by Hiroaki Sato
The Teach-in
On June 16, Mishima took part in his first “teach-in.” The teach-in that day was not for a gaggle of people gathered to voice divergent, opposing opinions for argument and debate, if mainly to persuade the persuaded. It was done as part of the campus festival of Hitotsubashi University, originally set up as a private school to study commercial law, in 1875, by Mori Arinori, Japan’s first consul in the United States and later its first minister of education. Mori believed that commerce would be the backbone of Japan in its dealings with foreign countries. Had Japan followed his vision, it might have had a different fate, but he was assassinated, in 1889, at age forty-two, for advocating the adoption of English as national language and other “unpatriotic” views.
Mishima spoke at a symposium held at the university’s Institute for Japanese Culture. There were two other speakers: Nakatsuji Kazuhiko, of the Ronsō Journal, and Fukuda Nobuyuki, a physicist at the Tokyo University of Education known for his infatuation with Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church. Nakatsuji discussed “Popular Culture and Revolution,” and Fukuda, “Energy Revolution.”
Mishima started his topic, “Principles of National Reformation,” by citing Carl von Clausewitz’s words, “War is a political act by other means; policy is war by peaceful means,” and Mao Zedong’s statement: “Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”29 He then went on to discuss “the May Revolution,” in Paris, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, in Los Angeles, earlier that month.
Mishima referred to the RFK assassination to contrast democracy, in which, he said, assassinations are unavoidable, with Communism, in which purges accompanied by executions are. There is no reason for condemning assassinations in a democracy, he said, for there are good and bad assassinations. Was he by any chance thinking of his grandfather Sadatarō warning “the commoner Prime Minister” Hara Takashi of the assassination plot that was in fact carried out? (Hara wrote in his diary, on February 20, 1921, that Hiraoka Sadatarō and another man separately came to tell him that a plan to assassinate him was afoot. He was killed by a switchman at Tokyo Station, on November 4 that year.)
Was he a devil’s advocate? Probably not. Some students naturally asked obvious questions. Even conceding that assassinations are “unavoidable in a democracy,” a student asked, is it not “going too far” to kill someone like RFK, who had a large number of supporters, just because one doesn’t like one aspect of the man?
As to the May Revolution, Mishima confessed he had “a classical notion of a revolution,” as a “basic force for overturning power.” A revolution has two components, rational and emotional, and for it to succeed, the two must work together but also must have the military’s support. The May Revolution failed not just because the rational forces (workers) and the emotional forces (students) sometimes came close, sometimes went separate ways but also because they failed to elicit any support from the military.
By the time he spoke, de Gaulle, who had dissolved the National Assembly, was coming down hard with repressive measures, but his policy had the danger, Mishima predicted, of pulling the rational and emotional elements solidly together.30 That did not happen. De Gaulle handily won the election, on June 23.
In separate remarks—before the election and for the Ronsō Journal—Mishima assessed the French student movement differently, calling it a new mode of revolutionary method that “escalated” from a demand for “simple educational reform” to economic struggle to political struggle. Noting that there were moments when some expected it to succeed as “the first revolution in an advanced industrialized country,” he said that in the process, R. Palme Dutt’s formula for a fascist takeover, through the “betrayal” of elements of the left, almost worked.31
In the event, strikers went back to work and students went on vacation, but there evidently was considerable anxiety among some French observers. The anti-Marxist philosopher-journalist Raymond Aron, while sympathetic to the students’ criticisms of their educational system, was concerned that the fragile social fabric would come apart if the workers and students succeeded in their demands, even as he dismissed the turmoil they created as “a psychodrama acted out on the stage where once the genuine item had been performed in repertoire.” The historian Tony Judt, who, then a student at the University of Cambridge, joined “the revolution,” took it seriously, and had “fun,” was later inclined to share Aron’s “skeptical words.”32 Mishima might have agreed to Aron’s assessment had he known it—at least later.
In the Hitotsubashi teach-in, Mishima inserted into his talk an image strikingly similar to the one he had conjured in a substantive article that had just appeared in Chūō Kōron. To illustrate the importance of taking responsibility for one’s pronouncements in the context of freedom of speech, he cited the story of an army lieutenant who suddenly dashed, with his sword drawn, and shouting, into throngs of Russian soldiers and was clobbered to death on the spot. He heard about it from someone who was on the scene. That happened, he said, when the Japanese army was disarming itself in front of the Russian army in Manchuria, in 1945. Mishima’s point: “speech is the same as the Japanese sword.” No matter how many thousands your opponents, you are on your own, a single Japanese sword.33
One evening in March, Mishima conducted an orchestra at a pop concert under Dan Ikuma’s directorship, a role he was given because he was a celebrity willing to take on anything. On the last day of the same month, he went with his family to the banks of the Tama River on a leisurely “grass picking” excursion, an old custom of collecting edible wild plants such as horsetail sprouts and watercress. Yōko drove, stopping the car here and there as they went. The cherry trees had just begun to bloom and willow trees were burgeoning.
The beauty of the latter reminded Mishima of a phrase from Ueda Akinari: “Blue, blue are the spring willows, but do not plant them in your garden.” It is the opening sentence of one of Akinari’s short stories, “Pledge by Chrysanthemum Flower” (Kikka no chigiri), and is followed by a warning: “In intercourse, do not associate yourself with someone frivolous. A willow may easily flourish, but it can hardly withstand the first autumn wind. It may be easy to make friends with someone frivolous, but he can quickly go away.” The story has to do with two men who adopt each other as brothers. Before parting, they pledge to meet again on Chrysanthemum Day, the 9th of Ninth Month, of the following year. But one of them, unexpectedly finding himself under a form of house arrest in a distant place, kills himself to turn into a ghost to carry out the pledge.
Later, when solicited by Shōsetsu Shinchō for one of those ephemeral filler-like essays for which most Japanese monthlies set aside space for writers, politicians, and such, Mishima wrote about that spring day, ending the essay, “Old Spring,” with a note that it was on the following day, April 1, that Japanese dailies issued extras—something that “had been forgotten in daily life since TV stations opened,” as he pointed out in a different essay34—on the news that President Lyndon Johnson announced his decision not to run for reelection and that he was suspending the bombing of North Vietnam for peace talks.35
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sun and Steel
The hallowing of Pain
Like hallowing of Heaven,
Obtains at a corporeal cost—
The Summit is not given
—Emily Dickinson
In mid-April, 1968, Mishima, with Matsuura Takeo and Nakamura Nobuo, pulled out of the theater troupe N.L.T. to set up a new one, Rōman Gekijō, “Romantic Theater,” and became its supervising director. At that moment Matsuura was directing Black Lizard at the Tōyoko Gekijō, with the transvestite Maruyama Akihiro playing the sexy, evil heroine. From the 3rd to the 5th of May, Mishima, with Hayashi Fusao and Muramatsu Takeshi, took part in a seminar held by the Japanese Students Alliance.
In June, he wrote the introduction to Yatō Tamotsu’s selection of photos of “naked festivals” (hadaka matsuri), in which men take part na
ked save for loincloths. In speaking of these festivals, Mishima gave a wry but succinct history of how the Japanese, perceiving themselves to be uncivilized or uncultured in comparison with Westerners, had acted perversely since the mid-nineteenth century, unaware that the Westerners themselves came laden with cultural hypocrisies. The Japanese failed to notice, for example, that something like which part of the body is to be hidden in public is not a matter of civilized or uncivilized. As a result, such routine things as men and women mingling naked in a hot spring and mothers suckling their babies exposing their breasts were quickly suppressed as “barbaric.”
So were the ancient festivals of men naked except for loincloths jostling to achieve a goal—such as carrying a set of yin-yang balls from one place to another, as happens in the Tamaseseri, at Hakozaki Shrine, in Hakata. But now that Japan had become advanced enough to export transistor radios, people felt confident enough to pull some “feudal customs” out into the open—when, alas, these, suppressed and forgotten too long, were about to disappear forever.1
About the same time, Mishima had a taidan with Genda Minoru on national defense. Genda, a skilled pilot who had taken part in Pearl Harbor and other battles as a staff officer of the naval airborne division and two and a half years on become one of the devisors of the Kamikaze tactic at the General Staff, was among the many who made a smooth transition to the SDF, where he achieved the rank equivalent to the US four-star general in the Air Self-Defense Force.
At the time of the taidan with Mishima, Genda was running for reelection for the House of Councilors. Mishima’s brief, laudatory essay on him for the Asahi Shinbun2 could have only enhanced his reputation as leader of the “Genda Circus” and as “the hero of the sky” in prewar years. Mishima began his report this way: “As soon as I met Mr. Genda, I asked, ‘Do you still pilot airplanes, sir?’ [He replied,] ‘Yes, sometimes. It’s easier than walking.’” Given his fame, however dubious in some ways, Genda’s reelection was a cinch. In the end he served in the Upper House for twenty-four years.
Also in June, Mishima joined sixty-two other experts from various fields to found the Japan Cultural Congress, and was duly elected one of its directors. The roster of charter members included such notables as Kobayashi Hideo, Fukuda Tsuneari, the historian Hayashi Kentarō, the painter Hayashi Takeshi, and the architect Taniguchi Yoshio, who years later would be commissioned to design the new building of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
The initial idea for the creation of the JCC may well have come from the CIA or one of its tentacles, but among Japanese intellectuals there was enough unease about the milieu generated by the anti-Security Treaty movement, which had seen its earlier peak in 1960, to agree on setting up a forum for those advocating “responsible freedom” that would reject extreme leftist and rightist positions.3 But the forum, when it was created, stressed that Japan as a mass society was facing a crisis as it had cut itself off from tradition and that individual thinking was being neglected by mass thinking.
Such sentiments are always amorphous, as those expressed by the JCC certainly were, but its goal was even more so: to make Japan “a philosophical bridge between the East and the West amid increasing complications and rising tensions in international relations.”4 Here the East-West dichotomy is that between Soviet-style Communism and American-style capitalism, not the Kiplingesque one between Europe and Asia. Before the Second World War, some Japanese intellectuals advocated that Japan become a bridge to enable the two different cultural spheres such as seen by Kipling to “meet.” The Christian leader Uchimura Kanzō was one of them; toward the end of the nineteenth century he argued that Japan’s geopolitical role would be to play just such an intermediary, and his book, On the Earthman (Chijin-ron), was reissued at the start of the Pacific War. The committee in effect intended to resurrect that role in a completely different setting.
Mishima stated his reason for joining the group in a Yomiuri Shin-bun article. He was irritated that “the minority” had to be put on the defensive vis-à-vis “the majority.” The majority insisted that they were for “peace” and therefore “antiestablishment,” which automatically made those who did not accept their positions and views “antipeace” or else the drum-beaters for the establishment. He felt that the prevailing black-and-white discrepancy was wrong.5
He remained a JCC director until the spring of 1970. The JCC disbanded in 1994, but Shokun!, the magazine created for it and published by Bungei Shunjū, lasted until 2009.
In July Mishima had a taidan with Fukuda Takeo, briefly his superior at the Ministry of Finance two decades earlier and now the secretary-general of the Liberal Democratic Party. In it he proposed the idea of splitting the SDF into two groups, one for the United Nations, the other for national defense only. He put the idea forward in reference to a recent survey by the weekly Yomiuri of sixty-odd people in a range of fields that found “an overwhelming majority was for leaving the Constitution as it is”—that is, keeping Article 9 intact—“while not recognizing the SDF as a military force.”6
Later that year he elaborated on the idea, first for the bulletin of the Japan Federation of Employers’ Association,7 then in a “free talk” (hōdan) for the monthly Bungei Shunjū.8 In the final form he envisioned, the sticking point was the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty, but his idea remained the same: 90 percent of the land force, 10 percent of the air force, and 40 percent of the maritime force would be reorganized purely for national defense, unrelated to the treaty, “not for America,” while 10 percent of the land force, 90 percent of the air force, and 60 percent of the maritime force would be reorganized as a genuine detachment of the UN police reserve, which Mishima thought would come into being sooner or later. The problem was the puny size of the SDF as it was. There was no way for a force of 160,000 to defend the country, because at least a million-man force would be needed. Another problem was the nation’s infrastructure, with the highways not built to bear tanks, and so forth.9
Decadence and National Defense
From that spring to summer, Mishima took on several disparate literary ventures, not counting The Runaway Horse, which he was about to complete, or the series of essays mentioned earlier, “What Is Fiction?” To name just three, they were: serving as sole editor of a special issue of Hihyō that focused on decadence; starting a series titled Spiritual Lectures for Young Samurai for a new magazine; and writing an essay, “On Defending Culture.”
As editor of the decadence special, Mishima selected, for illustrations, four paintings by four painters: Taiso Yoshitoshi, Takehisa Yumeji, Desiderio da Settignano (1428?–64), and Aubrey Beardsley. He did so because “they have in common a certain debility, a certain paranoia.” Throughout his painterly career, Yoshitoshi displayed “tireless taste for blood and gore,” Mishima explained, an understandable propensity of a man who “survived the turmoil of the last phase of the Tokugawa government” when assassinations and other killings were rampant, that culminated in the series 28 Folks with Heroic Names. But he chose one with “a concentrated expression of grotta”—what Mishima meant by “grotta” is obscure—that “reveals a soul trembling with a happy conjunction of his own physiology and the excitement of the peripheral nerves of the age.”
Yumeji, “the most moderate of the four” selected for the special issue, nonetheless “was not lacking in a certain amoral eye common with Beardsley,” Mishima wrote. In fact, he speculated, the Japanese painterillustrator, chiefly known for what might be called “lyrical ennui”—of which, like wearing “a flannel kimono in late spring, you can’t tell whether it derives from a slight fever, or from the weather”—must have been influenced by “Beardsley’s sharp, nonresisting decadence.” Simple kimono made of flannel (neru in Japanese) were prized as early summer wear during Yumeji’s era. Mishima chose his painting depicting an opium den, even as he noted that Yumeji had “compromised with the moderating sensibility of Taishō culture and his works could never have demonic depth or lurid satire.”
“A
bout Beardsley, I needn’t add any superfluous words,” Mishima wrote, even as he could not help choosing Priest to observe that “with its pale arrogance and what may be called an enfeebled kingly power,” it must be the illustrator’s self-portrait.10
He learned about Desiderio, as well as the painting he chose, from Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, Mishima wrote. “This sense of collapse is the most symbolic and most concrete expression of the sense of European decadence, of the collapse of the world. Continually, vividly reflected in the eyes of this unique painter obsessed all his life with a dream of a great collapse of a great building must have been the image of the destruction, which was to be, of Europe. And that great building,” Mishima closed his introduction to the special issue, Decadent Art, “never has had any resident in it. He, I venture, may have had premonitions of the disappearance of human beings in advance of the collapse of culture.”11
By chance or by design, the decadence special of Hihyō carried the last installment of Mishima’s most remarkable contemplation on body and death, Taiyō to tetsu (Sun and Steel). But we will look at it a little later.
Spiritual Lectures for Young Samurai was a series of twelve essays for the rather comically named monthly magazine Pocket Punch Oh!—the naming inspired, it was said, by Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” and because it was pocket-sized, though a more “intense” version of the weekly Heibon Punch for the young, with more photos of naked girls and such.12 Mishima’s series was suggested by the literary critic Mushiake Aromu who had read Mishima’s review of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï in the film arts magazine Eiga Geijutsu the previous year.13 In the review, Mishima had expressed admiration for the French film, with Alain Delon playing a perfectionist hit man, even as he condemned John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. Melville depicts a world, Mishima wrote, where “there are no social and political issues, where only the beauty of self-directing etiquette starts to glow as ethical, where there is only life and death, where, besides, the borderline between life and death is none other than the thin rim of an elegant fedora.”