Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  As the voices of lamentation and remonstration continue, the medium begins to be pushed around by unseen hands, violently—“a horrifying spectacle.” He then begins his last “song.” The souls of the Kamikaze pilots say everything was all right: Japan’s defeat, farmland reforms and socialist measures under the Occupation, and so forth, except one thing: “Your Majesty should not have said you were a human being.”

  Had Your Majesty wrapped your holy body in ritual garb, night and day blurred, in the innermost part of the Court, prostrate before the souls of your Imperial Ancestors, performing rites for the souls of those who died for you, The Deity,

  simply purifying yourself, praying,

  how venerable you might have been.

  Why did Your Majesty become a human being?

  Why did Your Majesty become a human being?

  Why did Your Majesty become a human being?6

  As the medium repeats the refrain, clapping his hands, his clapping grows irregular and his voice trails off, becoming almost inaudible, until he falls backward, lies supine, motionless. The blind young man is found dead, his face no longer his, but one “transformed into the amorphous face of someone, someone you cannot tell who.”

  Mishima wrote he began seriously looking into the 2.26 Incident, along with Kamikaze pilots, as his preparations for The Runaway Horse (Honba),7 the second of the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, got under way. The story was to deal with the nationalistic movement preceding the uprising, but he found the Tennō system intractably “lying at the rock bottom of it all.”

  The reaction to “The Heroic Souls” was considerable. The refrain conjured up, in a journalist, the bizarre image of “a blood-dripping knife pressed onto the Tennō’s chest.”8 When Sunday Mainichi interviewed him on the work, Mishima insisted that the motive of the young officers who rose up on February 26, 1936, was “pure” as they believed they were “saving the country.” The Tennō was to blame for branding them as “rebels,” even though it may have been the result of “the scheming of the old counselors who surrounded him, who were cowardly, timid, and shrewd,” he said, adding, “So as to remove the stigma from the surviving families at least, His Majesty should send them an Imperial Messenger” to apologize “as soon as possible.”

  As agrarianism inevitably moves to capitalism, feudalism to modern industrialism, “love” (ai) between two parties, without a third party or “medium,” becomes more and more unattainable, leading to D. H. Lawrence’s “agnosticism of love,” Mishima argued. In Japan, that third party forming the apex in that triangular relationship was the Tennō or deity born of agrarianism. He was, yes, definitely for the Tennō system.9

  Screams of Heroic Souls

  With “ The Heroic Souls” soon to appear in Bungei (in its June issue), Mishima was surprised to be asked, after kendō practice one day, to read a manuscript titled Screams of Heroic Souls (Eirei no zekkyō). Funasaka Hiroshi, who asked him to read it, was one of his “seniors” in the dōjō, whom Mishima had known for twenty years. He owned Taiseidō Shoten, a bookstore he had frequented since junior high school when Funasaka’s father ran it.

  Mishima knew Funasaka was passionate about kendō and encouraged his employees to take it up. But he had not thought that the man—a burly kendōka with “a physique like a heavy tank,” who was “extremely polite and deferential,” yet highly competitive, a man of “straightforward seriousness coupled with perseverance”—would also write. The coincidental title prompted Mishima to start reading the manuscript on the spot even though it was bulky with twelve hundred pages. Some moments later, he asked if he could keep it for a while. Funasaka, who had brought it with much hesitation and trepidation—he had seen enough people approach the celebrity author with the same purpose, only to be spurned out of hand—could not believe his luck.

  Mishima brought the manuscript back a week later with many notations. He told Funasaka it would make a great book, and asked him to show him the first galley. Funasaka, who had never written a book, eagerly incorporated Mishima’s suggestions, which included deletion of a great many paragraphs that reduced the size of the manuscript to one third of the original. Bungei Shunjū accepted the result. When Funasaka showed him the galley, Mishima brought it back to the dōjō a week later, again. To Funasaka’s consternation and gratitude, the galley came back with a heartfelt, revelatory preface.10

  Funasaka was an improbable survivor of the Battle of Angaur (Ngeaur), which took place from September to October 1944. The battle on the tiny island—its area is three square miles—tends to be overshadowed by that on Peleliu (Beliliou), a larger coral island six miles to the north, though its area is still a mere five square miles. Angaur and Peleliu are just two of the more than two hundred islands that make up the Palau Archipelago. Both battles were what Mishima called in his German concoction Vernichteter Kampf,11 though many others in the Pacific could be so characterized, including the last and largest, the Battle of Okinawa.

  Some American historians have questioned whether the Battle of Iwo Jima, another battle of annihilation, was necessary. The Palau part of the US Mariana and Palau Campaign was definitely not.

  “Many believed after the battle—and still believe today—that the United States didn’t need to fight it as a prerequisite to General Mac-Arthur’s return to the Philippines,” E. B. Sledge, who took part in the Peleliu Battle as a twenty-one-year-old US marine, noted in his account of his experience years later.12 Or, as a chronicler of the Pacific War wrote, it was “the one operation [the Joint Chiefs] had failed to cancel,” because Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Ocean Areas, insisted on it.13 In any event, it turned into “the toughest battle of the entire Pacific war,” according to Maj. Gen. (and later Gen.) Roy S. Geiger, who commanded the III Amphibious Corps, “the most vicious and stubbornly contested battle of the war,” according to Gen. Clifton B. Cates, who also commanded the Marine Corps.

  “Most of the enemy garrison on Peleliu died,” Sledge wrote. “Only a few were captured. Estimates as to the exact losses by the Japanese vary somewhat, but conservatively, 10,900 Japanese soldiers died and 302 became prisoners. Of the prisoners only seven were soldiers and twelve sailors. The remainder were laborers of other oriental extractions.”14

  The Angaur battle was smaller in scale, but no less annihilative. All the 1,286 men of the Japanese garrison (1,100 soldiers plus 186 islanders) were killed except for 36, who were taken prisoner, Funasaka among them. And how Funasaka fought! Part of the elite regiment of the Kwangtung Army uprooted from Manchuria and moved to Angaur earlier that year, Funasaka, a twenty-four-year-old sergeant, kept fighting even after the wound on his left thigh nearly put him out of action, on “a battlefield without water or food.” With several more serious wounds, and with most of his comrades dead or dying, he managed to crawl close to the enemy camp, with the intent of destroying the command post with hand grenades. Only then was he spotted and shot down. When he came to, three days later, it was in the enemy field hospital on Peleliu. (By coincidence, Sledge’s primary weapon was a 60mm mortar; Funasaka’s was a simplified or primitive mortar.)

  Altogether he had suffered twenty-three wounds all over his body. To name only the more serious, in addition to the “laceration on his left femoral region,” his first wound, and “the bullet wound on the cul-desac on the left side of his neck” that finally felled him, he had “two penetrating bullet wounds on his left upper arm, head concussion, sprained left shoulder, bullet wound in the cul-de-sac of the left side of his abdomen.” Years later, Robert E. Taylor, a US marine who took part in the battle, but by then a professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote Funasaka a letter: “We cannot forget your brave actions at the time. All Japanese will forever be proud of you.”15

  Screams of Heroic Souls was “neither a novel nor a literary work nor a so-called document, but simply something that has given flesh to a scream”—a scream of someone who felt, “Those heroic souls have allowed me to live as their rapporteur,”
Mishima wrote in his preface. To him Funasaka, who may have killed or wounded as many as two hundred American soldiers, including three he felled with a sword, was the very embodiment of “the truth of bravery and decisiveness.”16

  In an important way, indeed, Mishima’s advice that Funasaka shorten his manuscript to one third of the original may have gone against Funasaka’s original intent even as it turned it into a highly readable account of a diehard’s bravery and fortitude. Funasaka’s purpose of writing a twelve-hundred-page narrative—extracted from three thousand pages of notes he had made from interviews with thirty survivors and surviving families, not just battle documents—was to convey the “screams” of all those soldiers who were vanquished in the face of an enemy force twenty times as large with unimaginable firepower.

  Funasaka went on to write several books on Palau battles, giving one of them, published in 1977, the title There Was No Great Principle on the Island of a ‘Shattering-Like-a-Jewel’ Battle.17 It was a strong negation of the rightwing militarists’ insistence during the war that fighting and dying for the Tennō entailed the taigi, and that for an entire fighting unit, the larger the better, “shattering like a jewel” was the most glorious manifestation of it. The account, which was renamed Secret: A Record of a Palau Battle (Hiwa Palau senki) when it was reprinted in 2000, with the original title shunted into a subtitle, concerns 2nd Lt. Takagaki Kanji who led a sword-wielding commando unit to Garagon (Ngarchelong) Island, at the northern tip of Babeldaob, and was killed, but whose death was erased from the war records because his action was judged not to have occurred in an officially commendable fashion.

  In June, the film He, The Complicated One (Fukuzatsuna kare) opened. It was based on Mishima’s novel of the same title serialized in the women’s weekly Josei Seven, which was, in turn, based on the life of Abe Jōji. Mishima had become acquainted with Abe around 1953 when Abe, a member of the yakuza group Andō Gumi, was working as a bouncer at a gay bar. It was largely because he was impressed by Abe’s handling of a drunken gaijin that Mishima took up boxing when he thought he was ready. He decided he was unfit for the sport and gave it up after about a year, but he kept in touch with Abe. When Abe had the opportunity to write an afterword to Mishima’s novel, the erstwhile bouncer wrote he was surprised to see himself accurately described, up to the age of twenty-seven, though some details were Mishima’s concoctions. For example, the protagonist of the novel, Miyagi Jōji, is an airline steward popular among his female coworkers, and his uniform hides fabulous tattoos on his body. He was indeed an airline steward and, yes, he was popular among women, but he did not have tattoos.

  Mishima adored yakuza. And the Andō Gumi, during its existence, had attracted a good deal of attention because its members were all stylishly dressed in gray suits and many in its top ranks were college graduates. Andō Noboru, who founded it in 1952, was not one, but he was a good-looking man and a surviving Kamikaze pilot to boot. After disbanding his group twelve years after founding it, he went on to become a popular actor and singer. In that regard, he may have benefited from a film which was based on his erstwhile henchman’s life. Abe Jōji himself established his own career as a popular author.

  One thing Abe recalled after Mishima’s death was Mishima’s phone call the night before, asking him to finish his bottle of liquor reserved at Club Misty, in Roppongi. Mishima had followed the custom known as “bottle keep.” A customer has the bar he frequents keep a bottle of liquor, preferably of an expensive brand, with his name tag, for a certain period of time. The bar in Roppongi was one of the places where Mishima had kept such a bottle. As Abe recalled, the brief conversation ended like this.

  “It must be brandy or whisky, sir. It won’t go bad if left alone. Are you going on a long trip?”

  “Yeah, I am.”18

  On the last day of that month, Mishima went to see The Beatles perform at the Budōkan, a large building for “martial arts” as the name says, and was flabbergasted to witness the reality of “Beatle mania.” A large contingent of policemen had been readied for the event, including those positioned to line the inner walls of the ground floor of the building where no one was allowed to enter. The stage atop the triple-story platform was so far from where he was seated, in the third row on the second floor, that it would have required the kind of rocket that 007 carried on his back to get near the singers, Mishima mused. It was “the worst stage construction imaginable.”

  The frenzied screams that started as soon as The Beatles began to sing were such that they drowned out most everything. The only snatch of song he could hear was the word “yesterday.” Watching young women screaming and blubbering, he thought: “These girls, unlike me, came here after going through the dormant period and the early symptoms of Beatle mania in order to have the final, severe paroxysms, so their mental preparedness is different.”

  “I apologize for bringing in the devout Buddhists in Vietnam for comparison,” he went on with deliberate irreverence, “but these girls have come here, as it were, to have a party to set themselves on fire to commit suicide: before coming here, they pour oil on themselves, soak their bodies in it adequately, and the moment they see the time is right, strike a match themselves, so they get a quick result.”

  Mishima recalled his excitement during the boxing match between Harada Masahiko and Éder Jofre, the Brazilian fighter who would attain championships in two weight classes, that he had watched just a month earlier, in the same place, and had to conclude he did not feel even one-hundredth of the excitement with The Beatles. The only thing he admired was the efficient, unobtrusive ability of the police to control crowds.19

  On July 9 and 10, he appeared as a guest in Maruyama Akihiro’s charity recital and sang a song he wrote, “The Sailor Killed by Hong Kong Flowers.” The song tells the story of a second mate who, falling in love with a pretty girl in Yokohama, botches his navigation task as a result of that infatuation. While he is suspended, a storm hits. Chagrined, he readies himself to stab the bouquet the girl gave him during a storm. The next day finds he had stabbed himself to death instead.20

  Men of the Divine Wind

  On August 28, two months after the “2.26 Incident trilogy” appeared, Mishima went to Kumamoto to “grasp the spirit of the Shinpūren”21 whose revolt occurred there, in October 1876. In The Runaway Horse, he planned to give the pivotal role to the revolt. It was to provide the spiritual backbone to the eighteen-year-old terrorist Iinuma Isao, the protagonist of the second volume in the tetralogy and the reincarnation of the aristocrat Matsugae Kiyoaki, the protagonist of Spring Snow. As part of his preparations for the novel, Mishima went to see the Saegusa Festival, at Isagawa Shrine, in Nara, in mid-June, and returned to the ancient city, this time with Donald Keene, to visit the Ōmiwa Shrine and stayed in the mythical compound for three nights.22 It is during the dedicatory kendō contest at the Ōmiwa Shrine that Honda Shigekuni, through whom the four novels unfold, becomes acquainted with Iinuma.

  The Shinpūren Revolt was perhaps the most singular among the samurai uprisings that occurred as the Meiji government set out to do its work.

  The movement to replace the Tokugawa shogunate with a Tennōled government came into being as a result of the convergence of two basic factors. One was the sense, which was historically always present, that the Tennō was the legitimate ruler of Japan; after all, shōgun, “general,” was the title the Tennō bestowed upon his or her top military commander, and the military houses that established government from the twelfth century onward coveted the title. The other was the anxiety over the Tokugawa shogunate’s inability to deal with the growing foreign menace as expansionist England, France, Russia, and United States reached the Japanese Archipelago.

  After Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open itself, in 1854, these two political ideals, expressed as “Revere the Tennō” and “Expel the Barbarians,” came to the fore. Naturally, two counter ideals also emerged: sabaku, “Help the Tokugawa Government,” and kaikoku, “Open the Country.” Th
ese four ideals made shifting combinations to create “a derby” among them, as Mishima jokingly put it,23 producing some ironic results. In the end, those who advocated restoring the Tennō as ruler and opening the country won.

  But the new, Meiji regime born as a result took some missteps. One that would lead to the Shinpūren Revolt was a double policy reversal. On the day it issued the Charter Oath, with the last of its five articles urging the people to seek knowledge throughout the world, the new regime reinstituted the strict ban on Christianity, the one international policy, as it were, that the isolationist Tokugawa shogunate had rigorously enforced until it abolished it in 1857, three years after the agreement with the American emissary, Matthew Perry.

  At about the same time, it put Shinto at the top of governance; like Christianity it was a heresy to the Confucian Tokugawa shogunate that had officially regarded Shintoism as no more than a mumbo-jumbo concocted by Urabe (Yoshida) Kanetomo (1435–1511).24

  These developments were glad tidings to those who yearned to return to the classical era when pristine Shinto was imagined to have prevailed. But the government soon abandoned the two measures, the one on Christianity because of foreign pressure, the one on Shinto because of its incompatibility with the urgent need to import and adopt modern technologies. The reversal was naturally a crushing blow to fervent believers in classicism, many of them samurai.25