by Hiroaki Sato
If that was foreboding, either before or after the apparition, Mishima told Yamamoto Kiyokatsu, another guest, what would turn out to be a glimpse into the plan, however vague, that Mishima was laying out in his mind. The Shield Society “might turn against the SDF,” he said.40
By the time Yamamoto decided to write an account of his relationship with Mishima, ten years after the latter’s death,41 a mass of information on what had happened, particularly in the last years of Mishima’s life, was out and that must have colored much of his recollections. Among other things, Kuramochi Kiyoshi clearly stated, when called to testify during the “Mishima Incident” trial, that Mishima, along with Morita, chief of students, had decided in the fall of 1969 to die a year later,42 and the NHK journalist Date Munekatsu, one of the two men Mishima told in advance to be at the scene of his final act, had published a detailed report on the trial two and a half years after the event. Still, it is worth tracking what Yamamoto remembered from his association with Mishima following the New Year party.
In mid-January, he had a phone call from Mishima. It was simply to tell him that Nakasone Yasuhiro had phoned him to “explain himself”—that is, to apologize. During a New Year news conference, Nakasone, who became director-general of the Defense Agency on January 14, by coincidence Mishima’s birthday, had dismissed the Shield Society as “Takarazuka soldiers”—comparable to the toy soldiers played by the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes—and Mishima had expressed his anger. Yamamoto thought that Mishima called him to indicate that Nakasone’s private apologies cancelled out his derisive comment. Mishima had feared that the GSDF would stop working with the Shield Society. He was wrong, he later decided. Mishima was beginning to give up on getting any “cooperation” from it.
Muramatsu also thought that at that juncture Mishima had counted on the SDF. As it happened, Mishima had his forty-fifth birthday in Muramatsu’s new house, bringing as a gift a small table he had bought in Granada. While there Mishima heard the news that Nakasone had become director-general of the Defense Agency and at once telephoned his acquaintance at the Agency. Whether Mishima talked to Nakasone at the time or Nakasone returned his call Muramatsu does not say. But he was certain that Mishima was concerned about Nakasone’s intentions.
Nakasone, who would go on to have a taidan with Mishima and invite him to talk to his groups, was not alone among conservative politicians who had to be careful about Mishima. Even if they privately approved what Mishima was doing, they were unable to show in public that they did. Muramatsu recalled how Mishima telephoned him, on February 22, that none other than Prime Minister Satō had called him, albeit through his deputy cabinet secretary, to offer to defray the costs of the Shield Society to the tune of one million yen a month.43 As we have seen, Satō’s party had tried to persuade Mishima to run for the Diet, but this offer was a different animal altogether. Had it become public knowledge, it would surely have brought down the Satō administration.
Late in January, past seven in the evening, Yamamoto had another call from Mishima, this time asking him to come to his house at once. He had an unusual guest from Korea and he wanted him to meet him. Upon arrival, Yamamoto found Mishima having dinner with a man. He turned out to be a former general of the Korean Army who had made arrangements for Mishima and his group’s visit in Korea the previous month. Now director of an institute to study domestic and foreign affairs, he was on his way to the United States. The main topic of conversation Yamamoto recalled was bushidō, the way of the samurai. After returning from Korea, Mishima had lamented how South Korean military officers had twitted the Japanese visitors, to which he had no proper way to respond.
“We Korean soldiers have taken away the Yamato damashii, the Japanese spirit, from Japanese soldiers, so there cannot possibly be anything like a ‘spirit’ left in Japan” except perhaps “‘promotion spirit,’” the desire to get promoted, they had mocked, Mishima told Azusa after his return from Korea. Many of those who had risen to the top ranks of the Korean military since that country’s independence following Japan’s defeat were former officers of the Japanese Army and Navy. They included President Park Chung-hee, who had graduated as a top student from Japan’s Military Academy and was a lieutenant in the Manchukuo Army when Japan surrendered.
As a matter of fact, Azusa heard, after his son’s death, that President Park told a Japanese visitor, “So I see bushidō was still alive in Japan.” Korea had sent troops to Vietnam and their soldiers had gained fame for their ferocity. Japan, of course, had not fought in the war. In the meantime, Japanese businessmen in Asia were being called “ugly Japanese.”44
Regardless, Yamamoto, an investigator of the San’yū (Three No’s) Incident who had heard rumors about other “incendiary” joint schemes between Korea and Japan, was wary and steered clear from any specific talk. By then he had felt that the aim of Mishima’s Shield Society had grown to be far more “untransparent” than he had taken it to be. He was a little annoyed, too, by the discrepancy between the urgency in Mishima’s phone call summoning him and the pleasant atmosphere of dinner conversation he found when he arrived.
But, past nine, as soon as the Korean guest left with Yōko, who, at Mishima’s request, was to drive him to a station nearby, Mishima turned a serious face to Yamamoto and asked, “Shall we do it?” This sudden, unexpected query elicited a sudden, unexpected response from Yamamoto, according to his own admission: “If we’re going to do it, please cut me down first and do it!”
Luckily, no further words were exchanged. Mishima poured some more drink for Yamamoto, Yōko returned, and Yamamoto left. On his way home, Yamamoto was inexplicably touched by what had happened that night.
Two months later, he had another unforgettable encounter with Mishima. Mishima came to visit, unannounced. He was dressed in Japanese attire, as he seldom was in those days, and carried a sword, though wrapped in a brocade scabbard protector. Yamamoto became tense, recalling his own words, “Cut me down,” in the previous meeting. Invited in, Mishima put his sword against the wall behind the couch where he sat, as if to hide it. Yamamoto was a little relieved, but it was his wife who saved the moment. Noticing where Mishima had put his sword, she suggested she put it in a more appropriate place. Mishima obediently handed it over to her, and she placed it horizontally on the piano behind where Yamamoto was sitting, though in doing so she unnecessarily—in Yamamoto’s view—revealed that he, too, had a sword.
The conversation turned less awkward, with Mishima bringing up the subject, among other things, of Fujiwara Iwaichi running for office, but it never flowed. When he stood up to leave and walked toward the entrance, Mishima turned to Yamamoto briefly and said, “Col. Yamamoto, you are cold.” This, too, was unexpected, but so was Yamamoto’s own response that quickly came out of his mouth: “If you are going to do it, I beg you do it while I’m in uniform.”
Yamamoto recalls how deeply agitated he became by his own response, but not why he was—nor why he adamantly refused when Fujiwara asked him not long afterward to take off his uniform to direct his election campaign, except that he told his superior officer, in unmistakable terms, that he wanted to stay with Mishima. Fujiwara planned to run on defense issues just when the SDF’s ability to attract recruits had fallen far short of the target and that was creating scandals, among them the lowering of standards and the cheating by recruiting officers. Fujiwara would lose in an election a year later.45
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Hailstones, Ghouls, Golden Death
“Sensual quiétisme”
—Mishima on Tanaka Mitsuko’s poetry
Among the spate of essays that Mishima wrote in the brief period from the end of 1969 to the start of 1970 was a preface to the book by Michael Gallagher, Bombs and Ginkgo (Bakudan to ichō). Gallagher, the translator of Nosaka Akiyuki’s Pornographers, had won, on the strength of the work, a contract with Knopf to translate the first two volumes of Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. So the book had a preface by Nosaka as well, but i
t had another, by the devout Christian Endō Shūsaku.
Gallagher had offered to translate Endō’s 1958 novel, The Sea and Poison (Umi to dokuyaku), a fictionalized account of the vivisection of one of the captured B-29 crew at the Imperial University of Kyūshū toward the end of the war. Endō’s suggestion in the novel that the Japanese doctors may have acted as they had because they were devoid of the “conscience” they could have derived from faith in a Christian God—that, in other words, the “godless” Japanese lack any independent ethical sense as they are only concerned about “social punishment” or an assessment of their deeds only relative to what other people may think—had touched off strong controversy, and that may well have hindered him from working on his planned sequel.1
Endō’s subject was particularly apt for Gallagher. A paratrooper during the Korean War who studied Japanese while training to be a Jesuit priest, Gallagher had worked as a day laborer in Kamagasaki, the ghetto in Osaka that attracted the debris of human society “like the scum caught by the net at the end of a drainage pipe,” in Nosaka’s arresting image, and had also taught English at the University of Tokyo. But he had decided to give up on pursuing theology. His book Bombs and Ginkgo described his experiences in Kamagasaki and Tōdai, with the odd combination in the title deriving from the author imagining the bombs raining down from B-29s and turning Osaka into ashes and the ginkgo leaves used for the Tōdai badge.2
Mishima praised Gallagher for “the monstrosity of his spirit that watched both Kamagasaki and Tōdai from the same perspective,” adding that he could do so because “he was a believer of absolute freedom that may be called active apathy, that hates to belong to anything in the end,” where “love and despair almost converge.”3
Aside from the value of Gallagher’s book, which is detailed, vivid, and seldom judgmental, Mishima wrote his preface, as the two other writers did theirs, obviously out of a sense of obligation, but he was an obliging man in that regard. A year earlier, for example, he had written an appreciation of the haiku poet Hatano Sōha for Haiku magazine for the simple reason Hatano was his upperclassman when he wrote haiku at the Peers School, even though, unlike Hatano, he had left the genre soon afterward. Writing the appreciation enabled him to relive his haiku days. Sōha, the haiku name of Yoshihide, was a grandson of a former Minister of the Imperial Household.
“A junior-high-school student, I tagged along with him, taking part in haiku sessions and going on haiku excursions,” Mishima wrote. “Mr. Kyōgoku Kiyō, a Peers School alumnus and a haiku poet of the Hototogisu School, greatly loved him for his talent, which may have been one reason he approached the Hototogisu group. The haiku sessions in Viscount Kyōgoku’s residence were elegant and classical, as they were held in the guestroom with its floor covered with a ceremonial scarlet cloth, even in wartime. Finding myself seated at the end of the honored guests, cowed by the atmosphere, I made myself small.”4
Sensual Quiétisme
Another preface he wrote was for Tanaka Mitsuko’s book of poems, Hailstones That Faded on My Palms (Waga te ni kieshi arare). Tanaka was a poet Itō Shizuo admired, and Mishima’s preface exquisitely captures the pure femininity of the poet and her poetry.
“Miss Tanaka Mitsuko during wartime lived in Tsukiji Akashichō, and I, still a high-school student, once visited her there,” Mishima wrote, recalling, again, what had happened three decades earlier. “The place name Tsukiji Akashi-chō was an area that I, at the time familiar with Kaburaki Kiyokata’s essays, yearned for along with the images of his beautiful women, and Miss Tanaka who lived there was a beautiful person.” Kaburaki was famed for his paintings in Ukiyoe-influenced style of imagined Meiji women. “It was summer, and in the guestroom on the second floor were reed screens put up, each thin space between reeds filled with the sea light of the sky of Tsukiji. And Miss Tanaka was such a muliebrile person she was barely able to cope with the strong briny winds that rushed around the guestroom.”
Mishima then cites two poems. One of them has the first line for its title.
Sorrow
has become a beautiful ague
and entered
my flesh.
Your lips
fragrant
have left a mark.
Sorrow
resembles an acquired garden
that is quiet,
in quietude.
“Placed in front of such a sensual quiétisme, how noisy would even Comtesse de Noailles appear!”5 Mishima knew that Itō, enraptured by Tanaka’s first book of poetry, Highlands (Kōgen), that had come out at the end of 1942, had written her, “If you keep up this tone and succeed with long pieces, it will be like reading Lady Noailles in Collection of Corals (although, because I do not know French, I cannot say much about it).” Anna de Noailles, the poet reputed to have been of striking beauty and elegance, counted among her admirers many French writers and artists such as Proust, Colette, Cocteau, and Rodin. Collection of Corals or Sango-shū is a small anthology of French poems and prose pieces Nagai Kafū published in 1912, in his translation, including three poems of the countess: Soir romantique, Le Fruitier de Septembre, and En face de l’Espagne.
Did Mishima wonder if Itō’s pedagogic eagerness to correct Tanaka’s grammar and help revise her poems might have ruined her poetry to some extent and discouraged her from publishing her second book until long after Itō’s death? Most likely.6
Mishima was probably more than eager to write a preface to a biography of the man whose manner of death had become an increasingly pressing matter to him when it came along: Hasuda Zenmei.
“There is a dizzying disconnect, a contrast, between Mr. Hasuda’s literary work and his spectacular death,” and that may have led to a ready-made misunderstanding, he wrote. “When, right after the war’s termination, Lt. Hasuda carried out his own dramatic end by shooting his regimental commander on account of his enemy-coddling act and killing himself at once, Mr. Hasuda’s enemies who heard about it must have thought it was a natural corollary of the fanaticism of a wartime rightwing ideologue.”
The truth lay elsewhere, Mishima stressed. “Such a fierce anger as his, such a defiant act as his, was a genuine corollary of the gentleness of a certain noncompromise, and the origins of everything were in that ‘gentleness.’” It was something “his enemies did not try to know, did not want to know.” Mishima then quoted a few sentences from Hasuda’s essay on Prince Ōtsu (663-86), the legendary youth accomplished in both literary and martial arts who was trapped into committing suicide: “I think people of such an era must die young,” Hasuda had written, and then added: “I know dying in such a way is my culture today.”
Japanese intellectuals were the same during wartime as they are today, to an “astonishing” degree, Mishima asserted, in “their cowardice, their cynicism, their objectivism, their common sentimentality like that of a rootless plant, their insincerity, their toadyism, their gestures of resistance, their self-righteousness, their inaction, their talkativeness, their readiness to change their words.” In fact, the situation was even worse when these characteristics were “adorned with wartime hypocrisy.” When Hasuda smelled the “stench they emitted” and observed firsthand “how they poisoned the essence of culture,” he could only be “driven to fury for the sake of the culture as he understood it with his boyish noncompromise.”
Writing these words for Odakane Jirō’s Hasuda Zenmei and His Death (Hasuda Zenmei to sono shi), Mishima was to some extent superimposing his oft-stated view on a man whose knowledge, save for that of experience on actual battlefields, was far less and whose thinking process was far simpler or entirely different. Yet he was clearly telling the truth when he wrote: “As my age has approached his at his death”—Hasuda killed himself when he was forty-one—“what his death, what the form of his death, meant, suddenly illuminated my illusion like a revelation.”7
Yamamoto recalled Mishima coming to visit, again unannounced, toward the end of April. Mishima handed him a thick book. “This book has dete
rmined what I am today,” he said, and left. The book was the Hasuda biography.8 Hasuda Zenmei became a handy way for Mishima to hint at his plans, to those who knew, however vaguely, of the wartime writer and the fate he chose. Kojima Chikako, for example, remembered Mishima saying to her when she was visiting him in October to receive an installment of the last of his tetralogy—that is, about a month before bringing about his own death: “I’m finally beginning to understand how Hasuda Zenmei felt. That is what Zenmei was trying to say.”
They were waiting for the other guests of the day to come out of the house. Mishima had summoned a taxi to take gifts to two hospitalized friends of his, the writer Funahashi Seiichi and the artist Yoko’o Tadanori. Kojima recollected these words more acutely perhaps because, earlier in his guestroom, Mishima had turned, with a suddenly serious face, to one of his visitors, a senior alumnus of the Peers School, and, seemingly out of nowhere, said: “Mr. Akita, recently there’s a tendency to regard swords as artworks, ornaments, but what do you think? I object to that. Swords are . . . practical tools.”9
A Paean to Manga
During the same period Mishima penned a paean to manga. Manga had come to the forefront of postwar Japan’s popular culture largely, he pointed out, as a result of the explosive successes of manga magazines for adolescent boys that were then fueled by college students’ enthrallment with them.
In fact, behind the “revolutionary” student movement in the 1960s were, some suggested, the college students deeply affected by Shirato Sanpei’s two extravagant series, Book of Ninja’s Martial Arts (Ninja bugei chō) and Kamui Legend (Kamui den). Unlike his predecessors, Shirato presented ninja as people from the underclass up against the oppressors, and his realism was striking, especially in the way he detailed the rigors of peasants’ daily life. As befits a son of a painter in the Proletariat Movement in the 1930s, Shirato put forward a Marxist interpretation of history in his graphic narratives. Inevitably, his ninja, along with the peasants they tried to help, were beaten and crushed in the end.10