by Hiroaki Sato
So he was surprised, a few years later, to open The Temple of Dawn that Mishima gave him and read in it a detailed, precise description of the Rose Palace! The mystery was solved, though only partly, several years after Mishima’s death. When he happened to meet Yōko in New York, she told him that she had helped her husband peek into the palace by parting one section of the bougainvillea hedge surrounding it. Mishima’s descriptions included those of the interiors, so most likely Mishima had visited the palace during his stay in Bangkok two years earlier and this time he had merely wanted to refresh his memory. Even so, if Yōko’s story was true in any way, as it must be, the couple had put themselves in a dangerous situation indeed, Tokuoka was horrified to reflect. If the guards had seen them, they could have shot them dead on the spot.
There was one thing Tokuoka remembered about his interview with Mishima in Bangkok. When he wrote it up, he showed it to Mishima for corrections. He later wondered if he was one of the lucky few whose manuscripts Mishima proofread. Mishima, in any case, made necessary corrections and approved it. It was only when Tokuoka was about to send it to Tokyo that he had a call from Mishima, who asked him to delete one sentence, which he did. The sentence, as he recalled, went like this: “The Japanese can live in peace and quiet because America is fighting communism for them.”24
While in Bangkok, Mishima paid a brief visit to Laos because his brother Chiyuki was stationed at the Japanese embassy in Vientiane. Chiyuki arranged for the two to have an audience with King Savang Vatthana, who lived in Luang Prabang as a modest gentleman-farmer. The meeting lasted for almost an hour because Mishima and the “husky, dignified, and obviously wise” king discovered they shared a great interest in Proust. Mishima found a country without “elevators or means of making international phone calls.” It is “so laid back and peaceful you can’t imagine it is in fact a war-torn country that’s about to be divided up,” he wrote to Araki Seishi. Still, it was by a US military cargo plane that the two brothers were flown back to Vientiane, with its aft ramp left open; that scared Chiyuki but delighted Mishima.25
Savang Vatthana would turn out to be the last king of Laos. In 1975 the communist Pathet Lao brought down the royalist military junta, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The deposed king died in captivity.
Before leaving for India, Mishima had rehearsed his latest play, The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku, which the theater troupe NLT began to stage while he was away, on October 13, and continued until the 29th. It was to mark another literary step in the course Mishima would follow toward his final act.
The four-act play deals with the blue-blood aristocrat Grand Chamberlain Suzaku Tsunetaka’s determination to remain “loyal” to the Imperial wishes in the face of his country’s impending catastrophe. He refuses to do anything, except his help in bringing down the cabinet responsible for the war. As a result, not just the country and the Tennō, but also his own son, a freshly commissioned naval ensign, is destroyed.
But Mishima was apparently afraid that the reader and audience might think that the play has to do with the familial turmoil of someone exalted enough in lineage to be close to the country’s highest decision-makers yet irresolute and philanderous in his private affairs. He took care to explain his design in the note attached to the play when it appeared in the October 1967 issue of Bungei. “The theme of this play is an existential analysis of the spirit of shōshō hikkin. That is, the axis of the drama lies in the way perfectly passive loyalty evolves, unbeknownst to the person, into fealty as a kind of identification. What corresponds to Heracles’ madness is kochū as madness or else fidelity as destruction.”26 We have seen the term shōshō hikkin (Chapter 5); kochū, “solitary loyalty,” is the ability or willingness to remain loyal to a cause, in isolation, when all others have given up such an effort. By “Heracles’ madness,” Mishima refers, he explained, to that described in the Euripides drama, The Madness of Heracles.
Mishima made the same point in his program note, except for shōshō hikkin and kochū, but must still have been uncertain of the adequacy of his explanations. When a newspaper asked for an interview on the play, he took another tack. “When I wrote earlier about the 2.26 Incident,” he told the Nagoya Times, “I depicted a loyalty that pushed itself to the very end. It is the kind of loyalty that, in its attempt to follow the Imperial Mind, went as far as killing His Majesty’s closest aides.” On the face of it, what takes place in the play may appear “the opposite” of what happened in the 2.26 Incident, Mishima said. The protagonist, Marquis Suzaku Tsunetaka, “surmises His Majesty’s Mind”—that is, an unspoken command, “Do nothing about the situation”—“and goes on to destroy himself.”27
Here, the word Mishima uses for “destroy himself” is horobiru—“die down,” “perish,” “fade away.” In the play, Tsunetaka goes on to live, even after his nation is destroyed, but only as an empty shell. So, when Ritsuko, who would have become his daughter-in-law had he taken the simple step, which was perfectly in his power, of blocking his son from going to a doomed battlefield, demands, at the close of the play, that he horobiru, Tsunetaka is startled and blurts out: “How could I possibly destroy myself? I destroyed myself long, long ago.”
But what the young officers of the 2.26 Incident did and what the nobleman of the play does are no different: both follow the subjectively understood loyalty, Mishima explained. This is because loyalty can only be subjective; it is something “more metaphysical and complex” than, for example, the willingness to respond to a simple request such as “Bring me a cup of tea, will you?” In one’s relationship to the Tennō, “all you can do is to surmise [the Imperial Mind] and remain steadfastly loyal to it.”28 In the notes he had prepared to write The Suzaku, Mishima had put the matter in clearer terms, for there he had defined the two contrasting aspects of such loyalty as “terrorism” and “inaction.”29
Mishima’s intent aside, Ōoka Shōhei took up The Suzaku in his monthly literary review for the Asahi Shinbun to discuss it with two other works because, he explained, all three dealt with the question of loyalty: Abe Kōbō’s play Enomoto Takeaki, which appeared in Chūō Kōron, and Shiba Ryōtarō’s novella “To Cut His Stomach” (Hara o kiru koto), in Bungei Shunjū. Noting that loyalty is “an ethical question on which a human being bets his life,” Ōoka rejected the three writers’ attitudes toward it as either too “romantic” (Mishima), too “caricaturistic” (Abe), or too “dramatic” (Shiba) to his liking.30
Of the three characters they depicted, Mishima’s is a concoction albeit with strong historical references that were, the author admitted, rearranged with “sleight of hand.” The two others are historical figures. Shiba’s subject, Gen. Nogi Maresuke, became well known worldwide because he committed junshi on the day of the Meiji Emperor’s funeral to follow him in death. In fact, “To Cut His Stomach” was the second half of Shiba’s two-part biography of Nogi, the first part being “Fort” (Yōsai), and, as soon as it came out, the two were put in one book and published under the title of Junshi.31
Abe’s subject, Enomoto Takeaki, was less known. As one character in the play puts it, he has been “ignored” in recent years32 because, Ōoka noted, he has been “a problematic figure in various ways.” Appointed commander of the shogunate naval fleet just before the Tokugawa government collapsed, he took his fleet to Hokkaidō and established what he claimed to be “the legitimate government,” but he surrendered when he lost in the climactic battle, instead of fighting to death or committing suicide.
What makes Enomoto “problematic” historically is that after some imprisonment he served the Meiji government with distinction, in a round of high posts. In that regard, he was like Katsu Kaishū. Katsu played a crucial role in persuading his government, the Tokugawa, to surrender, but then he allowed the new government to appoint him to high posts. While they were alive, some thought the two men’s conduct dishonorable. Among the most prominent who did so, Fukuzawa Yukichi, the foremost leader of “civilization enlightenment” during Meiji, ar
gued that samurai ethic—as a matter of fact, a rule applicable to any society—would have required them to live in obscurity, declining to serve the new government in any way.33
Ōoka did not entirely condemn Mishima. He praised him for his “dramatic manipulation” to clarify his “rejection” of a “downward-moving” loyalty. But he was harsh on the other two. He faulted Abe’s interpretation of Enomoto’s “betrayal” as based on his “ignorance.” (Abe casts Enomoto as a man who sought “a third way” that was neither pro-Tennō nor pro-Tokugawa.34) As to Shiba’s Gen. Nogi, Ōoka suggested that Shiba did not really comprehend “the ethical question such as junshi”—a daring indictment of an extremely popular author famed for turning out one bestselling historical fiction after another. Regardless, if Mishima was unaffected one way or another by Abe’s play about the samurai with whom Mishima’s great- and great-great-grandfathers fought, Enomoto Takeaki, he may well have been affected by Shiba’s account of the Russo-Japanese War hero, who was the tenth President of the Peers School, Nogi Maresuke, as we will see later.
Five years after writing this review, Ōoka would turn down his election to the Japan Art Academy on “loyalty” grounds—that he had allowed himself to be taken prisoner during the Pacific War and survived.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Anti–Vietnam War Movement
Culture includes . . . the action of a naval officer who jumped out of his human torpedo, brandishing his Japanese sword, the moment it surfaced in the New Guinea Sea on a moonlit night and was killed.
—Mishima
While Mishima was away visiting India and Thailand, the anti–Vietnam War movement had taken a radical turn in Japan. On October 8, 1967, three thousand college students gathered at Haneda Airport to block Prime Minister Satō from visiting South Vietnam. With all the main accesses to the airport sealed by riot police, their attempt failed. Satō left Japan, toured East Asia, and, in Australia, made explicit his government’s support for the continued US bombing of North Vietnam. But during the protestors’ clash with the police, a student from Kyoto University named Yamazaki Hiroaki was killed. His death revived the memories of 1960 when another such death ocurred. The clash, dubbed the 10.8 Haneda Struggle (or the First Haneda Incident, in reference to the second such clash a month later), also revived the student movement in a major way.
The incident also marked an escalation of violence. Declaring theirs was a “Gewalt struggle,” students wore helmets, masked their faces with towels, and carried long square lumber for weapons. They called their primitive weapons gebabō, a concoction from the German Gewalt, “force,” “right,” and the Japanese bō, “pole” or “stick.” Armed with gebabō, they at times threatened to overwhelm the riot police. The use of lumber, in fact, would become routine in subsequent clashes, not just between protestors and police, but between student factions. The Zengakuren, in 1958, had split into pro –and anti–Communist Party factions—called Yoyogi and anti-Yoyogi Factions because the Japanese Communist Party is headquartered in Yoyogi, Shibuya, Tokyo—and the anti-Yoyogi Faction later split further into factions.1 The internecine clashes among the factions would begin to be called uchi-geba, short for “internal Gewalt.”
The escalating violence mesmerized Mishima, but he was contemptuous of collective action for certain aims. “At the time of the Haneda incidents I truly thought,” he would publicly say a year later, perhaps with the insouciance deriving from the creation of the assassin Iinuma Isao: “If you don’t want Prime Minister Satō to go to America, why not kill him? It would be so simple. Terrorism is a one-man act, and that might go against their theory of organizing the people, but I’d say they just don’t have the guts. They have no guts to do it alone.”2
The idea of assassination was not, of course, something favored by the majority, aside from the fact that most would not dare make such a bald statement. Also, they were sympathetic, as Mishima was not, to Communism in general and, in particular, to the small Communist country, North Vietnam, that was putting up a fight against the giant capitalist country, the United States. On the day of the first airport clash, a group of forty-six writers and others issued a statement announcing the formation of a “10.8 Rescue Society.” Among its signers were the writers Ōe Kenzaburō, Sata Ineko, and Sugiura Minpei, as well as the historian Hani Gorō, the sociologist Hidaka Rokurō, and the philosopher Mutai Risaku. Six days later, Ōe, along with several others from the same group, formed a new group of twenty-one to issue a statement condemning “state power.”
“The violence of the police armed by state power and the protest by students through physical action, when compared calmly,” their statement said, “are not the same in degree of the nature of violence. We wish not only to criticize the students for the excesses of their action but to protest the Japanese government with a hundred times greater force.”3
The nationwide rally against the war held on October 21—part of the global rally called for by American students—drew an estimated 1.4 million participants. The government grew ever more wary and stubborn in reaction. At the end of that month, for example, when TBS broadcast Japan’s first news documentary showing life in North Vietnam, Satō’s Liberal Democratic Party demanded that the TV station oust the journalist who made the documentary, Den Hideo. The demand was reminiscent of Tōjō Hideki’s sacking of a journalist during the Pacific War for writing that Japan was losing.
On November 11, the day before Satō was scheduled to leave for the United States, the seventy-three-year-old patent attorney Yui Chūnoshin poured kerosene over himself and lit it near the Prime Minister’s Official Residence (he died two days later). This was in protest of Satō’s support of the bombing of North Vietnam. In his act, Yui followed not just the examples of the Vietnamese monks who were immolating themselves in protest, but also those of two Americans two years earlier: the Quaker Norman Morrison, who burned himself to death outside the Pentagon, and the Catholic Robert Allen LaPorte, who did the same outside the United Nations building in New York City.
On the day of Satō’s departure for the United States, another three thousand students tried to block him and clashed with the riot police near Haneda Airport. Satō’s stated aim in visiting President Lyndon Johnson on that occasion was to negotiate the reversion of Okinawa, over which the United States held administrative rights since the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty. But the protestors were opposed not to the official aim itself but to the likely coupling of the Okinawa reversion with the upcoming renewal of the Mutual Security Treaty. It was also obvious that Satō would reiterate his support for America’s conduct in Vietnam, one pressing thing Johnson asked him to do.
That, indeed, was what actually happened. The joint communiqué, signed by Johnson and Satō in Washington, on November 15, emphasized the prime minister’s “view that reciprocal action should be expected of Hanoi for a cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam”—that is, he would support the bombing until North Vietnam acquiesced to US demands. As to returning Okinawa to Japan, the document merely noted that “the two governments should keep under joint and continuous review the status of the Ryukyu Islands, guided by the aim of returning administrative rights over these islands to Japan.”4 The United States did not return Okinawa to Japan until 1972; even then, it did not change its military arrangements except to promise not to bring in nuclear weapons.
Fatherland Defense Corps
The radicalized leftist movement—now called the New Left, following the example abroad—alarmed those on the right. Bandai Kiyoshi and Nakatsuji Kazuhiko, of the Ronsō Journal, and Mochimaru Hiroshi started to visit Mishima with tense expressions. During the few months remaining of the year 1967, Mishima prepared with them two articles, one short, one long, on the need to create a “fatherland defense corps” (sokoku bōeitai), which he chose to call, in English, “Japan National Guard”—JNG, for short.
The short one, titled “Temporary Proposal for JNG” and issued in the name of “JNG Headquarters” but with no
mention of Mishima’s name, was a pamphlet addressed to corporations, for fundraising purposes. It opened with a statement that must have either startled or amused those who actually read it, to wit: “The most important issue for Japan under present circumstances is the establishment of a national ideal and to make young men understand with their own bodies ‘What is the Great Principle?’” By then, it was twenty-two years since Japan’s vanquishment and it is hard to imagine many corporate executives taking naturally to the exhumed word taigi, “the Great Principle,” although some may have felt nostalgic about it.
“Many young men,” the proposal went on, “do mouth a resolve to take up a gun and fight when Japan is violated, but the fact of the matter is that they have no clear grasp of how to do it or the locale of the true enemy.” It then quickly proceeded to the need to protect corporations as it was “an important part of fatherland defense.” Yet the knowledge alone would not do because, “without a strong philosophical backbone,” it would “collapse right underneath their feet at a moment’s notice.”
The pamphlet did not explain the philosophy that was supposed to form the backbone or how the taigi was to be inculcated. It did mention, however, the importance of group life and physical training. What exactly did the JNG Headquarters propose to do? To become a conduit to the GSDF. It would look after company employees who were graduates of junior high school or high school—in Japan compulsory education is up to junior high school—for ten days to a month so they could experience the armed forces, perhaps once a year, or twice, in spring and fall, if necessary, then return them to the company as JNG members. For this, the JNG HQ would only ask for per diem expenses for meals and travel and the cost of a uniform.5
The longer version, “Why a Fatherland Defense Corps Is Necessary,” was far more detailed, spelling out the careful thought Mishima evidently had given to the question.6 Whether or not he believed in the Domino Theory that was the official raison d’être of America’s destruction of Vietnam, he focused on “indirect invasion”—citing passages from Lenin’s Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder—and on the need for the kind of paramilitary force he had in mind. For the latter, he summarized the military and paramilitary arrangements of England, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, France, and Communist China, then listed the pros and cons of the militia systems as analyzed by a Swiss soldier. At one point he explained that he rejected the Japanese word minpei, the usual word for the English word militia, in favor of “fatherland defense corps,” because minpei, “people soldiers,” sounds “shabby and unattractive.”