by Hiroaki Sato
Samurai suffered another—this one, fatal because economic—blow. The new government sharply downgraded their status first by cutting back on their entitlements, such as guaranteed income. Then, in the name of Westernization, it forbade them to carry the sword, the soul of the samurai, and ordered them to shed their traditional hairdo. Many of the samurai revolts that followed reflected outrage on their radically changed status. The Satsuma Rebellion, from February to September 1877, led by Saigō Takamori, one of the prime creators of the Meiji government, was the largest.26 The Shinpūren Revolt, in October 1876, was among the smallest but was, as noted, singular.
“The people in the important positions in the present government destroyed the Tokugawa Dynasty by advocating isolationism and expulsion of aliens,” one nationalist writer born a few years before the start of the Meiji regime summed up. “It was for that reason that the heroic men of Shinpūren sacrificed themselves, accomplishing whatever little they could.”
Yet, once those advocates took over the governance, “they in no time forgot their former words and followed the policy of opening the country far more servile than the Tokugawa government.” Even more intolerably, they were “adopting the aliens’ sartorial rules and imitating the aliens’ foods.” If such men were allowed to continue like this, “the aliens would take over the Divine Nation within ten years.”27
The 170 men who formed the group were absolute believers in the Shinto divinity of the Tennō and dedicated followers of the method of divination called ukei. Indeed, the real name of the group was Keishintō, “respect-[Shinto]-deity-faction.” Shinpūren, “men of the divine wind,” was the label they received because of the members’ excessive belief in Shinto. The label has since stuck.
These men rebelled against Westernization in no ordinary fashion. Some refused to touch the paper money the government issued as a European way of doing things; when they had to handle banknotes, they used chopsticks—as people would cremated bones. Some refused to walk under the telegraph lines as equally despicable; when they could not avoid doing so, they held up a white fan over their heads.28 The telegraph, along with the railroad and lighthouses, was one of the modern technological advances the government began to promote, in 1870, as among its top priorities in Japan’s industrialization. Some sprinkled salt, for purification, when they came across someone in Western clothes.
The divination method ukei that Ōtaguro Tomo’o, the leader of the Shinpūren, followed had ancient origins. In standard Shinto rites, the officiator sways back and forth a mitegura, a wooden stick adorned with several pieces of white paper, to call forth a deity. Ukei, in addition to the mitegura, required the use of four pieces of paper crumpled into balls and placed on a ceremonial tray: written on one of them is “yes” on the matter on which you are asking for divine judgment; on the three others, “no.” The diviner, after swaying the mitegura, lightly drags it across the tray. If the crumpled paper that sticks to the paper pieces of the mitegura says “yes,” you take the action you have in mind; if “no,” you don’t. Thus the chance of your getting “yes” is one out of four.29
Ōtaguro, the officiator at the Shingai Shrine, and his comrades, many of them the officiators of other shrines themselves, had not completely ignored rational elements. Ever since they hatched the idea of a revolt, he had conducted ukei from time to time. Once he had done so when he saw an opportunity he could not overlook. Two years earlier, in February 1874, a group of samurai in Saga had revolted and a large contingent of soldiers was dispatched from the Kumamoto Castle—the forbidding fort of the Hosokawa fiefdom that had been turned into one of the government’s outlying “pacification bases”—to suppress them, leaving only about two hundred men behind. Saga is just about fortyfour miles north of Kumamoto as the crow flies. When he heard about it, Ōtaguro took ablutions, clapped his hands, and conducted ukei. His comrades watched him closely, with bated breath. But he drew “no.” The revolt was cancelled.
When they did revolt, and mounted a night raid on the Kumamoto Castle, the men stuck to what they believed to be ancient ways. They employed only traditional weapons, such as swords, spears, and halberds. (One member suggested the use of guns but was overruled.) The two thousand soldiers guarding the fort equipped with modern weapons were taken by surprise but in no time regrouped and smashed the rebels. The ancient armor made of cloth and wood pieces that some donned, which provided little protection against arrows, was of no use. In the end 123 of them were killed or, wounded, committed suicide. Among them were teenagers.
The leader of the Saga Revolt, incidentally, was Etō Shinpei, another enabler of the Meiji Restoration who helped to establish Japan’s modern judiciary system. The central government, uneasy about the mounting discontent in Kyūshū, of which Saga is a part, reacted swiftly with an overwhelming force and quashed the revolt in no time. Etō was captured in March while fleeing, hastily tried in April, and beheaded. He was posthumously pardoned in 1919, on the occasion of the engagement of a Korean prince to a Japanese princess.
In Kumamoto lived the greatest local authority on the Shinpūren: Araki Seishi. Araki had also known Hasuda Zenmei in his youth. To meet him, Mishima asked Shimizu Fumio to write a letter of introduction.30
Araki had tried to carry out, two days after Japan surrendered, something similar to what the Shinpūren had seventy years earlier. He formed a group of about three hundred diehards that counted among them military officers, junior high school students, and housewives, named it sonnō giyūgun, “a volunteer army upholding the Tennō,” and barricaded himself with them in the Fujisaki Hachiman, Kumamoto’s main shrine. They raised a banner saying “I alone will remain unsullied in heaven and earth,” a resolve attributed to Wake no Kiyomaro, of the eighth century, when he managed to thwart a Buddhist monk’s attempt to usurp the throne. Their vow was to fight with the expected occupation forces to the last man, Deity willing.
On that occasion, Araki and Iwashita, the chief officiator of the Fujisaki Hachiman, took on the role of ascertaining the divine will. The judgment, which Araki announced with great excitement as he jumped down from the altar with foam in his mouth, turned out to be that the resistance of the kind they wanted to pursue would go against the divine will and “trouble His Majesty’s mind.” So they called it off, with only Araki and Iwashita to disembowel themselves. But the two did not carry out their own pledge, either—a turn of events that in retrospect appears more comic than tragic. (Mishima recognized it as what it was. In a letter thanking Araki later for sending him his own account of the event, he wrote he had not asked him about it earlier because he thought it would be “rude.”31)
Still, Araki had gone on to become a weighty local cultural asset whose presence was deemed indispensable to any important event, with the sobriquet “Lord Higo”—Higo being the old name of the region. He edited and published a magazine, Nihon Dangi.32 As it happened, Fukushima Jirō, fifteen years earlier a naïve university student who visited Mishima on impulse to learn the whereabouts of a gay bar described in Forbidden Colors, was now Araki’s close literary associate and a prizewinning writer. In fact, he had renewed his friendship with Mishima when he won a prize for his novel, in 1961. So it was he, with Araki, who met Mishima at Kumamoto Station, past five on the afternoon of August 27, 1966.
Mishima emerged from the train in a white half-sleeve shirt and white slacks, his head close-cropped. He looked like “a member of a high-school gymnastic team on a summer training camp.” He carried two enormous trunks. On their way to the parking lot, Fukushima offered to carry one of them, but Mishima declined, saying carrying them was good for his arms.
The three went to the hotel, named Castle, in English. Mishima chatted with Araki in the lounge, and, after Araki left, invited Fukushima to his room. He stripped down, leaving only the white fundoshi, the traditional loincloth made of a sash six feet or longer, proudly revealing a well-tanned, muscular body.33 “There was no longer a smidgen of that bodily fragility of fifteen years ago, like a b
ird trembling right after its feathers to protect its entire body have all been plucked off.” He turned his back and urged Fukushima to grab his haunch. He then told him that you had to work really hard to make your buttock muscles so firm. The two made love, but again the younger man found the result unsatisfactory.34
Fukushima remained Mishima’s companion and guide during his stay in Kumamoto, to the last day of August. If he was embarrassed to find Mishima more knowledgeable about certain specifics of his own city than he was, he was amazed that Mishima, the great celebrity who had told him that he intended to carry out this trip incognito, had some media people planted at some strategic points. He also dressed in such flashy fashion he could only attract attention in the generally staid neighborhoods of Kumamoto.35
On the evening of the second day in Kumamoto, Mishima invited Araki, along with Hasuda Zenmei’s widow, Toshiko, to an old-style restaurant. The two others he invited were Fukushima and, apparently at Araki’s suggestion, a professor who had served as one of the directors of a powerful “patriotic” speech-censorship organization in the last phase of the war.
The next day, when Araki offered to take him to the Shingai Shrine, Mishima courteously declined, saying he would like to savor quietly the nature of Kumamoto with which the Shinpūren men were familiar. This impressed Araki as much as Mishima’s erudition on the Shinpūren. During the talk at the restaurant the previous night, Araki had found that Mishima evidently had read all the books on the subject he knew, despite the self-deprecation before the meeting that he “hadn’t studied the matter well enough.”36
Ōtaguro Yasukuni, the officiator of the Shingai Shrine, remembered Mishima’s visit on August 29 very well. It was very hot, with cicadas shrilling away. Mishima, who came alone, stayed for about an hour. The shrine is a secluded island in the middle of a farmland crisscrossed by asphalt roads, with houses dotting the landscape. A number of large camphor trees five hundred years or so old block the sky, overshadowing whatever is underneath their foliage. Both the main shrine and the prayer shrine are modest. Most things appear to remain the same as they must have been when they were built in the early Edo Period.
“Mr. Mishima kept saying that the Shinpūren men were great people,” Araki later wrote. “Their way of thinking was the most Japanese in all Japan, so was their action, he said. He was drawn to the Shinpūren, he explained, because he came upon it while thinking about what in Japan might correspond to the spirit of resistance symbolized by Gandhi’s spinning wheel. He said he had to take up the group as a way of contemplating Japan.”37 Mahatma Gandhi turned to the primitive spinning wheel as a symbolic act of fighting the machine-woven clothing flooding India.
Mishima went to Kumamoto to feel what the area was like. He had formed the idea of what the Shinpūren meant to him a few months before making the trip. In a book-length, seven-part taidan with Hayashi Fusao on “the true nature of the Japanese”—the subject that perennially fascinates the Japanese—he had boiled down the question to: What can the Japanese do to fight the West without using Western weapons? His own answer: the Shinpūren. Why?
It was “the thoroughness of thought,” he explained. “When thought emerges as an action, something impure is sure to come in. Tactics are bound to come in, and with it human betrayal. . . . With the Shinpūren, it wasn’t that you could choose any means to an end, but the means was equal to the end, the end was equal to the means,” he went on.
“Everything was left to the divine will, so there could not have been any schism between the end and the means as there is in every political movement. It’s the same as form and content in art, I’d say. I think therein lay the most original, in a way, the most fanatic experiment in purity of the Japanese spirit.” In another taidan with Hayashi three years later, while discussing the differences between the modern rightwing and leftwing, Mishima asserted that what mattered was not “theory” but “sincerity.”38
Before leaving Kumamoto, Mishima purchased an old sword at an antique shop. He did not imagine he would soon receive a sword of a distinguished pedigree. He also bought twenty sword guards—apparently for his friends in kendō. He was a generous gift-giver. (For Araki, he had brought a German-made, battery-powered timepiece of ultramodern design. Shorn of decorative elements, it was about five inches in diameter and very thin and had only long and short gold-coated hands against the dark gray dial.) Back in his hotel room with Fukushima, he stripped naked, except for the white fundoshi, put on a headband, and brandished the sword intensely.39
In his letter to Araki thanking him, Mishima wrote that the “unexpected effect” of visiting Kumamoto was the discovery that the region was his “hometown as a Japanese,” even though he had no one in his family from there; he felt he had been “heimatlos for a long time.” He used the word “hometown” (furusato) in the Japanese sense of where all the sentiments and feelings that make up one’s being originate. He also wrote: “It seems to me that the Shinpūren has brought about one transformation in my intellectual history.” In his letter to him three years later, he enclosed a copy of the article he wrote on the Shinpūren at the request of the London Times.40
Out of what he learned from Araki’s writings and others on the subject, including the petition on the sword ban that Kaya Harukata wrote, which he found at a dealer of old books, Mishima wrote up a nonfiction account of the Shinpūren and inserted it into The Runaway Horse as a drama within a drama. That is the booklet entitled “The Historical Account of the Shinpūren” that Iinuma Isao recommends to the men he truly trusts. He wants to “create the Shinpūren of Shōwa.”
Not that Iinuma as a terrorist follows anything like ukei in pursuing and killing the éminence grise or “the pope” of the financial world Kurahara Busuke. When he learns from a special notice in a newspaper, “How Political and Financial Leaders Spend Their Year-End and New Year,” that Kurahara is in his villa in Atami, Iinuma decides to seize the opportunity. By then he also knows Kurahara is not the kind of man who guards his life. His action is impulsive only in so far as he heads to the financier’s villa after learning the man committed a sacrilegious act: during a Shinto rite he inadvertently sat on a mitegura.
In Kurahara Busuke, Mishima drew the essence of the bureaucratic mind, at least as it has manifested itself in Japan. In the novel he is not a bureaucrat, but when a young, feisty viscount asks him during a dinner party, “What is the people’s ultimate happiness?” Kurahara answers, “It’s the stability of the currency.” He goes on to point out: “The economy is not an eleemosynary enterprise, so we can’t help sacrificing about 10 percent of the populace. That way we can be sure to save the remaining 90 percent. If you leave them alone, 100 percent of them will happily destroy themselves.”
Ikeda Hayato, the then Prime Minister Satō Eisaku’s immediate predecessor in that position, had won notoriety for his “misstatements” not long after Japan’s defeat. In one, he suggested that the poor should be content to eat wheat—in a country where wheat is considered much inferior to rice. He was then serving both as minister of international trade and industry and as minister of finance, and the statement created an uproar. In another, he stated that in an economic readjustment you couldn’t avoid some small businesses going bankrupt and some of their owners committing suicide. For this statement, he received a vote of no confidence that forced him to resign.41
Kurahara is by no means a coldhearted man, as Mishima takes care to depict. He is merely insightful and influential in economic matters. It is for that very reason, however, that the simpleminded, hot-blooded Iinuma regards him as the source of all social ills. Still, Iinuma’s aim lies elsewhere. A university student accomplished in kendō, Iinuma insists that the Shinpūren revolt was not a failure when Lt. Hori, the army officer he admires, suggests it was. When Hori asks, “Well, then, what is your faith?” Iinuma does not hesitate but says simply: “The sword.” Hori asks, “All right. Let me ask you, then. What do you desire the most?” Iinuma hesitates somewhat, but says: “The su
n . . . at sunup, at the top of a cliff, looking at the rising sun . . . looking down at the brilliant sea, by the trunk of a noble pine tree . . . to kill myself with a sword.”
That is what he does as soon as he assassinates Kurahara, though he does so in the darkness of the moonless night, not at sunup as he had hoped it would be.
Late that fall Mishima received a letter from a man identifying himself as a former officer in the army medical corps who examined the corpses of Lt. Aoshima Kenkichi and his wife after they killed themselves, during the 2.26 Incident. The letter-writer, Kawaguchi Ryōhei, said he decided to write because he had just read “Yūkoku.” “Having little medical knowledge,” Mishima promptly wrote back, “I had a hard time describing the lieutenant’s death in my story “Yūkoku.” To prepare for revision in the future, I would greatly profit should you be kind enough to write down for me the detailed clinical process to death after the seppuku you inspected, as well as the manifestations of pain.”42 Kawaguchi gave a detailed response; soon after Mishima’s death, he published an article in a magazine, “I Taught Mishima How to Do Seppuku.”
Mishima wrote Kawaguchi on November 1. On November 11, the Tennō and his spouse held a garden party. Mishima and Yōko were among the guests. If he had an opportunity to speak to the Tennō, Mishima does not seem to have left any writing on it.
For a month starting on November 19, Mishima’s stage extravaganza The Arabian Nights was produced at the Nissay Theatre. Kitaōji Kin’ya, who had just debuted as a film actor and the second son of the good-looking kabuki-actor-turned film actor Ichikawa Utaemon, played the lead role of Sindbad. Mishima appeared on the stage as “the poet’s slave” a couple of times. Mishima would write The Terrace of the Leper King, based on the Cambodian king Jayavarman VII, with Kitaōji in mind. His youth and beauty impressed him.