Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  Theater Diary

  Not that Mishima fell into despondence. For one thing, he quickened his pace of theater-going. The notes on the kabuki and other plays he saw from January 1942 to the end of November 1947 and later assembled as a “theater diary” show that, of the one hundred times he went to theater during the six-year period, about half occurred in the first three and a half years, the other half in the two years and four months following Japan’s defeat. One reason was worsening military censorship compounded by the growing shortages of all kinds under the bombings, including stage equipment. Mishima left no entry in the four months from May to August 1945 when Japan was disintegrating fast. With the Occupation came a different kind of censorship but that did not deter him.35

  Mishima’s postwar entries really begin on September 10. The entry that day noted the Mainichi Shinbun reporting the reopening of the Teikoku Theater with Onoe Kikugorō VI performing the following month. There was also news that the theater, which was right next to the Daiichi Seimei Building, now the GHQ, might be “offered” to the Occupation, but it was soon followed by the news that the Occupation rescinded the plan to use it. In early October, the head of the GHQ’s “information dissemination” unit—which had been renamed the Civil Information and Education Service (CIE) by the time Mishima read the news—warned that Japanese theater had not eliminated “feudalistic” and “militaristic coloration” in contravention of the Potsdam Declaration, stressing the need to create new plays to encourage repatriated soldiers to engage in building a new Japan.36

  In noting this, Mishima was moved to comment: “Ah, what would be left if feudalistic coloration and militarism were deducted from kabuki?” “Americans themselves should know the evils of propaganda drama.” And: “I wish they would wait until knowledgeable people like Max Reinhardt come to Japan before interfering with theater inappropriately.”37 He was not aware that Reinhardt had died two years earlier.

  But the CIE was tightening its censorship. In mid-November there was “the Terakoya Incident”; Japanese police, followed by US military police, stopped the “head-inspection” scene in Terakoya, the popular section of Sugawara denju tenarai kagami, in mid-performance, and banned the section altogether on November 20th.38 (In kabuki many sections are staged independently.) On December 19, Mishima read that the GHQ would ban certain types of stories from kabuki and other plays. “With this the maruhonmono”—jōruri turned into kabuki—“are all out,” he despaired. “Freedom of speech would be shocked to hear this.” He then listed nine plays he predicted might be permitted.

  The January 20, 1946 Tokyo Shinbun headline “Kabuki Disappears All At Once” drew an equally strong reaction from Mishima: “The last day for kabuki has finally come.” The news report suggested that the main kabuki producer Shōchiku was dropping certain plays from its repertoire “voluntarily,” though who was behind the move was unmistakable. Mishima copied the list of about eighty kabuki items the GHQ would permit.

  Still, Mishima does not seem to have noted the long interview that appeared in the Tokyo Shinbun three days later, with the headline: “Regrettable Suicidal Step; Maj. Bowers Talks.” Maj. Bowers is Faubion Bowers, then Gen. MacArthur’s aide-de-camp and personal interpreter. Later called “the savior of kabuki,” he had become a fan of this form of Japanese theater during his yearlong stay in Japan from early 1940 to early 1941. Indeed, arriving with Col. Charles Tench in the Atsugi Airfield on August 28 in the vanguard of the Occupation forces, he had famously amazed the gathered reporters with his first question, in Japanese, “Is Uzaemon doing well?” Virtually no Japanese expected a US military officer to speak Japanese, let alone to be a fan of kabuki. For that matter, it is likely that in the chaotic final months of the war, not many reporters knew that the glamorous kabuki actor Ichimura Uzaemon XV, whose father was the French-born American Gen. Joseph Émile Le Gendre, had died in May that year, in a quiet spa where he had evacuated. In any event, the interview with the Tokyo Shinbun on January 23 was Bowers’s first salvo in his effort to counter the Occupation censors and remove restrictions on kabuki. In it he said the kind of things with which Mishima would have perfectly agreed.

  “The United States is a democratic nation, but it keeps producing Shakespeare plays that use feudalistic monarchs as material,” Bowers said. “Also, it still performs Wagner’s operas even though the Nazi leaders insisted that their inspiration came from the myths and ideology. . . . Art is art. The greatness of kabuki lies far beyond political, feudalistic tendencies.”39

  The first fruit of Bowers’s behind-the-scene effort may well have been the lifting of the ban on Kanjinchō, which Mishima duly noted in his entry of May 30 and went to see on June 7.40

  Imperial Declaration of Humanity

  On New Year’s Day in 1946, Hirohito—posthumously, the Shōwa Emperor—issued a rescript that would later be known as ningen sengen, “declaration of humanity” or “renunciation of divinity.” As Mitani recollected, Mishima was “furious” at the news, but not so much at the declaration itself as at the fact that the Tennō appeared in subsequent newspaper photos in a Western suit, not in the formal Heian court attire ikan sokutai. He may have been merely sarcastic about the sartorial matter, but he was truly angry with the ensuing journalistic assault on the Tennō system, saying, “Society will not accept something like this in the end,” Mitani wrote.41

  That prediction would prove unfounded soon enough, but the “declaration” went against Mishima’s view. “That which has reserved what is truly Oriental, the last line of Oriental mysticism, in the form of a modern constitutional state, is Japan’s Tennō system,” he stated in an undated piece but apparently written just about that time. “The Tennō system is the essence of all Oriental cultures of the past, the final conclusion of the sovereignty theory and the philosophy of life. When this is lost, Oriental culture’s bridge to modern culture, the last bridge of its understanding, will also be lost.”42 This view of monarchical transcendence would play a pivotal role in the cultural argument Mishima would develop late in his life, so here we will examine what Hirohito actually did.

  In the rescript all the major newspapers carried on the first of January, 1946,43 the Tennō began by citing the Charter Oath, the proclamation in five simple, declarative clauses that the Meiji government issued at its birth, in 1868. The Oath urged that the people hold discussion throughout the land and subject everything to public debate; that the high and low endeavor to manage government with one mind; that all strive to fulfill their aspirations; that they break out of discredited customs and decide matters on the basis of just principles; and that they seek knowledge throughout the world to strengthen the Imperial foundations. The British historian G. B. Sansom called the oath “the first Constitution of modern Japan.”44

  The Tennō then stated that the wisdom manifested in the Charter Oath was self-evident and urged his people to adhere to pacifism so as to build a new Japan. He described the devastations and the sufferings brought about by the war, and urged his people to resolve to seek peace unwaveringly. Then, expressing grave concerns that the anxieties and disappointments caused by the war that had ended in defeat might lead to loss of moral principles and chaos, he went on to say:

  Nevertheless, the bonds between you, the people, and us [imperial we] are tied together from beginning to end by mutual trust, respect, and love, and are not something simply generated by myths and legends. They are not something based on the fantastical (kakūnaru) ideas that hold that the Tennō is an akitsumikami, that the Japanese are a race superior to others, and that, therefore, they possess the destiny to rule the world.

  The Tennō ended by urging his people to strive mightily to contribute to mankind’s welfare and improvement. What is notable is the proportion of the part about akitsumikami: it took up just one eighth of the whole at most. It is revealing, indeed, that, even as the foreign press such as the New York Times took the “renunciation of divinity” as the focal point of the rescript as the Occupation had intended
, the headlines of the domestic dailies such as the Asahi and Mainichi made no mention of the “divinity” part of it. Apparently, most Japanese never believed the Tennō to be a god or deity—at least in the Western sense. They knew that the Tennō’s role and position were “twisted by military chauvinists to support their propaganda” and that the “notions of national and especially Imperial superiority due to divine descent” were “false,” as Harold G. Henderson, who became a conduit in delivering the Occupation’s wishes to the Imperial household, put it. Shillony’s observation was even more succinct. The “human” question “did not cause any sensation, because it stated the obvious.”45

  The question that remains is whether the Tennō wanted to renounce his being as akitsumikami as the term might have been understood as it came into being in ancient Japan. The usual translation, be it “deity incarnate” or “living god,” is woefully inadequate. As Sansom observed, the word kami “carries the general sense of ‘upper’ or ‘superior,’ and a thing or person is called kami if it is felt to possess some superior quality or power. The same idea is expressed in Polynesian countries by the term mana. . . . The same or a similar idea appears in Roman beliefs, where the special quality is called numen.” In other words, the Judeo-Christian concept of “god” or “deity” is misleading if applied to kami.46

  As pertinent, if we are to accept the interpretation of the folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu, for the Tennō to renounce his being as akitsumikami would have meant to renounce his social and religious raison d’être. Orikuchi defined the original role of the Tennō as a medium and servant of the amatsukami, “kami of heaven,” and his or her task as that of making sure that all the people of the land are adequately fed. In offering this explanation, Orikuchi added—at a time when chauvinistic and expansionist sentiments on the pretext of Japan’s Tennō system were going out of control—that the Tennō “doesn’t think of things like making a piece of land his own or expanding territory.”47

  Thirty-one years later, in 1977, in a rare news conference, a reporter asked His Majesty if it was true that, as various accounts had made clear by then, it was on his initiative that the Charter Oath was placed at the outset of “the declaration of humanity.” In response, Hirohito said: “The primary purpose of that declaration” was to remind the Japanese people of the Charter Oath. “The divine status (shinkaku) and such were of a secondary question.” He went on to explain: “At the time America and other foreign nations were so powerful that there was concern that they might overwhelm Japan.” America’s stated goal of occupying Japan was to bring democracy to Japan. But it was “Meiji the Great” who “adopted democracy,” His Majesty said, and the Charter Oath embodied it. He thought “there was great need to show that democracy was not something imported.”

  In Japanese journalism, questions and answers are seldom printed verbatim as they are most often summaries, with inconvenient words and phrases dropped or changed. One can never be sure of what the quoted person said exactly. But, as far as the news conference as reported by the Asahi Shinbun on August 24, 1977, is concerned, the reporter did not ask what “the declaration of humanity” actually meant to Hirohito, and Hirohito did not say anything about that part of the rescript. However, in responding to a later question on how His and Her Majesties spent their leisure time, he clearly stated they were “human beings,” suggesting that declaring himself to be human was utterly unnecessary.48

  The matter, in truth, goes back at least to the aforementioned controversy over the Constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsukichi’s “Tennō as a state organ” theory. In February 1935, the rightwing member of the House of Peers Lt. Gen. (retired) Kikuchi Takeo ferociously attacked Minobe, another member of the House, on his theory, calling him a “rebel,” “traitor,” and “warped scholar.” Minobe’s hour-long speech in rebuttal a week later was clear and detailed, and Kikuchi, who was no scholar, Constitutional or otherwise, is said to have been utterly impressed. Yet Kikuchi’s original accusations inflamed the diehard elements of the rightwing.

  During this controversy, it was the prosecutor of Hiraoka Sadatarō in his political scandal two decades earlier who tried to defend Minobe: Ohara Naoshi. Ohara, who became justice minister, in 1935, rode out the chauvinistic irrationality of the day by resisting the demand to indict Minobe on charges of lèse majesté because of his theory. Still, the enormous pressure forced Minobe to resign from the House of Peers. The following year he was shot by a rightwing thug and seriously wounded.

  The irony in all this was that the Tennō, who had a firm grasp of the origins of the Meiji Constitution, completely agreed with Minobe’s theory, though necessarily in private, pointing out that it was based on the Austrian legal philosopher Georg Jellinek’s argument.49

  As the Tennō recalled in his “monologue” recorded in the spring of 1946, but which did not come to light until 1990, he said he had explained the theory by comparing the national polity to the human body and also had his understanding conveyed to Inspector-General of Military Education Mazaki Jinzaburō. He was told that Mazaki “understood” His Majesty’s stance on the matter. Nevertheless, just a year later Mazaki would emerge as the spiritual leader of the February 26 Incident. We will look at the incident in Chapter Sixteen, but it was largely based on the belief that the Tennō was not a mere “organ of the state.”

  As to his understanding of his kami status, the Tennō recalled in the same “monologue” that, once when his aide-de-camp suggested that he was a divine person, he told him: “I have the same body structure as an ordinary human being, so I am not a deity; such talk troubles me.”50 The word the Tennō cited—as perhaps coming from the then aide-de-camp Honjō Shigeru or Usami Okiie—was arakami, which is the same as arahitogami and akitsumikami. But no matter. He was after all a biologist by training and in accomplishment.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  To Be a Bureaucrat or a Writer

  “Minus 150 points.”

  —Nakamura Mitsuo on Mishima’s story

  In early 1946 Mishima took several manuscripts, including “A Tale at the Cape” (Misaki nite no monogatari), to Chikuma Shobō. The publisher, which had absorbed Shichijō Shoin soon after the publication of The Forest in Full Bloom, had just launched a new literary magazine, Tenbō. Usui Yoshimi, the magazine’s editor and a man of considerable literary repute, was impressed to read what Mishima brought. He thought Mishima was “a kind of genius” and, even though he found his writings not to his taste, thought of accepting one of the stories, “The Medieval Period.”

  Written in taut, condensed language at times suggestive of kanbuntai, a style created in imitation of a straightforward translation of classical Chinese, and with elaborate imagery, the story tells, in eight short chapters, of the aftermath of the premature death of the ninth Ashikaga shogun Yoshihisa (1465–89): the grief of his old father, the eighth shogun Yoshimasa, the man’s dalliance with a young medium he summons to conjure his dead son, and an old Zen master’s dalliance with a young male dancer, once Yoshihisa’s lover. But, when asked for his opinion, Nakamura Mitsuo, one of the founders of Tenbō and Chikuma’s advisor who had studied in France before the war at the French government’s invitation, returned the story to Usui, with a curt note, “minus 150 points.”

  This anecdote came out in a taidan, “dialogue,”1 between Usui and Nakamura in 1952, and Mishima enjoyed recounting the episode later. But at the time, Nakamura’s rejection came as another blow to the young man who, having survived the war in which he had expected to die one way or another, was under serious stress: He had to alter his way of thinking altogether or else.2 He was forced to realize that all the accolades his admirers had given The Forest in Full Bloom had come to naught. As Usui pointed out years later, Nakamura went on to become the self-appointed “chairman of the PTA for Mishima,” but in the years immediately following the war he did not see anything good in Mishima’s writings.3

  Mishima was under pressure. Unless he established himself as a credible writer soon, he w
ould have no choice but to follow the route Azusa had prescribed for him: to take the higher civil service examination and live the rest of his life as a bureaucrat. (Within a few years, government reforms pushed by the Occupation would greatly reduce the salaries of elite bureaucrats, though not much of their power.) Yet the prospects for young men to make it in the literary world seemed almost insurmountable—even for someone like Mishima, a rising star at the end of the war. “At the time, new magazines sprouted one after another, but most were eager to seek manuscripts from established authors; the times weren’t settled enough for them to actively look for new writers,” Mishima recalled. “The works of great writers such as [Nagai] Kafū and [Masamune] Hakuchō were causing people to swoon with fresh charm as might”—and here a very Japanese analogy—“a fancy dinner with pure rice offered for the first time in a long while.”4

  The title Mishima thought up when, earlier, in January, a friend from the Peers School, Saitō Yoshirō, offered to arrange the publication of his poems in book form, may have reflected the state of his mind. “I’ve even come to think of giving this book of poetry the name Hōjō no umi, the name of the waterless sea in the bleak lunar world, the name that symbolizes the external surface of illusory luminance and the reality of total darkness, the brilliant illusion of life and the substance of death,” Mishima responded.5 The book was not published, but Hōjō no umi, “The Sea of Fertility,” would become the title of Mishima’s final work, the tetralogy he finished shortly before his death.