The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (38 page)

Morita chatted about himself, giving a long explanation of his reasons for having joined the Tatenokai, in reply to my question. Too few people in Japan cared about the national interest, he said. At Waseda he had been shocked to find how active the Zengakuren students were, and how destructive their demonstrations at the university. He had also felt it wrong that they should be taken by the general public in Japan to be representative of students as a whole at Waseda. He had joined anti-Zengakuren student groups
at the university, and had become the leader of one of these small organizations, the “Counter-Protecting Club,” as Mishima translated its name from the Japanese. This move had not given him satisfaction, as such student groups actually did very little; and he had read the works of Japanese nationalist writers to enhance his understanding of the situation. Once again his efforts had been frustrated, however. He had not been able to develop himself as a man, and he had turned, eventually, to the Tatenokai to study military techniques. He concluded by saying, via Mishima, who used the third person in translating: “In his way he wants to follow Mishima . . . Mishima is related to the Emperor.”

I asked Morita what he meant by these words, and in particular what was the meaning of the expression “related to the Emperor.” In what way was his leader linked with the Emperor, in his view? Morita appeared troubled and confused when Mishima translated my questions back to him. He looked about him as if at a loss for a reply, and for a while it seemed that he was going to say nothing. When his answer came, it may have been meaningless; the phrases which Mishima translated were, in any case, disconnected. Morita talked of “Japanese culture” and “his own emotions”; it was through these that he could grasp “the relation between the Emperor and Mishima's mentality.” Books had been of no assistance in this process; he had “never tried to catch through book reading” what he understood by feeling. As for Mishima, Morita praised him because “he keeps a sense of tradition,” “not through politics” but by his own “personal approach.”

Hard as it was to understand Morita, I thought I could grasp his two main points. The first was the importance of the concept of the Emperor to the Tatenokai; the second, his strong personal feeling toward Mishima. It was the first point which interested me. If Emperor-worship was central to the Tatenokai, then the organization
had
to be taken seriously, and was not a toy of Mishima's. (As a matter of course, those who exalt the Emperor in postwar Japan are assumed by most Japanese to be heirs to the tradition of the militarists of the 1930's.)

My feeling was that if the Emperor was the central value of the Tatenokai, as Mishima's choice of the name of the organization had suggested in the first place, and as Morita was asserting, then
the organization
was
a dangerous one. Emperor-worship had once before in this century led Japan along the path of war, and it was hardly desirable that militarism should be revived. Worship of the Emperor had supplied both a motive and a justification for the most grave actions: the annexation of Korea in 1910; the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the creation of the independent republic of Manchukuo; the invasion of northern China in 1937; and finally the attacks against the Allies in December 1941, which had precipitated the Pacific War. Behind these acts of aggression had lain a form of Emperor-worship which had poisoned men's minds. If the Tatenokai was imbued with the wartime spirit, then my suspicions had been amply confirmed. And yet I felt that it could not be as simple as that, not in 1969, and with Mishima involved.

Morita's second point had been his strong feeling for Mishima as an individual. I could not easily understand at the time, however, what he was saying, or, beyond that, what could be Mishima's role as leader of the Tatenokai. It was natural that much younger men should look up to Mishima. He was twenty years older than the oldest of the Tatenokai students; he had been educated before and during the war; and he shared their presumably nationalistic views, unlike most of his contemporaries. It was not surprising that they should admire one of the best-known men in Japan. What was puzzling was the relation which Morita had insisted on, between the Emperor and Yukio Mishima. The student leader was a prosaic-seeming person in his way, and Mishima a careful translator; there could be no doubt that Morita had twice spoken of such a relation. Mishima was the only person, I reasoned, who could have put such an idea into the heads of the Tatenokai members;
he
must have told the students this, persuading them that in some mysterious way he was connected with the Emperor. The question was
how
one of Mishima's great intelligence had put this point to the students. However he had done it, I had the feeling that it was in this manner that he had secured the affections of such a stolid student as Morita, and those of other members of the Tatenokai, who had been willing to follow Mishima to Camp Fuji.

After the talk with Morita and a few others, Mishima suggested that we pay a visit to the second group of Tatenokai members, those who had come to Camp Fuji for an entire month, and were
comparative newcomers to the group. Mishima took me along to them then. We found the students in a long room similar to the one we had just left; there was the same high ceiling, rows of bunks, and young Japanese in denims sitting on the beds talking to one another. I decided not to ask questions this time, and Mishima started to tell me about some of the students in the room with us. They were, I noticed, paying attention to our conversation, and listening to what Mishima said; unusual for Japanese students, some of them could follow English. One student, said Mishima, had waited for two nights outside the Imperial Palace to be the first of 200,000 to sign the Emperor's book at the New Year. The students around us listened carefully, and I felt that they were a much more lively and intelligent group than those with whom we had just been talking. One of them asked me: “Do you think that war must come every twenty years? Quite recently more and more students have wanted to fight, just look at the streets of Tokyo . . . What do you think about it?” Giving a brief answer, I asked the student his opinion of the Zengakuren, hoping to provoke my questioner.

“They are very childish,” one of the students said in a loud voice. There was a little burst of applause. “We have guns,” said another, “and all they have are
gewabo
”; he referred to the Gewalt sticks carried by the left-wing students during their street battles with the police. Mishima at once qualified what he had said, adding that, although the Tatenokai might carry rifles in the camp, they were not permitted to fire them, under Jieitai regulations. The students were chattering loudly, and the room became distinctly noisy; some unfriendly faces looked down on me from the bunks, and other students laughed and joked as they looked across at us, sitting at a table. Mishima introduced me to the student who had waited outside the Imperial Palace for two nights, Tanaka from Asia University. “Why did you wait for two days and nights outside the palace?” I asked him. Mishima almost had to shout so I would hear the reply: “Because he respects and loves the Emperor from his heart.” Others were shouting, too. “Don't compare us to the Sampa,” said a tall student in English—Fukuda from Waseda University—referring to the most militant of the Zengakuren factions, the Sampa Zengakuren. My answer should have been that Mishima
himself had made such a comparison when talking about the spirit of the Tatenokai; but for a moment I was lost for a reply. “What do
you
think of the Tatenokai?” the tall student shouted. “Are you terrified of us?” “Yes, I am scared to death,” I replied, wondering if I did not mean what I said. There was something odd about this tense questioning, an atmosphere of sexual excitement amid all the shouting.

I had been in Japan for almost five years, but I had not encountered a reception like this before. It was usually hard to get much of a response from a group of Japanese at a first meeting; the first Tatenokai contingent had been typical in this respect: slow and stodgy and hard. The second group could not have been more different. “Are you a
gaijin
spy?” shouted one, using the word for “foreigner,”
gaijin
, which has either a familiar or a pejorative meaning, when used by an adult. There was more laughter and chattering among the Tatenokai students, and also one or two distinctly sour faces. “
Gaijin
spy!
Gaijin
spy!” Some were treating it as a joke, and others definitely not.

It was a hard experience to analyze, but at the back of my mind there lay the question: What was the meaning of the Emperor to this second group of Tatenokai? It was as if Mishima read my thoughts. Sitting close to me at the table, he said: “In the Tatenokai, A relates to B, and B relates to me, and I to the Emperor.” It was precisely what he must have told the Tatenokai members. And he added: “The whole thing is built on personal relationships.” I did not have the wit at that moment to ask Mishima how his personal relationship with the Emperor had been established. I felt fuddled and ill at ease. “You all scare me to death,” I tried to joke once more, and I half meant it. “That boy,” said Mishima, pointing to a student, “has been arrested eight times by the police for attacking Sampa barricades.”

Before I left the barracks that night, I talked to Mishima about the organization of the Tatenokai. He told me then that the finances were entirely borne by him. The students bought their train tickets and paid for travel; and the Jieitai gave them free accommodations at the barracks, and also paid for such items as petrol for the armored personnel carriers which they used at Camp Fuji. Apart from this, the entire burden fell on Mishima. For this reason, he
said, the organization would have to remain small; the membership would go no higher than a hundred. He also told me about the recruiting of the Tatenokai. Almost all the members were students, as students, unlike working men, had time to train with the Jieitai for a month at a time. The first-year members were found through advertisements in the
Ronsō Journal
and through Mochimaru, the student leader of the Tatenokai. The requirements were stiff, he stated; only five out of 150 applicants were admitted the first year. The second-year members were brought in through personal introduction, though Mishima had also put a notice on the board at Waseda University. That was after the Tatenokai became publicly known, in the autumn of 1968, when it was formally inaugurated and the first report about it appeared in a Tokyo magazine.

Shortly after eight I left the barracks, driven by jeep to the Fujimotoya, which turned out to be very near the gates of the camp. In two minutes I was back in what I thought of as the real world. After being greeted by an elderly maid in the hall, I took my shoes off and was led along the ice-cold corridors which one expects in a Japanese
ryokan
(inn) in winter to my room. There I quickly changed into a
yukata
gown, with the maid assisting me, folding up my ski clothes. With an effort I managed to conceal the fat
haragake
about my waist; I was not anxious to be the laughingstock of the village, the funny foreigner with the
haragake
. Was the Fujimotoya busy at this time of year, I asked. “
Botsu botsu
,” replied the old woman—“Not very”—and hurried me down the icy corridors once more to the bath. I slipped off my
yukata
, all set for a long soak, and taking note of the inscription in English that read:
DO NOT SOAP IN THE BATH
. I was surrounded in that inn by the tiny problems raised by the foreigner in Japan: normal problems, real people. When I returned to my room, I found that the mattress on the tatami floor had been made up with a small brown blanket obstinately tucked between the sheets, Japanese-style; I removed the blanket, and got into bed. Thank goodness I was not on Mt. Fuji at that hour.

When I arrived back at the camp the next morning just before seven, I found that a full-day exercise had been planned. It had been decided that Mishima and I would play the parts of local
collaborators, or spies. We would lead a column of Tatenokai guerrillas through enemy territory, and finally make an attack on an enemy camp. I summoned up memories of military training at an English public school fifteen years before; essentially, this was to be an exercise in map reading, moving across ground, and attack. I would observe from the perspective of my training in the Winchester College Cadet Corps. Images of flank attacks and smoke-bomb charges flitted through my mind, and a recollection of my last field exercise, at the age of eighteen, lying in a wood in East Anglia, being tormented by flies.

The weather was extraordinary. Instead of the murky skies of the day before, they were a brilliant blue, not a trace of a cloud anywhere. The air was dry and cold, and the snow sparkled everywhere. Above the camp there was a great sheet of snow stretching up to the forests a mile or two away; and beyond the trees was Mt. Fuji, looking very high, inaccessible, and sacred; it formed a pointed white triangle against the blue. This was as close as I had ever been to the mountain, a more or less extinct volcano which had not erupted since the eighteenth century. Could anything be more magnificent? What I longed to do was climb Mt. Fuji on skis, wearing a fine pair of sealskins, and then ski slowly down in what would surely be superb powder, but it might be lost in a day. There was no prospect of any such thing, and I was afraid we would get no farther up the mountain that day than the tree line, which at six thousand feet was halfway up Mt. Fuji. On skis it could easily have been done, but without them the going would be slow.

I had found Mishima in his little room at the barracks, and after coffee and a chat about the novel
Spring Snow
, which had just been published, he led me outside, where we waited for a jeep to pick us up. Mishima had dressed for the role of spy with a good deal more care than I had anticipated. He wore a pair of blue jeans with a fashionable fade, and gaiters to keep the snow out of his plain army boots. He had also put on a black leather jacket, a double-breasted, belted garment of the kind he had once worn to play the lead in a gangster film,
Karakkaze Yarō
. His chief ornament on this occasion, however, was a big khaki-brown hat. It was round, the shape of the head, and lined with white fur. Two heavy flaps of white fur hung down over the ears, and he was
letting these fly in the air as he exercised in the brilliant morning sun to keep warm. The flaps jumped and swung as he leaped into the front seat of the jeep, telling me to get into the back with a sergeant. We left the compound and went east, traveling along a narrow road that had been cleared of snow, with Mt. Fuji on our left.