by Hiroaki Sato
The essay dealing with this experience, “Planning an Action,” concerns the unplannability of most “actions,” and his point here may be forced but is revealing. Taking the example of a battlefield charge, he posits that only irrational mental power can bridge the gap between the rational plan and the unknowable dead-end it may run up against and that the Japanese sword can best represent that mental power.31
The Officer with His Sword Drawn
In “The Beauty of Action,” he again brings up the image of a naval officer leaping out of his “special submarine” on a moonlit night, his sword drawn, only to be shot dead. Here, he is a little more specific and says it happened in Australia. There indeed was a submarine attack in Sydney Harbor, on May 31, 1942, but the image he put forward was likely to be no more than “a story handed down.”32 Or he mixed it up with what may have happened on the same day in Diego Suarez, Madagascar.
That day in Sydney Harbor, one of the three midget (“special”) submarines launched from three submarines to attack the Allied ships anchored in the harbor became entangled in the antisubmarine net and its crew of two scuttled their own vessel and killed themselves. One midget submarine was spotted; after repeated attacks, it was damaged, and its crew killed themselves. Just one succeeded in sinking a ship, escaped, but was then lost. (Sixty-four years later, in November 2006, a group of scuba divers found the submarine sitting on the bottom of the sea a few miles off the harbor.) The operation in Madagascar went better. The two midget submarines seriously damaged the battleship HMS Ramillies and sank a tanker.
Following the Madagascar attack, the crew of one submarine were sighted on land. They were shot dead. However, the Royal Navy’s investigations of the Diego Suarez attack appear to have been far less thorough and not much detail is known, let alone whether one of the Japanese had time to draw his sword.
The two attacks, at any rate, were reported in Japan, evidently with patriotic emphasis. “Just now at 7:30 pm, having finished hearing the news on the special-submarine attacks in Madagascar and Australia, I am writing this card to you, sir,” Mishima scribbled to his teacher Shimizu Fumio. “I feel as if I have a lump in my throat and do not think I can talk with any kind of ordinary words. So grateful am I for the Imperial Glory that tears are on the verge of overflowing my eyes and running down my cheeks,” the seventeen-year-old used a vocabulary and style reserved for matters related to the Tennō.
“At the same time I cannot restrain myself from feeling bright and clear, and I feel as if hearing the laughter of the eighty-thousand deities filling the azure skies in the South.”33 That many deities are imagined to fill the Japanese land and romp.
As far as such things go, we would love to know how Mishima reacted to Rear Admiral Gerard Charles Muirhead-Gould’s honorable action. The Royal Navy’s Officer in Command of Sydney Harbor at the time of the attack, the admiral had the bodies of the crew of the two midget submarines raised from the harbor and, despite strong protests, gave them a naval funeral, and returned their ashes to Japan. Mishima’s remaining or collected essays or letters from that period have no reference to the gallant deed.
The two items he chose to go with the twelve-installment series on “action” when a publisher offered to turn it into a book were The Aesthetic of Ending (Owari no bigaku),34 a series he did three years earlier for a women’s weekly Josei Jishin, and an extended essay, “Yangming School as a Philosophy for Revolution” (Kakumei tetsugaku to shite no Yōmeigaku),35 that he did for the monthly Shokun! Mishima said he did these for the readers of particular magazines, noting, in the case of The Aesthetic of Ending, that he did the series “half frivolously.” The essays for young women, in truth, are lighthearted as they deal with the “endings” of such things as marriage, phone conversation, male virginity, the beautiful face, quarrels, manners, and jealousy, each illustrated with common daily examples, but they inevitably include some telling observations.
The news that Kasai Masae, captain of the Japanese women’s volleyball team that won the gold medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, has become a housewife, for instance, prompted Mishima to reflect that Kasai may have ceased to be a hero but that she, being a woman, has the privilege of beginning anew as a woman. A man has no such luck. A man’s heroic act lasts as heroic for only about five minutes. The rest of his life is, well, “the rest of his life.” In the event, is it not best to die with the act?
This reasoning may be non sequitur, as Mishima obviously knew, but it did not prevent him from succumbing to fondly recollecting the state funeral he watched of the greatest hero of the Russo-Japanese War, Adm. Tōgō Heihachirō, even though the victor of the Battle of Tsushima was, he suggested, someone who lived too long after his heroic act. He passed away in a good era, so the ending of this hero was a truly grand ending of a hero. In my life I am unlikely to see again the ending of a hero so resplendent, so like a sunset. For the great opportunity to watch the state funeral of the Admiral of the Fleet, we grammar-school children were made to stand solemnly erect, in a row, for hours on end, by Chidorigafuchi Park. The procession of the state funeral slowly began to approach from the direction of Kudan. When a cortège of foreign military attachés in military uniform of various colors came into view, walking with that unique way of walking, moving one foot forward, pulling the other foot to the same level, then moving one foot forward again, the white plumes on their helmets were like a column of wonderful tropical birds approaching.
Chidorigafuchi Park is on the bank of the west moat of the Imperial Palace. Kudan is where the Yasukuni Shrine is located. When Mishima wrote this, the national shrine for the war dead was far from becoming a subject of international protest and condemnation it would be a few decades later. China, in a civil-war turmoil that Japan aggravated, had its own delegation participate in the funeral. It was June 5, 1934. The cortège was “interminable, the casket being quietly pulled . . . until finally, without seeing the procession to the end, I suffered from cerebral anemia and fainted.”
Mishima’s description is a reminder, if any is needed, that he grew up in an era when military accomplishments were duly honored and exalted. For Tōgō’s funeral, the Great Powers of the day, as well as countries such as China and Holland, dispatched warships to send honor guards to take part in it. Mishima was a typical aikoku shōnen, “boy patriot,” as he put it just before his death, when asked in an enquête about his reaction to the news of Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor. He was a good respondent to all sorts of questionnaires Japanese publishers love to send to writers and such, although he avowed that he tore up all of them when he received them.36
This enquête, by the Sunday Mainichi, had to do with the then contentious question of what to call the Japanese part of the Second World War: the Greater East Asian War, as the Japanese conservatives insisted, or the Pacific War, as the US Occupation insisted on calling it. Mishima was for the former because, he explained, a country should be able to name a war in which it is involved on its own.37 (Gore Vidal, who believed that the Pearl Harbor attack was merely FDR’s success in provoking Japan, called it “the American-Japanese War of 1941–1945.”)38 The responses to the query appeared in the November 29, 1970, issue of the weekly.
“To know is to act”
The other item, the one about the Chinese Confucian thinker Wang Yangming (1472–1529), was a knowledgeable but easy-to-understand attempt to provide a philosophical underpinning to Mishima’s “action.” Wang, who was also an able military commander, advocated the unity of knowledge and action, “To know is to act,” or, as he put it in one of his explications, “Those who are supposed to know but do not act simply do not yet know.” In China his “dynamic idealism” influenced, among others, the founder of modern China Sun Yatsen and the philosopher Xiong Shili. In Japan it became one great backbone of the Meiji Restoration.39 In fact, Wang’s philosophy, called Yōmeigaku in Japan, may have had more varied or historically conspicuous influence in Japan than in China.
Aside from those who wer
e mainly dedicated to philosophizing, the followers of Yōmeigaku included Yamaga Sokō, the military strategist for the Akō fiefdom that produced the famous forty-seven samurai; Ōshio Heihachirō, the police inspector who revolted out of anger at the government’s refusal to succor the poor and starving in the continuing famines; Yoshida Shōin, the firebrand advocate of expelling barbarians who pleaded with Cmdr. Matthew Perry to take him to the United States just so he might acquire the technological wherewithal to repel foreign interferers like Perry himself; Saigō Takamori, who rebelled to alleviate the plight of his samurai followers brought on by a government he helped to create that nevertheless put an end to the samurai class; and Nogi Maresuke, who disemboweled himself to express remorse for his failure to carry out his military duties properly for the Tennō.
Indeed, “the intellectual milieu engendered by Yōmeigaku ended with Gen. Nogi,” Mishima said. Thereafter, rejected by “Taishō culturalism and Taishō humanism,” Yōmeigaku “went underground only to become a hotbed for radical rightwing thought” and “a special instrument of a segment of the military.” He might have added that, among the writers representative of what Mishima called “Taishō culturalism,” Akutagawa Ryūnosuke wrote a story titled “The General” (Shōgun) to twit Nogi Maresuke. Still, he did not forget to add that underlying the New Left was “the ethos of the unity of knowledge and action.”
Ōshio Heihachirō (1793–1837) was one of the men Mishima chose to describe at some length in his extended essay. He initiated “a riot almost hopeless for the relief of the poor” and ended up burning down a quarter of Osaka, bringing greater suffering to the people. “Yōmeigaku has dämonisch elements that those who possess the Apollonian rational mind find it hard to comprehend.” It is imbued with “mysterious antiintellectualism and actionism,” and Ōshio’s was a “Dionysian action.” It was natural, then, the Apollonian Mori Ōgai, in writing his document-based account, Ōshio Heihachirō, should have failed to develop any “empathy” for the man.
“The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case,” Mishima observed, “the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.” Take the French Revolution: It “hid the Marquis de Sade’s deep nihilism behind Rousseau’s optimistic philosophy.” As well, “some of the Jacobins went to the Grand Lodge of Scotland to hear its oracles,” as Gérard de Nerval pointed out, Mishima said. Likewise, the Nazi Revolution had its mysticism formed by Alfred Rosenberg in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, “against the background of the active nihilism Nietzsche and Heidegger had prepared.”
What is notable about Mishima’s argument is that it appears to have been inspired by Shiba Ryōtarō’s account of Gen. Nogi Maresuke, Junshi, especially by Shiba’s description in Part II, “To Cut His Stomach,” of how Yōmeigaku influenced a series of Japanese thinkers. In particular, Mishima must have been struck, even shaken, by the way Shiba opened the section: “The mysterious declivity that his death must not be a natural death began quite early in Nogi Maresuke.” Then, before starting his précis of Yōmeigaku in Japan, Shiba wrote: “The idea that one must make oneself the actor of one’s spirit and must not act in any other way was one of the very unique thoughts handed down until Meiji.”40 The two were exactly what he was about, Mishima must have felt. This explains why death became central to his accounting of Yōmeigaku.
Thus, looking into Ōshio Heihachirō, Mishima draws attention to the thinker’s observation in his most important treatise on Wang Yangming, Senshindō sakki, the book Saigō Takamori, the leader of Japan’s “last national rebellion,” loved to read to the end of his life: The sage “does not resent his body dying but resents his mind dying.”41 As to Saigō, Mishima paraphrases a passage from one of his writings: The fear of death is a sentiment you develop after you are born. You do not fear death before your birth. You can see the nature of death only when you detach yourself from your body. You must discover the truth of not fearing death within your fear of death. That is to return to your true nature before your birth.
From Yoshida Shōin he quotes what he finds to be “the most terrifying, unforgettable phrase” in one of his letters to a young man: “Compared with the everlastingness of heaven and earth, even pines and oaks are like gnats.” The letter says at the outset:
That you have not yet reached enlightenment on death and life is too silly for words. Let me say: If you regret death at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, you will regret death at thirty, and even if you become eighty, ninety, you will never feel it is enough. There are things who live only half a year, like insects in grass and insects in water, but they don’t think they are too short; there are things that live several hundred years, like pines and oaks, but they don’t think they are too long. Compared with the everlastingness of heaven and earth, even pines and oaks are like gnats.
When he wrote this Shōin himself was in his late twenties. He would be beheaded before he turned thirty.
That Shiba’s story must have prompted Mishima to inquire into Yōmeigaku is suggested by the letter he wrote half a year after the story appeared: It was to Yasuoka Masahiro, reputed to be not just the greatest Yōmeigaku scholar in modern times but also the greatest political éminence grise who counted among those who respected him Chiang Kaishek.
In his letter thanking Yasuoka for giving him, through Izawa Kinemaro, one of his books hard to come by, Mishima denigrated Etō Jun for making a big fuss about Zhu Xi philosophy—the mainline Confucian school of thought the Tokugawa shogunate adopted for governance—only since returning from teaching at Princeton University. Mishima also dismissed as “unscientific” Maruyama Masao for giving just half a page to Yōmeigaku in his famous tome on Japanese political thought in recent centuries. In contrast, Mishima praised “the popular writer” Shiba Ryōtarō for “seriously studying” Yōmeigaku.42
Mishima dictated the Yōmeigaku article in a series of nine sessions, as he had the series on “action.” Tanaka Kengo, the editor of the essay, was deeply impressed by Mishima’s “astonishing brain.” He met Mishima nine times at a restaurant where the writer would come with several books to quote from. After the meal, Mishima would start his dictation, only occasionally dipping into a book. The result when transcribed required scarcely any editing, and each dictation came to the more or less specified length of nine pages.43
The last installment of the seamless essay was published two months before his death, in the September 1970 issue of Shokun! As he included it in the aforementioned book, Mishima wrote an afterword and said he hoped some readers, when the time came, would realize “So this is what he meant to say.” These essays, unlike his novels and such, are full of his own “experience, sighs, and frustrated feelings.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Constitution
“The Self-Defense Forces are unconstitutional!”
—Mishima in his final speech
On October 27, Mishima attended Nippon Columbia’s announcement at the Akasaka Prince Hotel to issue a record of Ichikawa Ebizō declaiming Kanjinchō and Mishima reading “the upper volume” (Act One) of The Wonder Tale. The following day his kabuki play was rehearsed for the first time. Four days later, he summoned all the “group leaders” of the Shield Society—each leader heading a company of eight or nine men—to his house to review the International Antiwar Day ten days earlier and work out the details of the parade three days later.
As to what happened on October 21, 1969, he noted that matters had developed in such a way that prospects for the GSDF deploying its domestic security force had disappeared. The possibility of the deployment was not Mishima’s fantasy. At the start of the same month, the GSDF had carried out a large-scale exercise for that purpose at the Fuji School with journalists invited—in other words, openly. No deployment of the security force meant no involvement of the Shield Society, Mishima said, and asked how the society should respond, though they would have the parade as planned. The letter of invitation had already been sent.1
>
Morita, the new chief of students, proposed to surround the Diet with the GSDF and the Shield Society to force the legislators to work out a draft for Constitutional revision. Mishima demurred. He mentioned the difficulty of acquiring necessary weapons and the difficulty of doing anything of the sort while the Diet was in session.2 The idea, if anything, was as unrealistic as the one Mishima himself had suggested to Yamamoto of sending a commando to defend the Imperial Palace. Still, Mishima would soon take up the idea of Constitutional revision seriously, an idea he had rejected earlier. He broached his decision to members of the Shield Society on December 22, when they had a oneday training with the GSDF at Camp Narashino, in the northwest corner of Chiba Prefecture.
The Rooftop Parade
The Shield Society held its first public parade, as planned, on November 3, Culture Day, on the roof of the National Theatre that has an up-close view of the Imperial Palace. November 3 is the Meiji Emperor’s birthday and was celebrated as such before Japan’s defeat; after the war the reason for keeping it as a national holiday was changed from a Tennō’s birthday to “culture.”
At three in the afternoon, eighty-four members of the society turned toward the Imperial Palace, stood at attention, and sang Kimigayo—the national anthem though it did not legally become that until 1999. It goes, in Basil H. Chamberlain’s inimitable 1890 English translation:
Thousands of years of happy reign be thine;
Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now
By age united to mighty rocks shall grow
Whose venerable sides the moss doth line.
The young men represented a total of seventeen universities, including the University of Tokyo, Nihon University, Waseda University, and Gakushūin University—this last the division for higher education set up after Mishima’s alma mater, the Gakushūin (Peers School), ceased to be private and became public during postwar educational reform, along with the abolishment of peerage.