by Hiroaki Sato
Nevertheless, he had responded to the invitation with “a considerable resolve,” he told the students frankly, humorously; after all, as the adage has it, “A man faces seven enemies once he steps out of his gate.” Despite the easygoing air he maintained, he was concerned enough in fact, the rightwing education commentator and friend Izawa Kinemaro revealed after Mishima’s death, to carry a dagger with him. If true, photographs of that occasion do not show it. Perhaps he was wearing a haramaki and holding the weapon underneath it. A haramaki, a long sash wound several times around the stomach, is a yakuza accouterment. The idea is to prevent the guts from spilling when you are slashed in the stomach. As far as such things go, Mishima was no doubt wearing a fundoshi.
Izawa added that a couple of students had vowed beforehand that they would “defeat Mishima in debate, so he won’t be able to talk himself out of it and will be forced to disembowel himself on the stage.” Sensing the peril, ten members of the Shield Society quietly placed themselves in the second row of the classroom.25 In the end, nothing remotely resembling violence occurred.
The debate that day was informal and, without any topics agreed upon beforehand, meandered. Mishima had thought of five topics for debate and declared, at the outset, that he would face whatever issues they might raise “on the premise that [the two sides] would not understand each other.” But the Zenkyōtō had not lined up a proper number of students to engage him on any specific questions.
Still, some students had read Mishima well and pondered on his “philosophy of life,” and Mishima announced he recognized the value of what the students had done—“smashing the nose of self-conceit” that pervaded the “intellectualism” of Tōdai. Among the icons of such intellectualism the students had abused was, Mishima noted approvingly, Maruyama Masao, the much admired Tōdai scholar of modern Japanese history and advocate of “postwar democracy.” There was, further, the sense that, as student “A,” who played the role of moderator, was honest to say amid laughter, Mishima, for the students, deserved the honorific address sensei far better than “the Tōdai teachers loitering around there.” So, contrary to the usual assessments, the two sides were not without points of agreement.
For one thing, Mishima explained he had come to regard Communism as his “enemy.” He was initially interested in eroticism—like Ōe Kenzaburō, he said, eliciting laughter—but eroticism necessarily requires “the other,” albeit in reference to Sartre whom he detests, he said. And as he became wearied of eroticism, he had to create some kind of illusion (his English) that was “the other.” The result was Communism.
For another, Mishima’s concept of the Tennō became clearer. A student identified as “H”—who obviously could not decide whether he should be rude or respectful to Mishima—proposed that the kind of Tennō that Mishima had written about in “Voices of the Heroic Souls” and elsewhere can “exist as beauty that is at once supreme and most forbidding,” as Mishima may put it, only because it does not exist or else is utterly “unrealistic.” If Mishima is “a writer who pursues beauty,” as he must be, he shouldn’t join the SDF for a couple of days or “playact a weird rightwinger,” but “confine himself in the beauty” he is pursuing. Once he steps out of that confine, “H” suggested, his action degrades the Tennō as embodiment of “beauty, the community fantasy, the community model.”
That was the spirit of the mid-nineteenth-century slogan, “devotion to the Tennō,” Mishima responded, saying he was glad to find someone with that spirit. When another student promptly accused him of being facetious, Mishima pointed out what he professed he had always maintained: that “as a political concept there is almost no distinction between the direct rule by the Tennō in the first year of Shōwa and the kind of direct democracy talked about at present,” the “one common factor” between the two being “the dream that the people’s will directly links to the nation’s will without going through the intermediary medium of a power structure.” He went on to add: “Because this dream was not once fulfilled, all the prewar coups d’état failed.”
There is a difference, Mishima continued. The earlier form carried the name Tennō, whereas what the students are trying to achieve now doesn’t. They think “sticking the Tennō to it will do no good.” They, in other words, have never thought about “the people at the bottom of Japanese society” or “the people’s mentality” (English his). But if they did, “what may not succeed might,” he said. The point, in short, was a matter of naming, a matter of semiotics.
Mishima was consistent. The debate would be remembered mainly by one point he made: that, had the students barricading themselves in the Yasuda Auditorium uttered the word Tennō, he would have gladly joined them, or, as he put it toward the end, “If you simply called the Tennō a Tennō for me, I’d gladly join hands with you.” This, however, led Mishima to tell the students “a personal impression” that would confound even some of the Shield Society. Mochimaru Hiroshi, for one, had never heard Mishima reveal that emotive aspect in any of the many conversations he had with him.26
“I am born during the war, you see,” he said—meaning that his youth coincided with the time when Japan was at war. “His Majesty was sitting in a place like this, and I saw him remain absolutely still for three hours. Whatever you may say about it, for three hours, he, like a wooden statue, remained absolutely still, during my graduation ceremony. I received a watch from a Tennō like that. I have a personal debt like that.”
Among the teachings on imperial conduct handed down since the tenth century was one dictating that the Tennō remain imperturbable and impassive in all circumstances. Also, the special education Hirohito received as constitutional monarch, from several prominent tutors, combined British and samurai traditions. Among the tutors while he was in the Peers School’s elementary division, Gen. Nogi Maresuke, then president of the school, taught him to be always mindful that he was to be the Grand Marshal, that is, supreme commander of all armed forces. That included being spartan with himself to the point of frugality. Hirohito evidently followed these lessons to the end of his life. The austere image of Hirohito astride a white horse stock-still during a grand military review lasting for hours, for example, was a familiar one to all prewar Japanese, if not finding themselves in the presence of the Tennō maintaining the same posture, as Mishima did.27
Mishima’s personal revelation, as it were, inevitably elicited laughter among the students, but he finished what he had started to say. “Such things happen in a man’s personal history. And I cannot deny it within me no matter how I try. He was truly admirable, the Tennō at that time.”
“In May this year,” Mishima wrote six months later, on the occasion of the first official parade of the Shield Society, “I happened to be summoned by students of the Radical Left and had a thrilling debate with them. It became a book, and a bestseller. The students who were my opponents in the debate and I agreed to split the royalties fifty-fifty. So probably they bought helmets and Molotov cocktails, and I purchased summer uniforms for The Shield Society. Everybody says this wasn’t too bad a deal.”28
For the debate, Mishima took a cameraman and a stenographer from Shinchōsha with the idea of turning it into a book. But, as he told Tsutsumi Seiji later, without irony, when he arrived at the designated hall, he found the students had summoned mass media—TV stations, weeklies, newspapers. They were ahead of the game!29 As a result, TBS devoted a thirteen-minute segment to it in its primetime news hour that day. The transcript of the entire proceedings, which lasted for two and a half hours, with supplementary essays by Mishima and three students representing the Zenkyōtō, came out the following month under the title of Beauty, the Community, and the Tōdai Struggle (Bi to kyōdotai to Tōdai Tōsō).30
The Shield Society’s “surveillance-investigative training” under Yamamoto was growing more rigorous. One day in early June, the month Kill! was filmed, Mishima invited Yamamoto, along with his fellow officers, to dinner at the restaurant of the Yamanoue Hotel, in Ochanomizu, whe
n one such training session was over. As soon as everyone was ushered into a private room, Mishima asked the waiters to leave, telling them that he’d order dinner after a discussion was over, and locked the door. This startled Yamamoto. He saw that Mishima had invited only those he trusted the most. Despite himself, his legs shook at the thought of Mishima finally announcing his “decision.”
He was right. Mishima pulled out a piece of paper from his inner jacket pocket and read it aloud. It was his action plan, and it consisted of three items. But the first was so “shocking” and farfetched that Yamamoto did not remember the second and the third, or so he averred in his memoir. That first item said Mishima would storm into the Imperial Palace with the Shield Society and defend it to the last man. Such an idea indeed would have unnerved anybody in their right mind. Still, it is too bad that Yamamoto did not remember when and under what condition Mishima explained he would do it. He did remember more or less, however, Mishima announcing he had already formed a suicide squad and given swords to its nine members.
Yamamoto could think of forming a special unit to defend the Imperial Palace, but only for preventing riotous people from breaking in, which, if that were to be assumed, would require hand-to-hand-combat training that was radically different from the kind of “surveillance-investigative” training Yamamoto was putting the Shield Society through.
After some awkward moments, Mishima struck a match and burned in an ashtray the piece of paper he had read from. A Westernstyle dinner, with knife and fork, followed, though when a waiter asked him if he would prefer bread or rice, he barked, “I hate bread!”
At one point during dinner Mishima suggested that they do their next training on the premises of the Prime Minister’s Official Residence. Yamamoto promptly objected. Some in the mass media were already referring to what Mishima and his group were doing as “the rightwing’s armed training.” Yamamoto felt he had to forestall any action that might give any such idea. Since they had come to know each other, Yamamoto had come to agree with Mishima that the ultimate act for the Shield Society might involve the Tennō. But he had also come to realize that they had two separate scripts leading to it, whatever it might be.
One of the officers, bewildered by what appeared to be Mishima’s thinking, sarcastically offered: “Shall we then go to your house, set up straw figures, and practice” cutting them up with swords? Setting up a straw figure and cutting it up, in lieu of a corpse, was what samurai used to do for sword practice. Mishima looked glum but unfazed.31
About a month before his death, Mishima told Isoda Kōichi, a student of English literature who had debuted in 1960 as a literary critic with his essay on Mishima, that what he truly wanted to do was to kill the Tennō in the Imperial Palace. Was that also what he had in mind when he broached to Yamamoto and others the idea of storming into the Imperial Palace and defending it with a suicide squad? Perhaps. But Isoda was recollecting his last conversation with Mishima with a somewhat convoluted explanation and an interpretation of what happened subsequently. As he saw it, Mishima chose to do what he did in the GSDF compounds because he knew he wouldn’t be able to get into the Imperial Palace. According to Isoda, Mishima thought his act of killing “the human Tennō” would paradoxically prove that he was the transcendental being as depicted in “Voices of the Heroic Souls,” even as he established his own identity as a loyal subject by that act.32
Be that as it may, the idea necessarily brings to mind at least two earlier military involvements with the Imperial Palace. The leaders of the 2.26 Incident did not try to occupy it; for them such a move would have constituted the worst case of lèse majesté. During the Palace Incident—an attempt, from the afternoon of August 14 to the morning of August 15, 1945—to prevent Japan’s surrender, part of the Imperial Guards Division did, but to no avail.
The palace, in any event, is not something you can “storm into” with a force of less than a hundred men. Built where Edo Castle once rose, with some of the donjons and other buildings retained, it is a sprawling area of 350 acres. Was Mishima just testing Yamamoto as to his seriousness in joining him when the time came, on the upcoming International Antiwar Day, October 21?
In July Yamamoto was promoted to vice commandant of the GSDF Research School. His assignment to develop intelligence personnel was over, though that did not mean his association with Mishima was.
Mishima planned to hold the first parade of the Shield Society to mark the first anniversary of its formation to go with International Antiwar Day. As noted before, Mishima was responsible for all the costs involving the Shield Society. Here, let us take a brief look at the pecuniary aspect of maintaining a group such as the one Mishima created.
There were first the uniforms. Though the society’s membership still had not reached Mishima’s aim of one hundred, he ordered one hundred and one sets of summer and winter uniforms—that “one” being himself. Estimates vary, but Shiine Yamato thought each set cost ¥120,000 and each hat ¥20,000. So that alone came to more than ¥14 million. Then there were boots, fatigues, and such, not to mention the costs for various activities: impromptu gatherings at cafés, lodging for intensive lectures and such for several days, sending members to the GSDF for training.33 “There is no way the national budget could be used for students planning to join a private organization,” a new Shield Society recruit thought when handed the military gear at the society’s office, and he was right.34 What did all such expenditures mean to Mishima?
One way of assessing it is to go back to the payments for his writings. Popular weeklies and such paid him a good deal more, but the staid monthly Shinchō paid ¥1,500 a manuscript page for his tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, serialized from September 1965 to January 1971. With his customary precision, he planned to allocate 750 pages for each of the four linked but separate novels, and he followed the plan for the first three, more or less. That means he earned just about ¥1,125,000 for each, somewhat more than what Mochimaru Hiroshi, chief of students, drew for his salary as editor of the Ronsō Journal for a year.
There were of course royalties for the four novels published in book form, in addition to those for all the other books. But we can see why Mishima hinted at the financial burden of maintaining the Shield Society when he and Yamamoto repaired to a restaurant following the latter’s lecture to the members of the society, on May 23, 1969. Mishima had handed an envelope containing one thousand yen to each of the approximately one hundred participants in the lecture.35 As he told Yuasa Atsuko, who years earlier had run a salon that inspired Kyōko’s House, the cost was “not negligible.”
Or, as he candidly admitted, he learned that “the morality of any movement” is determined by money. For that reason, he had “never received a single penny of assistance from anyone,” he wrote. “All the funds come from my royalties.” That was the “economic reason” he was unable to increase the number of Shield Society members beyond one hundred.36
He may even have changed his mind on the publication schedule of the tetralogy because of the need for money. When he set to work on it, Mishima had planned to publish it all at once when the entire serialization was over. But sometime after he completed the first two novels, Spring Snow and The Runaway Horse, he had the strong urge to publish them in book form. The explanation he provided for this change of plan had nothing to do with money, of course. “The work of continuing to write such a long narrative as this without having any reaction”—from critics, for literary critics rarely, if ever, took up something under serialization for comment—“is work like that of a subway operator who doesn’t see outside scenery all day long, someone mocked me,” he explained. He agreed, and decided to go outside to enjoy fresh air and scenery, so he might take up the remaining work with a refreshed mind. “Otherwise, the first half [of the narrative] would remain knotty in my head, become accumulating dregs in my heart, and unnecessarily hamper [further] work.”37
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Wang Yangming: “To know is to act”
&n
bsp; What do you think of people calling you brazen?
“I absolutely agree with them. It’s as if the word were made for me.”
—Mishima in an interview
It was because of money that Mochimaru Hiroshi and half a dozen others connected to the Ronsō Journal had to part company with Mishima in the summer of 1969.
The periodical did not win many subscribers or buyers, the total number of copies sold of each issue falling far short of the goal of ten thousand at the best of times. Out of desperation, Nakatsuji Kazuhiko, editor-in-chief, and Bandai Kiyoshi once again turned to Tanaka Seigen for funding. They knew it would bring ire from Mishima. It certainly did, but through an unintended route.
In a meeting Tanaka bragged he was the “patron” of Mishima and the Shield Society. A friend of Mishima’s happened to be at the meeting and duly conveyed Tanaka’s words to him. Mishima lost his temper. The upshot: at the end of August, seven Ronsō Journal people quit the Shield Society. What hurt Mishima was that they were also among the original ten who made the blood-oath. Muramatsu Takeshi witnessed part of the process, as well as the result.
After a Japan Cultural Council conference, Mishima took him to a café in the Akasaka Prince Hotel nearby. Nakatsuji was already there. As soon as they sat down, Mishima told Nakatsuji to “quit magazine editing and pack up and go home.” He did not explain why, and the young man did not ask the reason, either. Muramatsu thought his role was simply to witness something already agreed upon.
Mishima tried to persuade Mochimaru to cut his relationship with the journal but not with the Shield Society. In fact, he wanted him to focus on the militia. Till then the society was conducting its business in the journal’s editorial office, but now it would have its own “command post.” As always, Mishima would take care of all the expenses, including Mochimaru’s salary. But Mochimaru would not agree to the proposition. He planned to marry his fiancée in the fall, and did not want to wholly subordinate himself to Mishima. He needed a job of his own, a life of his own, while nurturing his own political thought. He did not want to be the kind of man often found among rightwingers—spouting vainglorious ideas without their feet on the ground, he explained to Mishima.