Mishima – Political Struggle as Spiritual Struggle
Over the course of the past decade a great many white Europeans have been undergoing a very profound awakening, whether it be conscious or unconscious. An awakening which has summoned within millions the general sense that our collective destiny as a race is being derailed. A sense that the splendid modern world envisioned by our predecessors has been tragically diverted from what it could have been by a malevolent, cloaked specter of amorphous configuration, which manifests itself to those aware of it’s presence in nearly every crack and crevice of modern life. While it is more consciously definable to those intellectually intrepid enough to break from the pervasive, ceaseless propaganda onslaught and research the true history of the Western World, the effects of this nefarious force are shared by all. While it is of paramount importance as a European to read into the great revolutionary movements throughout the past in Europe, which routinely sought to preserve a nation’s preferred destiny of refinement and progress through the preservation of time-tested traditions, it is also quite beneficial to observe, compare and contrast how other nations have managed their own destinies in the face of modernity. Japan in particular has been of great interest to me for the past 8 years and this interest was initially sparked by becoming an devoted reader and admirer of Yukio Mishima.

In this piece I will focus primarily on the fascinating last five years of Mishima’s life, during which he underwent a radical political awakening, as well as his best and final written work The Sea Of Fertility. I recommend the John Nathan book Mishima to those interested in a comprehensive biography. A novelist, playwright, film maker, poet, actor, bodybuilder, kendo expert, founder of a private army and extreme ultranationalist, Yukio Mishima personally embodied the conflict, rebellion, tragedy and complexity of modern Japan’s attempt, as a people, to reconcile their deeply held traditions with an increasingly nihilistic and materialistic global landscape intent on replacing enduring historical conventions with hollow consumerism and Marxist egalitarianism.

“Spiritually I wanted to revive some of the samurai spirit through it(his private army ‘The Tatenokai). I don’t want to revive hara-kiri itself, but through the vision, such a very strong vision of hara-kiri, I wanted to inspire and stimulate younger people. And through such a stimulation I wanted to revive some old, traditional sense of order or a sense of very strong responsibility, and a sense of ‘death in order’. That is my purpose.’ This quote, taken from an interview from around 1968, essentially sums up Mishima’s core missive in the bulk of his late works. As his understanding and reverence for the Japanese classical traditions increased during his final years, his fervent nationalism also did. Although Japan did not experience as drastic a cultural transformation as Germany did in the aftermath of WWII, the nation did undergo drastic alterations which morphed it’s social and political landscape. The Marshall Plan and the American-drafted constitution, under which the Japanese were forced to live, basically forbid the nation to have a standing army capable of defending itself. This was Mishima’s primary grievance, though the Japanese were afforded a nominal ‘self-defense force’. He believed that a Japanese military force in the hands of the nation’s reigning, post-war Liberal Democratic Party would be incapable of maintaining the true essence of Japan’s marshal tradition and would be subject to the dictates of western powers.

The superior ideal of the samurai which Mishima came to believe was at the core of Japanese identity along with the hierarchical emperor system was not only being swept aside by the nation’s new constitutional restrictions, but was also being eroded by two distinct forces working in tandem to undermine his people’s shared sense of long-established cohesion – one being commercial consumer capitalism and the other being communism and it’s philosophical progenitor – liberalism.

Mishima said once in an interview, “The economic prosperity gives us(Japanese) some bored feeling already, and it gives us a big, huge spiritual vacuum. An unbearable boredom – particularly among intellectuals. Not only among intellectuals, but also among younger generations. In the present situation we are never satisfied. We are never contented. We cannot believe such economic prosperity and what it means. We had, you know, the long tradition of Samurai. They lived for order and spirit, and they despised and looked down on money.” If there is one thing most will glean from a cursory examination of his life, it is a pronounced sense of overlapping internal contradictions which, on the surface, appear to be irreconcilable with one another. However, upon further delving, one can observe many of these seemingly conflicting characteristics as decidedly coupled with one another. Mishima was a uniquely convoluted character even by the standards of creative geniuses. He was able to strategically exploit, for his artistic purposes, select trappings and affectations of Western influences in order to convey the importance of traditionalism. Despite being deeply entrenched in these traditionalist, anti-materialist notions, he lived in a Western style home, wore Western style clothing, aimed to make use of new mass media platforms in order to increase his popular celebrity and often spoke very highly of Western art and literature movements, particularly Greek/Roman sculpture and German philosophy. He was acutely aware of the contradictory nature of post-war Japan and sought to internalize these conflicts, first in his writing, and eventually in his entire being in an attempt to reconcile them. He was, to use Julius Evola’s term, ‘riding the tiger’ – firmly grabbing modernity by the scruff of it’s neck and attempting to orient it’s chaotic trajectory towards some semblance of order. In the end, as it is with most modern figures who choose this most dangerous path, his endeavor to resuscitate the noble ideals of the past within an increasingly incompatible contemporary framework led to his violent end.

In the 1960s Japan’s political landscape was constantly shuttering with turmoil, starting in 1960 – a year marked by the revisal of a defense treaty with the U.S., and with Otoya Yamaguchi’s(who Mishima has a great admiration for) assassination of the Mao-controlled socialist party leader Inejiro Asanuma. The peak of the unrest took place during the massive youth riots from 1968 to 1970. Student leftists and communist agitators were engaging in regular violent confrontations with police in the nation’s major cities, taking over universities and setting fire to government offices in an effort to demonstrate against the possibility of Japan being dragged into a war with America against the communist forces in Southeast Asia. Mishima – a staunch anti-communist – viewed the upheaval as a grand opportunity to express his advocacy for a return to the emperor system of national leadership, as well as a revitalization of both pre and post Meiji era(1868-1912) ethics. From about 1964 to 1965 he began conjuring up a blueprint for a private army to eventually engage in, what he called, ‘the final action’. Convinced of the possibility that the violent student demonstrations would intensify to the point where the police would not be able to quell the leftist uprising and be forced to call upon the national defense army, he assembled a 100 man fighting force which would hypothetically take to the streets along side the army and defend the emperor to the death. Being one of the most well known and well connected men in Japan at the time, he was able to secretly secure funding for his Tatenokai(translated to ‘Shield Society) from top echelon political officials, and was even granted permission to train his small army on the grounds of official military bases. After his death, when it was revealed that the Japanese government was directly funding this extreme, far right, ultranationalist militia, it scandalized the politicians who gave it approval and financial support.

It was the aim of Mishima after establishing The Tatenokai to die in the street, sword-in-hand, defending the emperor against the vile communist and liberal onslaught. Unfortunately this dream did not become a reality for him. He had hoped that in needing to employ the defense force to stop the radical rioters, that the necessity to scrap Japan’s Western imposed, pacifist constitution would become clear and fully legalize their army for the first time in the post-war era. When the police and government were alone able to subdue the anarchy in the streets, a disappointed Mishima then resolved to act upon a fallback plan which he had already contrived over a half decade before his final day of action in November of 1970 dawned.

There is no better written work from the prior century which so completely and tragically portrays the dissolution of a nation’s fundamental traditions as Mishima’s Sea Of Fertiliy tetralogy. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find more than a few dozen works by any great author in the last 200 years of comparable genius. Published in four volumes between 1965 and 1970, this epic masterwork follows the character Shigekuni Honda from his youth during the end of the Meiji era up to his declining years in the early 1970s, as he searches for the reincarnated spirit of his dead childhood friend Kiyoaki against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming Japan. To go into detail about the work would require the composition of another full article, but it’s core themes of cultural decay, spiritual conflict and yearning, death, the influence of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japanese culture, the decadence of modern life, personal identity being tied to national/ethnic identity, the hollowness of old age, the corrosive power of materialism, the significance of dreams, the purity of youth, self-sacrafice, suicide as honorable ritual and as the solitary destruction of a despised world, right wing terrorism as spiritual expression, insurrection, assassination and more are conveyed here. Mishima knew when he began writing the tetralogy that it would be his final work before death, and a profound sense of doom and tragedy pervades it through and through. Without divulging spoiler details, the final book Decay of The Angel concludes with main character Honda, now a frail and elderly man, facing a gulf of uncertainty regarding whether or not his lifelong search to uncover verification of spiritual substance has instead led him instead to an enormous nihility. On the morning of November 25th 1970, Mishima penned the closing line of his last and greatest work along with the words, “Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.” He would be dead within the next few hours.

“The river of the body naturally flowed into the river of action. It was inevitable. With a woman’s body this would not have happened. A man’s body, with it’s inherent nature and function, forces him toward the river of action – the most dangerous river in the jungle. Alligators and piranhas abound in it’s waters. Poisoned arrows dart from enemy camps. This river confronts the river of writing. I’ve often heard the glib motto, “The pen and the sword join in a single path.” But in truth they can only join at the moment of death. The river of action gives me the tears, the blood, the sweat that I never begin to find in the river of writing. In this new river I have encounters of soul with soul without having to bother about words. This is also the most destructive of all rivers, and I can well understand why few people approach it. This river has no generosity for the farmer; it brings no wealth nor peace, it gives no rest. Only let me say this: I, born a man and alive as a man, cannot overcome the temptation to follow the course of this river.” This passage, taken from a catalogue for an retrospective exhibition of Mishima’s life and work very shortly before his death, is just one instance of foreshadowing what would happen on his final day. Ritual suicide became a fixation in his writing and other creative expressions in his final years. He even went to far as to direct and star in a short film based on his story Patriotism, in which the character he portrays graphically and violently commits seppuku. Possessing a morbid and romantic obsession with death since his youth, which became increasingly tethered to his notions regarding what was truly at the core of what it meant to be Japanese, he was determined to make his final living act a bloody work of political art. Having been deprived of his desired opportunity to die gloriously on the battlefront of the streets defending his emperor against the radical uprisings between 1968 and 1970, Mishima sought to create his own battlefront in the form of a dramatic coup d’état.

On the morning of November 25, 1970 Mishima gathered four members of his private army and drove to the Tokyo headquarters of the national defense force to meet with the base’s commandant. After a few minutes of conversation he and his men tied up the commandant and barricaded the doors to his office. When army personnel were alerted to what was unfolding they attempted to break into the office, but were warded off by a sword-wielding Mishima who took a few swings at those trying to disrupt the situation, and warned them that the commandant would be killed if any further intrusion into the office were to happen. Through the office windows Mishima shouted his demands to the shocked army officials. He demanded that all soldiers present on the base be summoned to the courtyard outside the headquarters building and that he was not to be interrupted while delivering a prepared speech to them. The negotiators, not willing to forcibly intervene and risk death or injury to their commandant, announced through the base’s loudspeaker system that all personnel were to assemble outside of headquarters at once. When the present troops had amassed outside of the building minutes later, Mishima walked out onto the office balcony, leapt up on it’s stone parapet and, now wearing a traditional hachimaki headband delivered, spoke the following words to the soldiers below:

“We of the Shield Society were raised by the Self Defense Forces, and it could be said that the SDF is our father and older brother. So why have we repaid that debt with this act of ingratitude?

Looking back, during the four years – three years for my students – we spent as a reservists within the Forces, we received an education that contained not a hint of mercenary self-interest, and we in turn loved the SDF. Here we saw the dream of a “true Japan” that no longer exists outside the Forces, and here we finally knew the tears of true men, unknown since the end of the war. The sweat we shed here was pure, as we ran about the plains of Mount Fuji with comrades who shared our patriotic spirit. On this point there can be no doubt. To us, the SDF is our homeland, and the only place in today’s listless Japan where we could breathe a rigorous, bracing atmosphere. We received incalculable love from the instructors and assistant teachers. Why, then, have we come to take this action? Although it might sound implausible, I declare that we have done it precisely because we love the SDF.

We have watched as postwar Japan has become infatuated with economic prosperity and forgotten the foundational principles of the nation. Citizens have lost their solidarity, rush ahead without correcting fundamental problems, have fallen into stopgap measures and hypocrisy, and have cast their own souls into a state of emptiness. Politics is just a facade over a mass of contradictions, self-preservation, lust for power and hypocrisy. Any long-term plans for the nation a hundred years from now have been consigned to foreign countries. We have watched with gritted teeth as the the shame of defeat has been ducked and avoided rather than wiped away, and as Japanese themselves sully their own history and traditions.

Even now we dream of the SDF as the only place where the true Japan, true Japanese, and the true soul of the warrior remains. Furthermore, it is clear that legally the SDF is unconstitutional. The fundamental issue of the nation’s defense has been weaseled around with an opportunistic legal interpretation, and we have seen how having a military that does not use the name “military” has become the source of corruption of Japanese souls and the degeneration of morality. The military, which should hold the loftiest honor, has been subject to the basest of deceits. The SDF continues to bear the dishonorable cross of a defeated nation. The SDF is not a national military, has not been accorded the foundational principles of a military, has only been given the status of a physically large police force, and even the target of its loyalty has not been made clear. Postwar Japan’s long slumber enrages us. We believe that the moment the SDF awakens will be the same moment Japan awakens. And we believe that if the SDF does not awaken itself, Japan will also fail to awaken. And we believe that our greatest duty as citizens is to exert all our effort, however feeble, to work towards the day when, through constitutional reform, the SDF can be made into a true national military and stand upon a military’s foundational principle.

Four years ago I entered the SDF alone with this ambition, the next year I formed the Shield Society. The fundamental principle of the Shield Society is the resolve to sacrifice our lives so that the SDF might awaken, to make it into a national military, a national military with honor. Since constitutional reform was already difficult under the parliamentary system, a domestic security operation* offered our only chance. So we aimed to cast aside our lives as the vanguard of a domestic security operation and become the keystone of the national military. A military protects its nation, a government is defended by the police. When we arrive at the stage where the government can no longer be effectively defended by the police, a deployment of the military will make it clear just what the nation is, and the military will revive its foundational principle. The foundational principle of a Japanese military can only be “protecting Japanese history, culture and tradition centered on the emperor.” In order to correct the twisted foundation of this nation, we, though few in number, trained ourselves and volunteered ourselves to this task.

But what happened on October 21st of Showa 44? The demonstrations that reached their peak prior to the prime minister’s visit to America ended fruitlessly under overwhelming police power. Watching the situation in Shinjuku, I came to the bitter realization that with this the constitution would not change. What happened that day? The government ascertained the limits of the far-left’s power, they ascertained the response of a populace faced with police power that amounts to martial law, and gained the confidence that they could control the situation without taking up the burden of constitutional reform. A domestic security operation became pointless. The government gained the confidence that it could maintain the political system through constitutional police power alone, and the confidence they could continue ignoring the fundamental problems of the nation. With this, left-wing power has continued to suck at the pacifier of constitutional preservation, hardening their strategy of abandoning their principles for practical gain, and have gained the advantages that come with positing themselves as champions of constitutional preservation. Abandoning their principles for practical gain! That’s fine for the politicians. But those politicians cannot have failed to notice it is a fatal blow to the SDF. And so the hypocrisy, cover-ups, flattery and deceit began again even worse than before.

Take heed! The truth is that October 21st of Showa 44 was a day of tragedy for the SDF. For the SDF, which has been waiting for constitutional reform for the 20 years since it’s founding, that was the day that its hopes were decisively betrayed, and constitutional reform was removed as a political program. At the same time, it was the day that the Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party, which insist on party parliamentarism, expunged the possibility of extra-parliamentary means. Logically, that was the day that the SDF, the bastard child of the constitution, was recognized as a “military of constitutional preservation.” Could there be any greater paradox?

Ever since that day, we have been watching the SDF carefully, moment by moment. If, as we had dreamed, the soul of the warrior still remained in the SDF, how could it ignore this situation? Protecting the very thing that negated it, surely that is a logical contradiction. If you are men, how could a man’s pride allow this? Even after enduring and enduring, rising up with firm resolution once the last line of what you are supposed to protect has been crossed is what it means to be a man, what it means to be a warrior. We desperately strained our ears. But from nowhere in the SDF did we hear a man’s voice rise in response to the humiliating order to “protect that which negates you.” Now that it has come to this, with the awareness of your own power, you knew that the only path forward was the correction of the twisted logic of the nation, but the SDF has been as silent as a canary with its voice stolen.

We were sad, angry, and finally enraged. Gentlemen, can you do nothing without being given a mission? But, sadly, the mission accorded to you will ultimately not come from Japan. It is said that civilian control is the basic principle of a democratic military. However, in England and America civilian control means financial control over military administration. Unlike Japan, it does not mean that the military is castrated without even the right to make personnel decisions, manipulated by treacherous politicians, or used as a pawn in partisan politics.

Furthermore, it seems the SDF has swallowed the flattery of politicians and is walking the path of even deeper self-deceit and self-desecration. Where has the soul of the warrior gone? How will you go on, as nothing but a giant armory whose soul is dead? During textile negotiations, textile workers called the LDP traitors. Yet although it is clear that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which concerns the long-term security of the nation, is the rebirth of the 5:5:3 Unequal Treaty,*** not one general from the SDF has cut his stomach in protest.

What does the return of Okinawa mean? What does the defense of the mainland mean? It is clear that America doesn’t want Japanese territory being defended by a true autonomous Japanese military. If we can’t revive our autonomy within the next two years, the SDF will end forever as, in the left-wing’s words, mercenaries for America.
We waited four years. The last year we waited with particular passion. We can wait no longer. We cannot wait for those who would desecrate themselves. But another thirty minutes; let us wait the final thirty minutes. We rose up together and together we will die for righteousness. To return Japan to Japan’s true form, that is why we die. Is it enough to insist on the sanctity of life, even when the soul is dead? What sort of military holds nothing above the value of life? Gentlemen, we are now going to show you a value even greater than the sanctity of life. That is not freedom, nor democracy. It is Japan. The country of history and tradition that we love, Japan. Is there no one here who will throw their bodies against this degenerate constitution and die? If there is, stand with us and die with us now. We have undertaken this action in the fervent hope that you, gentlemen, who have the purest of souls, may be reborn as individual men and as warriors.”

He had meant the speech to be thirty minutes long, but as boos, jeers and insults resounded from the crown of soldiers below and a helicopter loudly flew above the headquarters building, he decided to cut it short at around the fifteen minute mark. Having had his expressed sentiments utterly rejected and mocked by the crowd, he saluted his emperor three times and entered the office, uttering to his fellow militia men, “I don’t think they even heard me.” He then dropped to his knees, drew a short katana blade and ritually disemboweled himself in the traditional style of samurai suicide.

The shock to the nation in the aftermath of Mishima’s suicide protest was tremendous, however the general consensus was quite negative. Mishima was the nation’s most popular modern author one of their most notable and famous cultural exports to the outside world. Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature he was thought of as one of Japan’s most coveted artistic treasures, but to many his highly political seppuku was a disgrace. Since the end of the war many Japanese had no interest in harking back to the collectively shared militaristic code of samurai bushido which Mishima viewed as the most important component in the distinct identity of his nation. Those at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, however, had a different and surprisingly similar respect for what Mishima had done, which still is held in high regard in some extreme rightist circles in contemporary Japan. Surprisingly a number of the left-wing student organizers who participated in the late 1960s protests and takeovers of Japan’s universities would later admit their awe and admiration for his final act. Many of them rightly viewed the length Mishima had gone to in expressing his political and spiritual grievances as farther than anyone on their side had gone in doing so. None on the left in the student movement had willingly sacrificed themselves in order to impress their message, and in bearing witness to such a mighty and painful act of self-sacrifice it, both consciously and subconsciously, provoked the thought in the minds of many leftists that the ideas which brought Mishima to his brutal protest had more potency and possibly more truth than the ones driving their efforts.

Mishima stood for many things throughout his extremely prolific creative career, but the overwhelming possession of his being by the ancestral spirit of his people was at the core the lesson he attempted to impart with his late work, and most certainly with his final act. He believed that the true soul of his people was contained in the time-honored, militaristic traditions which were being torn asunder by the modern political policy, which sought to conform Japan to the rest of an increasingly globalized world. His suicide was not only a political demonstration against the engulfing, worldwide trend towards abject materialism, but a dispatch aimed at inspiring young people to not give up on who they are as descendants of a proud people who must never abandon a sense of reverence and appreciation for their enduring traditions, lest they forever lose their unique existence as a race.