by Hiroaki Sato
“Because it is nothing more than what provides man’s instinctive sense of good or bad with a plausible excuse, humanism can be,” Mishima wrote, “like the last descendant of ethics, meaningless, even harmful.” But there must be something that “transcends all value judgments.” War may be “a nation’s supreme aim,” Mishima suggested, but “when a contradiction is born between the supreme aim and humanity, the moral principle ceases to exist, the moral principle is lost.” Still, “humanity” must be “maintained as powerfully and as persistently as the war effort so as to shed its outward ‘weakness.’” Otherwise, a people “devoid of that good resolve” will be met with retribution.
For the other, the military planners deprived the tokkōtai pilots of their “divine seat” by calling their deployment “a tactic.” It was in fact their advocacy for “victory” that revealed their “moral laxity” and that “moral laxity” was the reason for “the failure of defending Okinawa with death.” Not that “the fall and loss of Okinawa” was no less awe-inspiring. “In the midst of the great air raids that made us think of the ultimate of the end of the world,” Mishima mused, “we for the first time thought with immediacy and witnessed the two words, ‘Divine Nation.’”
This argument may be as difficult to follow as the testament is abstruse, an attempt as it was to reconcile Mishima’s by then indelible eschatology with two other strains of thought: his belief in what the authority on the Tennō institution Ben-Ami Shillony proposes to call “monarchial transcendence”17 and his resolve to rebuild Japanese culture in general and Japanese literature in particular.
So it was that the Tennō stepped in to prevent further degradation and accepted surrender, Mishima averred. The imperial action was “the first ray of dawn” as it meant a return to the age of the Tennō’s direct rule, that of Daigo, the sixtieth Tennō by tradition. And Mishima, who began the testament with a declaration that the war had intimated the onset of another Medieval Period, “the opening of a chaotic world,” ended it by exhorting the youth of his generation to “build and recover” Japanese culture, to turn Japan into “the envy of a peaceful world.” He had a specific prescription for literature: to “hone” its feminine aspect, tawayameburi, while for now subduing its masculine aspect, masuraoburi, because that is what “our everlasting history of literature continuously teaches us.”
What did Mishima mean by the Medieval Period or “the chaotic world”? In his story “The Medieval Period,” he designated the era not as the period so named in the standard historical divisions—that is, the period of four centuries that began in the mid-twelfth century as the samurai shunted aside the aristocracy as ruling class—but, rather, as the Age of Warring States that came into being as the decade-long Ōnin War was fading into the past, toward the end of the fifteenth century. The story, which again shows Mishima’s absorption in classical language and literature, concerns Zen master Ryōkai’s love of the young male dancer Kikuwaka, the eighth Ashikaga shogun Yoshimasa’s love of the young vestal Ayaori, and, in the end, the love between Kikuwaka and Ayatori. Mishima later said it was one of the stories he wrote thinking “this may be my last work,” expecting the entire Japanese population to be annihilated at any moment, “shattering like a jewel.”18
What made him “intuit the opening of a chaotic world,” as he put it at the outset of his testament, was a poem found in the manuscripts Lt. Wakabayashi left, Mishima wrote. Wakabayashi Tōichi was killed in January 1943, in the last phase of the Battle of Guadalcanal, yet another example of the Japanese military’s strategic and logistical blunder that left fifteen thousand soldiers to die of wounds, illnesses, and starvation on the tropical island. But Wakabayashi’s charisma was of the kind that would create instant legends. For example, his adjutant, who had been pulled back from the front, is reported to have said, when he heard about his commander’s death, that he had no more reason to live and wandered off, with a grenade in hand, into the jungle where Wakabayashi was thought to have died, apparently to kill himself.19
In fact, his reputation was such that a movie was made about him, with the leading actor of the day, Hasegawa Kazuo, playing the lieutenant. It was exceptionally long, too. As the war wore on, the increasing power and material shortages had forced filmmakers to limit average movies to the length of one hour, but the movie, titled Ato ni tsuzuku o shinzu—based on what was reputed to be Wakabayashi’s last words, Ato ni tsuzuku mono o shinzu, “I trust those who will follow me”—was ninety-two minutes. It was released in the spring of 1945.
The poem, which Mishima quotes in full, along with its title, “Holy Life,” seems uncannily to adumbrate Mishima’s thinking.
Suffering layered upon suffering mornings and evenings,
this day cannot not be another day of torment.
Life begins and ends with suffering;
the day of joy is the day of death—
Who was it that took this view?
Thus “Suffering being what I am,”
I’ll die to hurry to Nirvana, so saying,
many a one has hastened to do that.
Suicide is a kind of spasm,
heretical in the view of life.
If someone full of vigor and blood,
full of spirit and life, is to say,
I’d like to die, that’s a falsity.
If he says it is true,
that’s happiness-drunk falsehood.
My life that is no accident,
my only life that is holy,
discard it for whose fame?
Do not behave so intolerably.
Our holy place to die,
is holy, therefore beautiful.
To train for the day to scatter and end,
strive this moment, this very moment.20
Mishima wrote the testament on the war and surrender, he noted with a touch of self-conscious pomposity, “for future historical considerations.” Perhaps luckily, it was not found and printed until almost a decade after he killed himself. But three days on he made his literary ambitions public, as it were. On August 22, he chose a good lined sheet of paper and wrote a rather formal letter to Mitani to tell him of his resolve in “the extraordinariness of this age.” “I would hope to build, if only within my own self, a maximal, beautiful order. I would like to contribute, to the best of my ability, however slight it may be, to a postwar renaissance in literature and arts, and the ordering of them.” The renaissance he had in mind was “William Butler Yeats’ Irish Literary Revival,” Mishima revealed to Noda Utarō ten days later.21
He would not be content to confine his design to Japan, Mishima went on to tell Mitani. Calling war “a phenomenon for cultural exchange,” he declared he would do whatever he could “for the universalization of Japanese culture and its transfusion that goes beyond introduction.”22 Given that Japan had just been crushed in war, such ambition was daring. In addition, as he was starkly aware, Japan’s efforts to disseminate its culture overseas was at a primitive stage (and would remain so for some time). Mitani guessed that his friend had made this resolution long before the day that might never come with himself alive: the end of the war. He probably was right.23
For example, in the early summer of 1944, when the government’s war regimentation extended to the Peers School to force it to shut down its Literary Arts Society to replace it with something as “soul-stunting” as “daily-life society”—based perhaps on the authorities’ idea that regular people, even the students at the Peers School, should mind dealing only with matters of daily living—Mishima wrote to Shimizu that he would continue to work toward “a daybreak,” “the rise of the literary fortune.” He disavowed “German-style culturalists’” judgment that “war retards culture by twenty, thirty years,” encouraged as he was by “the last passage of Bashō’s Record of a Phantom Hut (Genjū-an no ki).” That is where the haikai master vows to continue to pursue the path he has chosen, “devoid of ability and talent” as he is, ending the haibun with a hokku: “Not showing it is soon to die
the cicada shrills.”24
“There are only two roads for a great traditionalist nation: either extraordinarily feeble or militaristic,” Mishima continued his thoughts on the calamitous war and its aftermath in mid-September, in a list of aphoristic statements he titled Postwar Analects. “A situation that is in itself healthy and uninterruptible does not exist. Tradition tells us of two things: barbarism and overripeness.”
“Shōshō hikkin is a command for serious reflection,” went another esoteric-sounding aphorism. “For the populace inflamed with a war fever to switch to a peace fever one morning, the casual escape from self-revolution should not be excused with these sacred words.” The phrase he cited opens Article 3 of the Constitution attributed to Shōtoku Taishi (574–622): Shōshō hikkin, “When you receive an imperial edict, act in humility.”25 Lt. Gen. Kawabe Torashirō, “the last vice chief of staff,” for one, had cited the phrase to tell the army to keep quiet, not to engage in any rebellious act, now that the Tennō accepted surrender. Mishima took it to be a warning, although in The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku (Suzaku-ke no metsubō), his play from three years before his death, he would use it as its theme, taking it in the sense Gen. Kawabe followed: “If the Tennō tells you not to do anything, do nothing.” The result was self-destruction.26
He also took up “democracy” and “war responsibility.” The Potsdam Declaration had said that there would be “stern justice” to “all war criminals,” stating that the purpose of occupying Japan would be “the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people.” Naturally, talk of democracy and debate on who were responsible for the war became rife in no time. “Blinded by the one word democracy, politicians are already busy in their sycophancy and ingratiation to the masses,” Mishima observed with distaste.
But the real war responsibility lies with the masses and their stupidity. Just as The Tale of Genji had the foundation of its being in the hordes of multitudinous unenlightened masses, so does the literature of our age owe for the most part to the traditionally unenlightened masses [Mishima’s emphasis]. What precedes enlightenment is the hometown of literature. Enlightening these masses would be useful only in depriving Japan of the creativity of its great classical literature.—But that would never happen. I am at peace about this. Politicians will not indict the masses on war responsibility. They are afraid of them just as the Westerners are afraid of Asia. In this fear lies all our traditional sentiments. In this sense we have been democratic since ancient times.
Mishima followed all this with an assertion: “Only the conservation of Japanese-style nonrationality will contribute to world culture a hundred years from now.”27
On the day of Japan’s surrender, Azusa made a strange announcement to his son: “The world from now on is one for artists. You better become a novelist after all.” This was part of what Mishima recalled in an essay, “Around August 15,” in 1955, when the mass media wanted to mark the tenth anniversary of Japan’s defeat.28 Azusa’s was, of course, no more than a blurt in a moment of chaos. The defeat had created a mass disorientation. The novelist Shiga Naoya, for example, proposed, with a straight face, that the Japanese abandon their own language in favor of French because, he reasoned, without their amorphous language the war would not have happened.29 Azusa would soon regain his footing and resume urging Mishima to work toward employment at the Ministry of Finance—just as Shiga continued to write in Japanese.
But if Azusa’s reversal was temporary, that of a more visible part of the Japanese populace in the face of a crushing defeat was not. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), arrived in Atsugi Airfield on August 30. The route from Atsugi to Yokohama, where the Occupation Headquarters (GHQ) had been temporarily set up two days earlier, was guarded by Japanese troops lining both sides of it, guns ready but famously facing away from the caravan of Occupiers. The surrender ceremony was held on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, on September 2. On September 15, the GHQ was moved from Yokohama to the main building of the insurance company Daiichi Seimei, in Tokyo, that faced the Imperial Palace from the southeast corner, and the SCAP settled down in the former US Embassy, in Akasaka.
By early October, the about-face of the Japanese was complete. Writing to Mitani early that month, Mishima spoke of the “popularity . . . simply a bizarre popularity” of the Occupation troops he witnessed in the part of the Ginza where the Kabuki-za theater he frequented was located. Mitani, released from the officer-candidate course, had written about the great change that had descended on Karuizawa.
“I had a little errand to run and went to Owari-chō, where the fierce human traffic hasn’t changed a bit since before the war,” Mishima told his friend. “Still, there isn’t a single store where the Japanese can buy things. The Occupation force popularity, shall we call it, it’s simply a bizarre popularity; shabby dirty Japanese in khaki and monpe attire mill around.” The ragged, beaten-dog appearance of his compatriots contrasted sharply with the vitality of the machinery Americans brought. “On the streets jeeps and military trucks whiz back and forth incessantly, at wonderful speed.” Mishima was witnessing what until a few months earlier used to amaze the Japanese soldiers exposed to US forces in battlefields: the sheer abundance of the mechanized part of the US military.
“Enchanted by shopping Occupation soldiers and women reporters, there are, I tell you, crowds upon crowds of people, mouths agape, listening gratefully to (though can’t hope to understand) the responses in English. Nothing other than animal curiosity.” Not only had Tokyo, once the vaunted “great city of the world,” turned into “a dirty pockmarked map,” Mishima observed, referring to the numerous bomb craters, but those who used to “put on airs as they sallied forth night after night in unaccustomed silk stockings and high heels or in readymade jackets, heads oiled aglitter, have their true worth revealed.” Now women were “in slovenly soiled monpe, men in worn-out khaki overalls that some workmen seem to have given up.” And as they gawked at Americans and other foreigners, male and female, who have flooded the land, the Japanese “flaunted their real idiocy, grotesquery, ignorance profligately or, rather, as though they were enjoying it.”
“There are some who frown on those begging for cigarettes from the Occupation troops and bemoan, ‘The Japanese have fallen so low,’” Mishima concluded with sarcasm: “But this lament somewhat misses the point; their present ugly state neither adds anything to them nor subtracts anything from them. What a base, despicable, and yet loveable people the Japanese are!”30
In fact, the Japanese government had led the way in groveling to the victorious. Just three days after it announced surrender, the Police and Security Department of the Home Ministry, the central organ for censorship and for controlling overall civilian conduct, set up in Tokyo a Rest and Amusement Association—so named in English, but in a literal translation of the Japanese, “association for special comfort facilities” or, in plain language, brothels—for incoming foreign servicemen, and ordered municipalities to follow suit. This the Ministry did in the name of patriotism and weeks before the Occupation requisitioned a number of brothels for its own use. Less than ten days later, the first such brothel opened for business, in Ōmori, Ōta Ward, Tokyo. That was the day before the vanguard of the US force arrived in Atsugi Airport, on August 28.
By the time soldiers of the Allied Powers started arriving in earnest, the government-financed effort had lined up 1,360 women for them, even as women were evacuating from Yokohama and other areas for fear of “demons and beasts.”31 (Decades afterward, Japan would win notoriety for “comfort women.”)
Later, Mishima would reflect on what Japan’s defeat meant to him in a range of essays. “Japan’s defeat, to me, was not an event to be sourly lamented,” he recalled ten years later in “Starting out with an Eschatological Sense—A Self-Portrait in the 20th Year of Shōwa.” Or, as he noted in “Around August 15,” “At the end of the war, my sister, along with her friends, went to the Imperial Palace
Plaza and wept, or so I heard, but tears were far from my state of mind at the time.” This statement may not have been exactly true: the day after the surrender he had written Shimizu Fumio that he had shed tears when he heard the Tennō announce Japan’s capitulation.32
Mishima did weep when his sister Mitsuko died, on October 23. A student at the College of the Sacred Heart, whose buildings were destroyed in an air raid, Mitsuko and her fellow students were mobilized after the war to help clear some of the ruins in Tokyo. After working in one such place she became ill—either because she drank well water or because she was infested by lice. Diagnosed as having a cold at first, she was rediagnosed as having typhus fever when her condition worsened. When she fell into coma, she was moved from Keiō Hospital to a quarantine hospital where Mishima stayed by her bedside. From time to time, he would suck up liquid food in a tube and move it to her mouth. The quarantine hospital was dilapidated. Azusa remembered his son shooing away swarms of insects flying in the window.
“Several hours before her death, though she was utterly unconscious, she said to me, ‘My dear brother, thank you very much.’ When I heard this, I wept aloud,” Mishima wrote. The word she used to address him was o-nii-chama, a polite childhood form of addressing one’s older brother. He had loved his vivacious sister with long glossy hair—kissing her on the cheeks, exclaiming, “You are so cute!” She was seventeen years old.33
Toward the end of the year, Mishima learned of Kuniko’s engagement and half a year later of her marriage to a man twelve years older. “I was to be engaged to a woman I had made friends with during the war but, on account of my hesitations, she became another man’s wife,” he wrote. “These two incidents, my sister’s death and this woman’s marriage, became, it seems to me, the forces that drove my subsequent literary passion.” What Kuniko did, in particular, almost drove Mishima to suicide or at least serious thought of it—if we are to assume that the first full-length novel he began a month or so afterward that would eventually become The Bandit (Tōzoku) is any indication. “Grief over the lost love and revenge on the one who betrayed him” would recur as a leitmotif in his stories for the next several years, Muramatsu Takeshi observed in his biography of his friend. Mishima mused, “The sense of barren blankness in my life in the several years after that scares me even now as I remember it.”34