Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  Kishi, in some ways, was more like Azusa’s father, Sadatarō. His brilliance at the Imperial University of Tokyo was legendary; his academic performance was unprecedented. Along with his competitor in brilliance, Wagatsuma Sakae, later an authority on civil law, Kishi was expected to stay on to become an academic, but he did not. As Wagatsuma noted years later in a manner reminiscent of a description of Sadatarō, “his hegemonic ambition and talent did not allow him to stop at an ivory tower.”

  Why did such an ambitious, talented man choose the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce? “In those days, the ministry to which the brightest flocked was the Ministry of Finance. The most glamorous for the bureaucrats, most appropriate for government officials, was the Home Ministry,” Kishi recalled in a memoir of his youthful days. But he decided to join Agriculture and Commerce after talking to an official there whose argument on stock trade was attracting both economists and businesspeople, and whose knowledge of the economic problems Europe was facing following the Great War impressed him.40 He decided that “the substance of government in the future lay in the economy,” he told one of his biographers.

  In 1925, when the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce was split into two, one for agriculture and forestry and one for commerce and industry, Kishi chose the latter, even as Azusa chose the former. He may have heard that Herbert Hoover had transformed his Commerce Department from a sleepy agency into a prominent one. The following year, he was sent off on a yearlong overseas tour. His first stop was the United States, where he saw the International Exposition to Celebrate the Sesquicentennial Anniversary of American Independence, in Philadelphia. The scale of America’s industrial power, along with its waste, overwhelmed him, even generating “a kind of resentment.” At the time Japan aimed to produce one million tons of iron and steel a year. The United States was producing more than five million tons of iron and steel every month!

  “Everywhere I went, I saw heaps of old automobiles junked,” he reminisced late in his life when interviewed for a history of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, postwar successor of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. “Now you can see such a spectacle in Japan, too, but Japan in those days had few automobiles. You repaired rickety-rackety cars and drove them. That was the norm.” The US tour made Kishi “pessimistic” about the future of Japanese industry.

  But he then went on to England and Germany, and the latter gave him hope. Then struggling to recover from the devastations of the Great War, the country “eliminated waste and was doing everything rationally. Compared with that, the American economy was all waste.” “Germany, like Japan, lacked natural resources,” Kishi said elsewhere, “but it was attempting economic development through advanced technologies and scientific management techniques. ‘This is the way for Japan to go,’ I was convinced.”

  The movement for industrial rationalization in Germany further impressed Kishi when he went to that country again in 1930. It reinforced his confidence in the great role bureaucrats could play in “enriching the nation and strengthening the military,” the slogan of the Meiji government in which men from his prefecture, Yamaguchi (Chōshū), had an outsize presence.41

  During the second half of the 1930s, Kishi became the leader of “reform bureaucrats,” and he was the one who the Kwantung Army, a semi-autonomous unit of the Japanese Imperial Army set up in 1903 to protect Japanese interests in Northern China, chose as its man in Tokyo.

  From 1936 to 1939 Kishi was counted among the five men who elected to “build” Manchukuo, the state Japan created in 1932. The four others were Lt. Gen. Tōjō Hideki, chief of the Kwantung Army’s military police, then its chief of staff; Hoshino Naoki, who ran the day-today business of Manchukuo government as head of its General Affairs Agency (though the real power resided with Kishi); Matsuoka Yōsuke, president of the Southern Manchurian Railroad, who as Minister for Foreign Affairs had won some international notoriety; and Ayukawa Gisuke, head of Japan Industrial Corporation, a conglomerate, which had under it Nissan, Hitachi, Japan Mining, and Japan Chemicals. Because of their personal names, the five men were known as Two Ki’s and Three Suke’s.

  Unlike Kishi, who would later be called a “monster,” “ghoul,” and “revolutionary,”42 Hiraoka Azusa did not leave any imprint, either on the Japanese government or Japanese history—except in playing a part in wrecking an epochal farm bill, a matter that did not come to light until forty years later.

  During the period before and after the era name changed from Taishō to Shōwa, tenant-farmer disputes increased alarmingly. In 1926 the number of disputes reached the prewar high of 2,713 cases, with more than 150,000 landless farmers taking part. To deal with the situation, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry prepared a bill that would give a piece of land to each tenant farmer, a landmark step. The plan, which by itself would have created a firestorm among landowners, called for the issuance of bonds amounting to ¥3 billion or today’s equivalent of ¥30 trillion—a staggering sum. It was, therefore, kept tightly under wraps.

  Kōno Ichirō, who after the war would serve as Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Construction, among other government posts, was a journalist at the time. Sensing something was afoot, he ferreted out the contents of the top-secret bill. The news made a huge headline in Kōno’s newspaper, the Asahi Shinbun, on June 14, and the bill was buried even before it was submitted for Cabinet consideration.

  The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department was notified and tough internal investigations were made, but Kōno’s source was never found. It was only in 1965 that Kōno disclosed in his autobiography that he obtained the information by snatching the relevant bill draft from “the writer Mishima Yukio’s Papa, Hiraoka Azusa.”43

  Disjointed Memoirs

  Shizue’s “joint remembrances” with Azusa were actually disjointed. Azusa sold the idea of writing about his famous son to a publisher soon after Mishima’s death and started work. But early on he decided to allow his wife to have her own say. The man who would not raise a finger for his wife when she needed his help the most was oddly accommodating when it came to describing what their son was like. He freely let her interweave her observations into his own, often to contradict him. Early in their marriage Shizue had found her husband was not someone with whom she could have a proper “dialogue.”44

  John Nathan, who interviewed the couple for his biography of Mishima, tells of their open discord. When he went to see them at their house, Azusa came out and responded to Nathan’s questions. Shizue, however, instead of joining them for the interview, positioned herself in the next room, just beyond the sliding doors, and would occasionally correct her husband, even upbraiding him at times. “My child cried because you threatened him,” she said at one point. At another she said, “How can you tell? You weren’t there. You were never close by when he needed you.”

  Nathan was discomfited by all this but managed to finish his interview. When he was done and was ready to step out of the foyer, Shizue suddenly emerged and declared with stern dignity, “Mr. Nathan, now you know what a sadist my husband is.” Azusa, who was right there, did not even try to protest. Several days later, Shizue got in touch with Nathan and designated a place for him to ask her questions separately—a kimono store in Nihonbashi.45

  If Shizue was somewhat unusual, Azusa, who flaunted what may be called amused detachment, was not much different. Before letting his wife step into his recollections, Azusa quotes her disparaging remark to him: “You are like a water buffalo, with no delicacy, only interested in action, an insensitive person, you can’t possibly understand Kimitake’s heart.” The only caveat he makes about her is that the reader should ignore her if she started saying anything as wild as Mishima’s testimony that he remembered being bathed right after birth, which opens Confessions of a Mask.

  At any rate, when Shizue has given her account of Natsuko’s bizarre conduct, writing for a dozen pages, Azusa butts in with “Let me interrupt a little . . . I couldn’t stand watching my son growing
up like a girl, glued to my mother, as always, and I don’t know how many times I quarreled with her over that and forcibly took my son outside.

  “One day, when I took him to Shinjuku”—by then Japan’s main railway junction—“I happened to see a steam locomotive go by. At once we went near it. Between the plaza this side and the railroad was a fence made of charred piles. We were so close to the locomotive we could almost touch it just by stretching out our hands.” The next train approached in no time, belching “great plumes of black smoke, barreling down upon us with roaring clatter.” So: “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is it! A once-in-a-lifetime chance to give him a Spartan education, fearless, unperturbed!’

  “I picked him up and, protecting his face with my felt hat, got closer to the engine. I said to him, ‘Scared? Don’t worry. You cry, you’re a weakling, I’ll dump you in the ditch.’ I watched his face. But, contrary to what I’d expected, he showed no reaction.”

  Azusa evidently was unaware of his own contradiction, but concluded that his son was “like a doggie not yet old enough to know what fear was or else he’d lost the ability to react to such a stirring, masculine phenomenon as a result of mother’s girlie education.” So he decided to take a different tack. “The next day I chose a quiet train and tried it on him once again, but it was no good. I thought he must burst into cheerful shouts, but he kept his nō-mask face. I gave up. I never could figure out the mystery.46

  Azusa goes on to observe that Mishima in those days “was almost consistently expressionless, just as he was when he flunked the draftees’ physicals and when we heard the Tennō’s words at the end of the war in our relative’s house in Akatsutsumi.” On August 15, 1945, Hirohito for the first time spoke on the radio; it was to tell his subjects that Japan was conceding defeat and that the nation had to be prepared to “endure the unendurable.” Azusa concludes that “the mystery” of his son’s impassiveness “remained unsolved to the end.”

  This was no mystery to his wife. “I think my husband is wrong when he says, ‘Until he began his loud laughter he was a man as expressionless as a nō mask,’” Shizue writes when her turn comes. After he became an established author, Mishima became known for startling bursts of laughter. “I think Kimitake assumed a nō mask to control perturbation as best he could whenever my husband said something unreasonable to him.”

  Perhaps because Azusa—and Shizue—told him this childhood story more than once, Mishima presented the same experience, but in a different light, when he had a chance to write about it in a story. In “The Forest in Full Bloom,” there occurs this passage: “beyond the enclosure of black charred piles . . . in the mist, on the track, part of which was gleaming faintly white, [the child] saw a giant locomotive start to move, repeating spasms of asthmatic coughing.”

  The “steam train,” in fantasy, is “cold-hearted,” as it runs through a northern land “as it pleases, not turning its eyes to a village with sasanqua in early bloom, to a rundown factory town where smoke rarely rises, or even to sadness,” loaded as it is with “many boxes of green apples and the salmon brought from more distant seas.” But it is the narrator, “the child,” who asks his father to leave him by the rail track: “Whenever his father took him to town, he let him stand by the fence next to the track for a while exactly as the child asked him to. Beyond the track, countless neon signs resembling the remnants of the red evening sun turned and turned like willful stars against a black backdrop.”

  Then comes this sentence: “Like a tropical man who wildly cheers each time an elephant rumbles by, each time an electric train sped by, the child jumped up in his father’s arms, laughing, clapping wildly, recklessly.”

  Here, Mishima is projecting a child trying to “get into the cracks in his dreams as he sleeps alone.” Also, a thundering steam locomotive becomes a smooth electric train. Still, we might as well not read too much into Azusa’s observations. It was none other than Shizue who wrote in her diary, when her son was six years old, to marvel what a “cheerful” child he had turned out to be, always smiling, “for all the cruelties he suffers.” She could not help thinking he had to be “a deity incarnate.”47

  In April 1931, Hiraoka Kimitake enrolled in the Elementary Division of Peers School, a school for sons and daughters of peerage. That was what Natsuko wanted, and for that she lined up Yoriyasu as sponsor. Yoriyasu had inherited the peerage rank of viscount from his father. The arrangement turned Azusa into the butt of dismissive, sneering jokes among his government colleagues. Mishima himself might have harbored some unease about the lack of a titled person among his immediate family members—a point his brother Chiyuki made and Shizue often complained about, although Muramatsu Takeshi, who asked some of Mishima’s classmates, discounted this.48

  In first grade, Kimitake wrote a composition titled “The Owl” in his Japanese class. It began, “Owl, you are the queen of the woods.” He was one of the few pupils who were asked to read their writings in class that day. But what he read was clearly over the heads of most of the pupils, as well as his teacher. The pupils tittered nervously, and the teacher, apparently lost, mumbled, “Hiraoka is special, you know.” He never asked Mishima to read his composition again, a classmate recalled years later. Confined to Natsuko’s gloomy room much of the time, with his mother reading fairy tales to him every day, the child had created a world of fantasy.

  He appeared sickly. He “looked uncomfortable with a dressing around his neck in his uniform with a stand-up collar,” the same classmate remembered,49 though the getup was largely because Natsuko demanded it. He readily took a day off, similarly at her behest. In second grade, asked to write a composition on the topic, “Things I Was Praised For,” he wrote: “In first grade I took fifty days off. . . . In second grade so far I have not taken a single day off.”50

  In August 1933, when he was in third grade, the Hiraokas moved to a place near the Keiō University Hospital, in Shinano-chō, and the grandparents and the parents began to live in separate rented houses, both smaller than the previous house. Their move was the result of economic pressure. Three of their six maids were discharged. It was an opportunity for Shizue to take her son back from her mother-in-law’s management. But she only won a small concession: she allowed Shizue to take him to school.

  “We would go to the park in front of Yotsuya Station and together pick acorns and sing songs, the moment so happy I almost had tears,” Shizue recalled. “Whenever I took him to a dentist, we would agree to a condition: he could have ice cream at Yotsuya Mitsuke, and I remember how happy he was. But once home, he had to have the three-o’clock meal mother-in-law had prepared; then, near her pillow, the hour for me to have him do his daily study would begin.”51 She thought the snack Natsuko prepared was too small. She would have fed him something more substantial.

  But Natsuko, still fearful of the relapse of autointoxication, was convinced that she could give him only light food. Mishima describes how it was in Confessions: “When it came to fish, I knew only those with white flesh, such as flatfish and flounder; when it came to potatoes, I knew only the kind mashed then strained through cloth; when it came to cakes, those with bean paste inside were forbidden, with only light cookies and wafers given me. With fruits, I only knew thinly sliced apple and tiny portions of orange.” The snack eaten, he was allowed to go to his parents’ home. But he had to be back to his grandmother by suppertime.

  Still, at school, the boy turned out to be no withdrawing, helpless weakling. His friends reported that in third grade, for example, he was counted among “the three pranksters.” He was as vivacious as the next boy. Natsuko nicknamed him Shōko, “Little Tiger,” although that may have contradictorily included her wish he’d be a samurai boy. He also was an irresistible laugher and cackler from childhood. Grownups said it was embarrassing to take him to a movie because he’d burst into laughter at the most unexpected spots. At school, some teachers avowed they could tell his presence because of his cheerful cackles. As an adult, a playwright friend once a
sked him to provide canned laughter, as it were, along with some other good laughers.52

  There is a childhood recollection that Mishima wove into an early story that took Shizue by surprise when she read it. The story is “Sorrels” (Sukanpō), which Mishima wrote in 1938 when he was thirteen and would later count among his four “virgin works.”

  “Sorrels” concerns a boy and an escaped convict. The boy always wants to go to the hill nearby, which is overgrown with pink sorrel flowers, so he may fully relax and be free. But his mother forbids him to go near there. In one corner of the hill is a prison “filled with gray air”; besides, an escaped prisoner is abroad. Once, though, he ignores the warning and runs up to the hill. He throws a white ball high into the sky.

  “The blue sky, following the ball, rose up high; then fell toward him with a terrifying speed. When he caught it, he was as happy as though he had made the blue sky his own.” While he is absorbed in his play, darkness falls. He becomes lost in the woods. In front of the sobbing boy appears a man, an escaped convict.

  Looking back on this story just before starting work on Confessions, Mishima wrote: “I symbolized in the sorrel flower the pure soul that a young boy’s heart awakens in the dark heart of an escaped convict.” John Nathan’s judgment on this story was tough. Calling the story a “fantasy,” he said: “the ecstatic identification with nature the boy achieves on the hill is sham, the earliest example of Mishima disguising his desire,” adding, “The essential elements are a dark woods, a beautiful, weeping boy, and a murderer. Here is a model of the beauty that would compel and terrify Mishima all his life.”53