by Hiroaki Sato
That fall, when Screams of Heroic Souls came out, Funasaka Hiroshi told Mishima he’d like to give him a sword as a token of gratitude. He collected swords. Mishima declined a number of times but Funasaka persisted, and finally managed to invite him to his house. When he took out two swords of Seki no Magoroku make, Mishima examined them according to form. He became mesmerized.
Seki no Magoroku refers to the generations of swordsmiths of Seki, in Mino (today’s Gifu), from the early sixteenth century onward. The swords made by the first generation, Kaneko Magoroku Kanemoto, and the second are highly prized. The two Funasaka showed Mishima—one, 2.34 feet long, the other a littler shorter—were of later generations, but both were certified as “very valuable.” In the end Mishima accepted the longer one. Its cutting edge was chipped a little near the swordguard, suggesting its use in actual combat.43 He later turned it into a guntō, “military sword,” to be carried à la saber. It was this sword that he took to the Eastern Ground Self-Defense Force Headquarters, on November 25, 1970.
Nakamura Taisaburō, who owned the sword before selling it to Funasaka, was the “supreme master” of the Toyama School of iaidō that was developed by the Japanese Army in the 1920s by combining the expertise of several schools for modern hand-to-hand combat. The school almost died out with the demise of the army. After the Self-Defense Forces came into being, however, some took it up, thereby reviving it.
Nakamura taught Mishima kendō a few times, but it was with Funasaka’s son, Yoshio, of the Ōmori School, that Mishima studied iaidō—which, Funasaka stressed, entails the move for kaishaku, seconding someone disemboweling himself to behead him, an act “indispensable to the last moment of a samurai.” Of the twelve forms that make up the Ōmori School iaidō, the seventh was kaishaku, and Mishima was particularly intent on mastering it, Yoshio recalled. In the spring of 1967, when he took a demonstration test after a year’s training and was accorded one dan, Mishima, ever a man of perfect manners, sent Yoshio a present of expensive fabric from Eikoku-ya, “the English Shop,” of the Ginza.
Funasaka would later be chagrined to reflect that he, the father, gave Mishima a sword and, Yoshio, the son, taught him how to use it to have himself beheaded.44
Mishima and Kendō
This may be a good place to see how well Mishima did in the sports he took up.
In kendō he was initially regarded as too clumsy, and he never seems to have attained agility. His wrists were too stiff, either innately, from writing constantly, weightlifting, or for some other reason, and he was unable to correct the problem.45 As a result, he never learned to move quickly enough to hit the opponent’s wrist. But he made steady progress in acquiring dan. He was awarded one dan in April 1961, two in 1963, four in May 1966, and five in August 1968. When the International Kendō Championship was held in April 1969, he took part in it. He had a draw with a kendōka from Taiwan.
Mishima started training in iaidō, the art of drawing the sword in a sitting position, in November 1966, and was awarded one dan in February 1967, two in December 1969. He began karate in February 1967 and was awarded one dan in June 1970. In these sports the greater the number of dan, the higher the rank. The ranks range from one to ten, eight to ten being honorary.
Still, awarding dan in these sports, unlike measuring the time required to run a certain distance or the amount of weight lifted, is subjective. As a result, the suspicion persisted that Mishima got all the dan as “honorary” or celebrity privilege. Shiine Yamato, the brash twentysix-year-old when assigned to the irreverant weekly Heibon Punch in the spring of 1968, decided to find out. He interviewed the kendōka who actually had faced Mishima in practice and training sessions, starting with Yoshikawa Masami, the seven-dan police instructor whom Mishima admired and followed wherever he could. But no one seemed willing to give a straight answer, until an instructor at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department who also held seven dan, said, “It’s not whether Mr. Mishima is good at it or not; his is a spiritually strong ‘sword style.’ He grasps the essence of the matter. He will be real fivedan in three years. Spiritually, he’s more than five-dan, though.”
As soon as the issue of the weekly came out with his article with the heading, “A Real Five-dan in Three Years,” Shiine had a phone call from Mishima. He expected fully to receive a tongue-lashing. Instead, Mishima, without saying a word on the article, suggested he train in kendō with him. So Shiine ended up doing just that, buying all the necessary kendō gear and training with him.46
Some years later and in a different setting, one blunt answer came from Mishima’s former upperclassman at Peers School, then director of New Year’s Tanka Recitation at the Imperial Palace: Akita Kazusue. A natural at kendō while a student who later headed his alma mater’s Kendō Club, he was also an important figure in the publishing field and a friend of Mishima’s. After Mishima’s death, Bōjō Toshitami had occasion to ask him, “Wasn’t Mishima clumsy at kendō?” Akita was tall, skinny, and dark, yet was apparently the model for the kendō instructor in Mishima’s short story, “The Sword,” who looks exactly the opposite. He answered: “That’s an understatement. I wouldn’t give him one dan, let alone three, I told him.”
At that, Bōjō had an epiphany: Mishima chose certain sports to pursue, knowing full well he was clumsy at them. That was his way of facing the world.47
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“The Way of the Warrior is to die”
Death can become an object of blind ardor, of a hunger like that of love . . . this unsung battle against emptiness, barrenness, fatigue, and the disgust for existing which brings on a craving for death.
—Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
On the “dark, rainy, wintry afternoon,” of December 19, 1966, just after he finished writing the first installment of The Runaway Horse, Mishima had what would prove to be a fateful visit—“an incident that caused a revolutionary change” in him or, as he put it to Kojima Chikako, the Shinchō editor assigned to him: “It’s, like, scary. What you’ve written as fiction emerges as fact. Or, the other way round: fact sometimes precedes fiction.”1
The visitor was a young man who came to see him through Hayashi Fusao’s introduction: Bandai Kiyoshi. Bandai was on the editorial staff of the new Ronsō Journal, “controversy journal.” He, along with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Nakatsuji Kazuhiko, had found employment after graduating from Meiji Gakuin University, but both had soon quit, hoping to start a magazine for the Minzoku-ha. This school of thought had newly emerged out of minzokushugi, “nationalism,”2 but had a strong dose of antimodern sentiments, with an affinity to kōkoku shikan, which interprets Japanese history with the Tennō as its center.
Nakatsuji and Bandai, who wanted their magazine to be a vehicle for views that, while based on Hiraizumi’s stance, went beyond it—views conveying “sound conservatism,” as they put it—sought and found a sponsor for their publishing venture. But all the contributors they had been able to recruit till then were minor writers who were known for their patently “hawkish” views but little else. They wanted a contributor of considerable repute who would appeal to the general reader. By then the American terms “hawks” and “doves” had become part of Japanese political jargon.
At the time, students movements were dominated by leftists. Many who took part in them or were sympathetic to them included the bright, articulate, and well read. They could sprinkle their arguments not just with quotations from Marx and Lenin, but also with references to modern European writers such as Sartre and Camus, even Radiguet. The students of rightist inclinations, in contrast, tended to be less articulate, unable as they were to cite a range of thinkers freely, let alone foreign ones, and they were afraid that, even if they tried to do so, they would lose in debate with those of leftist leanings.
But it was Bandai’s very inarticulateness that stirred Mishima as no other young man ever had. As he heard the laconic young man explain, haltingly, how he found some likeminded young men who agreed to do someth
ing about the need to “rectify the distortions in Japan” but were struggling, Mishima found himself “moved”—was surprised at himself reacting in such fashion, far more than by what Bandai had to say, as he wrote for the Ronsō Journal ten months after their encounter.3 He saw in Bandai a phantom of the Shinpūren. He promised the visitor he would do whatever he could for the journal. And he did, beginning with the magazine’s inaugural January 1967 issue.
Still, it was not Bandai but another young man who, encouraged by Bandai, came to see him, that would play a crucial role in helping Mishima create his own version of the Shinpūren, Tate no Kai, “the Shield Society”:4 Mochimaru Hiroshi. A student at Waseda University, Mochimaru was executive director of the Japanese Students Alliance—Nihon Gakusei Dōmei or Nichigakudō, for short—only recently formed out of frustration with the leftist domination of student bodies or, as its founders put it, for “the normalization of Waseda.”
The formation of Nichigakudō had strong backing from Waseda’s Oratorical Society, some of whose members would go on to occupy prominent positions in the Liberal Democratic Party. Among them were three prime ministers: Kaifu Toshiki, 1989–1990; Obuchi Keizō, 1998-2000; and Mori Yoshirō, April to July 2000. One might add to the list Tamazawa Tokuichirō, director-general of the Defense Agency, 1994–95. This indicates the existence of a strong conservative current despite the outward dominance of radical students in those years.
Mochimaru, at any rate, was planning to launch a student paper for the Minzoku-ha. Unlike Bandai, he had leadership qualities, an ability to express himself logically, articulately, and an ability to organize things and execute plans effectively. He would go on to become Mishima’s informal aide-de-camp.
Mishima contributed a congratulatory article, “For the True Voice of Youth,” to the inaugural issue of Mochimaru’s Nihon Gakusei Shinbun that came out in February 1967. In it, though, he had to add a writerly point: “The abstruseness of the prose of student newspapers utterly confounds me. Their prose is difficult to understand not because it is profound. Its difficulty results from people writing things they don’t understand, feigning they do. I want you to talk only about the thought you have firmly grasped with your hands, in lucid words, in clear language. Prose so written is the true ‘voice of youth.’”5
In April 1967 Mishima had yet another occasion to deal with “heroic souls.” For a new recording company’s venture called Poemusica, he recited a poem accompanied by music.6 The poem, Heaven and the Sea: Seventy-Two Chapters Dedicated to the Heroic Souls, was by Asano Akira, and the music by Yamamoto Naozumi. Asano, a survivor of the Battle of Sunda Strait, in 1942,7 wrote the elegy, a sequence in simple words and images, for all the Japanese soldiers killed in subsequent battles in the South Seas. Mishima called it, with more than a touch of hyperbole, “a lyric that is at the same time an epic, a single poet’s work that is at the same time a national work, a modern poem that is a classic poem that immediately leads to the Man’yōshū,” which, with “the enormity of its ability to move you and in the depth of its lamentation, matches Greek tragedies, for example, Aeschylus’s The Persians.”8
Three years earlier, Mishima had taken up Asano’s 1963 book of poetry Cold Color (Kanshoku), the winner of the Yomiuri Bungaku Prize, while serializing his observations on various arts in Geijutsu Seikatsu, and praised its beauty as lying in expressing “fury cleansed of all political character.”9 Like many bright young men in the 1920s and 1930s, Asano had shifted his political stance. He had studied French law and public finance at the Imperial University of Tokyo and, in 1926, joined the Japan Communist Party. He almost made it as a member of its Central Committee but in 1928 was arrested and jailed, for two years. While on parole, he read Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Representation and decided to part company with Marxism. He became a follower of the Japan Romantic School and turned himself into a prolific critic advocating radical nationalism until Japan’s defeat. It was in fact while he was part of the army’s propaganda unit attached to its Expeditionary Force that his ship was sunk.
A week after the recording, Mishima began training with the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) or what would normally be called the army.
Experiencing the Military
The Self-Defense Forces (SDF) are an anomalous military. The United States famously made Japan declare, in Article 9 of the Constitution, that the country shall never maintain any “war potential.” It was a chunk of idealism dreamed up following the furies of war and imposed on a country regarded as a historical aberration, a particularly belligerent nation. Helen Mears, a member of the US labor advisory committee for Japan soon after the country’s defeat, penned a polemic against that view, Mirror for Americans: Japan, “as a full-scale critic of American policy in Asia.” The Occupation’s response was to ban the publication of its Japanese translation.10
Sure enough, the United States had to reverse its “no-war” stance in a few years and forced Japan to build armed forces, as we have seen. The result, the SDF, was not to be a military because of the Constitution. This pretense was accomplished partly by turning the Japanese word gun, meaning “military” or “armed,” into “a taboo,” as Mishima pointed out.11 Overt or covert linguistic tricks were deployed to deny the existence of anything military.
None of the terms rikugun, “army,” kaigun, “navy,” and kūgun, “air force” was employed. Instead, the three service branches were separated by the words rikujō, “ground,” kaijō, “maritime,” and kōkū, “air,” with no suggestion of “military.” The word hei, “soldier,” was shunned, too, in favor of taiin, “unit member.” The word hohei, “foot soldier,” was replaced by futsū, “regular.” Likewise, a whole new nomenclature was devised for the military ranks. These linguistic sleights-of-hand have been successful; there is an amorphous sense among the Japanese that the SDF or any of its three “defense forces” is not “military.” The SDF calls the act of any non-SDF person, such as Mishima, who join it to have a taste of it for a limited period taiken nyūtai, “joining the unit for actual experience,” not guntai taiken, “military experience.”12
Mishima had started plotting for training with the GSDF soon after his return from Kumamoto. He knew the GSDF would not easily accept his request, and pulled strings. He discussed it with an executive at Sunday Mainichi, a retired lieutenant general, and the second in command at the Defense Agency, among others.13 Itō Keiichi, then director of public affairs at the agency, recalled how Mishima’s request confounded his higher-ups.
“Almost all such requests came from companies that wanted to have their new employees experience life with us for a couple of days,” Itō said. “So we were surprised to receive a request for half a year. Those in the upper echelon said that would be too much even if they were to make an exception. In the end, the compromise was struck that we’d accept him at several bases, for the maximum of two weeks at each.” The SDF did not want to be accused of providing a training ground for revolutionists and terrorists—or rightwingers.14
So, starting on April 12, and ending on May 27, 1967, Mishima was attached to three different units: the Officer Candidate School, in Kurume, Fukuoka; the Regular Division of the Fuji School at Camp Takigahara, Shizuoka, on the outskirts of Mt. Fuji, where he took the Advanced Officer Course and trained as a ranger (the term directly adopted from the US Army); and the Parachute Division, in Narashino, Chiba.
His participation was kept secret, because, Mishima explained in his account “Actually Experiencing the SDF,”15 the Defense Agency wanted it that way while Mishima himself wanted to be exposed to military life just as it was, with no special treatment. Luckily, many of those he mingled with did not recognize him—or those who did treated him as a regular fellow. He was given no rank, so a couple of officers, apparently unaware of the arrangement, barked at him, “Where in hell is your insignia!”
In the Officer Candidate School, which combines the practices of Japan’s old Military Academy and West Point in devising tight, d
etailed schedules for each day, Mishima had a taste of standard clothes inspection. “Without advance notice, they conduct uniform inspections at morning roll call,” he wrote. “If they find something amiss, you must do ten pushups to reexamine your conduct. That’s their custom. They found one button on my chest unhooked, too, and I had to do ten pushups.”
One thing he noticed was the use of the Japanese language. The school accepts both graduates of the National Defense Academy and graduates of regular colleges. Those from regular colleges were evidently finding it hard to use the imperative mood in telling a fellow candidate to do something as required. As he heard a student inspector correct some students who had used polite language, Mishima realized how narrow the range of usage for command forms in Japanese was.
At the Fuji School, where he stayed the longest, he learned to drive a tank (though he refused to learn to drive the car he owned; his wife drove it), marched and bivouacked with soldiers of the artillery unit, took a class on tactics, and trained as a ranger.
“Tactics is the one esoteric”—his English—“field of study that has been regarded since [Japan’s] former military as that which sharply distinguishes between officer and ordinary soldier,” he wrote. “The only fields of study that have ever interested me are criminal lawsuits and tactics.” As to the training as a ranger, he was honest. “At the ‘sailor crossing’ in which you cross a valley on a single rope put up between two cliffs, with a mountain stream down below, I failed a number of times, until finally I managed to do it more or less. As these things continued, my fatigue accumulated day by day, and I began to quail, though I hate to concede defeat.” At the Parachute Division, he had permission not to do parachuting for fear of head concussion, though he jumped twice from the thirty-three-foot tower.