by Hiroaki Sato
Then, with Gen. Ikarii Junzō (Ret.), commander of the Fuji School until eight months earlier, at the review stand, with Mishima tensely standing somewhat behind him to the left, the society did a march-past for fifteen minutes with the Fuji School’s military band playing. Among the other SDF officials attending were Gen. Fujiwara Iwaichi (Ret.) and former Administrative Vice Minister of the Defense Agency Miwa Yoshio.
Mishima was lucky to have these men. As the day of the parade approached, the mass media got hold of the news and started looking at the politicians and SDF men on the invitation list, creating considerable unease among them. Many cancelled their participation, including Kawabata Yasunari, who called Mishima the day before the parade to tell him firmly that he would not attend, deeply disappointing Mishima. Of the total of 107 writers, actors, and such who were invited, only 50 attended.
Following the parade, a reception was held in the grand dining room on the second floor of the National Theatre. Fujiwara and others gave congratulatory speeches. Mishima gave his, in English, his garb changed into a white military uniform. He summed up what he said in the pamphlet prepared and distributed on the occasion, “On the Shield Society.”3
What did some of the participants think of the whole affair?
Henry Scott-Stokes, the Tokyo bureau chief of the Times and by then Mishima’s friend, was “embarrassed”: “Parade was most embarrassing; students marched back and forth in their silly uniforms while Mishima stood at one side. Felt embarrassed for Mishima. Prayed all the time that students would not bungle their marching and tumble off the roof or something; just wanted parade to end. (Why should it matter to me?)” The end of the day’s entry on Mishima: “Not inappropriate that these activities staged within (and on top of) a theater.”4
At least one guest had an impression not too dissimilar. Muramatsu Takeshi told a reporter for the right-leaning daily Sankei Shinbun that the Shield Society was a “‘theater troupe’ the Romanticist Mishima created. It’s interesting that he is creating a new form at a time when forms are collapsing.” In his literary biography of his friend, Muramatsu practically skipped describing the parade, observing merely that Mishima had planned it on November 3 obviously because he had not expected anything of finality to occur on October 21, International Antiwar Day.
Another guest, Tsutsumi Seiji, observed, in a taidan with Mishima not long afterward, that Mishima’s was “not a political movement but a romantic one.” Those who regarded it as “a rightwing political movement” completely missed Mishima’s “spirit and aesthetic.”
It was during this taidan with Tsutsumi that Mishima stressed again the importance of freedom of speech—by praising the United States for allowing the report on the My Lai Massacre to be published while the war was still raging, adding that you could not imagine the Japanese Army or government would have done anything like that while at war. The example he cited was the Nanjing Massacre.5 It was about the time Mishima had the parade that the journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the mass murder that had occurred in a Vietnamese village in March 1968.
As to the uniform, the Sankei reporter described it as in “a loud style that at first glance made you think of the doormen of a first-class hotel.”6 Some Shield Society members were even more mocking. It is appropriate only for chindon’ya, they said—clownish ad men in outlandish costumes who walk about the streets playing the several instruments they carry on them.7
“Among the guests were,” Scott-Stokes wrote, “Kazuko Aso [daughter of Japan’s best-known postwar Prime Minister, Shigeru Yoshida] and the young Konoe [adopted grandson of the wartime Prime Minister]; also actresses—particularly liked Mitsuko Baisho, hefty girl, should be more of them.”
The glamorous—i.e., buxom—Baishō Mitsuko had appeared with Mishima in Kill!. Muramatsu Eiko, the actress Mishima was “nurturing” was there, and so was Atsumi Mari, who, still in her late teens, had appeared in soft porn films. All to Mishima’s taste! Asked why she decided to attend the parade, Atsumi replied, “I felt somber and solemn. The Shield Society don’t give people trouble, so they’re better than the Zengakuren, I think.”8
One thing to be noted about the day is the weather. Henry Scott-Stokes jotted down: “Not good weather. A light drizzle most of the time. Gray Tokyo.” Yamamoto Kiyokatsu, who was naturally on hand, recalled: “It was a dazzlingly clear day from morning on” and the parade was executed “in the autumn sun that poured down.”9 Who is more trustworthy, the Times reporter or the ranking Japanese military intelligence officer?
A Wonder Tale
Two days after the parade, A Wonder Tale: The Moonbow opened at the National Theatre. Scott-Stokes, who was invited by Mishima and took his Japanese girlfriend, judged: “The production was curiously amateur.” It had “lots of technical hitches; heavy objects crashed to the earth backstage; cast not knowing where to stand. Worthy of a high school.”
Stage glitches that night no doubt chagrined Mishima and the technical staff who spent so much time and thought on devising traditional and new props and effects on grander, “modern” scale. But Scott-Stokes, who wasn’t used to kabuki, may have been mainly bemused by the “monumental staging.” For one thing, he found the title Chinsetsu: Yumiharizuki “as long as” the play.10 The play was long, yes, it lasted for five hours, but the title certainly was not, as far as kabuki titles go.
The theater critic for the Asahi Shinbun got the spectacle part right. He saw that Mishima’s was an attempt to “restore theatricality” lacking in Japan’s modern plays, and thought the Stage Arts Study Group of the National Theatre deserved a “distinguished service” prize for what they accomplished. “All the characters are like those from fairy tales and monstrous legends or else from animations,” so that “the protagonist” of the play was none other than “the visuality and protean-transformation delights of the scenes.” He was so captivated by the series of spectacles lined up one after another that he found one scene—nefarious, funny, and crucial to the narrative—“longwinded” and “tacked on,” because it lacked spectacles.11
Muramatsu Takeshi attended the production on closing night, on November 27, and went to a sushi restaurant with Mishima and Yōko by the car she drove. He was surprised to hear Mishima say what he wanted to depict in the play was the Shinpūren, he reported.12
Mishima did not get some of the things he wanted for the kabuki production. When he had decided on the subject of the play, for example, he had proposed the actor to play Tametomo: Ichikawa Somegorō VI. He did not get him, and he appears to have regretted it to the end.13 But there were also serendipities.
Whether or not he suggested the actor to play Princess Shiranui is not known, but Bandō Tamasaburō V who got the role “thrilled” him, prompting him to call his advent “a miracle.” A handsome, willowy youth then nineteen, Tamasaburō was not from a kabuki family but had entered the classical theater while taking dance lessons from a kabuki actor to reduce the aftereffects of the polio he suffered in infancy. His demeanor while rehearsing and acting in The Moonbow impressed Mishima so much that, when he took part in the Third Young Kabuki Actors’ Festival at the National Theatre the next August, he wrote a heartfelt paean to the waka-oyama, young female impersonator, who is “delicate, elegant, and sensuous, like a figurine made of ivory.”
“When his body like a green lacewing sways pliantly on the stage,” Mishima rhapsodized in the program note for the festival, “a lyrical beauty accompanied by a certain precarious sense overflows. And what is important above all else is his old-fashioned, nobly beautiful face.” For “if kabuki loses the power of a beautiful face to seize people’s hearts as if it is a matter of privilege, the artistic power of old actors’ profound training alone will not suffice to maintain it. Since Zeami, the Japanese Way of Art has been supported by a boy’s ‘timely flower’ and an old man’s ‘true flower,’ the two in tandem.”14
Tamasaburō would go on to become one of the most celebrated Japanese actors in the decades following Mishima’s death.
Madama Butterfly’s Offspring
The year’s last big demonstrations were mounted on November 16 in an attempt to prevent Prime Minister Satō from visiting the United States. The rally organized by the Socialist Party to call, mainly, for an unconditional, immediate return of Okinawa drew seventy thousand people to Yoyogi Park. But the riot police stopped the seven thousand protestors heading toward Haneda in the Kamata area, some distance west of the airport. The arrests that day exceeded nineteen hundred, a far larger number than the previous record, the fifteen hundred apprehended on International Antiwar Day. That same day (November 15, US time) there was the largest anti–Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C., with a quarter million people taking part.
In his meeting with Satō, President Richard Nixon agreed to the Okinawa reversion, not immediately but in 1972, and with the proviso that it would not affect the functions of its military bases in Okinawa in any way. Nixon was reducing the US troops in Vietnam but had no intention of cutting back on the US military presence in the Far East.
Apparently with the Satō-Nixon meeting in mind, the New York Times asked Mishima to contribute an article, which appeared on November 29, 1969: “Okinawa and Madama Butterfly’s Offspring.” Mishima’s suggested title, in English, was “Stage Left Is Right from Audience,”15 and he made a brilliant exposition of the perverse ideological confusion among the leftists and rightists that had come to prevail in Japan over the preceding decade, although Mishima’s sarcastic details were skimped necessarily in the Times version.
“Those who insist on the independence of the Japanese minzoku, oppose American military bases, oppose the security treaty, and shout, ‘Return Okinawa at once,’ would be nationalist and rightwing, in a standard understanding abroad,” Mishima wrote in his original article. “But in Japan, they are leftwing and Communist.” He knew that the definitions of leftwing and rightwing are different from one country to another, as he made clear in a taidan with Hayashi Fusao a little earlier. In Western Europe, for example, rightwing means anti-Semitic, but the split is generally between internationalism and chauvinism.
Take a recent case in France, Mishima suggested. In a survey during the May Revolution, the French were asked to choose de Gaulle ouï or de Gaulle non. The choice, in short, was between France or Communism. But if a similar survey were to be taken in Japan, the question would have to be the approval or disapproval of the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty, and that would mean a choice between pro-America or pro-Soviet/China, with no considerations of Japan.16
“A certain section of the traditional rightwing, completely deprived of their stock-in-trade nationalism by the leftwing,” Mishima wrote, “countered the leftwing demonstration against the port call of the American nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise by sallying forth with the American flag in the left hand and the Japanese flag in the right. In that, they were just like Madama Butterfly’s child on the operatic stage.”
The leftists’ behavior is no less strange. Referring to “the radical leftists” with whom he had debated earlier that year, he argued: “In their exaggerated linguistic expression, they are in the traditional Chinese mode, and in their love of the people’s court system, they are in the modern Communist Chinese mode, even as they are internationalist in their rejection of Japanese tradition.” They are also, Mishima added, obviously to poke fun at himself, “in the samurai-style rightwing mode in their affirmation of terrorism.”
In a similar vein, he went on to observe: Yakuza movies “depict the world of traditional outlaws, press on you the old Japanese mentality, and, in their sentimentalism and heroism, their affirmation of violence and illogicality, appeal most to the rightwing Japanese heartstringism, or so leftwing ‘cultured people’ have reasoned as they condemned them outright.” The genre of films he brought up would begin to be known widely in the United States only some years after he wrote this, perhaps with Sydney Pollack’s 1975 film, The Yakuza.
Here, too, a reversal of sorts occurred, Mishima pointed out. “The Japanese-style John Waynes have become the students’ idols, and the leftist students always go to see these movies the night before their violent demonstrations to recharge their hearts with passion.”
Mishima, “author and playwright, heads a small nationalistic student group,” the Times caption to his article noted.
Prospects for the 1970s
The December general election showed a clear shift in popular sentiments that had occurred. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party won a fewer number of votes than in the previous election but still increased its seats to three hundred, whereas the Socialist Party reduced the number of its seats by a dramatic 35 percent, from one hundred and forty to ninety. The idea of blocking the extension of the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty in 1970 had become a fantasy, as Mishima had predicted.
“When the domestic market becomes completely saturated and no more consumption becomes possible,” Mishima predicted in a taidan with Nosaka Akiyuki, the author of Pornographers, at the end of 1969, “there’s nothing more left to make than weapons, don’t you think?” Then, nationalism, hitherto camouflaged in the “fakery” of US military protection, will reveal itself.
The issue at hand was the prospects for the 1970s, and Mishima was referring to the talk of jishu bōei, “autonomous defense”—Japan’s national security not entirely dependent on the United States—and the ambitious Fourth Defense Plan that was gaining ground within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. (Like many such terms created under duress, political or otherwise, jishu bōei was dubious, jishu suggesting volunteerism. Years later, the term would change to dokuritsu bōei, “independent defense.”) As Mishima would state in his manifesto a year later, since it was “self-evident that the United States [would] not be happy with Japan’s autonomous military protecting its own homeland,” if Japan did “not restore its autonomy within the next two years, the SDF would “end up as America’s mercenaries in perpetuity.” That, Mishima pointed out, was what the leftists argued.
In the meantime, the Japanese manufacturing industry, the driving force of the double-digit economic growth throughout the 1960s, was flooding not just the domestic but foreign markets as well with consumer goods. Overseas, it had led to heightened calls for trade restrictions on Japan, which, Mishima was suggesting, would inevitably compel the industry to turn seriously to weapons manufacture to survive, reducing the need to buy practically all weapons from the United States. That would bring the talk of nationalism to the fore.
As it turned out, the growing trade deficit the United States accumulated with much of the rest of the world, created, most contentiously, by Japan’s textile exports as Mishima mentioned in the taidan,17 would force Richard Nixon to terminate the fixed exchange rate regime—the core of the Bretton Woods System—in the summer of 1971, throwing Japanese industry into the biggest quandary since the war, and the idea of “autonomous defense,” along with the Fourth Defense Plan, would quickly fade. This Mishima presciently foresaw—though not in the form it took and he certainly did not foresee its effects on Japanese industry.
But Nixon’s action was still one and a half years away. For now, the Japanese economy continued to expand, and the Expo ’70, the world fair held in Osaka that year—with the “comically self-congratulatory” theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind,” as a later writer noted18—would draw, during the six months of its operation, from mid-March to mid-September, more than sixty-five million attendants or half the Japanese population. But, as Mishima did not foresee, the year would become the last one with double-digit economic growth, thereby making the extraordinarily successful world fair the fitting last chapter of “the leisure boom” that had started a decade earlier and so perturbed Mishima—or so he said.
Mishima, for that matter, had foreseen a sudden rapprochement between China and the United States that would totally bypass Japan, as actually happened in February 1972, when Richard Nixon flew to Beijing and met Mao Zedong. Such a turn of events would plunge
Japan to the bottom of a valley, able only to “eavesdrop” on the two countries high above, Mishima had predicted as early as the spring of 1968, when Lyndon B. Johnson was US president. Japan would be left “an orphan in the Orient,” abandoned even by Taiwan.19
All that would occur after his death. As the year 1969 turned into 1970, one paradox for those observing Mishima was his pursuit of Constitutional revision in earnest just when, as he assessed publicly, and accurately, any chance for it had receded at least “by a decade.” The revision had become only a remote possibility because, he explained—in Ushio, the magazine of the religiopolitical organization Sōka Gakkai—the ruling LDP gained the conviction from its experience on International Antiwar Day that it could maintain the status quo. That day it used the police in the manner of martial law, but the LDP won “popular support,” instead of provoking protests.20
Or, as he put it in a speech at a January gathering of the Kokumin Kyōkai, People’s Association—the LDP’s powerful fundraising arm—the LDP must have come away from October 21 with “the judgment that not changing the Constitution [had] two extreme merits, international and domestic.” Domestically, by not tampering with the Constitution, the ruling party could continue to appease the leftists who clung to “the Peace Constitution”; internationally, it could evade the US pressure on Japan to send its troops overseas—to Vietnam—by citing “the no-war clause” that is Article 9, which none other than the United States had imposed on Japan. That meant, Mishima said, the Japanese did “not live in an era for fundamental reform” of the Constitution.