by Hiroaki Sato
In the movie, the contract killer, before going out of his bachelor flat (garçonnier) to carry out a killing, checks his getup in the mirror, and touches the rim of his hat at the end of his narcissistic, preening ritual. Mishima then cited words from the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Elements (Gorin no sho) to characterize the rule of action that Delon the Hitman follows: “Your mind shouldn’t follow your body, nor should your body follow your mind. Your mind must be cautious while your body is not.”
Spiritual Lectures, at any rate, is not exactly what one might expect from its title. Like some of his other writings of a similar nature, it turns out not to be a bunch of pep talks, however outlandish the opinions expressed may be Mishima-style, despite the headlined topics such as “the courageous man,” “manners,” “trust,” “dress,” and “the order for the old and young.” Rather, it mainly concerns the complications that modern youth has to cope with as a result of changing times and influences.
The section, “On the literary feeble bodies,” is a case in point. “Literary feeble fellows” (bunjaku no to), in Mishima’s youth, meant those who were physically weak on account of their pursuit of learning in general and literature in particular. Mishima begins by mentioning his days in higher school when the tough students who advocated the notion, “military might decides all—budan-ha, and they were all members of sports clubs such as baseball and rugby—took it upon themselves to openly upbraid and intimidate ‘literary feeble bodies.’” In fact, there was a case of severe bullying in the fall of 1936, the year of the 2.26 Incident, that was serious enough to grab the headlines: one night a group of budan students called out bunjaku students one by one and beat them up, necessitating hospitalization of some.14
So one might expect Mishima, who showed off his bodily development even as he kept up his literary prowess, to advise would-be writers among the readers to pay equal attention to body and mind. But, no. The last thing he wants to do is to act like any of those bundan bullies, Mishima said. Instead, now that Japan is brimming with “a bunjaku spirit,” he wants the reader to know fully “what a deceitful spiritual structure bunjaku adherents have.”
“I have always felt the danger,” he wrote, “that literature itself makes you lose sight of morality.” This is because false or “second-class” literature is that which is written to exhort each man to work toward an ever higher spirit,” whereas “true literature” shows you “with what horrible destinies human beings are filled” and tells you that “there is nothing in our life, that at the bottom of humanity lurks an unsalvageable evil.”15
From July 25 to August 23, Mishima led the second JNG group to train with the GSDF, at the same camp, Takigahara. This time there were thirty-three students.
Defending Culture
Mishima probably meant “On Defending Culture,” published in the July issue of Chūō Kōron, to make a theoretical case for establishing the Shield Society, a justification of “the Tennō system as a cultural concept.” However, his argument provoked a strong putdown from the one critic who counted: Hashikawa Bunzō. A professor at Meiji University who taught history of Japanese political thought and a literary critic, Hashikawa was one of the few close readers of Mishima’s works who had consistently shown a positive appreciation, though he avowed his interest lay in matters historical rather than literary.
For example, in an essay, “The Young Generation and the Postwar Spirit”16—here seishin, of which “spirit” is a translation, is a Japanese word chosen for the German Geist, just as seishinshi, “spiritual history,” later in this paragraph, is a term chosen for Geistesgeschichte—Hashikawa expressed the kind of empathy for Kyōko’s House that only a contemporary with kindred sensibility could have felt. He characterized the novel as “a requiem” for what Mishima called “a brutally lyrical era” when Japan was in utter ruins.
“Someone like Mishima who worshipped the image of ‘ruins,’” Hashikawa had argued, had to be “driven into a life of ‘isolation and asceticism’” as the “metahistoric, eternal elements” receded along with the ruins and “the reactionary process called dailiness” set in. Mishima’s works interested him because they enabled him to sense something akin to a spirit turning variously luminous as “the image of that sanguinary ‘war’” transmuted itself. In short, they created for him “a document of wartime and postwar spiritual history.”
In contrast, Ishihara Shintarō was merely atavistic—shamelessly so, even, in his historical ignorance, Hashikawa judged. His novella, The Season of the Sun, won the Akutagawa Prize in 1955 and mesmerized the Japanese mass media throughout the ensuing year—the very period that Mishima defined as the ending of the postwar era in Kyōko’s House. What made Hashikawa indignant was the young writer’s striking resemblance to Haga Mayumi, a scholar of German literature who, along with Yasuda Yojūrō and Kamei Katsuichirō, was a member of the Japan Romantic School.17
“The similarities between the two in spiritual history are such as to make one sense almost a certain kind of historical scandal,” Hashikawa wrote. Though one emerged a decade after Japan’s defeat, the other a decade before it, they are “two Don Quixote’s, each clothed in a banal Romanticism”—not just “in their worship of the senses and mystification of the body” that have been standard since Friedrich Schlegel, “in their crudity and frippery in logic and rhetoric, in their naïveté in relation to ‘good upbringing’ but also in their lack of irony that is common to orthodox Romantics.” The Ishiharas were well-to-do enough to own a sailing boat, a luxury at the time and an important prop in his novel, and Haga was a son of a prominent scholar.
Ishihara’s “ignorance of the historical inefficacy of his own ideas is astonishing,” Hashikawa went on. Just as Haga’s exaltation of the body developed into a justification of Japan’s invasion of China via xenophobic nationalism, so did Ishihara’s “emotive activism” lead to worship of dictatorship via a sense of political crisis. Some decades later Ishihara would win international notoriety by spouting “flamboyant nationalism” as governor of Tokyo.18
As we have seen, Kyōko’s House, with four male characters pursuing different goals, had drawn largely poor reviews, so Hashikawa’s comments, though not a literary accolade, intrigued Mishima. He saw his oeuvre in the context of “spiritual history,” even while disparaging his younger rival, Ishihara. As a result, Mishima turned to Hashikawa for an afterword, in 1964, when Shūeisha offered to publish a fairly large volume of Mishima’s works “in the author’s own selection”: four novels, two short stories, a play, and an essay. Hashikawa consented, and wrote “Asceticism of Someone Who Died Young.”19
In it, he noted that Mishima was “one of the most admirable narrators” of his own spiritual history, though his approach to selfintrospection set him apart from other Japanese in that his compared with that of “the Calvinist’s self-examination filled with pessimism and awe.” The determinant was the war—Orgia or Todesgemeinschaft in Max Weber’s terminology. “Dying young was self-evident.” Accordingly, “the artificial resplendence of Mishima’s style, in truth, embodies an ascetic effort to construct a precise alibi for the absence of life.” Older than Mishima by just three years, Hashikawa was affected by the war’s destruction, physical and human, that he witnessed, as much as Mishima was. He had escaped the atomic bomb in Hiroshima by sheer chance.
Again, in 1966, when the publisher Bungei Shunjū planned a total of forty-three volumes of “modern Japanese literature,” beginning with Mori Ōgai, and decided to give a single volume to Mishima, one of only several living authors chosen for the series, Mishima asked Hashikawa to write his literary biography. Hashikawa again agreed, and came up with an account of substantial length. It was the first one, as a matter of fact, that began with Mishima’s grandfather, Sadatarō, in describing Mishima’s life.
“I am grateful to you from the bottom of my heart for writing such a fine biography,” Mishima wrote when he saw the manuscript. “Long ago, when you kindly wrote about Kyōko’s H
ouse, I remember your saying you are not interested in Mishima’s literature itself, your main interest being in spiritual history. Indeed, I feel that, with such an approach, you see accurately what lies at the base of my attitude, that is, what I am betting on literature, or what I am making use of literature for. . . . With this writing of yours, I am filled with joy that I have gained a true acquaintance.”20
Mishima added that he learned a great deal—things like the exoteric and esoteric aspects of the Tennō system and the question of orthodoxy in Shinpūren thinking—by rereading Hashikawa’s books, such as the one on the Japan Romantic School. Indeed, Hashikawa as scholar probably knew more than Mishima did, not just about the Tennō system, but also about the Shinpūren and Hagakure.
All the more because these things had led Mishima to trust Hashikawa as an astute judge of what he was doing, the university professor’s putdown of On Defending Culture, printed in the September issue of Chūō Kōron, came as a great surprise to him. He was “crushed” by the manner in which Hashikawa “skillfully pointed to my deception and logical defect,” Mishima wrote in his “Open Letter to Mr. Hashikawa Bunzō,” which the same monthly printed the following month. He called Hashikawa “a most faithful double agent,” whose “clarity of style and sharpness of brain” suggests not so much someone “demonic” as someone who sold himself to the demon.”21
How did Mishima advance his argument in defense of culture? If he were to argue for “the Tennō system as a cultural concept” as part and parcel of “culture,” he had to define “culture” and the role of “the Tennō system” in it. He did, but did so limply. “On Defending Culture” is at once convoluted and discursive; it is loaded with lumps of assertions hard to understand unless you are familiar with certain strands of historical ideas, and it touches on too many complex issues in a limited space.
Shed all the abstract terms and notions liberally studding it, Mishima’s argument may be summed up as follows: “Culture” is all inclusive, in the case of Japan covering both “the chrysanthemum” and “the sword”; but the postwar bureaucrats in foreign and cultural affairs did their utmost to sunder the chain linking the two, focusing only on all those things that are “gentle and unthreatening,” that is, things that “the chrysanthemum” represents. What is needed is for the Tennō to link the two back together to restore the cultural “totality.”
By the two metaphors, one a flower, the other a weapon, Mishima was referring to what the American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict had famously put forward as the two opposing characteristics of Japanese culture in a tract commissioned by the US War Department during the war, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Indeed, some may be surprised that Mishima brought up Benedict’s famous though simplistic metaphorical taxonomy of Japanese culture to explain his position. Mishima was aware of this. In a taidan with Tsutsumi Seiji toward the end of 1969, he explained: “There is Ruth Benedict’s book called The Chrysanthemum and the Sword; no book makes fun of Japan as much as this one. But I find interesting her way of division of culture as ‘the chrysanthemum’ and the martial way as ‘the sword.’”22
So, what is Japanese culture in its comprehensive totality like? Culture is “neither something material (mono) nor a formless national spirit” that is sometimes assumed to exist before anything like culture takes shape in the formation of a nation, Mishima writes. Rather, it is “something transparent and crystalline through which you can see the national spirit.” It “includes not only the so-called artistic works but actions and action patterns.”
“Culture includes,” Mishima explains, things ranging “from a pattern in nō [acting] to even 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, as well as the innumerable wills left by the special attack forces.”
The “human torpedo” is a torpedo turned into a mini-submarine whose crew of one or two was expected to die upon his vessel’s contact with his target, an enemy warship. Most of these suicide vessels failed to come in contact with their targets and, forced to drift, were lost at sea. Mishima’s man drifted to the shore instead, so he could jump out of his vessel, wielding his sword or otherwise. Like the lieutenant he described in the teach-in at Hitotsubashi University, it was the image Mishima was projecting for himself.
Culture includes, Mishima goes on, “both ‘the chrysanthemum and the sword,’ from The Tale of Genji to modern fiction, from the Man’yōshū to avant-garde tanka,23 from the Buddhist statues at the Chūsonji to modern sculptures, from flower arrangement and tea ceremony, to kendō and jūdō—not just these, but from kabuki to yakuza sword-fight films, from Zen to military etiquette.”
The Tennō System as a Cultural Concept
This definition of culture, Japanese culture, which Mishima makes in one of the clearer passages in “On Defending Culture,” is certainly comprehensive and “total”—perhaps too much so. Mishima tries to cover so many developments, political, cultural, and social, it even appears that he at times loses his train of thought, as he seldom did in this kind of argument. This seems to be especially the case where he tries to define “the Tennō system as a cultural concept.”
In arguing for such a Tennō system, Mishima leaves one vital point unclarified: exactly when, if ever, in Japanese history the Tennō embodied both chrysanthemum and the sword. One might think the Tennō did in the Meiji government, for in the Imperial Rescript to the Soldiers and Sailors, in 1882, the Meiji Emperor asserted he held “ultimate authority in both literary and martial fields.”24 But, no, the Japanese nation under the Meiji Constitution was made possible, Mishima argued, “on the corrosion of cultural totality.”
He begins by citing the scholarly or philosophical attempts to define the Tennō and his role by such stalwarts as Sasaki Sōichi, Watsuji Tetsurō, Tsuda Sōkichi, and Maruyama Masao—attempts made mainly in the years following Japan’s defeat and as a result of the US Occupation’s introduction and imposition of the notion of the Tennō as “the symbol of the state.”
As a matter of fact, Mishima’s reference to “exoteric” and “esoteric” aspects of the imperial system in his letter to Hashikawa mentioned earlier reflected a theory that emerged during the process.
The philosopher Kuno Osamu, for example, posited that Meiji oligarchs endowed the constitutional monarch they created in the person of the Tennō with those dual attributes. The Tennō in that new guise was, on one hand, an “absolute monarch with boundless authority and power,” while, on the other, he was “a limited monarch whose authority and power were circumscribed by the constitution and other things.” The “absolute monarch” or exoteric aspect was for the government to control the populace, whereas the “limited monarch” or esoteric aspect was for the government to control the Tennō.
This duality may not be as farfetched as it appears. The American political scientist Robert Dahl, for one, has noted something similar as regards the US presidency.25
Likewise, Mishima’s good friend Nakamura Mitsuo had argued, as early as 1956—a mere eleven years after Japan’s defeat—that “the great weakness of the governing system of modern Japan” lay in the fact that “the Tennō, even as he was situated at the pinnacle of government, was regarded as a being that transcended government, was not responsible for the actuality of governance, and was powerless.”
Yes, in modern Japan, governing was carried out “in the name of the Tennō,” Nakamura conceded, and, yes, “those in the position to make use of [the name of the Tennō] pushed irrational acts in the name of the taboo [i.e., the Tennō],” but the Japanese people “understood, as a matter of common sense, that the Tennō was not involved in the actuality of governance and had no power to do so.” This argument holds true, Nakamura added, only on the premise that “the Tennō system was to be blamed as an institution but not the Tennō as an individual,” that “the Tennō was absolutely powerless as a politician.” That premise was true, Naka
mura concluded.26
But Mishima quotes Sasaki, Watsuji, et al., only to assert that Japanese culture centers on the aesthetic notion of miyabi, “elegance, urbanity, in court poetry whose “wellspring is the Tennō.” This is because, Mishima says, all the other important aesthetic principles later developed, such as yūgen, hana, wabi, and sabi, were miyabi no manebi, imitations or derivatives of that “supreme aesthetic value.” Hana, “flower,” in this listing is what Zeami Motokiyo in his dramaturgy of nō put forward as the symbol of all that is beautiful and elegant.
That indeed may be the case, but does it follow that “the Tennō is the very source to which the honors of the chrysanthemum and the sword ultimately return”? Does it further follow that “military honors must also be given by the Tennō as a cultural concept,” that “the substance of the Imperial authority to confer honors”—the Meiji Constitution states, “The Tennō confers titles of nobility, rank, orders and other marks of honor” (Article 15)—“must be restored to the Emperor,” and that the Emperor “must of course accept the honor guards and must directly confer regimental flags with his own hands”?
Since the Shōwa Constitution cites “awarding honors” as one of the “acts” the Tennō performs (Article 7, Section 8), Mishima clearly meant the authority to confer military honors. It was a sore point to him that the Shōwa Emperor did not review the honor guards. Still, here is indeed a logical defect, a leap in logic. Mishima was probably aware of this even as he made the argument, for in the concluding paragraph that follows, he tried to explain why he made this kind of argument. But the concluding paragraph itself seems to contain a leap in logic.