by Hiroaki Sato
Mishima started the day on “the campus of Japan [Tokyo] Medical and Dental University in front of Ochanomizu Station,” Yamamoto recalled. “The student units engaged in close combat with the riot police kept up their fierce resistance by putting up barricades near there and in front of Meiji University,” which was close by. “His eyes bloodshot with Molotov cocktails flying and spurting out black smoke and the tear gas from gas canisters, Mr. Mishima stood in its midst without even twitching a muscle.”
After a while, Mishima moved to the Ginza. It was “a horrendous disaster area as [student] fighting units involving crowds and the riot police continued advancing and retreating, fiercely clashing,” Yamamoto wrote. “Mr. Mishima suddenly climbed up to the roof of the police booth on Ginza 4th Street. He kept staring at the street battles, for all the crisscrossing stone missiles. For some reason his body kept trembling slightly. Perhaps it was the excitement of someone facing his first battle.” According to other accounts, it was from the roof of a parking garage that Mishima watched the clashes for three hours.
It was when Mishima and Yamamoto retreated to a room in a building in Akasaka for a lunch break, well past noon, that he sensed Mishima was looking for “a place to die”—part of a samurai idea of dying in a suitable battle. To calm him down, Yamamoto offered him the whiskey he had ready. Mishima instantly became furious and cried: “What! A drink in a situation like this?!” He violently stood up and left.
Past eleven that evening, they gathered again, at the same place in Akasaka. Mishima asked Yamamoto to review the day’s action. Sensing Mishima was thinking of something big, which could only be a more overt action, Yamamoto declined, and suggested the group “fall out” at once. All they were doing that day was to put what they had learned so far to practical use. The situation was still far from serious enough for the JSDF to mobilize its domestic security force. Mishima’s group must exercise utmost caution not to act rashly. They should not make any move that might provoke either security authorities or the mass media.
Mishima’s expression stiffened. In a moment, he told a young man to tell the members of the Shield Society gathered downstairs to move to the National Theater, then left the room without saying anything further. Again, Yamamoto felt that Mishima was looking for “a place to die.” Mishima’s contempt, Yamamoto guessed in retrospect, lay in the thought that “a soldier may shed blood when ordered, but not out of an inner order or demand.”15 The two men had approached the matter differently. The incident would mark the beginning of the eventual split between Mishima the military or security amateur and Yamamoto the professional soldier.
Actually, Yamamoto, writing with remorse after Mishima’s death, may have read too much into Mishima’s mind or at least tried to present a particular image of him. Mishima may have been “excited” or “exhilarated” that day, but not quite somber, except perhaps in Yamamoto’s presence.
Chiyuki, whom Mishima visited at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to eat the lunchbox he brought with him, remembered his brother’s palpable excitement; so did Shibusawa Tatsuhiko who that evening met him, along with a few others, to discuss his new magazine at a restaurant in Roppongi. Mishima showed up in a helmet, khaki battle fatigues, and boots, and kept making phone calls, apparently to keep up-to-date on where the demonstrators were heading.16 (Yamamoto neglected to mention Mishima’s conspicuous getup that day. As commander of the day’s intelligence-gathering activity he should have prohibited any such thing.) Similarly, a woman who saw Mishima that day on Ginza 4th Street, recalled a man very different from the one Yamamoto presented.
“Someone who was with me said, ‘Look, that’s Mishima Yukio,’ and pointed at him,” the woman, a student and a member of the Beheiren at the time, recalled with clarity. “So I looked and sure it was him. It was, like, he’d come to enjoy a fireworks festival. He watched, with a smile on his face, the clashes between the demonstrators and the police, and when stone-throwing got fierce and the police broke ranks, he looked ready to jump up and clap his hands” to applaud the students.17
The woman’s observation, in fact, hit the bull’s eye. Excited as he was about the turmoil of the day, Mishima was not necessarily aligning himself with the police. Later that year, he made clear that his main complaint was that those running around calling for “a revolution” weren’t risking their lives. They threw stones at the riot police from a safe distance or smashed the windows of streetcars—“Even I could do such things.” The students in helmets color-coded by faction were like “swarms of ladybirds,” he snorted. The talk, when published in Bungei Shunjū, was titled “Turn Tōdai into a Zoo,” a twist on the students’ call for “turning Tōdai into the bastion of antiestablishment.”18 Tōdai is the acronym for the University of Tokyo.
Worse, with their faces masked with towels, they looked as ludicrous as if they were about to do “major house cleaning” or something, as he put it in a taidan with Iida Momo. “The trouble is I have a sentimental sympathy” for them, he said. Iida was the top graduate of the Tōdai Faculty of Law in Mishima’s class. He was employed by the Bank of Japan upon graduation, just as Mishima was by the Finance Ministry, but tuberculosis forced him to quit. Recovering, he joined the Communist Party but was later expelled. Still, his sympathy was solidly with the antiestablishment side.
Mishima insisted that if he unsheathed a sword he’d wound or kill people, prepared to die himself. In many internecine clashes during the student movement, athletic clubs and such were rightist-leaning, and rightwing organizations sent thugs to help them. In one instance a man had appeared with a sword and wounded several.19
Probably about the time Yamamoto and Mishima had the last exchange of the day, an overturned armored vehicle was set afire in front of Shinjuku Station and demonstrators ran amok on the platforms and tracks. Close to midnight, the decision to apply the law against disturbances was made. All that while, the GSDF’s domestic security arm had been placed on alert in secret. But there was no need to put it into operation.
The following day, the top dailies blared such headlines as “Shin-juku Turned into Lawless Zone” (Mainichi) and “Law against Disturbances Applied to Student Demonstrators” (Asahi). Disturbances the demonstrators created had indeed made a serious impression. The New Left announced the creation of “liberated zones” in various parts of Tokyo.
But there is a difference between “disturbance” (sōran) and “civil war” (nairan) as Japanese criminal law defines them. The former refers to “the group act of violence or threat” in a specific area of society, whereas the latter refers to an overt act of “destroying the nation’s administrative structure or eliminating the nation’s power in its territory to exercise power in its stead.” And the latter could only, in limited circumstances, lead to the JSDF activating its domestic security unit.
That was Yamamoto’s assessment and he was right. Yes, the New Left’s actions “greatly shook the capital,” he wrote:
But it was not a battle in the living space of those involved in it, but a battle in a certain assumed situation; accordingly, there could not have been anything like a total destruction of the living space. As long as there is no total destruction, tomorrow is sure to come. As long as there is a tomorrow, social order has not been destroyed. The ordinary citizens who have joined the demonstrators will return to their daily lives as commuting workers overnight. The Zenkyōtō’s battles that cannot gain a regional sympathy may appear for a moment as if they involve ordinary citizens, but as long as their battles are not rooted in their own living space, they will soon become isolated, unable to continue and expand the battles.
“A large city is like a large vessel with water in it. The water may be disturbed by something, but unless the vessel is destroyed, it regains its quiet state in no time,” Yamamoto observed.20
In fact, not far from the “liberated zones,” salarymen who had little interest in International Antiwar Day except as a spectator sport or as an exciting piece of news had the usual cocktails u
nder the red lanterns on their way home that very day and the pachinko halls were as raucous as ever, with “The Warship March,” the all-time favorite among the Japanese military songs, blaring away. The Shield Society’s “intelligence gathering” activities did not even look into those routine aspects of daily life; if its members became excited, as they certainly did, they did so in the same way that Zenkyōtō students did.
Regardless of it all, his experiences that day may well have become a vital turning point for Mishima, at least as his mother saw it. That evening, he returned to his quaint house in a quiet residential district, unhurt. But his “excitement was such that it was almost uncontrollable,” Shizue recalled, in 1977. “As I look back, wondering when Kimitake clearly began to be driven to action, it was from the Shinjuku Station demonstration incident. . . . I was fascinated to hear him talk in great detail [about what he had seen and done that day], gesticulating, but I was also spooked. I felt what had lain hidden deep in his heart spurted out all at once, with a great force.”21
Joy of Death
On the 26th and 27th of that month, Mishima’s two-act ballet Miranda was staged at Nissay Theatre. In July Ozawa Kinshirō’s ballet based on the film Yūkoku had been staged, but Miranda was Mishima’s own—and his only—ballet. The Ministry of Education had commissioned him to write “a Japanese ballet” to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the first year of the Meiji Era. It was “a tough assignment indeed,” Mishima wrote. The question was how to blend Japanese elements into an essentially foreign form. He did not want to create something like the ballet version of the Mikado that he had seen abroad. The dresses for the samurai were “exactly right,” but he was disheartened when a ballerina showed up onstage in white tights but with her upper body in a long-sleeved kimono that reached only to her waist.
So he decided to base his ballet on the Italian circus troupe Chiarini’s that had toured Japan in the nineteenth year of Meiji (1886). He constructed his story backward, first imagining a grand pas de deux between a young female Italian equestrian acrobat/tightrope walker and a young Japanese fishmonger. Because the men working in the fish markets in Japan in those days, like most other workers, wore tights-like pants reaching the knees and jackets open in front but tied at the waist, and because there was nothing strange about an Italian female acrobat appearing in a tutu, that would solve the problem of the dancers’ freedom of movement without straining the imagination of the audience.22
In his notes for the ballet, Mishima, appropriately for the assignment, had, as the ballet’s theme, “the joy of civilization and enlightenment”—“civilization and enlightenment” being the Japanese government’s slogan for Europeanization during the early part of Meiji.23 By “joy,” he meant that of the reconciliation between Japanese chauvinists and Japanese proponents of Europeanization. In the notes he also cautioned himself not to make Miranda look like West Side Story. That musical by Leonard Bernstein had won such popularity in Japan that some of those who could afford it flew to New York to see it.
The acrobat/tightrope walker Miranda, trapped in her love for the fishmonger Seikichi and a Japanese politician who, even as he spouts Europeanization, demands she become his mistress, pleads to be allowed to be with Seikichi if she succeeds in her last tightrope act. She wins assent but fails in the act, and dies in Seikichi’s arms. Mishima could not resist repeating the fate that he had given the tightrope walker in his story, “Circus.”
Tachibana Akiko directed the ballet. Tani Momoko, then Japan’s best ballerina, played Miranda.
In November the inaugural issue of Le Sang et la Rose (Chi to bara24) appeared. Subtitled “A Comprehensive Study in Eroticism and Cruelty,” the “highbrow” magazine was topped by a series of nine photos, starting with two of Mishima as model—one showing him as a naked man except for an ample white loincloth against a large, dark tree, hands held up with a rope and three arrows shot into his torso, titled “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” (with the subtitle “Les morts masculines”) and the other showing him as a naked man washed up on a rock, titled “Death by Drowning.” Shinoyama Kishin was the photographer. These were two in a series to be called A Man’s Death (Otoko no shi), with Shinoyama photographing Mishima in various postures, and the sessions would last until just before Mishima’s death, with Mishima assuming that the collection would come out after his immolation; the photos were to be “images of his greatest and ultimate joy.”
In these and other photo sessions, Mishima was an eager and compliant participant, naturally, although in the session for “Death by Drowning,” which took place on the Kamakura beach, he was uncharacteristically reluctant to take off his small white loincloth, until the artistic director Horiuchi Seiichi told him it wouldn’t work unless he did. Curious onlookers were milling around.25
The idea of modeling as Saint Sebastian no doubt delighted Mishima, but that year there was an immediate predecessor: George Lois’ photo, “The Passion of Muhammad Ali,” that had adorned the cover of the April issue of Esquire. It showed Ali “as a martyr refusing to fight in a bad war.”26
The inaugural issue of Le Sang et la Rose also carried a series of essays by some of the more prominent writers of the day—among them, Inagaki Taruho, Haniya Yutaka, Nonaka Yuri, Yoshiyuki Jun’nosuke—but Mishima’s essay titled in English, “All Japanese Are Perverse,” topped them.27
The Tōdai Turmoil
The unrest at the University of Tokyo, known as the Tōdai Turmoil or Struggle, depending on whether you took the administrators’ or the students’ viewpoint, started in January 1968 when the students at its Graduate School of Medicine went on strike “indefinitely.” They were opposed to unpaid internship as well as to the new registration system that the government, recognizing the inequity of the internship, had proposed in the Diet. In the internship system, graduates of medical schools were required to serve as unpaid interns for a year before taking national examinations. In the new registration system, they would take the exams at once and those who passed them would be registered as physicians but then would be required to go through “clinical training” for two years. During that period they were to be paid but the pay was too low to make much difference.28
Before the students at Tōdai Medical School struck, those at other universities had gone on strike for a variety of reasons, but the action at Tōdai and what happened there subsequently would go on to symbolize the student movement of the 1960s. Kawashima Hiroshi, a leader of the Tōdai Zenkyōtō who took part in the barricading or “blockading,” on July 2, 1968, of the university’s Yasuda Auditorium, the nine-story clock tower where its president had his office and where its entrance and graduation ceremonies are held, wrote in the monthly Bungei Shunjū that for the protesting students the auditorium in the end became “the bastion of Japan’s student movement, no, the bastion of Japan’s class struggle.”29 It had come to symbolize “Japan’s modernization and imperialism lasting a century.” By then the call was for “dismantling the Imperial University.” The students were using two slogans of the Cultural Revolution, “Rebellion has reason” and “Revolution is no crime”—the slogans Mao Zedong had come up with back in 1939.30
Mishima threw himself into the Tōdai Turmoil on November 10, when he, along with Agawa Hiroyuki, went to the university to see if they could win release of the dean of the Faculty of Literature and historian Hayashi Kentarō from the hands of the students who put him “under house arrest” at the Yasuda Auditorium. Agawa, a naval first lieutenant who after the war started out writing for the purpose of pacifying the war dead, had won two years earlier the Shinchōsha Literary Prize for his biography of Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku, who devised the Pearl Harbor attack. He would write biographies of two more admirals, Yonai Mitsumasa, who helped to end the war as the last Minister of the Navy, and Inoue Seibi, Japan’s last full admiral.
The rescue mission failed. Hayashi, mindful of the delicate, however lopsided, negotiations with the students continuing, asked them to leave him alone. H
is “house arrest” would last 173 hours, until he was carried out on a stretcher to be hospitalized.31
For four days from December 21, Mishima and the Shield Society had intense study sessions with Yamamoto. The sessions took the form called “lodging together”: all the participants stay in one place night and day for a given period. Yōko’s aunt Komatsu Shizuko provided space for the gathering. Komatsu ran Tokiwa-ken, a restaurant specializing in lunch boxes sold at train stations. Tokiwa-ken had acquired the concession rights to sell lunch boxes at Shinagawa Station back in 1923, and it had a seven-story factory near it. Mishima was allowed to use, free of charge, the relatively large room on the first floor of the building set aside for the employees’ rest and relaxation; he also had all the meals free. That was a great help to Mishima who took care of all the expenses related to the Shield Society. The room also had a blackboard. That, too, helped.
The four-day session consisted of four eight-hour lectures, one each day, all about guerrilla warfare: introduction, management, and engagement. Yamamoto took the lectures seriously; so did Mishima, who took meticulous notes, just as he did in preparing to write novels and plays. During a question-and-answer session, a member of the Shield Society asked Yamamoto, with deadly seriousness, whose assassination would help Japan the most. It was Morita Masakatsu. That is the very question Iinuma Isao, the protagonist of The Runaway Horse, asks (in Chapter 13) while visiting Lt. Gen. Kitō’s house with two of his plotters and being entertained by his daughter, Makiko. The question suggested that Morita had closely read the novel and was imagining himself to be the incarnation of Isao who equated loyalty to the Tennō with death.