by Hiroaki Sato
Kuniko, terrified, clung to Mishima. Mishima for the first time held her, putting his arm over her shoulders, “not unnaturally.”
B-29s continued to raid Tokyo and elsewhere, bombers and fighters to bomb and strafe, in the end laying 65 percent of all Japanese cities to waste.65
In April the Imperial University of Tokyo protested the treatment of its students at the Nakajima aircraft factory and withdrew them. Lectures at the Faculty of Law resumed, but in May, with too many professors unable to make their classes, these were abandoned again.
On the fifth of that month, Mishima’s wartime assignment changed from an aircraft factory to a naval factory in Kōza, Kanagawa, where he worked as a librarian and a trench-digger. The letters between Mishima and Kuniko increased. They exchanged photographs. Kuniko even wrote, using a most courteously feminine locution in Japanese to say, “I long for you.”
On May 24, there was another large-scale air raid by B-29s—the second largest, in fact, after the one on the night of March 9. This one destroyed Yamanote—an area where well-heeled families tended to live, including the Hiraoka’s. Mishima went home from the naval factory, walking half the way along the railroad on which the trains had stopped running. The ties were still smoldering.
Miraculously, the Hiraoka house along with those in its immediate neighborhood hadn’t been hit or burnt. These houses stood out neatly, like an oasis in a desert. His family was unscathed, too. To celebrate their good fortune, they dug out canned sweet bean paste yōkan from the underground food storage buried for an emergency and ate it. Mishima’s sister, then an acute and unreserved seventeen, asked him during the celebration.
“You are crazy about someone, aren’t you?”
“Who told you something like that?”
“I can tell.”
“Anything wrong about me liking someone?”
“Nope. When are you getting married?”
By then the Mitani family had evacuated to Karuizawa. It was an all-woman contingent: grandmother, mother, Kuniko, and her two sisters. (In Confessions, Kuniko’s father is described as dead.) They sent an invitation to Mishima to visit them. Mishima did, in mid-June. Kuniko had come to meet him at Karuizawa Station. “I hadn’t seen her, and had passed by her, when she poked me in the back, with ‘Boo!’ I turned round, and she turned red like a coquelicot. In such an act, her shyness, and a kind of innocent coquetry, there was something that made me clearly feel that we were lovers.”
Both Confessions and My Puberty describe their first kiss—something Mishima wanted to do. However, there is a great difference between the two descriptions. The one in Confessions is loaded with Radiguet-like adolescent calculations. The one in My Puberty is simple.
Through her raincoat, I suddenly felt her fierce heartbeat coming to my chest. It was as though I were holding a large trembling bird. Then I saw right before my eyes the downy hair growing above her upper lip. She had her eyes closed tight. I pressed my lips on hers, which had no lipstick and were dry. She was quaking so hard that our teeth collided.
About a month after this incident, in late July, Mishima received from Mitani Makoto a letter, which the epistler said he was writing as “ambassador extraordinary”: My family, Kuniko included, is taking her relationship with you seriously. My mother is even thinking of setting the wedding date. I don’t know about the wedding, but I don’t think it’s too early for an engagement. But first we must know how you feel about it. We’d be of course delighted with YES, but we won’t feel bad even if it’s NO. Feel free to respond frankly.
The rapidity of the development alarmed Mishima. He came up with explanations as to why he couldn’t marry Kuniko. In Confessions, the narrator explains to his mother the content of the letter he has just received and gives the reasons for declining the marriage so he may elicit her “stubborn objections”: that “my father is neurotic and a scold and living with him in the same house is bound to make the person who is to be my wife suffer; that, on the other hand, I have no prospect for setting up a separate house for the time being; that my old-fashioned family and Sonoko’s cheerful, easygoing family can’t expect to get along with each other; that I myself don’t want to have a wife so early and go through all the attendant problems. . . .” The actual reasons he passed on to Mitani were probably more or less the same.
The familial explanations aside, it was a fact that Mishima was only twenty and still a student. Thus, the Mitani family’s—or Kuniko’s—urgency put a halt to Mishima’s first love for the moment, at least in its overt form.
CHAPTER SIX
The War and Its Aftermath
I would like to contribute, to the best of my ability, . . . to a postwar renaissance in literature and arts, and the ordering of them.
—Letter to Mitani Makoto on August 22, 1945
On August 15, Japan surrendered.
To most assessors, Japan had no chance of winning the war with the United States, let alone the forces with England, and the Netherlands added to it. The Total War Research Institute the government set up in the spring of 1941 by assembling youthful men of keen intelligence and wide experience from a variety of fields made this abundantly clear.
Toward the end of August, the members of the institute formed a mock cabinet and in a two-day session presented to the actual cabinet, including Army Minister Tōjō Hideki, the conclusion that defeat was inescapable in the approaching war. In October, the political leadership chose Tōjō, the war advocate, as prime minister with the understanding that he would work to avert the war. The leadership thought he had the decisiveness to fire people who went against stated national policy. Tōjō took the job seriously enough but could not resolve the impasse he had helped to create himself.1
Besides the fact that Japan’s military venture had bogged down in China, the basic reason for a projected surefire defeat in the event of war was simple: the vast economic discrepancy between Japan and the main enemy it was to take on, the United States. Lt. Gen. Ishihara Kanji put it perhaps most memorably: “It’s a contest, isn’t it,” he is known to have kept telling anyone who would listen, “between Japan, which is going to buy ¥10,000 worth of things when it has only ¥1,000 in its wallet, and the United States, which is going to buy ¥10,000 worth of things when it has ¥1,000,000 in its wallet?” If you are Japan, “you might not notice it while buying this for ¥100 or that for ¥200, but after a while you quickly find you’re ruined.”2
Ishihara, a strategic thinker though also a religious fanatic, had predicted that the United States and Japan (Asia) would be the two last combatants in “the final world war”; the Manchurian Incident he had pulled off, in 1931, was part of his idea of unifying Asia for that eventuality. But he had also argued that Japan was far from ready, and insisted that Japan would lose even with its dazzling initial victories. In the fall of 1942, when the government was forced to withdraw from Guadalcanal and a meeting with Tōjō was arranged, Ishihara, ever blunt-spoken, told the man who had put him out of active duty in March 1941 and was now prime minister, to resign on the spot because Japan was sure to be defeated and destroyed as long as he ran the war. Tōjō responded by tightening the military and police surveillance of Ishihara.3
Ishihara survived under the Tōjō regime, but another fierytempered leader, Nakano Seigō, did not. The journalist-turned-politician who at one time advocated Hitler/Mussolini-style totalitarianism, Nakano became an outspoken critic of Tōjō as the latter accumulated dictatorial powers. On New Year’s Day 1943 the Asahi Shinbun published his article titled “On Wartime Premiership” that cited Clemenceau, Lenin, and ancient Chinese leaders to suggest Tōjō lacked leadership qualities.4 Although the article had passed pre-publication censorship, Tōjō banned that edition of the daily.
That fall the Kenpeitai arrested and interrogated Nakano—despite the fact he was an active member of the Diet—on the ground, as was revealed after the war, that he had accused the army and navy of interservice discord that had created the disaster earlier that ye
ar that was Guadalcanal. Upon release, Nakano committed suicide by disembowelment. His funeral is said to have drawn twenty thousand people when assembly was severely restricted.
In less than three years, Mishima would make friends with a young woman whom Nakano once wanted to adopt: his sister Mitsuko’s best friend, Sassa Teiko.5
Uesugi Shinkichi and Japan’s Mission
Even as triumphant announcements of overwhelming losses inflicted upon the enemy in each major battle became ever more extravagant, a sense of doom spread. In his “Saturday communication” of April 14, 1945, Mishima was moved to invoke “the now deceased prominence in statist Constitutional studies at the Imperial University, Dr. Uesugi Shinkichi” Uesugi, he said, had written, in 1924, a “great tract” on the inevitability of a US-Japanese collision, arguing that even if “the Japanese race were to be annihilated,” Japan would not be able to avoid fighting the United States because doing so would be “Japan’s one great mission for the world.”6 Uesugi, who had died in 1929, had advocated Tennō absolutism in Constitutional interpretation on the ground that the Tennō possessed “divinity” and thus had been the adversary of Minobe Tatsukichi, another Constitutional scholar at the same university who argued that the Tennō was a “state organ.” Of the controversy provoked by Minobe’s theory, we will see more later.
Uesugi’s dire fatalism, however “medieval” in its presentation,7 reflected one major strain of the Zeitgeist of the 1920s, well into the 1930s. By that decade the inevitability of a clash between the United States and Japan had come to be widely accepted on both sides of the Pacific. Among the books predicting it on the US side were Banzai! by Parabellum (1908),8 The Valor of Ignorance by Homer Lea (1909), and The Great Pacific War by Hector C. Bywater (1925). Nothing excites people’s imagination more than the talk of war, and the Japanese fully reciprocated. Writers both serious and merely fantastic came up with accounts of the predicted war. Ishihara Kanji was different only because his prediction was based on his analysis of the history of war.
What provoked Mishima to invoke Uesugi was the unexpected courtesy the daily newspapers showed in reporting the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which Mishima guessed was a result of the influence of Gen. Anami Korechika. In the days when references to the United States and United Kingdom routinely came with the epithet “devil/beast,” Anami’s action was admirable, Mishima said. He remembered a story from two years earlier: the general had lamented the loss of whatever moral high ground Japan may have had when he saw a movie showing Japanese soldiers trampling upon the American flag as they marched. In early April, in what Mishima called a “coup,” Ret. Adm. Suzuki Kantarō had formed a new cabinet and Anami was his choice for Minister of the Army. There was the instinctive feeling among the Japanese that Suzuki’s task was to find some way of ending the war—a dread thought for the diehard core of the military. Anami himself continued to insist, to the very end, on fighting to the last man.
If Mishima citing Uesugi at that point surprises, his words on tokkōtai a week later, on April 21, may startle. Tokkōtai—an abbreviation of tokubetsu kōgekitai, “special attack force”—in this context refers to a squadron of warplanes tasked with crashing into enemy warships. A desperate measure that Vice Adm. Ōnishi Takijirō had formally introduced during the Battle of Leyte Gulf six months earlier, it was instantly given the epithet kamikaze, “the divine wind”—kamikaze being the Japanese reading of the Sinified word shinpū, the generic name officially devised for the force.9 The naming came from the folkloric belief that it was “the divine wind,” a typhoon in fact, that helped Japan repel two Mongolian invasions, in 1274 and 1281.10 Respect for voluntary self-sacrifice in a hopeless situation was a traditional ideal and Mishima was writing at the height of the Battle of Okinawa in which the deployment of tokkōtai dominated. Still, the almost delirious tone of his April 21 letter makes us pause.
. . . the tokkōtai is not a resuscitation of the ancient era but an annihilation of the modern—that is, the “modern” that Japan’s cultured class has tried for a long time to overcome but has been unable to—not overcoming but wounding and killing (this, one step higher, fiercer, and more beautiful than overcoming) of the “modern” that is vast, monumental, Kant’s, Edison’s, America’s that we should never disdain. Through the tokkōtai has “modern man” for the first time been able to grasp the dawn light of “the present age” or, rather, of “our age” in its true sense; for the first time the intelligentsia, which was until now the illegitimate child of the modern, has become a historic heir.
Behind this apparent raving was a debate on “overcoming modernity” that had culminated in 1942. The question, which survives to this day, not just in Japan but elsewhere, was: Is modernization the same as Westernization? For Japan, which at the time seemed particularly successful among the latecomers in global self-assertion, it came with a nagging doubt: Is a modern Japan nothing more than an awkward imitation—“an illegitimate child,” as Mishima put it—of the West? Was creating slogans such as “getting out of Asia to become part of the West,” in the process, an embarrassment?
The matter came to a head when Japan went to war simultaneously with the United States, United Kingdom and the Netherlands and unexpectedly won a series of battles. In July 1942 the monthly Bungakukai convened a symposium on “overcoming modernity” with thirteen participants, among them a graduate of the Berlin National Music School and composer; a Catholic theologian; a historian of Medieval Europe; a physicist then engaged in atomic research; and a philosopher of science. (A month before the symposium the Japanese Navy had suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Midway, which the navy regarded as fatal and naturally kept top secret.11)
These men were well aware that European thinkers had raised questions on the validity of modernity in their own context—that, for example, some focused on the scientific progress promoted in the nineteenth century, and others went back to the Renaissance, which necessarily led to the question of humanism. On that score, as Nakamura Mitsuo, one of the men-of-letters participating in the symposium, pointed out acidly, if the purpose of the symposium was simply to exalt Japan over the presumably declining West, it would be disgraceful to employ the term Europeans devised for themselves: “overcoming modernity.”12
Still, the term became a catchword of sorts. For Mishima, then twenty, the advent of suicide air corps when Japan was on the brink was nothing as “lukewarm” as “a resuscitation of a myth,” but the annihilation of modernity itself. It was “my own interpretation alone,” he wrote Mitani, but he may well have been inspired to say this by Yokomitsu Riichi’s essay simply titled Tokkōtai that had recently appeared in Bungei. In his essay, the writer who had turned from an admirer of things Western to a fervent nationalist wondered if “the tokkō spirit” is not “the most genuine world spirit that has been transmitted since the primeval time several thousand, tens of thousand years ago.”13
Mishima went on to assert: “Herein lies the reason that all the cultured class of Japan, all the cultured people of the world, should genuflect before the tokkōtai.” These strong words did not faze Mitani, at least as he assembled Mishima’s letters forty years later. Instead, he wrote that these words showed his friend’s true worth in this assessment of the tokkōtai.14
The idea that the suicide missions or the men who took part in them represented an inexorable yet worthy value would play an important role in Mishima’s thinking later in his life. He determined that the tokkōtai was the ultimate form of “decadence,” though a “paradoxical decadence (that cannot be so termed)” that he fully affirmed. That is how he put the matter in a testament he wrote four days after Japan’s surrender “to commemorate August 1945.”15 But he knew the idea so stated was too outlandish for comprehension, so he quoted Satō Haruo restating his point before setting out to explain.
In the preceding decade, “Japan’s literary fortune, long shriveled up, did not prosper. Romanticism that erupted at the start of the China Incident”—
a clear reference to the advocacy of Bunka Bungei, the first issue of which appeared in July 1937—“fell apart showing no admirable blossoming and fruiting. It was an ominous sign. The level of Japan’s modern literary arts never attained the level of the military, forced as they were either to follow the latter subserviently or to fall silent. In this imbalance lay one cause of Japan’s defeat.”
The need for a coequal existence of both martial and literary or intellectual sides of society was not something Mishima suddenly thought up. In his letter to his teacher Shimizu Fumio in June 1943, for example, he, lamenting the enfeeblement of literature at the Peers School in favor of things martial, had stressed his belief that “the literary way,” that is, “poetry,” had to “match the martial way” for it is “the only thing” a soldier “dashing through the battlefield” has to “count on.”16
By late 1944, the war situation was such that “we,” “the poets,” were about to “head for grasping decadence,” the result of much meditation on “the eschatological thought that flows straight through [Japan’s] medieval literature,” Mishima continued. “We may have prayed for the final progression of this malaise, but we no longer wanted its complete healing. We wanted our age to drive us to a furious death.” By then, of course, militarists were loudly calling for the whole nation to fight to the last man, to “shatter like a jewel,” as one military unit after another met that fate.
It was then that the first tokkōtai appeared, in the Philippines. “We saw a flood of modern predilections for tragic heroism in our towns or heard praises with optimistic mythological quotations in our streets.” That was because what “we quickly intuited and prayed for” was to be with the pilots, to die. But then two things happened. For one, as suicide missions were repeated, “the old-fashioned puerile humanism”—Mishima used English just as he did for decadence—“from whose milk-smell we have long striven to escape” reared its head.