This blog is dedicated to everyone's favorite modern day Samurai, right-wing nationalist, and morbidly poetic author Yukio Mishima, the name by which he will be he known here for the simplicity of an English-speaking audience and so as to maintain his famous pseudonym. Expect quotes, photos, and articles written about any aspect of the man, his work, or his life.
It is because human beings always think of living for some kind of ideal, and they soon get bored of living just for themselves. It is because of this that the need to die for something arises. That need is the âgreat causeâ that people talked about in the past. Dying for a âgreat causeâ was considered the most glorius, heroic, or brilliant way of dying. However, there are no âgreat causesâ now. This is natural because the democratic political system does not need âgreat causesâ.
I'm doing an independent study project on Japanese right-wing politics in the post-war era. In general, one of the most fascinating aspects is the apathy so many of the Japanese populace have for the far-right in its most blatant forms. Germany has emphatically been divorcing itself from its Prussian militarism as atonement for the horrors of the Nazi period, but Japan is popularly conceived of as fanatically opposed to any notion that the nation bears responsibility for the Second World War and Japanese atrocities.
Nevertheless, the post-war period established a new Japanese identity which, despite mounting tensions with the Soviet Union, China, and the DPRK during the Cold War (conflict with China and the DPRK continues today), largely discounted the aggression of the pre-war Showa period.
What enthusiasm there was for the war, which manifested in the atrocities, suicidal charges, and Kamikaze attacks sanctioned by and committed in the name of the Emperor, evaporated into a state of national despair at its end in 1945. The war-weary Japanese people endured bombing on both a massive and, for the nuclear technology introduced, unprecedented scale. Hirohito's Humanity Declaration of 1946 forced him to shed his divine cocoon and emerge as a fallible, mortal human being to his subjects, who were still reeling from the shock of defeat.
The American propaganda film Our Job in Japan proudly proclaimed that every aspect of the pre-war Kokutai, or Japanese national identity, would be exorcised. Shinto was a backwards folk superstition. Bushido was a brutal moral code that had caused untold suffering across Japan's colonial empire. The Emperor's absolute authority was anathema to egalitarian democracy, though his guilt in the war would not be prosecuted, solely for the purpose of maintaining some resemblance of stability in Japanese society.
As an enthusiast of Mishima's life, works, and for the era which he belonged to and portrayed, Mishima's place in these affairs is of great interest. The temptation to view Mishima's political beliefs as easily extricable from his literature is not accurate. Mishima certainly did not believe that was possible.
Mishima was intimately involved in a counter-reformation to this new current. For the literary, theatrical, and cosmopolitan circles he involved himself in, his obsession with the spiritual aspect of Japanese totalitarianism seemed more like a puerile exercise of ego masquerading in a brown uniform. To the modern Western reader who encounters Mishima, there is an element of surprise and incredulity to discover the imperial obsession Mishima plunged himself into in the final years of his life.
Like H.P. Lovecraft's readers who squirm at his racism, and Ezra Pound's readers who must reluctantly acknowledge his fascism, Mishima's readers must address the issue of his imperialism. It was that deadly ism which the American occupation had emasculated and preserved only as a bulwark against communism.
Mishima is thus something of an anachronism. Many Japanese soldiers held out for months, years, and even decades in remote Pacific islands, having never received the message that the war had ended or having chosen to ignore it. Mishima seems to have been a similar case, awash in a sea of modernism and capitalism that he hated, though he was trapped in the epicenter of Japanese civilization, and he was never a soldier. The foundations of this anachronistic nationalism were what Mishima described as the aesthetics of the "Emperor system" in a postscript reflecting on the Ni Ni Roku incident.
The Ni Ni Roku incident, Mishima claimed, was a sign that "some great God had died." Mishima identified with the officers who, on February 26, 1936, staged a coup aimed at purifying the Imperial order. The Emperor, the rebels claimed, had become surrounded by corrupt advisers and bureaucrats who whispered poison in his ear and corroded the soul of Japan. These were "the cowardly, sniveling, timid old vassals who surrounded the Emperor," as Mishima called them. The greatest irony of the Ni Ni Roku incident was Hirohito's rejection of the uprising. The only repugnance he felt for the existing order was the failure of the military to crush the uprising more quickly. The rebellion came to an ignominious end. Some of the rebel leaders committed suicide after realizing their struggle was hopeless. Those who survived were captured, tried, and executed. The instigators had grievously misjudged the situation and the feasibility of a coup.
Nevertheless, the affair was a formative influence for Mishima. At the age of eleven, he thought little of it at the time. At the age of twenty, with the war lost, Mishima fell under its spell. With the same fiery passion, Mishima wrote a manifesto of his beliefs, Eirei no Koe, an elegy which asked "Why did the Emperor have to become a human being?" His short story Patriotism, later made into a film, was the story of an Imperial guardsman during the Ni Ni Roku incident who commits seppuku to avoid the moral dilemma of being called into action against his friends and comrades, who have joined the rebellion. This heroic death embodied the pure, virile aesthetic that made Mishima acknowledge the taboo of discussing the Emperor's position in the press. Conversely, Mishima criticized the Emperor for his intervention in the Ni Ni Roku incident, and also for his failure to honor the spirits of those who had died in the Second World War. It was this philosophy, of a pure, godlike Emperor, for whom one could willingly die in the obligatory Samurai sense, that Mishima wished to expound on as the best course for Japan's spiritual restoration.
In the student demonstrations and leftist riots of the late 60s, Mishima found university-age students with right-wing outlooks as willing recruits for his Emperor-obsessed worldview. Mishima founded the Tatenokai, the Shield Society, as the champions of the moribund Kokutai. The initiation ceremony was a grisly blood oath. Mishima held out a piece of paper, stating that "We hereby swear to be the foundation of Imperial Japan." He cut his finger over a bowl, and let his blood flow to fill it. He urged the assembled students to do the same, and they did. One sickened and left the room to vomit. When the bowl was full to the brim with blood, the men used a brush to leave their signatures on the declaration. When this had been completed, Mishima was still not satisfied: the blood should be drunk. Jokingly concerned over VD, and quipping that the students with their mouths and teeth red were like little Draculas, Mishima saw the ritual through to its end.
The ritual was consummated on November 25, 1970, when Mishima killed himself after facing the raucous jeering of an assembled garrison. Mishima, like the officers of 1936, had misjudged the enthusiasm Japan still had for antiquated codes of masculine, militaristic honor. To claim that the coup on November 25 was merely a pretext for his suicide would be insufficient. Mishima had been rehearsing for his death ever since his masochistic frame of mind placed him in the shoes of the suicidal Lieutenant in Patriotism, and this death was based on the "hard, huge rock at the very foundation of my aesthetic-the Emperor system."
Whether the modern reader agrees with his imperialism or not, Mishima was an imperialist.
Today, my mother questioned my interest in Mishima. On flipping through two books from the local library (the Scott-Stokes and the John Nathan biographies), she took particular note of an image of Mishima in a loincloth, in a bombastic samurai pose. The rippling muscles of his torso are shadowed by the strategic lighting, so that he appears lithe and deadly as he clutches a katana.
This photo, by Tamotsu Yato, perfectly captures the exhibitionist quality of Mishima's psyche, the mask he puts on for the public world. Here he is calm and icily resolute. His face is potent in its blankness, despite the chill of the snow.
The word my mother used to describe him was "Nutter."
Before leaving his Tokyo home on November 25, 1970 to stage the dramatic coup that would end in his own suicide, Mishima left a note on his desk: "Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever."
Would have been 89 years. You'd probably still be alive, albeit with grey hair, wispy eyebrows, and flabby cellulite where there used to be raw and toned muscle. That's the bit that would have infuriated you the most.
The protagonist Shunsuke in Forbidden Colors realizes he is losing the ability to walk and exert himself physically, and looks back on a life filled with disappointments. His massive collection of writings is equaled only by the chaos of his personal life, fraught with the insanity, infidelity, and suicide of his wives.
Shunsuke is the Mishima the world would know today if he were still alive. Perhaps he would have grown more cunning and manipulative as his body decayed, and more bitter. Shunsuke acts out a vicarious life obsessed with aesthetics and which supersedes the responsibilities of marriage through his toy, the beautiful youth Yuichi. Mishima may have regretted not having lived such a life as he peered back through his own from the pedestal of his twilight years.
Somehow, letting nature steal the glory of the destruction of his body doesn't seem like the sort of fate Mishima would accept. Mishima dreamed of temples in flames, actors with their grimacing masks, perfectly sculpted young Greek men, and a grand final bow doused in blood. From the day he first entered the world to the day he left it, his birth and death would be inextricably tied to a cycle: emerging from the void before life and at last reentering it.
43 years ago, two men shed their own blood on the carpeted floor of the Ichigaya headquarters of the Japanese Defense Ministry. One was Masakatsu Morita, who, in his fear of student anarcho-communist organizations, veered to the right. The other casualty was Kimitake Hiraoka, Yukio Mishima, the legendary author, the notorious narcissist, the (somewhat) concealed homosexual, and the indomitable nationalist, each identity a mask for the same man with the same confessions.
I fit into this equation in the most peculiar way. I only became aware of this man's existence a year ago. Before then, neither he nor his consummate act of self-destruction meant anything to me. I found Mishima through the voice of another artist: Paul Schrader, and his film which I have analyzed and viewed several times.
I saw a man who felt that his spirit could not be fulfilled in any way other than his own spiritually-charged death, abhorring the thought of growing into a flabby and deteriorating sack of skin and bones as old age crept its hands around him. Mishima fought this battle every day of his life, practicing his art, his writing, and slowly dying.
Mishima was an odd man. An observer remembers having the beheading ritual of Hara-Kiri demonstrated on him by an unarmed Mishima to a group. Mishima's sweat-covered, throbbing vision of masculinity and his banner-waving militarism was off-putting to many, but he retained such popularity that his novels remain successful. Extensive translations of his work into other languages suggest a popularity that extends beyond the country of his birth.
I can't help being intrigued and, dare I say it, obsessed with, even seduced by, this man. It is odd, and dangerous in its own way. I am not congruent with Mishima's politics, nor do I advocate a premature suicide to keep one's body frozen in the public consciousness at the height of its beauty. Mishima was 5'1", and about as muscular as a person his height could possibly be, like a stout rhinoceros beetle lifting a load many times its weight.
He was full of contradictions, but he brought them all to a personal dĂŠnouement by plunging a blade into his stomach. In traditional Japanese society, the stomach was the seat of honesty, much in the way a Western audience might think of the heart as being the core of emotional truth. Mishima's self-absorbed brutality brought him to the void and swept away all contradictions.
But he still exists in some way. His writing is a corpus stacked to heaven and the ethereal vastness after death, and each syllable is written in blood.
A little man who twists the camera to appear a giant.
Paul Schrader's monumental 1985 biopic covers the life of the man originally named Kimitake Hiraoka, here portrayed by Ken Ogata. He wrote poetry, fantasized about death on the battlefield, and became an acclaimed author and commander of a paramilitary force rooted in militaristic ideology. Fitting a man whose life was unconventional in its most mundane moments, the film's narrative follows an unusual arc.
This is not a review, as my love for the film is undeniable and I would stronhly recommend it to anyone, but rather an analysis. I am not a student of film, and as such view Mishima for its relevance to its namesakeâs work and life, and not solely for its qualities as a film.
If you have not watched the film, it can be viewed online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_aaPW1rASo, or can be purchased through Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/movies-tv/dp/B00005J6UO. It is rated R primarily for scenes of nudity and some violent content. It is also entirely in Japanese (subtitled in English), except for English narration in some parts and one scene in which Mishima himself speaks to a visiting English-speaking group.
The film begins with the swell of triumphant music as a red sun rises over a Japanese shoreline strewn with pebbles stained by the gaining light. The flaring calligraphy of Mishima's name appears on the screen, and the opening credits go by to the effervescent whinnying of Philip Glassâs musical score. The first chapter is titled "Beauty": the still Tokyo morning reveals Mishima awake and stretching his way out of a deep sleep. He goes about his morning business with a deathly calm that mirrors his purpose. He finally dons a brown, belted uniform and an officer's cap that seem bizarre in a postwar Japan. He mails the finished manuscript of his final novel, The Decay of the Angel, and marches out his door to the throbbing strains of a string orchestra and military drums.
It is here that the first flashbacks to Mishima's childhood are shown. His grandmother's oppressive concern for the young boy prompt her to keep him secluded away from his mother. When he is forced into the unforgiving world of education, he is taunted mercilessly as "Mama's boy" and left with no outlet to express his thoughts. He remains silent with a drooping expression of loneliness on his face. As he stutters his first words, the shot changes to a nervous man stuttering the same words.
The narrative then switches to the story of Mizoguchi, a stuttering monk distressed with existence and obsessed with the aesthetic quality of a Buddhist temple, and one of Mishima's characters from the novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The grey shots of Mishima's childhood switch to the glorious and saturated world of color of Eiko Ishioka's design (and her designs merit a temporary tangent).
Each of her sets for the film's literary scenes vary from rich and deep to bleak and simplistic. Her imagining of Kinkaku-ji (or Rokuon-ji, as it is officially known), the temple the story focuses on, dominates each of its scenes, filling the atmosphere like, in the words of Mizoguchi himself, "Tremendous music." Each detail is lovingly produced; the golden glow the temple radiates on Mizoguchi's face, and, in later scenes, the pink, jarring world of a seedy Japanese brothel, and the sound of feet grinding on loose stone the surface of a cliff before a half-sunken temple.
Mizoguchi is an acolyte obsessed with the consuming beauty of Kinkaku-ji, convinced that the temple, which dwarfs him (to his eternal terror and servile bewilderment), must be destroyed so that its corrupting beauty may be liberated. He ponders and aches, before making a final, resolute decision. Mizoguchi slips into the temple one night, and lights a match and drops it into a pile of straw. The dim glow of its flame illuminates his smile as he waves the fire throughout the structure, hunched over and reveling in the destruction like a drunken satyr at Bacchusâ side. The first chapter thus ends.
The segments of the first chapter dedicated to The Temple of the Golden Pavilion are interspersed with more segments from Mishima's life. One is his experience of masturbating to the image of the near-martyring of St. Sebastian. The white body of the saint is pierced with arrows, his hands bound from above by a leather thong and his face in an expression of exquisite agony. A second scene shows the war years during the bombing of Tokyo; Mishima is on air raid duty, a jittery, pale teenager, but imagines himself dying a beautiful death on some nameless field of war, fantasizing that he would explode like a rocket, âLighting the sky for an instant.â
He heads to an enlistment office and is examined by a medical officer of the Imperial Army; he coughs with a forced violence and is promptly diagnosed as having the symptoms of tuberculosis, and is promptly rejected from military service. As he contemplatively leaves the establishment, his head facing the floor, narration reveals that he exaggerated his coughing to appear less fit for the army, lacking the mental resolve for such a self-sacrifice. He lied.
The following chapter, titled âArt,â is similar: scenes from Mishimaâs adulthood are blended with scenes from one of his books, Kyokoâs House, which follows the story of a young Tokyo-dweller named Osamu as he struggles to find and appreciate love with a woman many years older than he and exercising dogmatically to resolve the conundrum of his own existence. Mishima himself becomes a famous author at a remarkably young age, being translated in the West and winning critical acclaim for such novels as Confessions of a Mask and The Sound of Waves. Osamuâs story ends with his implied sadomasochistic death at the hands of his lover, who also kills herself, with the words â ... stage blood is not enough.â
The final story-based chapter, âAction,â revolves around the character Isao, a Japanese cadet and kendo master obsessed with reinstating a traditionalist outlook in Japan through violent coup ending inevitably in a pure death by a blade in his own hand.
Black and white scenes depict Mishimaâs creation of the Tatenokai (Shield Society), his nationalistic band of university-age young men. The last chapter, âHarmony of Pen and Sword,â concludes the color scenes depicting the prelude to the coup of November 25, 1970. Mishima seizes control of the Ichigaya building of the Japanese Ministry of Defense, and addresses a crowd of soldiers, police officers, and reporters below who jeer at his fanatical display of gnashed teeth and swinging arms as he calls for a restoration of martial honor to the spiritually derelict Japanese army before cutting himself open, screaming, in the relative safety of the Ministry building.
Most of what Mishima says, both in the film and in his literature (indeed, a fair amount of the English narration is taken directly from some of his literature, including Sun and Steel), can seem to be melodramatic, an artist playacting and pontificating like a Tojo for the age of JFK, the Vietnam War, and hippies. The film, however, acknowledges this; in one scene, after a bombastic rooftop parade of Mishimaâs Tatenokai, Mishima is questioned by an official concerned about his public image as one of Japanâs foremost writers. The amount of ridicule he could face for prancing about in an organization of toy soldiers who were unlikely to see any war, the concerned man explains, could ruin not just his own image but could damage that of Japan itself. Mishima answers, grimly and knowingly, that he has always looked ridiculous, but refuses to change his principles or disband the organization.
A very real, human Mishima is fleshed out over the course of the filmâs four chapters. I disagree, however, with one decision in particular. A teenaged Mishima laments what he believes to be his failure as a poet; this scene in the film gives one the impression that Mishima was an unappreciated prodigy at best or a mediocre mock-artist at worst, neither of which are true. Mishimaâs literary talents were in some ways appreciated and acknowledged even when he was a boy, as he received the support of his teachers and was a published author while in school. He earned the ridicule of the athletic youths during his education however, and was scorned by his father who declared his interest in writing to be soft and worthless. The film does not really give this complete a sense of Mishimaâs early ability despite these challenges.
Virtually every other aspect, however, sparkles with an unprecedented clarity. Details such as his deep, throaty laugh, as described by biographer Henry Scott-Stokes, toothy grin, and resolute eyes are imitated with panache by Ken Ogata. Mishima, contrary to his reputation as a raving bushido-obsessed madman, is able to enjoy a laugh with his Tatenokai comrades over a meal, and even jokes after signing an agreement among the Tatenokai members in his own blood (and encouraging others to do the same) that he hopes none of them have a venereal disease. He implores three of these men to stay alive on November 25, 1970, despite their anxiety over the coming coup and their devastating promises to also kill themselves.
Nevertheless, the brash Mishima makes a full appearance as well. He turns to bodybuilding, becoming a stout but perpetually short man, and decides to pose almost entirely naked in the posture of his childhood sexual fantasy St. Sebastian. Mishimaâs bluster and impassioned rhetoric does not save his cause during the November 25 coup, but leaves a lasting impression.
Mishimaâs plan to commit seppuku is revealed early in the film, so that his fate is never really in doubt (and, indeed, one would have to be completely unaware of Mishima to not know the circumstances of his death). The result is that the audience regards what he says with a powerful sense of impending doom, not dismissing his words and instead forming opinions about them based on the knowledge that his death is almost certain. Mishimaâs suicide hurdles toward the audience like a train, a train which Mishima himself pilots.
Most importantly, Mishimaâs ideology is itself given precedence over most other aspects of the filmâs plot. This is given form through the telling of Mishimaâs stories. Through demonstrating his obsession with perfect beauty and its consummation through destruction, Mishimaâs dramatized literature becomes symmetrical with the presented story of Mishimaâs life.
Mizoguchi is Mishima's sense of inferiority and failure to see the immediate beauty in themselves, delight only in destruction. Mishima masturbates to Saint Sebastian as Mizoguchi smiles at the flames he creates.
Osamu is Mishimaâs preening, vain desire for self-improvement in anticipation of death, who constructs the scenario for his own demise by achieving a zenith in physical beauty as Mishima lifts, runs, and theorizes his way to a perfect state of mind and body for seppuku.
Isao is Mishimaâs ferocious and unquenchable desire for action, who becomes fixated on killing a financial minister as Mishima denounces bourgeois materialism and soulless socialism. The triangle of the three fictional characters converge in Mishima.
Paul Schrader described Mishima as a man that would almost seem to be a character he would create for a film, but who, amazingly, was real. The Mishima Schrader creates and that Ogata animates is a wonderful composite of the real man; vain, self-conscious, zealous, and principled, all while assuming the place of one of the greatest modern writers in any country. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters ends with the image it began with: the rising sun, the perfect symbol of the void Mishima prepared himself for and finally laid down his life for.
The circle: the sun, and in Zen Buddhism, the symbol of the bare essence of everything and enlightenment. Stage blood was never enough.
It occurred to me that, to an outside observer, this blog appears to have emerged from cyberspace nothingness. It needs a statement, like a jisei death poem, that explains the significance one small man written off as a fanatic can have to me.
As of now, my personal collection of Yukio Mishima's published works remains small (containing The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Confessions of a Mask, and Forbidden Colors) and it is almost certainly doomed to remain so for the near future. Lacking financial independence and a competency in reading and understanding Japanese, I almost certainly will not be able to draw on the vast amount of literature Mishima wrote in his prolific and comparatively short lifetime. Considering that this is a man who wrote and adapted plays, short stories, literary essays and criticisms, full-fledged novels, and starred in the occasional motion picture while acting as a full-time darling of both the Japanese and international media, stout bodybuilder, and later nationalist political leader and paramilitary commander, that is truly a shame.
Mishima's creative outpouring was a rare thing, beginning with short stories and poetry that made him a target of the athletic tough guys at his school and his disapproving father and ending with The Decay of the Angel, the conclusion of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. His legacy remains divisive: the champion of the Japanese right and a titanic literary figure, who, in his lifetime, laughed a deep, throaty chuckle and, by night, set the spikes on the rail to his own death with his writing.
I, as this post certainly may suggest, have not become adept at weaving my words together to form a coherent, compelling picture in quite the way Mishima could paint a sometimes bleak, sometimes vibrant picture of life with his. Nevertheless, this blog will be my place and, through the submissions of others, the place of many more to reflect on the life, times, and death of one of Japan's most enduring men.
It is only fitting that this scrawl should be ended with an aforementioned example of a jisei death poem, this particular example being that of the sixteenth-century daimyo Uesgui Kenshin. May you reflect on the duality of sword and chrysanthemum.
Even a life-long prosperity is but one cup of sake;
A life of forty-nine years is passed in a dream;
I know not what life is, nor death.
Year in year out-all but a dream.
Both Heaven and Hell are left behind;
I stand in the moonlit dawn,
Free from clouds of attachment.
Death poem can be accessed at: http://www.samurai-archives.com/deathq.html
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