by Hiroaki Sato
The Ultimate Action Is Death
Mochimaru spoke for the last time on October 12, the day the Shield Society rehearsed its parade on the roof of the National Theatre. They then moved to Ichigaya Hall, where the mutual aid association of the Defense Agency was headquartered. Mochimaru recommended Kuramochi Kiyoshi, a Waseda student, to succeed him as “chief of students” on the ground that Kuramochi’s ability to take care of practical matters was good. Mishima evidently agreed with him, but he chose Morita Masakatsu instead. He may have seen in him a resemblance to his own creation, Iinuma Isao. The Shield Society’s business office was moved to Morita’s apartment.
Regardless of the differences in the assessment of what the Zengakuren might actually accomplish, International Antiwar Day, on October 21, that year was expected to create the biggest demonstrations in the battle against the renewal of the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty next June. Mishima himself foresaw “fierce clashes” between students and police, even as he expected the treaty would be “automatically extended” in the middle of next year, as he observed on October 15, in a speech at his former employer, the Ministry of Finance. His classmate Nagaoka Minoru, then director of the secretariat at the most powerful bureaucracy, had invited Mishima as part of the activities to mark the ministry’s hundredth anniversary. For the title of his talk, Mishima had suggested “something big like ‘Issues facing Japan now,’” as he put it. His talk, discursive and entertaining, ended on a personal note. When it was transcribed and published in the December 1970 issue of Bungei Shunjū, it was titled “What Is Japan?” That indeed was Mishima’s peroration.
The question is not, Mishima said, whether you are for or against the security treaty. Some may simply say that those for the treaty are for the United States and those against it are for the USSR but putting the matter in that fashion would be like “dividing Americans into whites and blacks.” The former would leave the question “What is Japan?” unanswered, just as the latter would not tell you what America is all about.
When the question of for or against the security treaty blows over, another dichotomy is likely to arise, between those who regard themselves as Japanese and those who do not, Mishima said, citing a brief conversation he had with a hippie at the time of his debate with Tōdai students. His dandruff-covered hair reaching his shoulders, the young man dismissed Mishima face to face as “a caged animal” and, when asked, said he had no nationality, despite his unmistakable “Mongolian-Japanese” appearance. With the sense of growing authoritarian oppression starting to pall over Japan even as traveling overseas became easier by the day because the Japanese were growing richer by leaps and bounds, such sentiments were gaining popularity. I’m Going to See Everything (Nandemo miteyarō), Oda Minoru’s account of global wandering on practically no money, had become a bestseller the previous year.
Mishima ended his talk by telling the financial bureaucrats that it was with that eventuality in mind that “I am readying my literature, readying my thought, or readying my action.”15
Here, if “action” sounds a little out of place, that is because the Japanese word Mishima chose for it, kōdō, had a special, even esoteric, meaning to him. Back in 1955, he had made a concise assessment of Yamamoto Tsunetomo of Hagakure, calling the samurai a kōdōka, “a man of action,” and characterizing as “Epicurean” Yamamoto’s statement: “There is nothing other than the immediate thought (nen) of the moment. I go on putting one thought on top of another and my life takes shape. Having realized this, I have nothing that keeps me busy, have nothing I seek. I simply live by keeping this one thought in mind.”
Mishima took nen in Yamamoto’s statement to mean the same as “decision” and “decision” the same as “action.” As we have seen, Yamamoto is famous for the dictum, “The way of the warrior, I’ve found, is to die. In a situation with a choice, you can only choose at once to die.” The ultimate action is death, be it natural death or some other death, such as one by disembowelment, Mishima argued. That being the case, “The judgment of the situation that spawns the judgment on death drags behind it a long chain of judgments, and honing oneself in endless judgments suggests a long time of tension and concentration that a man of action must put up with.”
A man of action thus inhabits a world in which he is “always drawing before his eyes a circle that can be perfected only by adding the last single dot.” But, unable to add the dot, “he, from second to second, discards the circle that can’t be linked without that dot to face another circle, yet still another.” An artist or a philosopher, in comparison, inhabits a world in which he “keeps adding layers of gradually spreading concentric circles around him.” The question is: “When death arrives, which one will have a more intense sense of perfection, the man of action or the artist?”16
This was fourteen years earlier. Now, not long before his speech at the Finance Ministry, Mishima had begun a series of essays on “action” for the monthly Pocket Punch Oh!, beginning with its September issue. Titled Introduction to a Study of Action (Kōdō-gaku nyūmon), the series was clearly meant to clarify the meaning of “action” through handy examples.
“Action has its own unique logic,” he had begun the opening essay. “Therefore, once it starts, it does not cease until its logic ends.” He then quickly brought in his favorite weapon: “The Japanese sword, once you draw it, begins a unique movement,” for, “as long as it is drawn, it cannot rest in the scabbard without [achieving] the aim of cutting something, or someone.”
“Action is swift,” while “life in one sense can take a long time.” Consider the men on the Kamikaze forces who flew themselves into death. People remember their action, but pay little thought to “the time of their life and their training that may have extended to several hundred hours.” Thus: “Action, exploding for a second like a fireworks, has the mysterious power to summarize a long life.”17
In the second essay, Mishima takes up “military action” to point to the contradiction between action and power in most military organizations: the greater the responsibility, the further from “action.” Only a guerrilla unit can escape this inevitability, for in it each member must be a true man of action even as he is required to display “an inhuman loyalty” to the whole. Still, it is only in “the beauty of an individual action” that we can try to find “the beauty of a human action.”18
In discussing “psychology of action” in the third, he admits that the human mind often prevents an action from taking place, even though “the action itself usually occurs with a speed that leaves no room for psychology.” This is because “to think of the future and think of the past is man’s unique nature, and the hard-to-deal-with ability called imagination, which animals lack, constrains man. How easy it would have been for [the men on] the Kamikaze forces had they not been tormented by imagination!”19
“‘Student Militia,’ Charge!”
The demonstrations on International Antiwar Day were indeed large. The Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Federation of Labor Unions made a unified front in organizing nationwide rallies to demand not just the ending of the war in Vietnam and the abandonment of the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty, but also the immediate, unconditional reversion of Okinawa and the immediate dissolution of the Diet. In addition, the Zenkyōtō and other student groups were expected to make their own moves.
It was the Yomiuri Shinbun that raised the stakes for Mishima. On October 19, the right-leaning national daily carried an article with a sensational headline, “‘Student Militia,’ Charge!,” with as sensational a subheading suggesting that a group was undertaking fierce training with guns “for yūkoku” and that its unusually long stay with the GSDF had raised some eyebrows. One of those quoted for the article was the influential journalist Ōya Sōichi whose comment in this instance carried a good deal of weight because he was known to be a friend of Mishima’s. Ōya suggested that the Defense Agency had gone a little too far in accommodating Mishima.
“Instead of being ple
ased about acquiring fifty or eighty militialike friends, they should think of the reaction of the great majority of the Japanese people. As I see it, most people do not support it,” Ōya said. “I understand well why Mr. Mishima can’t help feeling agitated about Japan’s present situation, but if you create an organization such as his and act [as he does], you will provoke those of the antiestablishment groups and worsen the confrontation.” He then warned: he sensed “the budding of Nazism” in what Mishima was doing.
Two days later, on International Antiwar Day, the morning edition of the Yomiuri carried another article on Mishima—this time a taidan between Mishima and Ōya’s “student” and friend Murakami Hyōe. The taidan itself may have been intended to convey Mishima’s “true intent,” but the accompanying article pointed out that an increasing number of people were expressing alarm that Mishima, a contender for the Nobel Prize only recently, had created something like the Shield Society.20
On the anticipated day, the rallies organized by political parties and labor unions drew more than eight hundred sixty thousand people nationwide, the largest number since the peak of the 1960 antisecurity treaty movement. The government deployed thirty-two thousand police men assembled from all over Japan, its core force the four thousand five hundred riot police, in Tokyo. In anticipation, Mishima had set up a command post in his house, secretly equipped with a wireless, apparently to tap police communications. Placed in the middle of the guestroom, it was a cumbersome affair, five feet wide and three feet high. Shiine Yamato, who had requested Mishima’s article on the day for his weekly and was to accompany him, thought of Che Guevara when he saw the machine and smelled cigar smoke in the room. Mishima liked to smoke Romeo y Julieta on special days.21
But the day turned out to be a dud, to Mishima’s disappointment—or was it? The main, obvious reason was the police. Also, partly as a result of the police campaign, the majority of people were quickly turning against the student movement and the violence that came with it.
The aggressive use of police force had become routine since the siege of the Yasuda Auditorium in January. The first big day following that was supposed to be April 28 Okinawa Day, but that did not happen. The police were relentless, even resorting to “preemptive arrests” which, as Mishima later suggested, would have provoked cries of illegality a few years earlier.22 They even disrupted “the antiwar folksong fest” that the Beheiren had organized in the plaza on the west side of Shinjuku Station on June 29; they used tear gas and arrested sixty-nine people. The after-the-fact explanation the police proffered was that the gathering created a traffic jam. Such strong-arm tactics led to the radicalization of one Communist faction of the Zengakuren. Toward the end of August the Communist Alliance announced the formation of the Red Army.
Also, some vigilante groups had sprung up. On International Antiwar Day there were even scenes reminiscent of wartime Japan: in various parts of Tokyo, women’s groups voluntarily went to police precincts and prepared food for the policemen.23
The result was far less violence in Tokyo than many had anticipated. During the day small bands of student demonstrators simply dashed through various parts of the metropolis like gusts sweeping through an empty house, prompting the Asahi Shinbun reporter to call them “sweep-through guerrillas.” In the evening, a sizable number of students finally managed to pour onto the railway track at Shinjuku Station, their strategic focus, and forced the National Railway to halt the operation of the line. But they were arrested in no time. The area around the station saw an estimated ten thousand people gather at its peak, but no violent clashes. Otherwise, with more than two-thirds of the “normally blinding neon signs” switched off early in the evening, the areas like the Ginza and Shinjuku that would otherwise be dazzlingly bright and noisy were bleak and quiet.24
The bleak and quiet scene was what Mishima saw when he arrived in Shinjuku late in the afternoon—dressed in a black leather jacket over a white see-through shirt, jeans, and leather laced-up shoes, topped by dark glasses and a racecar helmet—with some members of the Shield Society. The police hold on the east entrance to the station was far tighter than a year earlier, he noticed, as he described the scene for Pocket Punch Oh!. Though he did not tell the readers, he had asked the Metropolitan Police to put the Shield Society under its command but had been rebuffed.25
“There was nary a suggestion or a hint of the masses that had formed a terrifying mob around the east entrance” a year earlier, Mishima wrote, summing up the day in “Effects of Action.” “Terrifying” was the word Mishima used in several other places when referring to the nature of the mass of people that year. With all the stores and shops closed and all the surrounding buildings shuttered, the area had turned into “an ominous no-man’s land.”
It was “an ominous, nihilistic space” the riot police had created behind them, where no demonstrators would dare get in. The “iron rule of guerrillas” requires that they maintain an escape route through the masses who protect them. The students had greatly improved their resilience as well as the ability to quickly gather and disperse. But there were no masses they could count on. To that extent, they were now “calculating” their moves in response to the strategies worked out by the police, Mishima observed.
In fact, a great part of the masses had largely deserted the students. At one point in the windy evening mixed with rain, Mishima watched the owner of a mom-and-pop store pour a bucketful of water over a student. When fellow students quickly gathered around him to protest, the man’s wife came out and barked at them. The students beat a dispirited retreat, a spectacle so memorable that Mishima would mention it in several of his subsequent articles. It was Tuesday, and people were exasperated and angry with violent demonstrators that they had to close their stores.
Clearly, overwhelming government power had dramatically cut the effectiveness of the demonstrators. It was such that watching them unable to put up a good fight was “frustrating,” Mishima wrote. He walked about in Shinjuku muttering furiously, “This is no good. Absolutely no good.” As he complained to Morita later in the evening as they drank in Roppongi, it was as if Tokyo was “under martial law.”26 It was a supreme irony.
So what’s next? If “the so-called guerrilla warfare” without any plan to achieve “a decisive effect” from the outset, save to “engender a certain anxiety” in society at large, also fails to attract the serious attention of the mass media, as the demonstrators that day obviously did, then anyone who plans such warfare will “be driven into rethinking his tactic.” When that happens, “the only truly effective action will be for him to sacrifice himself for a terrorism aimed at the most extreme effect.” But “because we cannot think of our personal effect or personal gain on the other side of death, the political effect must be sought in some suprapersonal place.”27
October 21 would become a decisive point for Mishima—or so he would declare in his manifesto prepared for November 25, 1970. Yet Mishima surely had known the day would be a disappointment, Yamamoto Kiyokatsu wrote: Sassa Atsuyuki, chief of the riot police, had told him, as he had Yamamoto, that the police security measures this time around would preclude the day from becoming anything like a repeat of the October 21 of 1968.28
Regardless, eye-catching political events continued to unfold. In “Action and Waiting,” Mishima took up the Daibosatsu Pass Incident—an arrest, on November 5, 1969, of fifty-three members of the Red Army in a mountain house west of Tokyo. The radical group planned to attack both the prime minister’s official residence and the Metropolitan Police HQ to take hostages so they might demand or force release of its imprisoned members. To do so, several dozen members gathered near Daibosatsu Pass—made famous by the title of Nakazato Kaizan’s unending narrative, much of which has to do with a samurai on a rampage29—to train with weapons, mostly swords and Molotov cocktails. But the police gathered enough intelligence on their scheme and raided the house where they had gathered. Among those arrested was the founder-chairman of the Red Army, Shiomi Takaya.
Citing this incident, Mishima mocked the leaders of the Red Army: they had freely spouted military terms but failed to observe the basic requirement of infantry training, that is, putting a few men on guard duty. Mishima’s focus, however, was on the radical students’ inability to “wait,” of which the police took advantage by giving enormous pressure to put the situation under control in the shortest time possible. Any “action” requires the ability to wait for “the right opportunity,” Mishima suggested, and the ability to do so is “the courage most essential to action.”30
A month later, Mishima himself had a close call: he barely missed finding himself on a Korean airliner hijacked to North Korea. He had gone to South Korea as part of a group to look into the North’s guerrilla activities in the South, in particular the operations of Unit 124 that the North set up for guerrilla operations in the South. Nearly two years earlier, on January 21, 1968, a commando unit of thirty-one had crossed the DMZ and managed to get close to the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential residence. Its purpose was to assassinate the president and liberate South Korea. They ran into the police and in the ensuing two-week battle, most of them were killed. It was two days after the infiltration, on January 23, that the North captured the US intelligence-gathering ship, the Pueblo.
The group Mishima joined included his translator-scholar friend Ivan Morris who, with some others, had founded Amnesty International USA. After inspecting an area in question, on the east coast of the peninsula, the group flew back to Seoul, on the afternoon of December 10. The following afternoon, the same flight was diverted to North Korea. For all the strict airport security checks South Korea performed, the deception was easy: the only thing the hijacker did was to put himself in the uniform of a brigadier general of the South Korean Army.