1925-1970
“Fair is the knight who lieth slain
Amid the rush and the reed…” Oscar Wilde
Yukio Mishima, born Kimitake Hiraoka in Tokyo, was 16 years old when Japan entered into the second world war. An alienated child, Mishima spent most of his time reading, growing obsessed with the “beauty of the violent or excruciatingly painful death of a handsome youth.” The Japanese, a historically isolated nation, supported war efforts by promoting worship for their benevolent Emperor while parading racial and cultural superiority. Mishima, an aspiring writer, formed close ties with a band of literary nationalists who formed the Nippon Roman-Ha (Japanese romanticism) movement.
The movement was an embodiment of Japanese ethos: “elegance and that of samurai” An exalted warrior class, The Samurai was honour bound “to lay down his life for duty” as well as remaining “spiritually prepared to meet death bravely and fittingly at any time.” A certain Samurai spirit was revived during the war by conscripted university students boarding kamikaze planes towards a sacrificial death and romanticized by writers who viewed the war as “sacred”. Mishima yearned to satisfy his own desire for death in the military but he was declared unfit for service after embellishing a cold.
Japan surrendered in 1945, enacting a new constitution implemented by allied powers that prohibited the nation from maintaining a military and forced the Emperor to renounce his benevolence. After the war, Mishima made his debut as a novelist, releasing his first book Confessions of a Mask. A deeply revealing autobiography, the novel surprisingly made no reference to the war that marked his adolescence. For the next 20 years, Mishima would write thirteen novels and ten plays, remaining remarkably apolitical despite Japan’s rapid and forceful modernization.
In 1965, bubbling extremism in the form of public demonstrations piqued Mishima’s dormant interest in politics. The Japanese, according to Mishima, accrued a large amount of stress after being forced to “an ultra-modern way of life in [a] short space of time…” After a literary decline, he formed the Tatenokai (shield society) his “spiritual army” comprised of right-wing university students who would get together to perform military exercises and sing about “ballads of cherry blossoms, kamikaze pilots, gangsters…the spirit of old Japan.” On November 25th, 1970, Mishima committed ritual suicide (hara-kiri or seppuku) at the Ministry of Defense in Tokyo after an attempted coup d’état by four members of the Tatenokai. Before disemboweling himself, Mishima delivered a speech to a confused and irritated regiment who had been assembled at his request. The speech, barely audible, was a call for constitutional reform and restoration of Japan’s greatness.
“Modernization” writes Mishima, “damage[s] the totality of culture.” It is thus that “what is most exquisite in a national culture is tied closely to what may also be most disagreeable.” Mishima had recognized that since the end of the second world war the West “underrated the importance of the ‘dark’ side of Japanese culture.” The Japanese aesthetic, admired by Westerners, which includes the tea ceremony, Zen Buddhism, and haiku poetry only shows “one side of a moon, to the West, while pushing on busily with modernization.” As a result, Japan suppressed its martial tradition and, as stated ominously by Mishima, “insane incidents occur…wherever national culture seeks to regain its totality.” Referring to the “painful condition of Japanese culture” in which the rational humanism of Modernization “turns the eyes of modern man towards the brightness of freedom and progress” while “[wiping] the problem of death from the level of consciousness, pushing it deeper…turning the death impulse…to an ever more dangerous inner-directed impulse” Mishima poetically prophesized the dangers of unmitigated modernization upon cultures with incompatible traditions.
Hidden deep in the subconscious mind, Mishima writes, is the “impulse to be free and the impulse to die” which arise from the “fundamental contradictions of human existence.” Post-war Japan “overflowing with a mood of peace” could not fulfill “the impulse for surrender and death.” Thus individuals seek out “a goal worth dying for” in order to “avoid the boredom and fatigue that seep into an age of peace.” At the age of 45, Mishima was hardly the young handsome youth whose death he had so craved but by his own hand he had restored the traditional Japanese balance between “the chrysanthemum and the sword” for which he sacrificed his life.
In the 47 years following Mishima’s death, Japan’s incredible modernization fueled by “sacrificing everything for industrial growth” allowed them to catch up with and advance beyond other nations. It wasn’t until the 1990s when the country’s economy stalled that the extreme nature of the country’s progress came to light. According to Japanologist Alex Kerr, the nation fell into the pitfalls of both developing countries and advanced economies, “concreting its own rivers and seashores”, and mismanaging public wealth, resulting in a soaring national debt. Recently, Japan’s current prime minister Abe Shinzo has resurrected Japanese nationalism, pushing forward revisions to Article 9 which would end the country’s post-war pacifism. Mishima’s life and death serves as both a testimony and tragedy to the lingering human spirit that earnestly desires to detest, eagerly seeking out a cause to action for which one’s energy may be spent.
Jacob Krone
Works Cited:
Mishima, Yukio. Death in Midsummer and Other Stories. Penguin Books, 1971.
Scott-Stokes, Henry. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.
Mishima, Yukio, and Kathryn Sparling. The Way of the Samurai: Yukio Mishima on Hagakure in Modern Life.
Basic Books, 1977.
Ihara, Saikaku, and Caryl Ann. Callahan. Tales of Samurai Honor. Monumenta Nipponica, Sophia University, 1983.
Kerr, Alex. Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan. Penguin, 2002.
Pekkanen Robert J., author, and author Pekkanen Saadia M. “Japan in 2014 : All about Abe.” Asian Survey no. 1
(2015): 103. JSTOR Journals, EBSCOhost (accessed October 21, 2017).
Other Relevant Reading:
Wolfe, Alan Stephen. Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan. Princeton University Pres, 1990.
Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. New Directions, 1958.
Mishima, Yukio, and Michael Gallagher. Runaway Horses. Vintage International, 2002.
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