Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  What Mishima did with “Golden Death” was to schematically analyze the story’s protagonist Okamura’s criticism of the German enlightenment philosopher Lessing’s aesthetics (Laocoon) and link it to Tanizaki’s principal stories. Okamura’s thought and life, as described by the narrator, Tanizaki’s proxy, follows his argument for the unity of life and art that ends in his own “golden death” in a paradise he creates for himself. Okamura is so wealthy—if not as fabulously wealthy as the Ellison in Poe’s story, “The Domain of Arnheim”—that he can create an opulent setting in which to carry out his conclusion: “Art is an embodiment of sexual desire. Artistic pleasure is a kind of physiological or sensual pleasure. Therefore, art is not something spiritual but something wholly sensual.” So his “final proposition” may be summed up: “The ultimate of sensual creation can only lie in one’s aesthetic death.”

  Tanizaki wrote this story when the first tide of European psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychopathology was swamping Japan,26 but he saw danger, Mishima concludes, in this line of thinking and turned back and away from it.

  Mishima, greatly more knowledgeable about art than Tanizaki was when he wrote “Golden Death,” in 1914, made sure to deride the “poverty” of the great master’s grasp of art as represented by Okamura’s favorite artists: the ukiyo-e painter Utagawa Toyokuni in Japan and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the West. The combination was typical of the Taishō Era, Mishima insisted. Yet there is more than a grain of self-caricature when he condemns “the utopia of beauty” Okamura has created where the following things are proudly on display: copies of sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, the tableaus of nymphs by Lucas Cranach and other Western masters, “a mixture of Rome and China that doesn’t make any distinction between the fin de siècle and esoteric Buddhism.” All this “exposes the ugliness of Japanese culture that has lost a unifying style.” It is reminiscent of the Tiger Balm Garden in Hong Kong, Mishima added.

  He went on: “Compared with the disastrous situation where the slaves of pitiful Taishō Era culturalism have ended up as today’s opinion leaders, Okamura’s gallant self-sacrifice is something that should have been regarded as a model.”27

  Mishima’s commentary on “Golden Death” helped to reignite interest in Tanizaki’s long neglected Taishō stories.28

  Mishima also found time to “supervise” the translation by Yōko and her friend Matsubara Fumiko of Les petites filles modèles of the Countess of Ségur and write a foreword to it. Noting in his foreword that no elements of the “beautiful” world the Russian-born aristocratic French writer described—“the period, daily environment, religion, and customs”—are “relevant to Japan now,” Mishima stressed that was “the very reason the book should be read in Japan now.” That was why, he said, he advised his wife to choose “old-fashioned, grandly antiquated, elegant expressions” for conversations among the characters in the book, even though they may sound too “roundabout, even ridiculous to the ear used to crude modern conversations.”29

  Among Mishima’s friends who later realized he had begun cutting off ties to the world that spring was Muramatsu. He had a call from Mishima on April 18 to ask if he could come to a get-together at the restaurant Kitchō a week later. Asked what the occasion was, Mishima replied it was to welcome back Saeki Shōichi, professor of American literature, from Toronto.

  Up to around 1960, going abroad was a considerable undertaking for most Japanese, and it was common for friends and relatives to send off the chosen and welcome them back at the airport (by then far less often at a seaport). But as the decade progressed, overseas travel became common enough for people to dispense with such rituals, let alone holding a welcome-back party at a high-class restaurant.

  The party, in truth, turned out to be “strangely somber, without Mishima’s loud laughter or jokes.” Some of the things Muramatsu recalled Mishima bringing up were none too positive, either, and that did not help. For example, he lamented that Michael Gallagher, translating Spring Snow, asked him what tōgū (“eastern palace,” the metaphor for “crown prince”) meant. How could anyone who did not know a word like that dare to translate such a novel? He asked Saeki to look for better translators for the third and fourth novels.

  Also, by way of announcing that he was going to quit the Japan Cultural Council, Mishima proposed discontinuing Hihyō. Muramatsu was thinking something similar, and Saeki did not object, so they agreed to suspend their magazine. It was months afterward that it struck Muramatsu that Mishima had meant the Kitchō gathering to be “a farewell banquet.”30

  It was toward the end of July that Muramatsu was alarmed and sensed something was going awry. He belatedly read the “excrement” article mentioned earlier: it had appeared in the Sankei Shinbun on July 7. Titled “Promises I Haven’t Kept: 25 Years Inside Me”—the subtitle was the name of a series the daily started to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Japan’s defeat—Mishima’s essay, which topped the series, sounded like “his divorce letter to Japanese society.” Overshadowed by a “nothing-has-worked, I-don’t-give-a-damn” tone, it ended with a prediction for Japan: “I am deepening my sense every day that, if things continue as is, ‘Japan’ may cease to exist. If it does, there may remain in its place, in one corner of the Far East, a great economic power that is inorganic, empty, neutral, intermediate-color, wealthy, and shrewd.”31

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Toward Ichigaya

  What I was looking for was some spontaneous natural suicide.

  —Confessions of a Mask

  According to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s opening statement at “the Mishima Incident” trial, Mishima began to take a series of concrete steps to execute his plan in early April 1970.1

  Four members of the Shield Society eventually took part in Mishima’s plan: Morita Masakatsu, twenty-four, a senior, Department of Education, Waseda University; Koga Masayoshi, twenty-two, a senior, Department of Engineering, Kanagawa University; Ogawa Masahiro, twenty-two, a senior, Faculty of Law, Meiji Gakuin University; and Koga Hiroyasu, twenty-three, a graduate, Faculty of Law, Kanagawa University.

  Of the four, the two Kogas had different Chinese characters for the ko of their surnames: “small” for Koga Masayoshi and “old” for Koga Hiroyasu; henceforth, the former may be sometimes identified as the younger Koga, the latter as the older Koga. The older Koga, who joined the Shield Society in August 1969, was at the time studying for the state judicial examination, reputedly one of the toughest exams in Japan.

  Both Koga’s were members of the Seichō no Ie, “The House of Growth,” a religiopolitical organization based on an amalgamation of Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity, according to its founder Taniguchi Masaharu. Mishima’s grandmother Natsuko became its fervent follower and chanted its catechisms every day, so that Mishima found himself chanting them as his sister Mitsuko’s death approached.2 One of its teachings, the older Koga testified at the trial, was that to live as a Japanese is to live the history of Japan, that to keep the Japanese nation alive is to keep oneself alive. In that sense, the philosophy of the Seichō no Ie, which still has a sizable number of followers today, represents the fundamentalist variety of patriotism—or did, at the time.

  On April 3 or 5, 1970, Mishima asked the younger Koga, in the Coffee House, of the Imperial Hotel, if he was willing to “stay with him to the very end.” On April 10, Mishima asked Ogawa Masahiro the same question, while the young man was visiting him. Both Koga and Ogawa agreed, guessing the consent would entail death. In mid-May, while talking with Morita, Koga, and Ogawa when they were with him in his house, Mishima suggested that the best way to accomplish their aim would be for the GSDF and the Shield Society to go to the Diet as an armed rebel force and demand Constitutional revision.

  Some members of the Shield Society often went to Mishima’s to discuss things. They did so mostly when he was free of any other engagements—that is, during the hour he sunbathed on the verandah on the second floor, from the time he go
t up until about one o’clock. One day it was cloudy, so someone asked him: What’s the point of being out on the verandah with his clothes off in weather like that? Mishima’s answer left an indelible impression on the young men: I am weak-willed by nature, so if I don’t do something I’m supposed to do just once, on any excuse, I’ll stop doing it altogether by finding one excuse after another. That’s why I do this even when it’s drizzly.3

  On May 8, Mishima had a taidan with Shibusawa Tatsuhiko and there hinted at “a foolish act” he was likely to commit, adding that he was saying so “as a matter of probability” and he could not tell whether the act would be “political or personal.” The topic of the taidan was Inagaki Taruho, with its transcript to go with a volume devoted to him in Chūō Kōron’s Japanese literature series.

  A year earlier, Mishima had caused Inagaki to become the first winner of the Japan Bungaku Taishō, “grand prix for Japanese literature,” for The Aesthetics of the Love of Boys (Shōnen-ai no bigaku) or, as Inagaki himself called it in Latin at one stage of rewriting it, Principia Pædophilia. It is an erudite, discursive, at times humorous, exaltation of and speculation on the ass and anus from the viewpoint of loving boys in their early teens. Inagaki’s argument, by then familiar among his fans, was that, of the trinity of erogenous zones, in his nomenclature the “V(agina) sensitivity,” “P(enis) sensitivity,” and “A(nus) sensitivity,” the third and last was “the ace.” In October Mishima had also penned a succinct accolade when Inagaki’s book The Aeroplane Dudes (Hikōki yarōtachi) came out.4

  Still, the more he praised Inagaki, the more Inagaki, “being extremely shy,” badmouthed him, Mishima told Shibusawa. Among the things Inagaki said was this: “Mishima Yukio’s face is as repellent as a gibbeted head with its popped eyes.”5 In any case Mishima was resolved not to meet the writer he admired “for two reasons” that had nothing to with Inagaki’s reaction. For one, he did not want to destroy the image of a smartly dressed boy he had formed of Inagaki since he began reading him a long time ago. Inagaki, Mishima’s senior by a quarter of a century, was nearly seventy by then.

  The other reason is “extremely private.” It has to do with a “foolish act.” People all over Japan will laugh at him for it, damn him for it, but there will be just one person who will not: Inagaki. He may be “flattering himself” by assuming that, but he is “convinced” of it, Mishima said. This is because Inagaki is “the only writer who knows man’s secret,” the only person who “understands man’s feelings metaphysically, ready to catch with a hook, anywhere it may be, what emits from man’s secret as it dashes through heaven and hell.”6

  In fact, in The Aesthetics, Inagaki made one reference to Mishima when he attributed the following remark to him: “The cherry blossoms and maple leaves seen in [Japanese] classics mean ‘blood’ while the moon, geese, white clouds, eight-fold haze, dew, and so forth are [parts of] our body. However, the Way of Shikishima”—love of boys in Inagaki’s understanding—“is such an abstraction in the first place. Only those with no ability to enchase VPA in ‘the framework of a different time and space’ end up being called a sexual molester or a philistine.”

  Most important perhaps, in the same book, Inagaki had said this: “One completes his dandyism by ‘death.’ No matter what the manner of death, there is no one who does not gain some sensuality and elegance by death.”7

  On June 13, Mishima got together with the same three—Morita, Koga, and Ogawa—in Room 821 of the Hotel Okura, in Akasaka, and proposed the following: Because it became clear that they could not count on the GSDF, they would carry out the plan on their own, with these components: Take over a GSDF munitions depot to secure weapons, threaten to blow it up, while capturing the commander-in-chief of the Eastern Army, in Camp Ichigaya, as hostage, so they may demand an assemblage of troops, appeal to them, and, with the troops willing to go along with the Shield Society, occupy the Diet, and force it to adopt a resolution for Constitutional revision.

  The idea, Mishima surely knew, was impractical and unrealistic. Willing or not, none of the GSDF troops were under his command, unlike, say, the troops during the 2.26 Incident who were under their officers’ command. The distance from Camp Ichigaya to the Diet is 2.8 kilometers or 1.7 miles on foot; that meant, as Mishima’s group marched to the Diet, GSDF or police intervention would be inevitable. The Diet’s resolution itself would be only the first step for revising the Constitution; and so forth.

  Luckily, the three young men questioned Mishima’s proposal, though from a different angle. It would be hard to find the location of any GSDF munitions depot. But, even if one were found, the Shield Society would have to be split into two units, one for seizing the depot and the other for seizing the commander of the Eastern Army. (Whether the point was raised or not, Mishima no doubt knew the troops had to follow elaborate procedures to get their weapons loaded.)

  The plan to seize a GSDF munitions depot dropped, Mishima proposed, and the three others agreed, that the Shield Society have a parade on the drill ground in front of the Eastern Army’s HQ building to mark its second anniversary and take the commander hostage while he is reviewing the parade.

  The “Eastern Army,” it may be noted, is the English name for what may be given literally as “Eastern Theater Unit,” which, of course, hides, however clumsily, any military suggestion. In reality, it corresponds to the Imperial Guards Division in the prewar army. It is, in other words, an elite force. Also, Camp Ichigaya is where Japan’s Military Academy was initially set up, back in 1874, and where, after the country started war with the United States and others, the General Staff Headquarters were. Following Japan’s defeat, the Occupation used its main buildings for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to try Japan’s wartime leaders, sentencing Tōjō Hideki and six others to death by hanging. (In 1994, the Eastern Army HQ moved to Asagasumi. Ichigaya Hall, where Mishima started having the Shield Society’s monthly meetings in January 1969, later became the Hotel Grand Hill Ichigaya.)

  Gen. Mashita Kanetoshi, who would end up being taken hostage on November 25 and watch Mishima disembowel himself and then decapitated, had a history as laden with Japan’s recent military past.

  The top graduate of the War College, class of 1941, and a major at the time of Japan’s surrender, Mashita served as kaishaku, i.e., decapitator, when his classmate at the War College, Maj. Haruki Makoto, disemboweled himself, two days after Japan’s surrender, on August 17, 1945. Haruki was a staff officer on Saipan with the task of building the island’s defenses. He was transferred to a different post some time before the US assault but had felt he hadn’t done a good job ever since the island’s fall. Mashita agreed to serve as second because he did not want his friend to die “an unsightly death as a soldier,” he testified at the Mishima Incident trial.

  Mishima and the three youths kept under tight wraps what they were planning and plotting. But Mishima continued to drop hints as to what at least he was after, directly or indirectly. In an open letter published in the Mainichi Shinbun, on June 11, for example, he criticized Ishihara Shintarō, a member of the House of Councilors, for openly complaining about his own Liberal Democratic Party. What he was angry about, he wrote, was the general “anything-goes” atmosphere of the day, including “insider criticism.” A true samurai or a true man would either put up with the body he serves in silence or commit a kanshi, killing yourself to warn someone else of his improper behavior. That is shidō, the samurai’s moral or ethical principle, Mishima wrote.8 Some of the postmortem explainers, as it were, of Mishima’s act would resort to the idea of kanshi, Kawabata among them. Mishima was not discouraging it.

  Mishima’s talk of shidō attracted attention, not least because his target was a fellow-writer-turned-politician, and Tokuoka Takao, of the Mainichi, interviewed Mishima about the principle. Question: You say, Once you join an organization, don’t criticize it. Isn’t that suppressing resistance, demanding mindless obedience? Answer: Resist if you must, but do so with a do-or-die
resolve. Question: Isn’t shidō an anachronism? Is there any use in being a samurai when no one is practicing shidō? Answer: Yes, it may be anachronistic, but one person practicing it will be fine. It is a spiritual dandyism a man should flaunt.

  The interview was published in the July 12 issue of the Sunday Mainichi.9

  “Madness” and Death

  On the same day that his open letter to Ishihara appeared, Mishima gave a talk at Waseda University students’ history club, Shōshikai. His topic, in seven segments, ranged from social (“do not expect human beings to understand each other”), to historical (“Japan’s postwar Constitution and the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty are ‘Siamese twins’”), to political (“the Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party are the same in that they know they are liars”).

  But the focus of his talk, urging individual “isolation,” was to quote the words of the posthumously most famous Japanese patriot à la Patrick Henry, of the United States, Yoshida Shōin: “You seek power, I seek loyalty.” At the time, Shōin’s group aiming to defeat the Tokugawa shogunate was split into two camps, one for an immediate action, regardless of obstacle and outcome, the other arguing that the timing was not yet ripe. Shōin belonged to the former, a negligible minority.

  In referring to the famous firebrand, Mishima stressed that “loyalty” in this case meant a road to death, all alone and discarded in a barren field. It was the road he had chosen. In an era when killings and deaths were common and frequent, Shōin often equated dedication to a cause with death, at times clearly stating his death wish, as when he wrote to the then teenager and the later powerful bureaucrat-politician Shinagawa Yajirō in the spring of 1859: “My age is 30”—by traditional counting—“and it has not been just two or three times that I decided to die. Nevertheless I ended up not dying. Hearing me say this, you will say Shōin is lying, but people do not kill me no matter what.”