by Hiroaki Sato
Mishima’s purpose in this speech was to call for serious considerations of “true nationalism.” In his view, such nationalism at its core would have to be based on what most appealed to the Japanese heart, namely the Tennō—“the only thing with which [Japan] could squarely counter every foreign interference by force,” the only thing “with thousands of years of history and tradition.”
Mishima was talking to a conservative group, but he readily conceded: “any mention of the Tennō immediately brings to mind the harm” that “the prewar Tennō system, under the Meiji Constitution,” had brought about. “Harm” was too benign a word. Not just the Tennō system as set forth in the Meiji Constitution, but the abuses of power perpetrated by militarists and chauvinists who took advantage of it were the very reason for a strong, persistent demand since the International Military Tribunal for the Far East that Hirohito be called to account for his “war responsibility.”
But the Tennō was something the Japanese in each age have “created and recovered with all their might,” Mishima went on. In that sense, “there is always a new Tennō system, always the present Tennō system, and there is the eternal Tennō system based on the continuation of these present Tennō systems.” The Tennō he had in mind was one who is “not glued vainly to political power, but a selfless entity that is perennially accommodating,” he proposed.21
This view was true to history to a great extent but radical in a way, and it must have elicited some noteworthy reactions from the audience. But the Q&A session, if there was one, appears not to have been recorded in a readily accessible form. There was a strong sense, not limited to the conservatives, that Article 9 had to be rewritten just so as to recognize the SDF for what it was: a military. But even many of those in the audience that day who thought Constitutional revision was needed were likely bemused by Mishima’s assertion of the malleability of the Tennō institution.
The Unity of Rite and Governance
That same month, January 1970, Mishima had another occasion to argue for Constitutional revision, this time in a national daily. The Yomiuri Shinbun did a miniseries on the subject of “reification of a principle,” and asked the novelist Ishikawa Tatsuzō, the historian Inoue Kiyoshi, and Mishima, in that order, to discuss the question. Ishikawa, of “the societal school,” the brand for writers who take up contemporary social issues in their fiction, titled his essay “the student movement as rejection response”; Inoue, the Marxist known for his strong condemnation of Japan’s prewar militarism and postwar conservatism, called his “an aftershock of the fierce upheaval of all the people.”
Mishima found both arguments lacking. Ishikawa was sharp in his analysis, such as when he recognized in the student movement “a kind of self-disintegration wish like that Dazai Osamu had,” Mishima wrote. But the writer erred in taking a neutral stance trying to understand the Zenkyōtō that began by rejecting such an understanding in the first place. He was off the mark, too, Mishima said, in asking the students to “nurture a toughness that doesn’t weaken under heavy cultural pressure,” because their “rejection response” naturally included rejection of any attempt for salvation. Such talk reminded him of “the Kingdom of God and dubious salvation” in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, Mishima said. Ishikawa’s positing “an advanced cultural state” was also questionable at best.
Mishima faulted Inoue by noting that the historian committed a “logical contradiction” in asserting, “in his eagerness to defend the students,” that they showed courage in invoking “the right to silence.” Refusal to self-incriminate is something that must be maintained by staking one’s life, Mishima argued. But by adding it to basic human rights, the legal system has become “the very culprit that has allowed a soft-structure society to form by relativizing thought.” In the circumstances, exercising the right is “no proof of courage.”
“Soft-structure society” is the term coined by the political scientist Nagai Yōnosuke, to whose views Mishima often agreed. A professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology struggling daily to understand the protesting students, Nagai came up with the idea of distinguishing societies engulfed by student protests into two types: “hard-structure societies” and “soft-structure societies.” The former included East European countries and developing countries, where student protests were barely tolerated because they could lead to the overthrow of the establishment. Among the latter were Germany, France, Japan, the United States, and such, where “antiestablishment” movements were treated as manageable.
Nagai explained that he hit upon these terms in reference to the jū-kōzō, “soft- or resilient-structure,” then used to describe the high-rise buildings being permitted in earthquake-prone Tokyo with the rationale that architects and builders could now construct tall structures resilient enough to absorb most earthquakes.22
If Mishima’s linkage of the soft-structure society to the right not to self-incriminate raised some eyebrows, as it must have, there was more. For a real “transformation” to occur, Mishima went on, one must begin by recognizing that modern Japan had nearly lost “the unity of rite and governance”—the coexistence at the top of the polity of the Tennō who conducts rites and the entity that governs.
The nation-state as conceived and analyzed in modern political science is the latter, Mishima said, and it is “centrifugal”; it gives an increasing portion of its power to local communities while doing the same externally as it moves toward international cooperation, the world federation, and such. In contrast, the ritual part of the polity is “centripetal”; though “normally invisible,” it is the source of a nation’s history, tradition, and culture—its “Ethos, Pathos, and eroticism.” If the former is oriented toward humanism and rationality, the latter is oriented toward irrationality and sentimentalism. The problem of modern Japan, created by the Occupation, is that the governing entity was brought to the fore while leaving the ritual side of the state “lingering like a shadow behind it,” without really vanquishing it.
Mishima argued that the Satō-Nixon communiqué of the previous November23 rendered the Japanese Constitution more meaningless than ever, even as it enabled the document to gain a “more mysterious, demonic power” as a result. Now the only possibility for Constitutional revision would be through a coup d’état by the right or a violent revolution by the left, but chances for either’s occurring were practically nil, “as everyone knows,” he wrote. (More than two decades later, in 1992, Maj. Yanai Shinsaku, an instructor at the GSDF Research School, would be fired for suggesting that there ought to be a military coup to end endless political corruptions.24)
Nonetheless, he had to talk about the Constitution because it is where the idea of “state” appears most clearly and the state is where the question of “loyalty” comes in, which necessarily has to do with homeland defense, Mishima said. Absent Constitutional revision, then, one thing that can be done is to split the SDF into two entities: one, the Japanese contingent of “the UN Police Reserve”25 (“centrifugal” as it is for international cooperation, the world federation, and such), and the other, a force dedicated to homeland defense, to fight indirect invasion, without any military alliance or treaty with the United States or any other country (“centripetal” as it is for true nationalism). The SDF thus split, it would at least clear away the “suspicion” that, though the law says the Japanese prime minister is ultimately responsible for the armed forces, the SDF in truth is under the command of the US president.
As before, he had in mind an exact proportion for each armed service to be divided into: for the UN, 90 percent of the air force, 70 percent of the maritime force, and 10 percent of the ground force; for homeland defense, the rest. The basic idea for the homeland defense force, to be “absolutely independent,” would be “loyalty to the Tennō as chief of the ritual state.” This force would include “a sizable number of militias.” His Shield Society was “a pioneer” in that regard.
Mishima, ever clear-eyed, did not forget to add: When he explained the idea o
f splitting the armed forces to “an English friend”—most likely Henry Scott-Stokes, of the Times—the friend said, “It’s too logical to be realistic.” He knew himself it was a “dream tale.” He ends his tract, “Transformative Thought,” by insisting that he does not believe in “political efficacy,” that his aim is to “create a reality that can never be phenomenized or relativized,” and that the action for that can only be “an ultimate action with death in mind.”26
Constitutional Oddities
Mishima’s conception of the Tennō system aside, the Constitution that took effect in May 1947, the second year of the US Occupation, has some readily recognizable oddities. As Mishima pointed out when he wrote out the “issues to be examined” in May, July, and September 1970 for the thirteen-member group of the Shield Society assigned to consider the matter, some of them law students, there is “an obvious logical contradiction” between the first two articles of Chapter I, The Emperor. In what appears to be an official English translation it reads:
Article 1. The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the People, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power.
Article 2. The Imperial Throne shall be dynastic and succeeded to in accordance with the Imperial House Law passed by the Diet.27
The statement that the position of the Emperor comes from “the will of the people” surely contradicts the statement that follows, that the Imperial position is “dynastic.” What if the people changed their collective mind, assuming that their “will” was such when the Constitution was written? The Japanese text makes the gap even more acute: Article 1 says that the Tennō’s position shall be “based on the total will of the Japanese people” (Nihon kokumin no sōi ni motozuku), even as Article 2 follows it up by saying that “the Tennō’s position shall be hereditary” (kōi wa seshū no mono). As Mishima noted, wouldn’t it be “funny” to say that something based on the people’s will is “hereditary”?
This oddity was something those concerned became aware of early on. Among the early proposed revisions of the Constitution, one by Nakasone Yasuhiro, in 1961, restated the first two articles this way:
Article 1: Japan, with the Tennō as the center of the unity of the Japanese people, shall be a democratic state with sovereign power residing with them.
Article 2: The Tennō shall be Japan’s head of state and shall represent Japan.
Article 3: The Tennō’s position shall be inherited by a person in the Imperial line in accordance with the Imperial House Law.28
Nakasone, a lieutenant commander when Japan was defeated and a member of the Diet when he wrote the draft, was director-general of the Defense Agency when Mishima was pushing his argument, and would go on to serve as Prime Minister for five years beginning in 1982.
The difficulty with Article 9, which is Chapter II, Renunciation of War, is something else. The problem here lies in the stark discrepancy between what it says—“land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained”—and the very existence of the SDF. It has compelled one administration after another to come up with “one forced interpretation after another, merely adding to its abstruseness,” as Hatoyama Yukio, who became Prime Minister in September 2009, stated in his “An interim report on a tentative idea for Constitutional reform.”29
In his draft for revision, Nakasone simply assumed Japan’s right to maintain a military, though only for international cooperation and selfdefense. As to the “use of force as means of settling international disputes,” he kept what Article 9 of the existing Constitution says.30
The majority of Constitutional scholars regarded the SDF as unconstitutional, stated Satō Isao, dean of the Faculty of Law at Sophia University and himself a Constitutional authority, when called to provide testimony during the “Mishima Incident” trial, held from March 1971 to April 1972. Satō was counselor at the Cabinet’s Legislative Bureau—comparable to the Office of Legal Counsel, of the US Department of Justice—when the Constitution was drafted under the SCAP, Gen. MacArthur. It would be a matter of “evaluation of facts” whether or not the document as a whole was imposed on Japan, he stated, but the Emperor and Renunciation of War Clauses certainly were.31
“To put it plainly,” Mishima wrote, “Article 9 is a letter of apology of the defeated nation Japan to the victorious nations.” Whether Japan voluntarily wrote “the letter” or the United States forced it on Japan was “no longer a big issue.” The issue was simply that the article is like “a pledge tied down with two or three layers of oath” and, “if interpreted logically,” Japan is made to abandon “its right to self-defense”32—although MacArthur forced Japan to violate both the article and the oath when he ordered the creation of a military. In his harangue on the day of his death, Mishima shouted, “The Self-Defense Forces are unconstitutional! You men are unconstitutional!”
The draft for a revised or altogether rewritten Constitution that the Shield Society finally worked out, three months after Mishima’s death, was sprinkled with words Mishima liked to flaunt, such as kokutai (“The Tennō shall be the kokutai”), shinchoku, “divine edict” (“The Tennō shall conduct rite and ceremony by divine edict”), and Kokugun, “the National Army” (“The Tennō shall be the source of honor for the National Army”). So, as Mishima had insisted, the Tennō’s role was to be limited to rite and ceremony even as the National Army was to seek its honor in its service to the Tennō.
Given this context, one surprise may be this article: “The Tennō’s position shall be hereditary and not limited to the male line.” Limiting the Tennō’s position to males was something the Meiji oligarchs decreed by law, and it began creating problems a few decades after Mishima’s death when the Shōwa Emperor’s oldest grandson had difficulty siring a son. Mishima simply wanted to rescind the rule.
Mishima’s idea for Constitutional reform was radically different from all the other ideas as regards the Tennō. “Mr. Mishima takes up the Tennō as a cultural concept. He cuts it off from the concept of nationstate, the concept of government, holding that the Tennō is the source of the value of Japanese culture that transcends government,” explained Satō Isao on the witness stand. “The Tennō represents, should represent, Japan’s historical tradition, culture, and the Tennō’s position as holder of culture should be made clear. That was his opinion. Sato continued:
In contrast almost all the opinions on reform as regards the Tennō hold that the powers [of the Tennō] as an organ of the nation-state should be expanded and strengthened, or that, because [the term] “symbol” is unclear, it should be made “head of state” as his powers are strengthened. Mr. Mishima holds that doing so would go against the essence of the Tennō. His argument for reform holds that the Tennō is the center of culture. No one else holds the same argument for reform as Mr. Mishima.33
What irked Mishima with the Tennō as presented in the Constitution written after Japan’s defeat was that “the Westerners who know nothing but [Judeo-]Christian culture could judge other religions only with the preconceptions of the monotheists’ religious intolerance.” They “fantasized the religious source of every aggressivism in National Shinto and ignored Shinto’s non-religious uniqueness with its function to purify secular customs, refusing to understand Japan’s syncretism centering on extremely non-religious Shinto.”34
Muramatsu Takeshi would have gone a step further. Familiar with some of the constitutional monarchies of the West, he knew that “sacred” and “inviolable,” the terms used to define the status of the Tennō in the Meiji Constitution, were common—as in Article 13 of France’s Constitutional Charter of 1814, he could have added.35 What Mishima sought was enracinement, Muramatsu pointed out to explain what his friend had in mind. It was Muramatsu, indeed, who noted that the idea that the Tennō should be completely separated from matters of politics and governance did not begin with Mishima.
Prime Minister Hara Takashi, for example, wrote in his diary, on September 2,
1920: “If the Imperial Household cuts any direct relationship to political affairs and becomes an agency for charities and awards, it will become stable.”36 The Occupation’s judgment Mishima was fuming against was represented best in the flat statement in the manual on Japanese religions that its Civilian Information and Education Section prepared: “Tennōism, or Kokutai Shinto, is belief in the emperor (tennō) as the living incarnation of the Sun Goddess, and thus as a manifestation of the Absolute.” Thus Japan was a “theocratic state.”37
As to the possession of armed forces or “the National Army,” as Mishima preferred to call it, the first of the proposed articles worked out under his guidance stated: “The Japanese people shall have the sublime right of homeland defense.” Yet the military service would be a voluntary duty: “The [Japanese] people shall not have conscription imposed upon them.”38 Homeland defense must be carried out by those who believe in its importance. Whether Mishima, in rejecting conscription, recalled the searing conflict he had experienced in the induction tests a quarter of a century earlier is moot. At any rate, reintroducing conscription would have been even more difficult than Constitutional revision itself.
“Shall We Do It?”
On New Year’s Day 1970 Mishima had a family photo taken at the entrance of his house; Shizue sensed it would be the last such photo. That evening there was a party Mishima threw for members of the Roman Gekijō as well as the Shield Society, and invited some other friends. One of the guests, Maruyama Akihiro, at one point saw standing at attention near Mishima’s left shoulder a dark green shadow of a figure with a military hat with a chinstrap and a military sword. Khaki was the color of the prewar army uniform. When he said he thought it resembled someone related to the 2.26 Incident, Mishima rattled off more than a dozen names and, the moment he named Capt. Isobe Asaichi and Maruyama exclaimed, “That’s him!,” Mishima turned pale.39