by Hiroaki Sato
At the “mammoth school,” he found that, “by some strange fate,” the barracks were exactly the ones where he had stayed during the school field maneuvers more than two dozen years earlier. But there were differences. “Since the US Army used them, the walls were all painted green, and flush toilets were installed, so there was none of the toilet smell that had once pervaded the place all day. There was also no hint of bedbugs, several of which used to sprinkle down from your pillow when you shook it.”
Out on the maneuvering grounds one day, he thought he recognized a friend. “In the field that developed a Renaissance-style landscape as the evening settled in . . . I saw a farmer sowing seeds from time to time, indifferently. I felt he was Mr. Fukazawa Shichirō. He works as a peasant, I’m walking nearby in steel helmet. Though both are in temporary costumes, now a thousand miles separate us!”
Even for someone who follows a more or less standard daily routine, it would be hard to go through the kind of physical training to which Mishima was subjected. But Mishima was a writer with a socially and artistically dizzying schedule, who, in addition, followed the daily regimen of writing and reading from around midnight to the crack of dawn, sleeping until past noon, then going out to fulfill social, literary, athletic, and other engagements—or just to enjoy himself. Reversing this upside-down day-and-night routine alone could have brought on debilitating fatigue to a young healthy man. He was forty-two years old.
For all that, Mishima managed, without much difficulty, though with occasional permission not to do certain things and to take occasional breaks (“celebrity privileges”), to complete a well-organized program apparently made to show “all about the SDF”—or at least the GSDF part of it. The choice of that branch was his own. If Japan were attacked, it would be the one to play the most important role, he reasoned.
The Soldier Who Has Come Home
While Mishima was “actually experiencing” the GSDF, the weekly Heibon Punch conducted a six-week-long popularity contest, “All Japan Mr. Dandy,” among its readers, estimated to reach eight hundred thousand. In its May 8 issue the weekly published the result: Mishima was Number One, followed by the actor Mifune Toshirō, the film director Itami Jūzō, Ishihara Shintarō, the actor Kayama Yūzō, and so forth. Commenting on the result, Mushiake Aromu said: “Yukio Mishima has said, ‘I don’t want to be a dandy, and I don’t think I am one, either.’ But he got the highest vote. . . . This is ironic. This is exciting.”16
Mishima’s “secret” participation in military training was treated as a sensation when it came to light. The weekly Sunday Mainichi, an executive of whose publisher had an important hand in arranging it, naturally allocated an exceptional spread of eight pages to Mishima’s own account, in its June 11 issue, and a series of questions and answers between its top-of-the-line journalist Tokuoka Takao and Mishima. The industrial daily Nihon Sangyō Shinbun and the weekly Shinchō each got some crumbs, the former a short one in which Mishima voiced his objection to companies taking advantage of the SDF by sending their employees for a brief stint, and the latter a set of several photos of Mishima in the military with the captions he provided.
Mishima’s account was lyrical; he had expected certain things from military life and got them. He was elated as he answered Tokuoka’s questions, “like a schoolboy who is telling how wonderful the school excursion was to a boy who couldn’t make it.”17 But many of “the twenty-six questions” Tokuoka put to Mishima, “the soldier who has come home,” were political, and timely.18 The journalist did not hesitate to ask touchy questions and Mishima did not hesitate to answer them.
Above all, the question of Constitutional legitimacy that came with the birth of the SDF had not abated. Just two weeks before Mishima started training at the Officer Candidates School, a district court had handed down a decision on the Eniwa Case. In 1962 a dairy farmer in Chitose, Hokkaidō, destroyed some equipment of the GSDF, saying that the unit stationed there had engaged in artillery training without advance notification as promised. In its decision on March 29, the court avoided the Constitutional question but found the farmer not guilty on the basis of the SDF Law. In a debate in the Diet in July that year, a member of the Socialist Party referred to the Eniwa Case and cited a 1964 survey that found 88 percent of law professors considered the SDF unconstitutional or its existence questionable.
At the same time, there was growing unease about Mishima, Japan’s greatest celebrity author of the day, “turning perilously rightist in recent years,” as Tokuoka put it. Sugawara Kunitaka, the editor at Shinchōsha in charge of The Runaway Horse then being serialized and one of the few to whom Mishima had disclosed his plan in advance, was unable to hide his distress when told of it. Sensing the matter was going too far, he had pleaded with Mishima: “People who defend this country will always appear. This has been a tradition since sakimori”—the border guards created in the second half of the seventh century after Japan lost a war on the Korean Peninsula, in 663.
“You are an incomparable writer we cannot do without. There are many works no one else can write. Rather than have you defend this country, I would do it. Please simply write. You may not know it, but you are a genius. You are an invaluable person.”19
In the background were the escalating Vietnam War and the rising antiwar movement. In June 1966 the United States started bombing Hanoi, declaring there were no longer “sanctuaries” in North Vietnam. In August there were huge antiwar demonstrations in San Francisco and New York. In September the American troop strength in South Vietnam reached 320,000, topping the size of that country’s military forces. In April 1967 another wave of antiwar demonstrations were held in San Francisco and New York, half a million people taking part. In Japan, student movements were gathering steam, partly in anticipation of the renewal of the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty in three years.
Tokuoka’s question on the Constitutional legitimacy of the SDF had to do with whether Mishima sensed the armed forces suffered from something akin to “the guilty conscience of someone with a shady past.” The question had come to the fore as early as 1960, a mere six years after the creation of the SDF, in 1954. That year the literary critic and editor Usui Yoshimi interviewed a range of SDF personnel, from the chief of the Defense Agency to regular troops, and concluded his findings with an ominous suggestion that the sense of humiliation the 230,000 armed men suffered—that they were constitutionally invalid—might explode someday.
Usui had a particular precedent in mind: During the disarmament period following the First World War, military men were treated as social outcasts so that many refused to wear uniforms in public. One result, in his view, was the rise of the fanatical nationalism in the military in the years that followed. The 5.15 and 2.26 Incidents were partly manifestations of that nationalism.20
In reply, Mishima said he recognized the existence of such a sentiment in the GSDF, but added, referring to common epithets thrown at him: “I believe that in my thinking I am neither militarist nor fascist. What I hope for is simply to place a national army in its proper position as a national military.” Kokugun, “national army,” was the proper term for the Japanese military before it was abolished, in 1945.
In truth, the Japanese were not black and white on that issue. On the “renunciation of war” clause that is Article 9, Tokuoka pointed out: “There are many Japanese who think that the SDF as it is now came into being as a result of the linguistic contortion of ‘the military without war potential.’ On the other hand, there are also many who insist on the view, based on the idea that ‘every nation has its own right for self-defense,’ that the SDF is Constitutional.” His question was whether Mishima’s thoughts on the matter changed after he “experienced” the GSDF.
Mishima said no, his thoughts did not change. His position was that there was “no need to amend the Constitution.” At the time there was the argument, as there still is, that the Constitution should be amended if the SDF were to continue to exist. Mishima said “the enormous amount of p
olitical and social energy” that such a move would require might as well be used elsewhere—a view he would reverse by late 1969. As to the Eniwa Case, Mishima spoke of the view of some within the SDF that the court should have treated the case as a Constitutional question and found the SDF unconstitutional, just to clarify the matter.
Tokuoka asked if the SDF had any independent “hypothetical enemy,” which is one raison d’être of any military, and, if not, whether it existed to “suppress domestic riots.” There surely was suspicion to that effect at the time. Not just that the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty subordinated Japan to the United States, or that the SDF was just a detachment of the US military, but also that, in the rising antiwar sentiment worldwide, the SDF with no “war potential” could only exist for domestic use.
“I had the impression that they are doing their best to avoid keeping any particular country in mind as a hypothetical enemy,” Mishima replied. But the erstwhile law student that he was, he had to add: “When Article 3 of the SDF Law says that the SDF exists for ‘self-defense in case of direct or indirect invasion,’ I think ‘indirect invasion’ assumes nothing other than a civil war. But I felt that within the SDF there is something that prevents them from coming right out and saying that it assumes a civil war, so I told them, ‘You should clearly assume a civil war.’ That’s because it’s the only battle you can think of that the SDF is tasked to fight in the immediate future.”
How about the SDF men’s “view of life and death”? Tokuoka asked. In the prewar military, “preparedness to die” (shi no kakugo), as Mishima put it in his response, was what every soldier was expected to have. Aside from the samurai tradition, there was the stern injunction in the 1882 Imperial Rescript to the Soldiers and Sailors (Gunjin chokuyu): “Be resolved that duty (gi) is heavier than high mountains, death lighter than a goose feather.” There was also the 1941 Code of Conduct in the Battlefield (Senjinkun) with the fateful article that was taken to mean: “When faced with surrender, kill yourself.”21
Mishima replied that he was generally dissatisfied with the SDF’s spiritual education. “Either fearful of the reaction of the troops or fearful of the reaction of society at large,” the SDF attempted “no education that might lead to a view of death and life,” he explained. Still, there ought to be a clear distinction between education for regular recruits and education for officers—the former on “the pursuit of happiness, the latter on preparedness to die,” he said. The famous phrase in the US Declaration of Independence was made part of Article 13 of the Japanese Constitution.
Tokuoka brought up “Voice of the Heroic Souls” and the disillusionment with “the Human Declaration” Mishima spelled out in it, and asked what was the opinion of the Tennō among the SDF people.
“There was no interest, to a surprising degree. It truly surprised me,” Mishima replied. But he found even more disconcerting what he had heard: the Tennō wanted “to avoid standing by the honor guard from the SDF in welcoming a foreign emissary at Haneda”—at the time the only international airport in Japan. Mishima knew that Article 13 of the SDF Law places the Tennō at the top of those to receive the honor guard.
Wasn’t his joining the SDF to “actually experience it” just another sign of Mishima’s proclivity to flaunt his “eccentricity”? After all, not just boxing and bodybuilding, he had acted in his own film Yūkoku, and sung chansons onstage. “Tell us your apologia in advance,” Tokuoka urged.
“I won’t mind it at all if some say I’ve done it ‘to show off my eccentricity,’” Mishima responded. “I always ask myself, ‘Why do you want to do so many things?’”
“Are you not ‘turning perilously rightist’”?
“The rightwing and the SDF are totally different matters,” Mishima answered. “For example, what the rightwing is mainly concerned about is ‘the Tennō,’ but as I told you a moment ago, there is absolutely no ‘Tennō question’ in the SDF today. Those on the left call everything ‘rightist-oriented,’ but I’d like them to think more strictly.”
Supporting the Vietnam War
By then the United States was a “nation divided by a bloody jungle war whose beginnings are lost in controversy and whose final outcome is unpredictable,” as Newsweek put it in issuing a Vietnam War special, timing it with the celebration of Independence Day. The magazine set aside a section for the opinions of foreign intellectuals, among them the Australian novelist Morris West, the French diplomat André François-Poncet, Kingsley Amis (“one of a tiny band of British literary figures supporting United States Vietnam policy”), C. P. Snow (recently knighted), Golo Mann (Thomas Mann’s son). Mishima, “perhaps Japan’s most popular novelist,” was one of the three Japanese whose views were sought.
“It was America,” he was quoted as saying in “A Tarnished Image Abroad,” “which taught Japan the concept of democracy and freedom, but it was a very primitive, naïve concept—a feeling something like peace. And the Japanese believed this concept very honestly and simply and were shocked that America’s concept of freedom and democracy could include American involvement in a distant war in Vietnam.” In other words, Mishima thought the United States was “doing the right thing in Vietnam.”22
When Heibon Punch got hold of this Newsweek special, its editors decided to make a sensation out of it, but before doing so, they talked to Mishima to confirm he said what he had. “You can take it as they put it,” Mishima responded. “I’m someone who still affirms the Great East Asian War”—the Pacific War—“and I support America’s Vietnam policy, too. Don’t you agree? What would happen if America was defeated and withdrew?” He then added, “In this heat, I have no intention of dealing with the idiots of Beheiren.”
A controversy monger by design, the weekly directly took Mishima’s remarks to the anti–Vietnam War group. Kaikō Takeshi refused to respond head-on: “I’m busy; ask others, please.” Konaka Yōtarō, the writer whose role was to work for international collaboration for the cause, visiting Paris, Hanoi, and Stockholm, was diplomatic: “I personally respect Mishima and am one of his admiring readers. But I’d like to think we started this anti–Vietnam War movement as idiots.” Only Oda Minoru retorted sharply: “If that’s what Mishima is saying, I have no time to get involved in such idiotic remarks as his.” The actress Hiiro Tomoe recalled seeing Mishima in GSDF uniform on TV and said, “When I saw him like that, I questioned Mr. Mishima’s existence itself,” adding, “Something like that is physiologically repulsive.”23
Did Mishima decide to “actually experience” military life as one concrete step on his road to death? If he did, exactly what did he have in mind? He did not do so simply to provide realism to the military life he might describe in The Runaway Horse, as Matsumoto Seichō suggested,24 or did he? Mishima had fully anticipated such questions to be raised, so he dealt with them at the outset of his account of the GSDF experience—giving no real answers.
He did not mind whether other people interpreted his action “seriously or nonseriously, politically or apolitically,” he wrote. The only thing he wanted to make clear was that he was “opposed to the conscription system, opposed to turning into an obligation the matter of national defense, which, by its nature, is an individual’s right in any democratic country.” He clearly conveyed this view within the SDF, where he was able to talk to “men in all ranks, from generals to corporals,” he wrote.25
In fact, he had, although he had been more interested in the technical aspects of the use of the GSDF. In a lengthy interview he had conducted with Capt. Kikuchi Katsuo, his caretaker at the Fuji School, Mishima had begun by saying, “As a Japanese male, I have the honorable right to take part in national defense,” and closely questioned him on “coup d’état, the Constitution, the deployment of the GSDF for domestic security, conscription, civilian control,” and such. To Kikuchi, recalling the interview nearly four decades later, it was clear that Mishima’s “true purpose of training with the GSDF” was to find out what the officer class of the army was planning to do t
o deal with the rising turmoil at the extension of the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty in 1970.26
Still, we may pause to ask what Mishima’s “true purpose” was. He had already begun to write what some would later call his “suicide project,” and the work he took up next was to make excerpts from and comment on Hagakure, the large compilation of the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s observations, which, as noted earlier, is famous for its opening dictum, “The way of the warrior, I’ve found, is to die.”
But before we retrace Mishima’s thoughts on death, we must look at one question that lingered: how the GSDF would continue to accept someone like Mishima in the future. It was resolved in his favor, without fanfare, in August that year, by the Office of the Chief of Staff of the GSDF (its official English name: “the Ground Staff Office”), Mishima happily reported to Capt. Kikuchi. He learned this when he went to the Defense Agency where he was also told of the elaborate procedure the GSDF had set up to prevent members of rightwing or other similar extremist organizations from getting into it.
As fate would have it, the man who met Mishima and explained the special program to him—one of the five people that made up the Ground Staff Office—was Gen. Mashita Kanetoshi.27
Thinking of Death
In considering the trajectory of Mishima’s life, many have pointed to the poem he wrote the day after he turned fifteen, “The Disaster” (Magagoto), as something that clearly adumbrated what would come. It begins:
Every evening, come evening,
I stood by the window and waited for the unexpected,
for a ferocious sand swirl of calamity
like a night rainbow to surge toward me