Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  In his talk, Mishima also pointed out that Shōin spoke about kyō, “madness,” late in his life of 29 years, aware that he was at variance with the populace who were all content and “cynical.” Shōin had indeed spoken of “madness,” as in “Madman’s Testament” he composed in early 1858, while under house arrest. It opens: “The great illness under heaven lies in people not knowing the wherefores of the illness. Unless people know the wherefores of the illness, how is it possible to make a plan for it?” It was his “plan” for equalizing the rigid, ossified class system within the samurai class, and people, he said, dismissed his ideas as “violent” and “mad”—too out of step, too out of kilter.10

  On June 21, when they assembled in Room 206 of the Yamanoue Hotel, Mishima told his three comrades that he had secured permission to use the heliport in Camp Ichigaya for the Shield Society’s callisthenic exercises, but the heliport was way too far from the office of the commander of the Eastern Army. That meant they had no choice but to switch the hostage target to the commander of the 32nd Regiment, whose office was much closer. The weapon would be a Japanese sword and he, Mishima, would be responsible for it. The one responsible for taking the group into the camp would be Koga, the only one among them with a driver’s license. Koga would also acquire an appropriate car for the action. Mishima had a car but no driver’s license. Yōko drove the car.

  On June 22, the Satō government announced that the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty would be automatically extended the following day by another ten years. The next day an estimated 770,000 people rallied nationwide to protest the government’s action but with no effect. Mishima and his group simply ignored it.

  On June 30, Mishima met Saitō Naoichi to prepare a will. He had first visited the lawyer, Azusa’s classmate at the First Higher School and the Imperial University of Tokyo, around 1955, to learn about trials and court decisions. On that occasion, Saitō told him about the Shinpeitai Incident of 1933, a large-scale plan for a coup d’état that was uncovered, with conspirators arrested, before anything happened. Mishima told him it was the kind of subject he’d like to take up some day. After Mishima and his publisher lost in the After the Banquet case, in 1964, Saitō had led the appeal.11

  Mishima’s will said that his estate would be divided in accordance with the law, but with one exception: the copyrights to Confessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love would be bequeathed to his mother Shizue. Saitō, who served the Osaka High Court as chief justice, would be the one Mishima was to direct Koga to consult after the execution of their plan.

  The meeting of the four on July 5, in the same hotel, this time in Room 207, was to elaborate on the plan. Mishima said that, while the Shield Society is exercising or training in the heliport, he would walk over to the office of the regimental commander and take him hostage. The date would be that of the society’s monthly meeting in November. On July 11 Koga bought a 1966-model white Toyota Corona with the ¥200,000 Mishima provided.

  Meanwhile, the Liberal Democratic Party decided to push the idea of having Mishima run for governor of Tokyo the following year, and its leadership arranged a meeting with him. As Muramatsu Takeshi recalled, on July 13, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hori Shigeru, who had spoken to Mishima several times, invited him to the restaurant Kitchō. Muramatsu was also invited partly because he was urging Hori to set up an agency to deal with the worsening pollution problems, by then a pressing national concern. Also present were Deputy Cabinet Secretary Kimura Toshio and the Yōmeigaku scholar and political éminence grise Yasuoka Masahiro.

  Mishima, however, was irritable on anything political from the outset of the meeting, at one point even accusing Muramatsu, indirectly, of getting involved in environmental issues. The only outcome of the meeting was Mishima’s offer to put his thoughts on defense in “literary terms,” so Hori and others might turn them into “political terms.” Soon afterward Mishima dictated two articles and sent the tapes to Hori.12 His understanding was that his ideas would be taken up in a cabinet conference, but, he told Yamamoto Kiyokatsu in sending the transcripts to him by express mail on August 10, he gathered that Director-General of Defense Nakasone had written a long letter to block any discussion of Mishima’s ideas, and that was that.13

  At the time, the government was deliberating on “the basic direction of national defense.” But Mishima thought that the LDP’s position was, on one hand, to “curry favor with the United States with an open stress on the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty and, on the other, to treat the Three Non-nuclear Principles”—that Japan shall not possess, manufacture, or allow nuclear weapons onto its land—“as nothing more than the Satō cabinet’s public pledges,” a lie, that is. It was, in short, “a cross between international cooperationism and nationalism.” As it would turn out nearly forty years later, in 2009, the non-nuclear principles were a lie.

  In any case, Mishima said a position such as his, that Constitutional revision must come first, will “plunge into something less than that of a minority.”14

  When Mishima wrote this to Yamamoto, he was in Shimoda where he was conducting location research for the last volume of the tetralogy. Donald Keene happened to be in Shimoda, and Mishima showed the ending of the story he had already written. Keene, out of courtesy, declined to read it.

  In truth, there was little or nothing that policymakers could use in the two lines of argument Mishima submitted to Hori. In the main one, “Bushidō and Militarism,” his basic assessment of the global military situation may have been as correct as it was standard—that nuclear weapons have nullified total wars, limited wars inevitably create sizable domestic opposition, and so forth—but his conclusion that therefore Japanese culture, centering on the Tennō and bushidō, must be restored had little political relevance or practicality.

  In the subsidiary argument, “The Regular and Irregular Armies,” Mishima lamented that the GSDF was utterly deficient in its preparations for guerrilla warfare and, as it stood, the Japanese troops were no more than mercenaries for the US military.15 That assessment, however correct, also had little applicability, at least for LDP politicians, given the power relations between Japan and the United States.

  At the end of July, and again at the end of August, Mishima and three young men met in the Hotel New Otani, at its swimming pool, and, after some discussion, agreed on the need to add another member to the group. On September 1, on their way home after a meeting to work on Constitutional reform, Morita and Koga took Koga Hiroyasu to Café Parkside, in Nishi-Shinjuku, and explained their plan to him. It was close to midnight. The older Koga recalled in his testimony during the trial how he agreed to go along:

  At the time [the younger] Koga asked me, “Can you die with Mishima Sensei?” I did not ask for details, but I thought, They are going to do the do-or-die uprising. I was not surprised because since I had joined the Shield Society, I was determined to give my life to the cause of awakening Japan.

  When told, “We’ll do it in Camp Ichigaya,” I said to Morita, “Please count me in.”

  On September 9, over dinner at a French restaurant on the Ginza, Mishima explained the team’s latest plan to the new member: While the Shield Society is exercising at Camp Ichigaya, he will bring in a Japanese sword, the five of them will go to the office of the regimental commander on the pretext of showing an iai pattern, the drawing out of the sword, and take him prisoner for two hours to compel him to assemble troops so they may “appeal” to them. But then Mishima gave away the catch, the truth: It will not be possible to persuade any of the troops to join them. No matter: he, Mishima, must die. The date will be November 25. The older Koga reaffirmed his decision to join the team.

  On September 15, the group, now of five men, went to see Togakure School Ninpō Demonstration Performances in Chiba, Tokyo’s neighboring prefecture to the east. The Togakure School stressed the ninja art that Mishima thought highly of and wished to study if he had the time.16

  On their way back, they stopped at an eatery in Sumida, Tokyo, tha
t served boar meat. They then went to the sauna in the posh Isetan Kaikan, adjacent to the Shinjuku pleasure quarters. There Mishima narrowed the scope of the overall participants in the plan for November 25. He will pick the members of the monthly meeting of the Shield Society to be called forth that day. He will exclude anyone who has a relative in the Self-Defense Forces.

  On September 19, Mishima asked Takahashi Mutsuo to come to a meeting of three—the other two being Mishima and Morita—specifying the Daini Hamasaku, a Japanese restaurant on the Ginza. When Takahashi arrived at the restaurant a little late, he found the two men drinking over fugu sashimi in a private room on the second floor. No sooner had he entered the room than Mishima took a formal posture and said to him:

  Allow me to say a word. The man named Morita Masakatsu here with us today may die in the near future or he may survive to become a worthless old man. But, whatever may happen, Morita Masakatsu who is here now is a being with a certain value. For some time now I wanted someone to remember him just as he is now, and decided there is no one but you, Takahashi, who would do that. So today I’ll have him tell us about himself since his birth, the stories even I haven’t heard.

  Takahashi later realized that Mishima had meant it as an announcement of what would happen soon, a kind of will. That evening, though, he thought Mishima had started another jokey act and simply enjoyed fugu and drinks, barely listening to Morita as he mumbled his life story, scarcely touching the food. After the restaurant, the two men took Takahashi to a sauna in Roppongi. He guessed Mishima frequented it with the members of his Shield Society.17

  On October 2, the five men assembled in Daiichirō, a Chinese restaurant on the Ginza. The plan Mishima laid out then was detailed: The Shield Society’s meeting on November 25 will start at 11 in the morning. The members will begin their exercise at 1:30 p.m. at the heliport of Camp Ichigaya. Mishima will take part in the meeting in regular clothes, not in Shield Society uniform, excuse himself at 12:30 on the pretext of a funeral he has to attend, and the younger Koga, also in regular clothes, will drive him back to his house to pick up his sword, which will be put in the trunk. The two then will collect the two journalists Mishima trusts who will be waiting at the Palace Hotel. The purpose of having two journalists will be to have the entire action reported exactly as it unfolds. They will then enter Camp Ichigaya from its left inner gate, stop at the office of the commander of the 32nd Regiment, and, with the journalists in the car, take the commander hostage. The four young men agreed to the plan.

  Muramatsu Takeshi met Mishima, at the restaurant Tsutaya, in Yotsuya, on October 7. Alarmed by the Sankei Shinbun article, “25 Years Inside Me,” he had asked for a meeting, via Izawa Kinemaro, and Mishima had picked the date and place. Muramatsu had felt that he had been “in a state of severed relationship” with Mishima, though he did not explain the reason in his biography of Mishima. He knew, however, that Izawa, the “patriotic” historian, was “the one person Mishima still kept close to.”

  Mishima showed up in a half-sleeve shirt. One of the first things he said was, “I hear you gave a talk in Seoul, in French.” Muramatsu indeed had, at the conference of the International PEN held in Seoul, in July. He spoke in French, at the urging of one of the directors, Agawa Hiroyuki, who wanted the world to know that English was not the only foreign language Japanese could handle. Mishima said he had heard about it from Donald Keene. The American scholar had attended the conference.

  “More important,” Muramatsu said, to change the subject, “I gather that you finished writing the last chapter of The Decay of the Angel.”

  Mishima blanched. He wanted to know who told him that. Instead of giving the answer, Muramatsu explained why he had requested the meeting: The Sankei article worried him.

  “I see,” Mishima responded. “So you understand Japanese. I thought you understood only French.” The remark prompted Izawa, who was with them, to mutter, “How rude!” Muramatsu asked Mishima to rescind his remark, but Mishima’s response was, if anything, even ruder: “The first thing you’ve got to do is to expel the barbarians in your head.” The word he used was jōi. His deadly serious face at that moment made Muramatsu think of Iinuma Isao, the protagonist of The Runaway Horse.

  Mishima took Muramatsu home by taxi. In the taxi he kept saying, “I can’t wait any longer,” “I don’t like it”—apparently the way Japanese society had turned out to be. Muramatsu, who till the end of the previous year had heard Mishima repeat the word kirijini—dying while fighting with a sword—guessed that, if Mishima were to act in a drastic way, he would do so the coming year. Among other things, in the latest installment of The Decay of the Angel, Honda Shigekuni had just adopted Yasunaga Tōru, the beginning of a turn of events in the slowly unfolding drama.18

  On October 19, Mishima and the four young men got together at the photo studio Tōjō Kaikan, in Chiyoda, to have a commemorative photo taken, everyone in Shield Society uniform.

  October 21, International Antiwar Day, Mishima had a taidan with the screenwriter Ishidō Toshirō for Eiga Geijutsu. He had loved the film monthly for its outlandish approach to “film art.” The topic for the taidan was war and yakuza movies. Before the session started, Ogawa Tōru, the magazine’s editor-publisher who served as moderator, arriving late, mentioned the demonstrators he had seen on his way. That prompted Mishima to say he too had come across students on his way, but they would not do anything to him even as they clearly recognized him. He looked extremely displeased when he said this. Later reports put the number of those who rallied to protest that day at 370,000 nationwide, with 219 arrested.

  Of the recent movies brought up in the taidan, Gunbatsu, an account of Shōwa up to Japan’s defeat as an upheaval within the military, was one both Ishidō and Mishima roundly condemned for its utter lack of a sense of drama. No one did anything, according to the movie, but the horrendous war was the result. Just like the LDP today, Mishima said in disgust. What about Fascism? There was no such thing in Japan; if there had been, Japan would have produced some attractive personalities. The makers of the film could have at least brought in Nakano Seigō, for example, he said.

  Mishima praised Tora! Tora! Tora!, along with Airport, for the parallelism employed. Tora! Tora! Tora! was the first Hollywood movie on Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor that took into account the Japanese viewpoint. To present both Japanese and American viewpoints, two directors, one American and one Japanese, were assigned. The 20th Century Fox producer Darryl Zanuck’s first choice for the Japanese side was Kurosawa Akira. Agawa Hiroyuki, a former naval officer, cried at the scene in the former where Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku reviews his troops, Mishima mentioned. Do you not have some illusion about the war because you did not go to war? Ogawa asked. I might have some nostalgia, though I was “relieved like everyone else” when the war was over, Mishima replied.

  When Shindemoraimasu, the yakuza film featuring Takakura Ken and Ikebe Ryō, both as good-looking as the actor Tsuruta Kōji, was brought up, Mishima quickly said he had enjoyed Sudō Hisashi’s recent article in Eiga Geijutsu arguing that “Tsuruta must be taken back from Mishima.” Sudō would go on to direct his own films though none would have anything to do with yakuza.

  When Ishidō, himself a graduate of the University of Tokyo, said what he liked the most about Shindemoraimasu—“Kindly die for me,” a courteous, lethal expression Takakura had first used it in an earlier yakuza film just before killing his baleful enemy, had become a fad word since—was the setup in which Takakura’s mother is blind, Mishima responded to indicate it wasn’t such giri, obligations, and ninjō, emotional complications, between mother and son that moved him:

  Hmm. I wonder if I have some homosexual elements in me, though I do not think I am a homosexual . . . At the end [of the movie], where Ikebe and Takakura eye each other and, without saying a word, go [to battle], when I see a scene like that, my heart is wrenched, I get a lump in my throat. Now yakuza films are the only thing that carries forward the traditions of Japanese culture.
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  Shindemoraimasu has a scene, toward the end, where Takakura, playing a taciturn loner as usual, declines the offer of a man on his side, who feels obliged to join him in the final fight, and walks into the enemy camp all alone—although the character played by Ikebe, whose obligations are subtler, joins him. A yakuza forced to go through humiliations so acting in the denouement was routine in such films, and this particular film probably had nothing to do with what Mishima did. Yet, less than two weeks later, on November 2, he told Morita Masakatsu not to die with him. But there was no way for Morita, fired up for several months whose nerves were dangerously on edge by then, to accept Mishima’s word at that late date. By September or October, Morita’s friends remember him saying, “If Mishima doesn’t do anything at this late date, I’ll kill him.”19

  The taidan took place at a cheap students’ diner in Yūraku-chō at Mishima’s request. Watching him eat a dish of omelet with rice busily as a student would, as if it were the best food he ever savored, Ishidō imagined the way he might eat with the troops at GSDF.

  With the taidan over, Mishima pulled out an envelope from his pocket and showed it to Ishidō and Ogawa. The letter was from a man identifying himself as a group chief of a yakuza gang in Osaka, a former navy Pilot Trainee, who said he was a close reader of Mishima’s rightwing writings and pledged that if something happened to him, he would immediately bring fifty men to his side.

  “You see, you can’t attack me too much,” Mishima said. “Remember there’s someone like this to back me up.” Thereupon he laughed his famous laugh and quickly disappeared into the night.20