by Hiroaki Sato
Supersonic Flight as Ejaculation
When Sun and Steel was published in book form, in October 1968, Mishima added his account of riding a two-seat F-104, on December 5, of the previous year, as epilogue. The supersonic interceptor, with a lieutenant colonel steering it, flew out of the Hyakuri Air Base, located on the Pacific coast side of Ibaraki, headed out to the ocean, bore down south, flew inland around Mt. Fuji, and returned. The experience provoked thoughts of ejaculation and death in Mishima.
“The F-104, this silvery sharp phallus, tears apart the big sky at an erection angle,” Mishima muses as the fighter takes off with him ensconced in the backseat. “I’m tucked into it like a single spermatozoa. I will learn how a spermatozoa feels at the moment of ejaculation.”
The jet fighter climbs ten thousand feet, twenty thousand feet, and reaches Mach 0.9, then G comes. “But because it was a gentle G, it was not pain but a pleasure,” he recalled. His chest “was momentarily empty,” and that was that. “My field of vision was occupied by a slightly gray blue sky. It was the sensation of taking a bite off a corner of the blue sky and swallowing this clump down. My rationality was cleanly preserved. All was quiet, vast, and on the surface of the blue sky spurted dots of semen, the white clouds.”
Mishima also reflected on death. “I am someone who’s taken interest only in the edge of the body and the edge of the spirit, the border of the body and the border of the spirit,” he declared. “I’ve never had interest in the abyss. Let’s leave it to the others. Because the abyss is shallow. Because it is banal.” The question is what lies beyond “the edge of the edge.” Is all you will find “a purfle dangling toward the void”?
The contrasting entities of body and spirit had, for Mishima, something similar at their extremes. When he pushed his body to “a blinding fatigue,” he at times witnessed what he called “the daybreak of the body.” Likewise, when he pushed his spirit to the brink, “at the risk of falling into the void,” he at times glimpsed “a glimmer of the dawn of the spirit.” Yet the two had never “harmonized themselves.” He had “never discovered in a physical action the cold, terrifying satisfaction resembling an intellectual adventure,” even as he had “never tasted in an intellectual adventure that selfless heat, that hot darkness of a physical action.”
Where do they link themselves? “There has to be somewhere a domain where the ultimate of action is stillness and where the ultimate of stillness is action.” And if there is “a higher principle” that unifies the two, it has to be death, Mishima had thought. But at a high altitude in a supersonic fighter jet, he realized that he had considered death as something “too mysterious.” The physical aspect of death was “simple and clear.” The simple fact of the matter was this: “The earth is wrapped in death.”
Mishima ends his account of the F-104 flight with a poem, “Icarus.” In it, the speaker, Icarus, crashes onto the earth, “the iron plate,” rather than into the sea, and he, presumably dead, asks if the whole thing was something “the earth where I belonged” schemed in order to punish him:
Was everything what the earth where I belonged schemed,
the blue of the sky a hypothesis,
for the intoxication of the wax on my wings
to be scorched for a fleeting moment,
a plan heaven secretly aided besides,
to hand down a punishment on me?
Was the punishment for the crime
that I did not believe in myself,
or that I believed too much in myself,
was too impatient to know where I belonged,
or was boastful that I had known all,
tried to fly toward the unknown,
or to the already known,
either way a single dot, a blue symbol?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Shield Society, Counterrevolution
The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.
—William Carlos Williams, The Descent of Winter
Soon after Hashikawa Bunzō tore apart his argument on the Tennō system, Mishima conceived a play with the provocative title of My Friend Hitler (Waga tomo Hitler) and finished writing it on October 30, 1968.
The drama has four historical figures: Ernst Röhm, chief of staff of the Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment, SA); Gregor Strasser, the socialist theoretician; Gustav Krupp, the industrialist; and Adolf Hitler. It has to do with the Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, when Hitler had Röhm and Strasser assassinated. Mishima said he was inspired to write it when he read Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, originally published in 1952, but he made it plain that his play includes things unlikely to have happened or contrary to known fact. For example, Strasser, whom he depicts as a mousy intellectual schemer to provide a contrast to the plainspoken, simpleminded Röhm, in reality seems to have been a big, hard-drinking, boisterous man.
Why Hitler? Did you write the play because you like Hitler? many asked him, Mishima wrote in one program note. No, the fact that he wrote a play about someone doesn’t mean he has “an obligation” to like the person. “To be honest, I feel a terrifying interest in Hitler, but if the question is whether I like or dislike him, I can only answer, I don’t like him,” Mishima said. “Hitler was a political genius but was not a hero. He thoroughly lacked the refreshing, sunny quality indispensable to becoming a hero. Hitler is as gloomy as the twentieth century.”
Politically, he was extremely interested in the Röhm assassination. If it’s the iron law of politics that to prepare a nation for mobilization requires elimination of both the extreme left and the extreme right so as to create a semblance of the middle road, that’s what Hitler accomplished overnight, Mishima proposed. Japan, on the other hand, lacking any such political will, and doing everything ad hoc, had needed a whole decade to get rid of the left—the suppression of Communism in the 1920s—and the right—the execution of those involved in the 2.26 Incident, in 1936.
He also had a literary motive to write My Friend Hitler, Mishima explained: to create a male twin of Madame de Sade. He wrote the play with four male characters, in a German Rococo setting, to go with the earlier play with six female characters, in a French Rococo setting. The figures of four and six themselves derive from his love of the old Chinese belle-lettres style known as siliu-pianli-ti, in which four-six-character phrases form parallelisms, bringing up an unexpected analogy. In other words, there was “no deep meaning” in the choice of Hitler itself, he said.
When it comes to contrasting My Friend Hitler with Madame de Sade, though, another explanation he provided may be more pertinent. “The female elegance, boredom, the reality of sex, and the chastity in Madame de Sade corresponds to the male robustness, passion, the idealism of sex, and the friendship in My Friend Hitler,” wrote Mishima. He filled the character of Röhm with “Japanese sentimentality” and through dramatic exaggeration turned the man into someone akin to Saigō Takamori. In that scheme, Hitler is akin to Ōkubo Toshimichi, who successfully drove Saigō out of government.
“Both Marquise de Sade and Capt. Röhm are unconsciously thrust toward George Bataille’s so-called ‘impossibility of Eros,’ struggle, break down right in front of it, and are defeated,” the playwright explained. “Just before their stretched fingers almost touch man’s deepest secret, the door to the ultimate temple, Marquise Sade denies tragedy on her own, and Röhm buries himself in tragic death. That is man’s fate.”1 This description recalls the scene in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion where the protagonist Mizoguchi struggles to open the door to the Kyūkyokuchō and fails.
The last time Mishima brought up Bataille in writing, it may be noted here, was in the summer of 1969, in “What Is Fiction?” Naming him along with Pierre Klossowski and Witold Gombrowicz as among the modern writers of the West he paid greatest attention to, Mishima explained he did so because they share the characteristics of evincing “a raw, also rough, rude linkage between metaphysics and the human body that appears to connect directly the eighteenth and twentieth
centuries,” as well as “antipsychologism, antirealism, erotic abstractism, direct symbolic techniques, and the view of the universe lurking behind them.”
He discussed Madame Edwarda, in which a prostitute reveals herself to be God (“well and truly a mystical as much as an obscene book, at least if one understands its mysticism as absolutely obscene”), with the contrasting My Mother, in which the narrator’s mother reveals herself to be a bitch, far worse than his father, a debauchee (“not a novel about incest or, if it is, this only incidental, a plus”2).
These two stories show, Mishima wrote, that Bataille manages to “express through language the holiness lurking in the experience of eroticism even as he realizes it is impossible to attain it through language (though this has also to do with the impossibility of re-experiencing through language).” Mishima ends his close analysis of the stories with a pointed remark: “It was Bataille that cut open for us the abyss of eroticism the vulgar psychoanalyst of Vienna could not possibly reach.”3
My Friend Hitler was published in the December 1968 issue of Bungakukai.
The Military Uniform
On October 3, 1968, Mishima spoke at a teach-in at Waseda University. It was arranged by the Shōshi-kai, “Respect History Club,” a rightistleaning entity that was a recruiting conduit for the JNG. It was a big draw. Two years earlier, Robert Kennedy had drawn a large crowd, but Mishima’s was larger.
Two days later, Mishima formally launched the JNG, now officially named the Shield Society, at the Japan Education Center, in Tokyo. More than forty members of the society gathered in uniform. Heibon Punch gave a ten-page spread to the event, five in color, five in black and white photographs by Izumi Shigeru, who was known for “drawing eroticism out of actresses.”4 Mishima was asked to write an essay to go with it, and did: “Conditions for a Man to Wear a Military Uniform.”
The uniform, which, along with the Shield Society, would become a butt of ridicule and wonderment, was partly his reaction to the military look in clothing that had become popular in the preceding few years, Mishima explained. But he was also partial to color and style. “Loud colors such as red, gold, and green were originally for sartorial decorations for men.” However, “there must be certain conditions and determination for a man to wear loud colors.”
The matador’s brilliant costume would look intolerably “foppish” on someone “without the backbone of the manly profession of death. . . . A man without such conditions and determination puts on a gray flannel suit to prove he is a sheep of the society,” Mishima went on. Sloan Wilson’s 1956 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was translated into Japanese years before seemingly every single American journalist writing about Japan, no matter what the subject, decided it was de rigueur to characterize Japan as a society of “conformists.” Arthur Koestler had noted the other side of the coin four years earlier when Life asked him to write an essay on Japan for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics: in the United States “the organization man still sees himself as a rugged individualist.”5 Mishima explained that, whereas the gray flannel suit is meant to blend its wearer into his surroundings, the military uniform is meant to render its wearer “conspicuous,” to warn off those who see it.
Mishima was proud of the uniform he had worked out and asked the readers of the weekly magazine to give it a close look if they saw someone in it on the street. Still, even as he stated that “the military uniform is the supreme means for a man to bedeck himself,” he maintained it wasn’t all that serious. In listing the distinctive features of the uniform, he noted that what was inside the scabbard of the dagger to go with the uniform was “no different from a toy,” not a real thing, “in accordance with the regulations of the Metropolitan Police Department,” and that the uniform was trademarked so “no outsider would be able to make exactly the same thing.” He ended the essay with: “For inquiries on becoming a member [of the Society, call] 572-5744.”
Calls came, at once. About two hundred people phoned within three days after the weekly magazine hit the newsstand, Mochimaru Hiroshi recalled. Some were naturally threats. One man shouted, “Let the Zengakuren kill you all!” Nonetheless, there were many applicants, compelling Mishima to work out the bylaws.6
Years later, Muramatsu Takeshi, reflecting that Mishima finished writing My Friend Hitler eight days after launching the Shield Society, on October 13, guessed that Mishima was projecting himself in Röhm who had isolated himself by insisting on leading his militia, the SA.7
The Nobel Prize Recipient
On October 17, Kawabata Yasunari received the Nobel Prize. Upon hearing the news at the Japan Publishers Club, Mishima stood by at the Mainichi Shinbun Company, with the NHK reporter Date Munekatsu and the Shinchōsha editor Nitta Hiroshi, to confirm it, wrote an article congratulating Kawabata on the spot for the daily, went home to change clothes, and, with Yōko, visited him in his house in Kamakura to offer him congratulations.
“That Mr. Kawabata Yasunari has received the Nobel Prize is a proud moment for Japan, an honor for Japanese literature. Nothing is more felicitous than this,” Mishima began his accolade. “Mr. Kawabata, having inherited the most brittle, the most ineffable traditions of Japanese literature, has kept walking in front of the very tip of the crisis of this country that has always hurried in its modernization. . . . Under his classical, elegant style,” Mishima continued, “lurks the most pointed theme of modern literature, the question: ‘In the first place can one human being love another?’ ‘The impossibility of love’ at times drifts lyrically, melts mythically, but always floats above his works like an ominous cloud.
“And ‘beauty,’ as if to deride that impossibility, quietly emerges out of the snow in Snow Country, out of the scenic old temple of The Old Capital, or in the form of a beautiful woman carrying a wrapping cloth in Thousand Cranes, only to mysteriously walk past us.”8
Yet Mishima could have been displaying considerable duplicity—greater, perhaps, than he had six years earlier when he had edited the Kawabata reader. As the scuttlebutt at the time had it, Mishima fired off letters to some in the publishing world condemning Kawabata receiving the prize, calling Snow Country “trashy patchwork,” and those in the know perfectly understood what he was talking about.9 Today that rumor may be well nigh impossible to prove, but Mishima had expressed his antipathy to Kawabata’s literature publicly a year earlier. In the first part of a series of four taidan with Nakamura Mitsuo, Mishima stated that he had never once been “charmed by Mr. Kawabata’s literature,” he had never been “influenced by Mr. Kawabata in literary techniques,” and that he had never been his “sympathizer.” In fact, he could “not stand the yin” nature of Kawabata.10
As Donald Keene tells it, Kawabata, not Mishima, getting the Nobel Prize may well have been “an accident.” UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, deeply impressed by The Temple of the Gold Pavilion, had recommend Mishima for the prize before he died in 1961. The Swedish Academy took the recommendation seriously. In 1967 a reliable source had told Keene that the prize winner next year would be Mishima. But, as noted earlier, a know-nothing intervened at the last minute, arguing Mishima was too much of a radical to deserve the prize.
Keene evidently told Mishima this turn of events, which he learned in May 1970. A Shinchō editor who met Mishima that summer remembered him saying with bitterness that Hammarskjöld’s premature death had prevented him receiving the prize.11
Kawabata receiving the Nobel Prize was such a big event that the Asahi Shinbun, for one, carried the full text of his speech, which is fairly long, on December 16, 1968.
International Antiwar Day
October 21 was International Antiwar Day when demonstrations against the Vietnam War took place worldwide. In Japan it turned into a series of violent clashes that in the end prompted the Metropolitan Police Department to apply Article 106 of the Criminal Code, the law against the “crime of disturbance.” In consequence, the police arrested 912 people, the largest mass arrest in postwar Japan.
The princip
al mover of the mass protests was the Zenkyōtō, the acronym of Zengaku Kyōtō Kaigi, the All-Campus Joint-Struggle Conference. The coalition had started out just a half a year earlier to focus on campus democratization and had quickly become a powerful force. By then campus democratization was practically inseparable from the anti–Vietnam War movement that, in turn, was equated with blocking of the renewal of the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty coming up in two years, in 1970.
That day anywhere from three to five thousand coalition followers massed on the University of Tokyo campus alone. Large numbers of demonstrators gathered elsewhere as well, despite the Public Safety Commission’s prohibition of all public assemblies and demonstrations that day. Various groups broke into the premises of the Defense Agency, the Diet, and Shinjuku Station. They also clashed with riot police in Ochanomizu and the Ginza. They threw broken-up flagstones and Molotov cocktails and brandished square lumber poles. The riot police, armored with duralumin shields, responded with truncheons and tear gas.12
What prompted the application of Article 106 late that evening was the rampage on Shinjuku Station, the main railroad junction in Japan for American matériel for the Vietnam War. More than a thousand students took part, with a crowd of ten thousand cheering on.13 Although the police force mobilized for the day totaled twelve thousand, it at times gave the impression of being pushed around, with clashes taking place throughout the metropolis all at once.
The day turned into a memorable one for Mishima and the members of the Shield Society that Yamamoto Kiyokatsu trained. Yamamoto mobilized not just the Shield Society but also his Research School. About forty Shield Society cadets, as Mishima might have called them in English, were dispersed throughout the metropolis to “collect intelligence” or “grasp the actual situation.” Mishima, appointed “special correspondent” by the Sunday Mainichi,14 spent the day with a journalist the weekly provided and an intelligence officer Yamamoto provided.