Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  He also brought his central concern to the fore. He took up a short story of Murakami Ichirō, “Cdr. Hirose” (Hirose kaigun chūsa), “a fiction boundlessly remote from the Southern elephant seal,” a Balzac. He decided to read it, he explained, because he had admired Murakami’s book on Kita Ikki, published that year, and began his brief commentary by noting that it was an “extremely clumsy story,” which, all the more for it, “emitted a fragrant scent.”

  The Hirose of the story’s title is Hirose Takeo, the naval officer whose head was blown away by a direct shell hit at the outset of the Russo-Japanese War; he was searching for a subordinate lost aboard a ship being sunk to blockade Port Luxu (Port Arthur). Murakami’s first-person narrative concerns the writer himself. A naval officer during the Greater East Asian War, the narrator “I” was deeply moved by a ceremonial tribute to Cdr. Hirose in its midst. Having survived the war, though, even as he managed to marry the woman he had yearned for while death was close by, he cannot drive away the melancholy that recurs in his happy though destitute life.

  In his essay of 1960, as a matter of fact, Murakami had simply written: “My life ended on August 15 [of 1945], I should have died [that day]. The fifteen years [since then] have been an unnecessary addition.”18 Mishima was echoing a similar sentiment when he said, “My Shōwa is neatly cut off in its twentieth year,” namely, 1945. That was his response to a question the Asahi Shinbun asked a group of people when Shōwa turned into the longest era in history, in July 1970.19 Mishima observed that only a few other stories he had read “presented, as lucidly as this short story, the contrast between the happiness of dying beautifully and the happiness of living social ordinariness as the unbearable cruelty of choosing one or the other,” concluding that “the overwhelming idea of ‘the happiness of death’ never ceases to press on this earthly happiness.”

  Murakami was a follower of the Japan Romantic School, which believed that “lyricism must necessarily be accompanied by fury.” He was therefore repelled by the kind of “easygoingness” that Yasuda Yojūrō displayed, as he pointedly noted in his taidan with Mishima in late 1969.

  It was during the same taidan that Mishima had dismissed out of hand any possibility either for him or for his Shield Society to incite a revolution. There was “a difference between revolution and counterrevolution,” he said, adding “the only thing you have to do in a counterrevolution is to die.” He said, “Once you say, ‘I’ll die in November’” as a man of letters, “you must absolutely die” in that month.

  Five years after Mishima’s death, Murakami, who had told Mishima during the same taidan, “I’m not sure I can cut my stomach well enough,” killed himself by slashing his carotid artery with a sword. 20

  A Community of Warriors

  Mishima led the first JNP group to train with the GSDF, from the 1st to the 30th of March 1968, though he had to be absent for ten of the thirty days for his own work. The group was assigned to Camp Takigahara, on the south side of Mt. Fuji. It was an exhausting but exhilarating experience, he wrote Capt. Kikuchi, his friend since Kurume. The 30th was a drizzly day, but as Mishima’s group left the camp ground a little past noon, the regimental commander and all the instructors came to the gate to see them off and shook hands with each, tears streaming down the cheeks of everyone, both on the staying and departing sides. One student cried for an hour after the group got on a bus home. “A community of warriors” he had been dreaming about for many years had finally materialized, Mishima wrote.

  Some of the training wasn’t easy for the forty-three-year-old writer. He had to skip completing at least one arduous course: a march that required the troops to slog 22 miles knocked him out at its last leg of 1.25 miles where they had to dash, guns ported, for an attack, forcing him to be carried by a jeep, to his chagrin. In fact, the whole exercise fatigued him so, he felt his brain had become too fuzzy for work, he admitted. Still, on April 3, he went to pay a courtesy call to the new chief of staff of the GSDF, and on April 4, the day he wrote Kikuchi, he had gone to see the commandant of the Fuji School to express gratitude and secure an agreement to accept another group in the summer.21

  His own physical inadequacy aside, his glowing report to his GSDF friend belied a considerable disappointment and worry. The later estimate of the actual number of participants in the first group varies from twenty to thirty, all in their early twenties, but only about ten of them were fit enough to keep up with the required regimens, and barely. Part of the reason was that five of those who had signed up canceled at the last minute because the student strike at their university, Chūō, ended and they had to go back to class. That had forced Mochimaru, chief of students, to quickly find replacements in the Nichigakudō. Among the replacements was Morita, who had been laid up with a broken leg in a ski accident. He joined the group one week late.

  This turn of events forced Mishima and Mochimaru to reassess their plans. First of all, they would try to recruit the more physically fit for the next group. Second, they would abandon the idea Mishima had suggested, however unthinkingly, of training ten thousand JNG men. The greater their goal, the greater the number of dropouts and failures to deal with would be. There was also, Mishima pointed out, what he called “group egoism”—something like an amorphous sense of tyranny a large body of people engenders. He had seen its worst manifestation during the war, a point he would repeat. Instead, they would focus on creating a hundred-man officer corps, as had been publicly announced.22

  It was following this training session that Morita wrote, in the group journal the Nichigakudō kept: “Mishima Sensei expressed admiration for my fighting spirit when he saw my leg that had been broken, the day I arrived, late. Besides, we are both close-cropped and we at once liked each other (am I overstating?).”23

  Soon after the first training session, Shiine Yamato, of Heibon Punch, telephoned the famous man for the first time. He was surprised when Mishima himself picked up the phone, not a secretary or assistant, not even a maid. Famous writers, especially prolific ones, are known to have an assistant who sometimes writes for them. After listening to the young man explain the plan he had in mind for his weekly magazine, Mishima proposed a meeting, naming a place and time—“clearly, simply, . . . without any hint of hesitation or calculation.”

  The designated place was the Coffee House, in the Imperial Hotel. When the luxury hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright decided to add a restaurant for light dining within its premises, it chose an Americanstyle diner and gave it a generic name. American visitors were quickly increasing because of the Vietnam War. Mishima showed up five minutes before the appointed time. When he walked in the door, about one hundred customers, mostly women, that filled the restaurant, turned to look. He was dressed in an Italian-made white half-sleeve polo shirt, deeply cut to the stomach—the early spring weather was chilly—and black pants and black shoes. He looked like “a dandy Adriatic seaman.” Shiine almost saw an “aura” emanating from the man.

  As he explained his plan to do an article, “Mishima Yukio’s elegant personal life at home,” Shiine felt better and happier. Mishima’s responses were “not too polite, not too general, not too cold, not too meddlesome,” his voice bubbling up “like a honeydew spring.” When Mishima set his attaché case on the table—exactly the same model the James Bond films had made familiar—and opened it, he expected him to pull out some esoteric gadgets, but all Mishima pulled out was a few sheets of paper.24

  About the same time he met Shiine, Mishima ordered a uniform for the JNG. The designer was Igarashi Tsukumo, who made suits for Charles de Gaulle. He, perhaps via Mishima, may well have been inspired by the US Air Force Academy uniform; Heibon Punch had given it a three-page photo display three years earlier, and the design Igarashi came up with closely resembled it.25 Tsutsumi Seiji, president of the Seibu Department Store, put Mishima in touch with Igarashi. Mishima himself designed the hat, with an overt suggestion of what Nazi officers used to wear, with a distinct curve on the top. His initial order was
for twenty-five sets.

  Tsutsumi, whom Mishima had known since around 1955 when he became president of Seibu and published a book of poems, was an unusual man. Born in 1927 to a businessman-politician and one of his mistresses, he joined the Communist Party while studying economics at the University of Tokyo and became a leader of the Zengakuren in its early years. But he was so successful and innovative in his business, he became, during the 1970s and 1980s, a superstar in the business world, even as he continued to publish books of poetry and novels. He was accorded a doctorate in economics for his book criticizing consumer society, in 1996. In 2007 he was elected to the Japan Art Academy. A few months before ordering the JNG uniform, Mishima had written Tsutsumi to thank him for the new book of poems he had sent him. A poem-by-poem commentary, the letter is a marvel of conscientiousness and insight.26

  On April 29, the Shōwa Emperor’s Birthday and a national holiday, Mishima invited Muramatsu Takeshi to lunch at the Takanawa Prince Hotel.

  “In the banquet room was a large partition screen set up,” Muramatsu recalled. “From behind it appeared the [JNG] members who had switched into a uniform, one after another. I was startled, my eyes opened wide. Mr. Mishima watched the change of my expression with amusement.” Then they lined up in front of the screen, which was gold, and sang a song. “Be strong, righteous, and be tough. / We pursue both literary and martial ways. . . .” Mishima had written the lyrics. The young men followed this with a song satirical of Mishima, sung to the tune of The Sound of Music. “I know no other moment when Mr. Mishima looked as happy as he did while the young men in the newly made uniforms solemnly sang a song making fun of him.”27

  Spy Training

  Yamamoto Kiyokatsu, who visited Mishima’s first JNG group while they were training at Camp Takigahara, started training the same men in mid-May in the basics of indirect invasion and urban guerilla warfare. For his lectures and other gatherings, Mishima arranged a variety of places—inns, his acquaintance’s house, and theaters, in the middle of Tokyo or its suburbs—all at his own expense. Yamamoto was impressed, even moved, by Mishima’s eagerness to learn. In his memoir focusing on his association with Mishima, he detailed some of the things he did with him.28

  For his lecture on espionage, on May 27, for example, he cited the Noshiro Incident—the discovery in the early morning of April 1, 1963, of two bodies cast up on the shore of Noshiro City, Akita, a prefecture on the Japan Sea side of northern Honshū. The two—one Korean, one Japanese, both male—were apparently spies North Korea had sent. Their possessions—Soviet-made pistols, maps, code, a list of random numbers, wireless, and sizable amounts of dollars and yen—and other items found nearby did not suggest otherwise. But perhaps some authority wanted it hushed up: the case was quickly disposed of as a botched attempt by illegal immigrants.

  Yamamoto described the case to explain certain things spies were expected to carry and, also, that spies could meet unceremonious deaths. Mishima was engrossed by the topic but especially by the photo of the two dead men Yamamoto handed out. When Yamamoto suggested that the case could have been hushed up, he cried out, with a touch of anger: “Why did they leave such a grave matter unexplored?” When recess came, he urged Yamamoto to forgo it and continue the lecture.

  The following day, Yamamoto had the pleasure of surprising Mishima. Just before taking up the topic of the day, he casually played a tape recorder and saw Mishima’s large eyes widen when he heard his own voice: It was a recording of himself and his men at the café where he had taken them after Yamamoto’s lecture the previous day. Yamamoto then showed a film of Mishima and his men walking—as inconspicuously as possible, as instructed—into the inn where the gathering of the previous day had been held. He had placed some of his men to do the secret recording and filming.

  Yamamoto’s subject of May 28 was intelligence and counterintelligence. The lecture over in the morning, he gave the afternoon to practical training. By then he had observed what a celebrity Mishima was. The mass media paid close attention to every move he made, every step he took. Of course, Yamamoto had known all that to some extent from the outset, so one basic understanding between the two had been that Mishima would take extra caution not to reveal what he was doing with Yamamoto—that Yamamoto would cease his “cooperation” with Mishima the moment any of their work was known to anyone outside. If a journalist got wind of the secret undertaking, Yamamoto taking sole responsibility and resigning would not have worked. Given the legal and political position of the SDF and its standing among the general populace, the director-general of the Defense Agency, even the prime minister, could be forced to resign.

  That day, as a matter of fact, Mishima had shown up at the designated place in disguise—with a Coleman moustache. One topic Yamamoto had dealt with the previous day surely was the importance of disguise for spies, but even so! That moustache was what made the popular vaudevillian Tony Tani, for one, appear so comical. Unable to suppress his smile, Yamamoto asked if the disguise worked. Mishima was crestfallen. “On the streetcar on the Sōbu Line coming here, a studentlike fellow asked me, ‘Aren’t you Mr. Mishima?’ I tried to fib, but. . . .”

  The training that afternoon had to do with intelligence delivery. The task was collecting information in Roppongi and passing it to a certain man in a bookstore in Yotsuya. The Defense Agency, along with a number of foreign consulates, was located in Roppongi, and a large number of Chinese agents were known to be using mahjong houses and restaurants as their operational bases. Mishima, with a Coleman moustache and in sunglasses, became impatient that he wasn’t given any task.

  Yamamoto raised the level. One day it had to do with delivering a secret document as might happen when an agent decides to become a double agent for money. In the setup Yamamoto created, three people were involved: A, B, and C. A and C are known to each other, but they do not know B nor are they known to him. A is told to make certain signals at a designated place (e.g., the entrance of a department store), within a given timeframe (12:55 a.m. to 1:05 p.m.), and deliver a document to someone who recognizes his signals (B); he must do this in such a covert way that no one will not notice. C, who is in surveillance of A at one remove (a café across the street), approaches B as soon as he receives a document from A and finds out his name and company without creating any suspicion. Yamamoto says he enlisted the help of his friend who had made a great reputation in intelligence before Japan started its invasion of China, in 1937, but does not say whether Mishima took part in this particular exercise.

  The place Yamamoto chose for the training of terrain surveillance would turn out to be fateful: the Eastern Headquarters of the GSDF, in Ichigaya. He chose it just in case Mishima’s group might have to work with the GSDF, but also to introduce Mishima to one of his colleagues, a colonel.

  The task for Mishima’s group was to study the layout of the HQ buildings. The “operation” was a great success; the GSDF welcomed the public and the young men acted like any other curious citizens. One student even asked for and got a cup of coffee at the adjutant’s office. Yamamoto had no way of imagining what would happen there, in the same place, in two and a half years.

  Yamamoto designed the last training as a summing-up of all the elements of espionage he had taught. It was a daylong exercise, beginning in early morning and ending near midnight. The place where the trainees were told to gather, as the day progressed, was San’ya, the slum area in Arakawa Ward, in Tokyo, that had been known for several largescale riots since 1960 (officially the name San’ya had ceased to exist in the renaming of places in 1966, as frequently happens in Japan).

  When Mishima turned up at Benkei Bridge, in Akasaka, at six in the evening, before moving on to San’ya, Yamamoto marveled at his skillful disguise as a day-laborer: in a dirty alpine hat, a worn-out jacket, and in wooden clogs, and his face, hands, and feet dusty. No wonder: The moment he learned that the next and last destination was San’ya, Mishima, a man of theater, had a makeup specialist go to a house not far—the residence of a
translator of his works into English, as it turned out—and wait for him.

  The only problem with his disguise, as far as Yamamoto was concerned, had to do with the way he carried a towel. Almost all laborers carry such a towel to wipe off their sweat and for other purposes. But they do so around their neck; Mishima came with his tucked into his belt, rather in the manner of the students of prewar higher schools when they wanted to look rough, tough, non-elite. Upon further thought, though, Yamamoto guessed that Mishima did so in defiance of the violent student demonstrators who masked their faces with towels. Mishima openly disliked them for that.

  Yamamoto likely was unaware of it, but Mishima had used San’ya in his novel three years earlier, Music. That is where the psychoanalystnarrator, his assistant Akemi, his beautiful young patient Reiko, and her boyfriend Ryūichi go to the slums—in disguise. They do so to look for Reiko’s brother whose long-term sexual relationship with her is assumed to be the cause of her frigidity. “I was in shabby trousers and a wrinkly open-neck shirt that I had pulled out of a drawer, and Akemi, having removed all her makeup, in slacks made of mangy black serge and a gray blouse, the two of us looking like a down-and-out stylish artist couple,” and so on.

  When the day’s exercise was over past ten that night, the group repaired to a restaurant for review and dinner. The restaurant, Yōrō no Taki, was not far, as it was next to the Ekōin, in Asakusa, the old Buddhist temple for the nameless dead. “This is the first time I had an experience like this. We are truly grateful to you, sir!” Mishima exclaimed, repeatedly, as he drank, until he got quite tipsy, and teary, as he seldom did. Yamamoto prudently took him home himself, alarming the Mishima household with its master in strange guise and drunk.