by Hiroaki Sato
1 Hiraoka, “Boru no gotoku.”
2 Inoguchi Rikihei and Nakajima Tadashi, Shinpū tokubetsu kōgekitai (Nihon Shuppan, 1951). The most famous of the books on the subject when it appeared probably because it glorified the “Kamikaze spirit,” it was translated into English as The Divine Wind (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute, 1958). The authors, Capt. Inoguchi and Cdr. Nakajima, were involved in the formation of special attack forces, but they were later accused of having beautified the forces. Takagi Toshirō, Rikugun tokubetsu kōgekitai, jōkan (Bungei Shunjū, 1983), 481.
3 “2.26 Jiken to watashi,” Zenshū 34, 117–18.
4 The Fukui Shinbun article of June 6, 1966, is reprinted in Zenshū 34, 767–68.
5 Fukushima, Mishima Yukio: Tsurugi to kanbeni, 167.
6 Mishima wrote a different, longer version, titling it “The Evil Counselors’ Song.” Zenshū 20, 714–20.
7 The title Honba is translated Runaway Horses (in plural) by Michael Gallagher. But since the horse in the title obviously refers only to the story’s protagonist Iinuma Isao, the English should be in the singular.
8 Tokuoka, Gosui no hito, 38.
9 “Mishima Yukio-shi no ‘ningen Tennō’ hihan—shōsetsu ‘Eirei no koe’ ga nageta hamon,” Zenshū 34, 126–29.
10 Funasaka Hiroshi, Seki no Magoroku: Mishima Yukio, sono shi no himitsu (Kōbunsha, 1973), 87–91, 89.
11 It includes a misspelling. “The common term in German would be Totale Vernichtung (Hitler meant the annihilation of Jews, of course) or, grammatically correct, Vernichtender Kampf (which I never heard).” Guido Keller by private communication.
12 E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 52.
13 Spector, Eagle against the Sun, 420.
14 Sledge, With the Old Breed, 53, 155–56.
15 Funasaka Hiroshi, Eirei no zekkyō (Bungei Shunjū, 1966), 29, 194, 156–59. Taylor’s words are translated from Funasaka’s Japanese translation. Funasaka’s book was translated into English by Jeffrey D. Rubin as Falling Blossoms and published by Times Books International in 1986.
16 “Jo (Funasaka Hiroshi cho Eirei no zekkyō),” Zenshū 34, 263–67.
17 Translation: Gyokusai-sen no kotō ni taigi wa nakatta.
18 Abe Jōji, “Kaisetsu,” Mishima Yukio, Fukuzatsuna Kare (Shūeisha, 1987), 332–37.
19 “Beatles kenbutsuki,” Zenshū 34, 168–72.
20 “Zōka ni korosareta funanori no uta,” Zenshū 37, 784–88.
21 Mishima’s letter to Fukushima Jirō in mid-July 1966. Fukushima, Mishima Yukio: Tsurugi to kanbeni, 171.
22 It was during their time together in Nara that Keene appears to have created a “famous anecdote” suggesting that Mishima showed little knowledge of ordinary things, such as the names of plants. It had to do with the variety of pine known as mematsu, “female pine” (Pinus densiflora). Mishima did not even know mematsu is another name of akamatsu, the most common species of pine in Japan—that the name was not meant to sexually distinguish the species from the other one called omatsu, “male pine” (Pinus thunbergiana)!
One interesting aspect of this anecdote is the involvement of the journalist Tokuoka Takao. Tokuoka cited Keene’s story—which appeared in the Mainichi Shinbun the day after Mishima’s death—in his 1973 account of his travels with Keene without comment (Takuyū kikō [Chūō Kōron Sha, 1981], 46–47), but later, in his 1996 book on Mishima, argued that Keene probably got something wrong or came to a hasty conclusion (Gosui no hito, 118–19). In his second reference to the story, Tokuoka cited a botanist who closely examined the way Mishima described various plants to marvel at his accurate observations of details.
23 “Shikyaku to kumichō,” Zenshū 40, 514.
24 Ogyū Sorai, Taiheisaku. Maruyama Masao et al., eds., Ogyū Sorai shū (Iwanami Shoten, 1973), 451. Sorai (1666–1728) was a political and philosophical counselor to the eighth Tokugawa shogun, Yoshimune (1684–1751).
25 Muramatsu, Shi no bungakushi, 418–25.
26 Satsuma is an old name of Kagoshima. The Japanese name of the civil war is Seinan sensō, “Southwest War,” or seinan no eki, “War of the Southwest,” southwest being the direction of Satsuma from the viewpoint of the government in Tokyo.
27 Sugiyama Shigemaru, Kodama Taishō-den (Chūō Kōron Sha, 1989; originally 1918), 115. With Saeki Shōichi’s afterword.
28 By the time Hasuda Zenmei went to junior high school, in the late 1910s, such stories would provoke great mirth as well as a sense of awe. Odakane, Hasuda Zenmei, 18–19.
29 In the Chronicles of the Age of Deities (jindai-ki), the word ukei or its variant appears where Susano’o (Storm Deity) goes to see Amaterasu (Sun Goddess). Sakamoto Tarō et al., eds., Nihon Shoki, jō (Iwanami Shoten, 1977), 104. According to the editors’ explanation of ukei, 559, the diviner sets out with the premise that if A happens, it proves AA, whereas if B happens, it proves BB, then asks for “the shin’i,” the divine will.
30 Letter to Shimizu, July 31, 1946, Zenshū 38, 619.
31 Letter to Araki, June 26, 1967. Zenshū 38, 187.
32 Fukushima, Mishima Yukio: Tsurugi to kanbeni, 173.
33 For an illustration of how to wear a fundoshi, see Ross, Mishima’s Sword, 196.
34 When Fukushima’s book came out in the spring of 1998 and became a runaway bestseller, Mishima’s daughter and son, Noriko and Iichirō, brought a lawsuit (“cease-and-desist”) against Fukushima and his publisher Bungei Shunjū on the ground that his use of Mishima’s letters without permission infringed on the copyright law and Mishima’s jinkaku-ken, “personality rights,” a form of libel (Asahi Shinbun, March 25, 1998).
On March 30, the Tokyo District Court issued a preliminary injunction accepting the petitioners’ argument and ordered Bungei Shunjū to recall all the copies within seven days. Bungei Shunjū said that the decision was based on prejudice against homosexuals and that the cease-and-desist order was an abuse of Constitutional rights. The critic Kawamura Minato was against the recall from the standpoint of freedom of speech but said the matter should have been argued from the standpoint of violation of privacy. The critic Matsumoto Ken’ichi, who had written about Mishima, recalled that a book touching on Mishima’s homosexuality had been suppressed two decades earlier, and stated that the surviving members of the Mishima family should be more “relaxed” about such things (Asahi Shinbun, March 31, 1998). Matsumoto’s reference was to a Japanese translation of John Nathan’s biography of Mishima.
On October 18, 1999, the Tokyo District Court handed down a decision stating that letters were subject to copyright protection, the first such judgment in Japan. The court also ordered a payment of 5 million yen and publication of an ad of apology. The judge recognized that letters were different from literary works, but argued that those published in Fukushima’s book went beyond “seasonal greetings and simple replies.” Bungei Shunjū said they would appeal the decision as a constitutional issue (Asahi Shinbun, October 19, 1999).
On May 23, 2000, the Tokyo Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision. The judge explained that the letters in question included “sentences creatively expressing Mishima’s thought and feelings,” which placed them within copyright protection. Bungei Shunjū found the reasoning “lacking in persuasiveness” and said it would appeal (Asahi Shinbun, May 23, 2000). On November 9, 2000, the Supreme Court turned down the appeal as without merit (Asahi Shinbun, November 10, 2000).
35 Fukushima, Mishima Yukio: Tsurugi to kanbeni, 176–83 and elsewhere.
36 Mishima’s letter to Araki, August 15, 1966. Zenshū 38, 181. Fukushima, 185–86.
37 Fukushima, Mishima Yukio: Tsurugi to kanbeni, 185–86.
38 “Taiwa: Nihonjin ron,” Zenshū 39, 634. This taidan includes a succinct account of Shinpūren’s behavior, 632–33. “Gendai ni okeru uyoku to sayoku,” Zenshū 40, 576.
39 Fukushima, Mishima Yukio: Tsurugi to kanbeni, 222–24.
40 Letters to Araki, September 3, 1966 a
nd October 10, 1969. Zenshū 38, 183, 190.
41 The first occurred during a Diet session in December 1950 and the second in November 1952. The second one was a “clarification” of the remarks he had made in March 1950. At the time Japan had plunged into recession following America’s economic emissary Joseph Dodge’s imposition on the Japanese government of a strict balanced budget and other stringent belt-tightening measures. See Chapter Nine. In the March 1950 statement, Ikeda had said: “We can’t help some people going bankrupt because of the recession in the process of economic readjustment. For some time to come we must follow a thorny path.” Watanabe, Sengo Nihon no saishō-tachi, 179–81.
42 Letter to Kawaguchi, November 1, 1966, Hokan, 203–4.
43 Funasaka, Seki no Magoroku, 72–82. The length is given in Japanese as 2 shaku 3 sun 5 rin. It comes to 71.2 cm.
44 Ibid., 178–83. In his account of the search for the sword Funasaka gave Mishima after Mishima’s death, Mishima’s Sword, Christopher Ross describes how Funasaka gave the sword to Mishima, 1–14; Magoroku XXVII’s assessment of the sword, which he examined at the police after the incident, that “it was a Kodai Kanemoto, perhaps the fourth or fifth generation. There was evidence of the sword having been shortened at some time. The signature may have been removed then—all genuine Kanemoto swords are signed,” 162; a famous Sword Polisher (togishi and mukansha) who chose to remain unnamed, cited his student’s opinion: “He told me the sword was not Seki no Magoroku, not Kanemoto I or Kanemoto II, but was a later-generation Kanemoto sword. The later-generation Kanemoto swords represented a decline in quality and are not so valuable or collectible,” 182; Nakamura Taisaburō, not so identified by name but as the Swordmaster who sold the sword to Funasaka, who said: “It was not Seki no Magoroku. It looked like the second Kanemoto, but was not by him. If it had been I would never have sold it,” 220. For Funasaka’s own detailed description, see Seki no Magoroku, especially 106.
45 Hiraoka, Segare, 221.
46 Shiine, Heibon Punch no Mishima Yukio, 56–58.
47 Bōjō, Hono’o no gen’ei, 145–46, 164–65.
Chapter Twenty-One: “The Way of the Warrior is to die”
1 Kojima, Mishima Yukio to Dan Kazuo, 65.
2 Minzokushugi is often translated as “nationalism,” or vice versa. Depending on the Chinese characters used, minzoku can mean customs, mores, folklore, etc., of a particular group of people or a larger, distinct ethnic group itself; but the distinction between and as used in minzoku-gaku can become a matter of emphasis. Japan’s minzoku-gaku, meaning “folkloristics” or “ethnography,” is a field of study that came into being in the 1920s and 1930s under the influences of European and American thought, with the word minzoku carrying the strong sense of German Volk. As a result, the word minzoku tended to have nationalistic overtones, especially in prewar Japan. This is clear in Japan’s prewar slogan characterizing the Japanese as the “leading” minzoku, even amid a call for “a pan-East Asian minzoku”; it was a notion put forward to counter the Caucasian view of themselves as racially superior to every other race. The difficulty of finding the single-word English equivalent of minzoku may be seen in Kevin M. Doak’s article, “Building National Identity through Ethnicity: Ethnology in Wartime Japan and After” (Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, Winter 2001).
3 “Seinen ni tsuite,” Zenshū 34, 562–63.
4 One of the students who joined Mishima in “experiencing the GSDF” suggested Mitate-kai, and the name was accepted for the group they had formed. It was based on a tanka by Tachibana Akemi (1812–68), who for a while studied with a follower of National Learning: Ōgimi no shiko no mitate to iu mono wa koko ni naru mono zo to susume masaki ni, “Saying, ‘The Great Lord’s so-called ugly Imperial shield is right here,’ advance before everyone else.” Mishima later proposed to change it to Tate no Kai, saying that tate no sounds better than mitate. Hosaka Masayasu, Mishima Yukio to Tate no Kai jiken (Kadokawa Shoten, 2001), 149. The poem alludes to No. 4373 of the Man’yōshū, one of the poems offered by a border guard named Okinaga no Mahito Kunishima: Kyō yori wa kaeriminakute Ōkimi no shiko no mitate to idetatsu ware wa, “Starting this day, without regrets, I set out as an ugly Imperial shield.” Shiko no, here given as “ugly,” is self-deprecation, but it is also interpreted to mean, “tough.” Mi of mitate is an honorific, and tate, “shield,” is a metaphor for “soldier.” The soldier as a shield also appears in the section of the twenty-first Tennō, Sushun, in Nihon Shoki in the passage on Yorozu. See Sato, Legends of the Samurai, 13–15.
5 “Hontō no seinen no koe o,” Zenshū 34, 330.
6 Kawase Kenzō, “Ten to umi record-ka no koro,” geppō to Zenshū 34.
7 The naval battle on the night of February 28, 1942, in which a Japanese task force with a large troop convoy sank the USS cruiser Houston and the Australian HMAS cruiser Perth. But two Japanese transport ships were also sunk—accidentally, by a Japanese warship. Asano was aboard one of them.
8 “Ten to umi ni tsuite,” Zenshū 34, 397.
9 “Geijutsu dansō,” Zenshū 32, 558.
10 Richard Minear, “Helen Mears, Asia, and American Asianists,” International Area Studies Program, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Asian Studies Committee Occasional Papers Series, 1981, No. 7, 5–7. Also, Richard H. Minear, “Cross-Cultural Perception and World War II: American Japanists of the 1940s and Their Images of Japan,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 4, December 1980, 571–78.
11 “Kōdōgaku nyūmon,” Zenshū 35. 610.
12 Inose Naoki, Kūki to sensō (Bungei Shunjū, 2007), 40–44. Hiroaki Sato, trans., Japanese Women Poets (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 475–76.
13 Tokuoka, Gosui no hito, 37–41.
14 Muramatsu, Mishima Yukio no sekai, 481.
15 “Jieitai o taiken suru,” Zenshū 34, 404–13.
16 Shiine, Heibon Punch no Mishima Yukio, 28–29.
17 Tokuoka, Gosui no hito, 53.
18 “Mishima kikyōhei ni 26 no shitsumon,” Zenshū 34, 414–22.
19 Muramatsu, Mishima Yukio no sekai, 482–83.
20 Nakano, Akunin raisan, 293–94.
21 The Senjinkun (Code of Conduct in the Battlefield) was prepared in an attempt to deal with the loss of military discipline on the battlefields in China of the kind “not seen in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars”—“violence against officers, desertions, rape, arson, and pillage.” Issued in the name of Army Minister Gen. Tōjō Hideki, in January 1941, the code, in its main part, told the soldiers not to get drunk, not to be carried away by lust, to treat noncombatants with kindness, and so on. After Japan’s defeat, the code won notoriety, “from the standpoint of humanism,” as Shirane Takayuki explained, because of that infamous article. Shirane, who had studied philosophy at the Imperial University of Kyūshū and written books, was pulled from a Chinese front to join a small group to prepare the document at the Department of Military Education. The Senjinkun was intended to supersede the Gunjin chokuyu.
The article in question, however, when scrutinized, may have said something far less dire. Kyoko Selden who parsed the “no surrender” article says that the two-part sentence in parallelism says something like: “Thou shall not suffer the shame of being taken prisoner while alive; thou shall not leave the ill repute of crime and penalty when you die”—that is, “Do your best not to be taken prisoner.” So interpreted, it may be close to a standard admonishment in any military code of conduct.
Shirane Takayuki, “‘Senjinkun’ wa kōshite tsukurareta,” in Handō, Shōwa-shi tansaku 1926–1945, vol. 5, 143–46. Sato, “Gyokusai.” Another explanation for “no surrender” was that treatment of POWs was savage.
22 “The Vietnam War and American Life,” Newsweek, July 10, 1967, 5 and 60.
23 Shiine, Heibon Punch no Mishima Yukio, 12–13.
24 Kubota Hiroko, “Mishima Yukio to Matsumoto Seichō no Tōnan Asia,” Mishima Yukio kenkyū 10: Ekkyō suru Mishima Yukio (Kanae Shobō, 2010), 115.
25 “Jieitai o taiken suru,” Zenshū 34, 404.
26 Kikuchi Katsuo, “Mishima-shi no kangeki to zasetsu,” geppō to Zenshū 38.
27 Letter to Kikuchi, August 25, 1967. Zenshū 38, 455.
28 “Magagoto,” Zenshū 37, 400–401.
29 “Fuin,” Zenshū 37, 377–78.
30 “Mishiranu heya de no jisatsusha,” Zenshū 37, 384.
31 “Kasugai Ken-shi no uta,” Zenshū 31, 207. Yamauchi Yukito, “Mishima Yukio to tanka,” Mishima Yukio kenkyū 10: Ekkyō suru Mishima Yukio (Kanae Shobō, 2010), 135–36. Yamauchi’s purpose in his essay is to discuss the tanka poet Kasugai Ken’s fateful encounter with Mishima.
32 Muramatsu, Mishima Yukio no sekai, 76–77.
33 “Kaidai,” Zenshū 16, 758. The ending dots are part of the poem.
34 Kamen no kokuhaku, Zenshū 1, 328, 335. Mishima repeated the story about wearing white clothes in 1967 when the Asahi Shinbun asked for his comment on the Hiroshima bombing on its anniversary (“Watashi no naka no Hiroshima—genbaku no hi ni yosete,” Zenshū 34, 447–48; the original title of the article was: “Minzokuteki fungeki o omoiokose” or “Remember the Fury as a People”). But Mishima was wrong about “white clothes.” As Muramatsu Takeshi correctly recalled, what the government did—an appallingly delusionary act, no doubt—was to advise wearing white clothes to reduce the burns from the bomb. Muramatsu, Mishima Yukio no sekai, 102–3. Muramatsu notes that the fear of an atomic bomb being dropped on Tokyo became palpable on the night of August 12. The crew of a B-19 that was shot down had predicted it.
35 “Watashi no naka no Hiroshima,” Zenshū 34, 447–48.
36 “Shōwa 20-nen 8-gatsu no kinen ni,” Zenshū 26, 551–52.
37 “Jūshōsha no kyōki,” Zenshū 27, 29.
38 “Jōshi ni tsuite—yaya kyōgeki na giron,” Zenshū 27, 108–13.
39 Nakamura Shin’ichirō, Nakamura Shin’ichirō shishū (Shichōsha, 1989), 120.
40 Katō, Sheep’s Song, 180.
41 “Watashi no henreki jidai,” Zenshū 32, 296–97.