant a life of poverty. With the Meiji Restoration, Yoritaka’s house was rehabilitated because it was judged Yorinori had died for the imperial cause and, as the new government created five peerage ranks of prince (duke), marquis, count (earl), viscount, and baron, Yoritaka was awarded the rank of viscount.

  But the rehabilitation did not help the family much financially. The main Tokugawa house—what was left of it after the Meiji Restoration—took pity and arranged to have Yorinori’s younger and Taka’s older brother Yoriyasu appointed chief priest of the Tōshō Shrine in Kan’ei-ji, the main temple of the Tokugawa shogunate, in Ueno. In that position, however, Yoriyasu squandered so much money—to finance his womanizing and things such as his hobby of photography to create pornography (with a camera of the latest model from America)—that he was banished to a small villa, with a small stipend, where he died.

  The Shrine-Officiator, Lecher, and Monster

  This genealogy on his paternal grandmother’s side fascinated young Mishima. On Nagai Naomune, he evidently wrote a biography as a class composition, though it appears to have been lost. On Matsudaira Yoriyasu, Natsuko’s uncle, whom Mishima actually met a number of times, he prepared substantial notes as well as wrote a school composition, two short stories, and one incomplete story.18 The notes included a sentence (struck out) saying that the man who started the line of Matsudaira was Tokugawa Ieyasu’s favorite son.

  The class composition, titled “The Shrine Officiator” (Shinkan), describes Yoriyasu and Natsuko visiting each other.19 It is as impressive a piece of writing as his review of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia that he is thought to have written about the same time.20 Appropriately for a class composition, it is a tame affair, but his notes on Yoriyasu suggest that Mishima may well have been saturated with talk of sadism and sexual misconduct within his household in his early teens or even earlier. A decade later he fully realized the man’s lechery in “The Lecher” (Kōshoku) and his sadism in “The Monster” (Kaibutsu).

  Of the two, “The Lecher” is a story in which Mishima used real names, as he seldom did, including his own: “In this story the author is determined to rely solely on what Kimitake heard and never to turn to his own imagination, no matter how trivial the episode may be,” Mishima states. It is a hilarious yet loving portrait of an oddball with a nose like that of Cyrano de Bergerac. But one aim Mishima had in describing Yoriyasu in this story was to describe his great-grandmother, whom he brings in deftly as a “digression”: “Princess Taka, Yoriyasu’s younger sister, was a beautiful, tough-minded woman. From photographs late in her life, you can sense that the high-spirited, refreshing feeling around her eyebrows, her prominent nose, and her small, modest, shapely mouth display a delicate, graceful harmony. There you can see the somewhat cruel beauty filled with stoic clarity that was unique to the women of the feudal age.”

  Taka spent her girlhood in extreme poverty—for six years, from seven to thirteen, according to Mishima’s notes—and then married a “downright poor” judicial officer. She bore a dozen children—six girls and six boys and had to deal with them.21 She entrusted her first daughter, Natsuko, to “serve” in the household of Imperial Prince Arisugawa Taruhito, in 1888, when the girl was twelve. Entrusting girls with wealthy families to serve with them for a period of time to learn etiquette and manners was as routine as putting up children, male or female, for adoption with people you knew. The ostensible reason in Natsuko’s case was no different though she was a particularly difficult girl. But her service was also simply to reduce the number of mouths to feed.

  The Arisugawa was one of the four collateral Imperial Houses, and Prince Taruhito was accorded a round of high-ranking positions. Commander-in-chief of imperial forces against the Tokugawa shogunate at the start of the Meiji regime and later army chief of staff, chief of the General Staff, and president of the Council of Elders, he lived in a manner befitting his exalted status. His neo-classical Victorian style-mansion on twelve acres in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, took four years to build and was completed in 1884. A history of the Arisugawa family compiled in 1940, described it: “Its interior decorations, to go with the beauty of the radically new and grand design, were breathtaking in opulence.”22

  For the seventeen-year-old Natsuko, marrying the thirty-year-old Hiraoka Sadatarō was a letdown, particularly as it occurred soon after living in a mansion of such status, elegance, and grandeur. At the time the academic degree of bachelor of arts carried the kind of prestige unimaginable today and Sadatarō was a graduate of the most prestigious one, the Imperial University. He was handsome and dignified, but no mat
ter. There was the class chasm: She was a descendant of shogunate families, Sadatarō of peasantry.23 Her fiery temper and irritability, hauteur, and the extreme neurosis she would later develop went on to magnify her discontent with her husband. “My father was truly a man of heroic temperament. He liked to drink, he liked to womanize,” Sadatarō’s son Azusa said.24 And that, too, did not help.

  Not that the luxuries Sadatarō brought with his considerable and rising salaries were anything to be embarrassed about. The luxuries obviously did not match what Natsuko had seen in the Arisugawa mansion, but they were first class. The house he built on a 0.6-acre plot in Hongō, Tokyo, by bringing carpenters and craftsmen from Kyoto—and that was in his fifth year as administrator of Karafuto—stood out even in the residential area noted for its elegant houses. Behind the imposing stone gate rose pines and two large cherry trees. The front garden was adorned with a Western-style lawn. On the other side of the house was a stand of giant zelkova trees. Enter the impressive entrance and you walked into a spacious hall. The house had five guestrooms and elegant quarters for Natsuko. It had a large detached room connected with a corridor over a pond and a separate building for servants.25

  With the collapse of Sadatarō’s bureaucratic career, the family may have “started sliding down a slope at the easygoing speed of someone humming a song,” as Mishima put it in Confessions, but Natsuko was able to keep up her vanity for a number of years. Most of the private enterprises Sadatarō pursued subsequently failed. But compared with the size of the debt, the expenses needed to keep up Natsuko’s sense of entitlements were not large. The failure of his initial business venture, Japan’s first zinc manufacturing plant that went bankrupt with the onset of recession as the Great War ended, saddled Sadatarō with seven hundred thousand yen—at a time when the prime minister’s annual pay was twelve thousand yen and the prefectural governor’s thirty-six hundred yen.26

 

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