by Hiroaki Sato
On January 19, the University of Tokyo “fell.”
Early on the morning of January 18, 1969, the Metropolitan Police Department dispatched an eighty-five-hundred-man riot police force to dismantle the students’ occupation and “blockading” of the Yasuda Auditorium and other buildings on the Tōdai campus. The police had gathered a total of ten thousand tear gas grenades from all over Japan and an array of water canons for the occasion. They were also able to secure, albeit long after opening their assault because of jurisdictional disputes, the help of fire engines capable of blasting water powerful enough to smash through the boarded-up windows of the auditorium.
The barricading students put up a fierce resistance to counter the assault, throwing down broken-up flagstones and Molotov cocktails, not to mention chairs and desks. (In his Bungei Shunjū article, Kawashima Hiroshi insisted that the Molotov cocktails were meant not to explode.32 He was clearly mindful of Mishima’s talk of escalation of weapons in an earlier issue of the monthly.) By the end of the day the police succeeded in dislodging the occupiers of two dozen classrooms and others, including those of the faculties of law and engineering, though not the Yasuda Auditorium.
The one weapon neither side used was the gun. Sassa Atsuyuki, chief of staff of the riot police and the younger brother of Teiko, the woman Mishima dated after the war, reminds us of this in his detailed account of the battle titled The Fall of Tōdai (Tōdai rakujō). In the midst of the confrontation, an American journalist he knew, named Fisher, ran up to him, red-faced, and shouted, “Why don’t you shoot them? Kill them! Shoot them!”33 The Japanese riot police does not carry guns, except for a few high-ranking officers.
As night fell, the police left a twenty-three-hundred-man force on the campus. The next day the police used four thousand tear gas grenades and succeeded late that afternoon in dismantling the occupation. “Yasuda Castle fell.”
Casualties were high. A total of 710 police officers were injured, 31 seriously, although these figures included those deployed outside the Tōdai campus. More than two-thirds of the riot police were sent for support and to deal with the large numbers of students and citizens who demonstrated around Ochanomizu Station, Meiji University, and Chūō University, snarling up traffic.34 The proportion of student casualties was much higher: 270 of the 400 students arrested on the Tōdai campus alone were found to be wounded, many seriously. One became blind. The police inevitably kicked and beat up the students when they cornered or arrested them, as Shima Taizō has detailed in his account of the Tōdai Struggle from a student’s viewpoint. He was in a position to know. Then a student at the School of Science, Shima had taken on the job of “commander of the Yasuda defense unit.”35 Luckily, he went on to become an authority on primates and was decorated by the government of Madagascar for his study of the aye-aye. Many weren’t that lucky.
Why did the students’ resistance and violence escalate to that point? Kawashima summed up the answer: the students’ mounting anger at “the teachers, the school authorities, the riot police, the Minsei, and the rightwing students.”36 Sassa was sympathetic, at least as regards the first part of Kawashima’s statement. Himself a graduate of Tōdai’s Law Faculty, he pointed to the academic ills that drove the students to “the struggle”: “the feudalistic authoritarianism that remained old and unchanged, the empty content of lectures that did not deserve the name of ‘the highest academic institution,’ the inefficient bureaucratic management far removed from modern reality, the extremely impotent customs of professorial conferences.”37
The Minsei, the acronym of Minshu Seinen Dōmei, the Democratic Youth League, was the Yoyogi (Communist) Faction of the Zengakuren (it still is). In the power struggles within the leftwing groups, the Minsei directed its disciplined violence against the Zenkyōtō, which itself was splintered into factions and frequently resorted to internal violence. At times, the Communist faction strongly supported the students on strike, and at other times it seemed to withhold its support, in the end creating a situation where, “as long as it maintained its dubious attitude, the Tōdai Struggle could not end without the government’s strong-arm tactics”—the police force.38 As Mishima saw it, the Minsei was a scheming, hypocritical organization that took advantage of the students’ call for autonomy without believing in it even as the Zenkyōtō pursued its “phantom.” He detested it.39
As it happened, January 18 was the day Mishima’s theater troupe, Rōman Gekijō, had its inaugural production at Kinokuniya Hall. The drama he selected for it was My Friend Hitler. That evening Mishima went to his alma mater to observe the clash between the police and students but came away disappointed, again, that no students fought with the police by risking their lives.
Still, that day and the next, he feared that a student or two might jump off the roof of the Yasuda Auditorium in suicide. Some of those who watched the police-student clashes on TV wondered about that possibility.40 Aside from a law professor who, obviously angered by the destruction of his research chamber, suggested that four or five students jump to death from the clock tower,41 the thought may have echoed the experience two decades earlier: soldiers opting for suicide over surrender.
On the second day, Mishima telephoned Sassa urging him to devise some way of preventing the students from jumping off the clock tower; he also called the National Police Agency to suggest spraying hypnogenic gas over the tower from a helicopter to put the students there to sleep—a tactic that had already failed with tear gas; the helicopter blades dispersed the gas into thin air. Mishima’s concern, however, was peculiar to himself: he reasoned that just one student jumping off the roof and killing himself would instantly immobilize the riot police because of the uproar it would create. Furthermore, the appearance of a daring suicide among the protesting students would put the leftwing on equal footing with the kind of “Japanism” he had in mind: readiness to die for a cause.42
The government’s use of force in ending the students’ protests at Tōdai led to an ironic result, at least for the time being. It prompted students at other universities to go on strike or barricade themselves in important buildings of their campuses. In the end, students at sixty-eight out of seventy-five national universities, eighteen out of thirty-four other public universities, and seventy-nine out of two hundred seventy private universities went on strike. That in turn prompted the police to apply similar tactics, beginning with the Department of Literature at Nihon University, Japan’s largest university, on February 18. Nihon University was where the Zenkyōtō movement had started.
Nonetheless, “the Fall of Tōdai” took something vital out of the student movement, as Mishima would be disappointed to learn in time. It would also create a number of casualties in the nonphysical sense. Kawashima was one of them. A graduate student at the Faculty of Urban Engineering who dreamed of becoming “a freelance architect,” he would later be arrested as a result of his involvement with the Red Army that committed murders. His part in the Tōdai Struggle might not have entirely ruined his future, but his arrest in connection with that group did.
There was one thing about the outcome of the Tōdai Struggle that might have led Mishima to change his view of the Shōwa Emperor had he known it. When Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Department Hatano Akira went to His Majesty to report on the latest security situation, he had fully expected him to commend the police for a job well done. Instead, the question he received was: “Did anyone die on either side?”—that is, either on the side of the students or that of the police. When told no one had, His Majesty looked happy. Sassa was as disappointed to learn of this as Hatano had been surprised, but he had to recognize that from the Tennō’s perspective that was the way it must be: members of the Gemeinschaft that is Japan should not hurt each other. After all, the Shōwa Emperor, widely known to be a great fan of sumō, never once disclosed which wrestlers he favored. Taking sides was not his role.43
The Tennō’s concern could have reminded Mishima of the agony of the soldiers during the 2.26 In
cident: a possible inability to avoid internecine fighting.
On January 31, the last day of the My Friend Hitler production at Kinokuniya Hall, when the curtain came down and went up again, Muramatsu Takeshi was startled to see Mishima walk in from stage left in the Shield Society uniform and smartly salute the audience. Mishima briefly explained what the Shield Society was all about. “Nevertheless,” Muramatsu heard Mishima say, “I, the author of this play, love playing soldiers better than the three meals of the day, I hear people say, or that I’m always dreaming of the past, they dare say. I can’t tolerate that!” At this, the audience erupted with laughter, clapping.
During the end-of-the-run party that followed, Muramatsu commended Mishima for pulling off such an entertaining bit, which made Mishima happy. But Nakamura Nobuo, who played the role of Krupp, was none too pleased. He was put off that Mishima had shunted the actors aside at the curtain call.44
My Friend Hitler went on to Nagoya and Osaka, then Akita, Niigata, before coming back to Tokyo.
The Thai Princess
Shinchōsha published Spring Snow in January 1969 and The Runaway Horse the following month. Mishima used the opportunity to tell an anecdote of the kind only storytellers can. For background research for Spring Snow, he had visited a round of imperial convents in Kyoto and Nara. At one of them, the abbess asked the purpose of his research. He told her: In his story a young blueblood aristocratic woman betrothed to an imperial prince falls in love with a marquis’s son, becomes pregnant, aborts the baby, and takes Buddhist vows at a convent. Thereupon, the nun suspiciously looked at him and asked: “Where did you hear the story?”45
Mishima’s critic friend Okuno Takeo, for one, gave unstinting praise to Spring Snow, saying in his review that, after overcoming the initial difficulties he had with the novel, he “felt a real intoxication as never before,” finding in it “extraordinarily serious art that has abandoned all calculations and ostentations and that transcends all ages,” although he added the novel that followed, The Runaway Horse, was simply not to his taste.46
There was one thing that had made Okuno apprehensive about Spring Snow, however. It was the dark, foreboding image with which Mishima opens the story: a sepia photograph from the Russo-Japanese War that mesmerizes the novel’s protagonist, Matsugae Kiyoaki. It shows thousands of soldiers in a memorial service for those killed in the Battle of Delisi, on Liaotung Peninsula, in June 1904. At the center of the photograph, distant, tiny, but evidently tall, is a cenotaph in plain white wood.
On the afternoon of February 16, Sunday, the Shinchō editor Kojima Chikako brought two young Thai women to Mishima’s house. Kojima would occasionally dig up factual information for Mishima for the novels he serialized in her monthly. In the case of The Temple of Dawn that had started the previous September, she had already found out things like the Tokyo taxi fare and how people dressed the year the Occupation ended. This time it was to find someone he could use as the model for Jin Jan,47 the Thai princess in the novel. Jin Jan had already appeared in it, but as an infant girl whom Honda Shigekuni has an opportunity to meet just before Japan goes to war, simultaneously with the United States (Pearl Harbor) and Britain (Malay Peninsula). Now, Mishima wanted to envision her as an adult.
The young woman Kojima found, with some difficulty—there were not many Thai women in Tokyo—had a strikingly white face, “wondrously glossy” thick hair, and a pair of “heavy, moist black eyes that almost made you forget the existence of her eyebrows.” She was a student of economics at the University of Tokyo and was named Suwanchit. As Kojima suggested, as instructed by Mishima, she came with a friend. Mishima did not want a young woman who agreed to meet him—someone she didn’t know—to feel uncomfortable during the meeting.
For two hours, Mishima took care, as he always did with every guest, not to bore the two young visitors. There was not much to talk about, however, for all the months of unprecedented campus turmoil at Tōdai where the two young women studied. Perhaps, as foreign students, they stayed on “extraterritorial” terrain, Kojima wondered. Still, as they chatted, Mishima showed visible enchantment with Suwanchit, at times looking, Kojima thought, like an adolescent boy flustered to find himself close to a sensuous woman. The friend she brought, named Ditamat, apparently had “overseas Chinese” blood in her. She looked more Chinese than Thai.
When the meeting came to a close, Kojima realized that Mishima’s aim was to spend some more time with the young women, in a different setting. The women agreed to do so, this time on the Ginza. The date finally chosen, again with Kojima as conduit, would turn out to be more than six weeks later, the last day of March. First, Ditamat dropped out, so Suwanchit insisted on bringing a chaperone, the “mama” of her dormitory. Then, when the date approached, she canceled the meeting, which was to be in the Coffee House, of the Imperial Hotel.
When Kojima told this turn of events to Mishima on the phone, he sounded truly disappointed. But after a while he told her he had decided to change the storyline. As initially planned, Honda, meeting the Thai princess as a grown person in Tokyo seven years after Japan’s defeat, was to gradually fall in love with her.48 But in the novel actually written, Honda, learning that Jin Jan is in Tokyo as a student, sends his wife, Rie, to pick her up for their housewarming party, but Rie fails to find the princess where she is supposed to be despite the firm promise made on the phone. The reason given when she called the dormitory for foreign students was that the Japanese family with whom a new Thai student was staying had invited her to dinner.
For Counterrevolution with No Efficacy
Mishima’s “Counterrevolution Manifesto” appeared in the February issue of the Ronsō Journal. In some ways, his reasoning in this piece may be as hard to grasp as that in “On Defending Culture,” but he makes one thing clear: By counterrevolution he meant total opposition to Communism, an ideology that is contemptible because of its advocacy for “a better future society.” Rejection of a belief in the future was “the action principle of the Kamikaze Special Attack Forces”49—a dubious proposition at best, even as most on those suicide missions sincerely believed that their deaths would do some good for their country. Mishima was, in any case, arguing for rejection of the efficacy or usefulness of any action. And he knew, perhaps with wry amusement, that some had understood his line of thinking with alarm or disgust.
When the weekly Asahi Journal interviewed him in March, Mishima put that “principle” in a starker light, as if that were necessary. “Everything is counterfeit,” he declared. “Both governance and art, as long as they cling to efficacy in any form, are fiction,” he said, using English for the last word. “Only death is fact. What is the ultimate as proof of existence is death.” The matter, of course, had to do with himself, rather than a general principle: “When an artist tries to resist this dailiness=fiction, there is only death. Death as fact. Something like ideology is not the issue.” That artist was himself. “Unless I feel death somewhere, I cannot engage in artistic work.”
But he would “hate to die of anything like cancer, worse than death itself,” he insisted. Also, he despised “a man-of-letters’ suicide,” he said, of the kind his literary nemesis in his youth, Dazai Osamu, perpetrated: one “that piles on the self-collapse from art, life.” At least “Hemingway’s suicide with a hunting gun is closer to ‘manly death.’” Conclusion: “Because I at present am friendly with death, I am happy. And so, my life is worth living.”50
Naturally, some of Yamamoto’s colleagues were perplexed. Even those who agreed with Mishima on his anticommunist stance could not take his “action principle.” Yamamoto particularly remembered to write about a fiery-tempered man he identified as “M”—a classmate of his from the prewar army days. M insisted that Yamamoto introduce him to Mishima so he might point out “a big error” in Mishima’s scheme. So, the night before the anniversary of the 2.26 Incident, when Mishima had told him he’d come to visit, Yamamoto also invited M to come. As soon as the three sat down, M “concentrated his g
unfire attack” on a single point. The argument between M and Mishima, which was violent, went like this, as Yamamoto recollected:
M: What on earth would a movement that doesn’t take efficacy into account be like? What would you do if someone told you that you are just playing with words, no, you are just playing with “thought”?
Mishima: That’s not it. This is not a matter of playing with words or a matter of thought. Fact is, it’s to bet your own life on it and get killed while cutting down enemies (kirijini). That action will create people who follow you!
M: If you truly aim to change Japan, if yours is an action for that, don’t you think it’s meaningless unless you win once you act? If that’s the case, you necessarily have to have weapons that are superior to your enemy’s, be they tanks or missiles. The kind of spiritualism you talk about would of course be needed, but I’d say spiritualism that isn’t backed up with instruments is just a whiff of fantasy!
Mishima: No, you don’t understand. Your approach to this question is all wrong. As long as it is our goal to defend our culture with our own bodies, the only weapon we need is the Japanese sword!
The judgment that the excessive stress on the efficacy of the Yamato damashii, the spirit supposed to be unique to the Japanese, had lured the country into an unwinnable, disastrous war was inculcated into not just the officers of the SDF but all Japanese.51 But Mishima was not amused. Yamamoto later received his complaint, indirectly, that he was asking him to meet “strange people.”
Yamamoto felt, in retrospect, that Mishima was trying to lead the Shield Society in the kirijini ideal of the Shinpūren, which was totally incompatible with the need for material superiority in weaponry in the modern thinking of warfare. In that regard, he regretted that he had brought in M to raise such a basic issue with Mishima without Mishima’s prior agreement. Late that night Mishima left in a ceaseless snow, just like the night of the 2.26 Incident.52