The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (40 page)

I was grateful for this extravagant arrangement, which meant that I would have the opportunity to prepare my questions in advance, and would also be able to talk to Mishima without fear of interruption. I had seen two sides of the Tatenokai. In the evening, two days before, I had been exposed to all manner of wild ideological talk, centering on the Emperor and suggesting that the Tatenokai was an alarming organization, right-wing and nationalistic. The following day, when we had exercised in the snow, I had seen a completely different side of the organization. Essentially, the students were untrained, and unlikely to be effective as a force. My question, at the start of the proceedings, and before I had set foot in Camp Fuji, had been whether the Tatenokai was a right-wing group or simply a plaything; I had been inclined toward the former. Seeing the men in the field, however, had made me doubt my conclusion. My questions to Mishima must revolve around the problem—the nature of the Tatenokai: Fascist club or writer's toy? (Not that I thought the problem was to be easily resolved by questions, one way or the other. Nor did I think it was a matter of fundamental importance to Mishima himself, whose chief activity was writing.)

Just after midday Mishima arrived at the inn by car, and I piled into the back seat beside him. It was an expensive way of
returning to Tokyo. We could have taken a train, which would also have been quicker—but that method of traveling evidently did not suit him that day. He was simply sui generis. For the occasion, he had dressed in the manner of one returning to the capital after a weekend in the country with friends: a beautiful tweed suit cut from English cloth, matching tie, and imported brown walking shoes. But to which capital did he think he was returning? What country were we in? Could there have been any other intellectual in Japan who would have gone to the trouble of so fitting himself out? Leaving aside the Tatenokai exercise, it was a culminating touch which only Mishima could have devised. His heavy baggage must have been left at the camp, for he had nothing but a small case with him; I had seen into the trunk of the car. Here was effortless superiority à la Mishima. What on earth was the point of questioning a man for whom style was obviously so much more important than anything else?

The interest of our drive back to Tokyo was the scenery. From the hills around Hakone we had our best view of Mt. Fuji; we had really been too close to the mountain at Gotemba to get the proportions right. As the Toyota taxi began to drop down toward Odawara, however, we were both in more of a mood to talk. And so I asked Mishima why he had created the Tatenokai. The Tatenokai, he replied, as our car began to run into heavy traffic above Odawara, was “the first example of a National Guard”; he was reaching for a phrase to express the essence of the organization—it was a show. He wanted to “inspire people with a sense of national pride,” he said, as if imagining the sound of brass bands and cheering multitudes of onlookers. When talking to me, I realized, Mishima was inclined to stress that aspect of the Tatenokai which was personal to him, non-ideological and romantic, no more. I tried to press him on the right-wing nature of the organization, by asking him to confirm that it had unique training privileges with the Jieitai. Yes, this was true; the Tatenokai alone could exercise with guns. Tens of thousands of civilians passed through Jieitai camps, but they mostly stayed only a few days, under a holiday program designed for Jieitai public relations. They were not allowed to touch rifles. How had the exceptional arrangements been made for the Tatenokai, I asked. It had been very difficult, Mishima replied.
He had had to see a great number of people in the Jieitai, senior generals, but in the end it had been arranged with the help of the civilian head of the Defense Agency, Kaneshichi Masuda—and, I suspected, the Prime Minister.

And what did the Tatenokai amount to, in practical terms? I put the question while we were stuck in slow-moving traffic. Mishima was trying to bully the driver into taking a short cut, and the man firmly replied that the expressway which Mishima wanted to take had not yet been opened to the public. Mishima fell back into his seat, shrugging his shoulders. Well, he wanted to increase the Tatenokai to a hundred members in all; and then each of his men might take charge of twenty, making a force large enough to take effective action. To stage a coup? I might have asked. But I did not put the question. I did not believe in such dreams. Talking to Mishima about the Tatenokai, one felt the conversation bordering on his dreams, and I again sensed that with me he would prefer to stress the personal aspect of the organization, not the ideological. It was hard to pin down a suitable question for Mishima. I adopted a different approach, and asked Mishima when he had decided to create the Tatenokai. It was after completing his book
Eirei no Koe
(“The Voices of the Heroic Dead”), he replied, “three or four years ago” (in June 1966). I had not read the work. As we passed on down the increasingly steep road, swinging around hairpin curves and under the boughs of great trees, Mishima began to talk instead of Goethe and his essay on suicide: “If literature is not a responsible activity, then action is the only course,” he paraphrased.

As we left Odawara and reached the coastal expressway beyond, the car passed the first of the succession of big industrial plants which we would see on our return to the capital, still an hour away at least. There was no beach below us, only a dreary series of massive reinforced-concrete tetrapods, intended to break the force of the sea as it hit the mighty wall below us. “I believe in culture as form and not as spirit,” said Mishima, referring to the theme of a drama on which he was then working, the story of the leprous Khmer monarch Jayavarman III and his building of one of the temples of Angkor Wat, Bayon. He seemed very tired as he talked. “I want to keep the Japanese spirit alive,” he added, as if
unaware that he was contradicting himself. His voice drifted on. The Emperor, he said, was “the supreme cultural form”; his “physical body” was
the
form of culture. In the unique Japanese Imperial institution, with its long tradition of poetry, he found the ultimate value. And he added: “I do not believe in the non-material, only in the actual.” A few minutes later, he cradled his head in his left arm, leaning back in his seat, and fell fast asleep. The car sped swiftly on toward Tokyo, which we would reach in another half hour. I felt that I was worlds away from understanding this extraordinary person; and I, too, tried to sleep. From time to time I caught sight of buildings, new factories, other expressways. As we passed Chigasaki, there was an occasional pine tree to be seen by the road, still standing on what had once been the historic Old Tōkaidō Road to Osaka, three hundred miles to the west. That was all that was left of old Japan, perhaps—a few pine trees.

P
ART
T
HREE
S
AUNA
B
ATHS AND
S
ECRECY

A man of action is destined to endure a long period of strain and concentration until the last moment when he completes his life by his final action: death—either by natural causes or by hara-kiri.

Yukio Mishima
Essay on Hagakure, 1967

A month after his return from training with the Tatenokai at Camp Fuji, Mishima was invited to take part in an open debate with ultra-left-wing students at his old university, Tōdai. Mishima went to the hall where the debate was held—in the Komaba grounds of Tōdai—wearing a black shirt with a string front; outside the hall he found a large cartoon on a billboard depicting him as a gorilla. Both he and his student hosts were in an aggressive mood and the two and a half hour debate between them was a success, as entertainment. The Tōdai students, prompted by Mishima, showed a remarkable interest in the subject of the Emperor:

STUDENT
: Mishima writes a great deal about the Emperor. The reason for this is that the Emperor does not exist. His non-existence constitutes absolute beauty for Mishima. Why, then, does he play the fool all the time? He should stick to aesthetics. Instead, he starts fooling around and the beauty which the Emperor embodies is thus destroyed.

MISHIMA
: I am touched by your patriotic remarks. You want to keep your beautiful image of the Emperor and for that purpose wish me to remain in my study . . . 
(Laughter)

ANOTHER STUDENT
: I want to ask you about the Emperor. If he happens to fall in love with a woman other than the Empress, what should he do? He must be restricted in so many ways. One must feel sympathy for him.

MISHIMA
: But I really think the Emperor had better keep mistresses . . . 
(Laughter)

(Taken from a verbatim record published by Shinchōsha in 1969)

Mishima had a moment of paranoia when he approached the hall at Komaba, fearing that the students would seize and murder him on the spot. Afterward he remarked: “I was as nervous as if I was going into a lions' den, but I enjoyed it very much after all. I found we have much in common—a rigorous ideology and a taste for physical violence, for example. Both they and I represent new species in Japan today. I felt friendship for them. We are friends between whom there is a barbed-wire fence. We smile at one another but we can't kiss.” He also commented: “What the Zengakuren students and I stand for is almost identical. We have the same cards on the table, but I have a joker—the Emperor.”

I had numerous discussions with Mishima about events in Japan at this time, and in midsummer I asked him if he would write a short article for me, summing up his thoughts. I proposed to send this to
The Times
in London. In the middle of August he told me that the piece was ready and invited me down to Shimoda, where he was staying with his family for the summer holidays. I was there for a couple of days, swimming with the Mishimas on the beach, and returned to Tokyo with his contribution for
The Times
.

The article, which was published on September 24, 1969, was a crystallization of our conversations and one of the clearest summaries Mishima ever made of his “political” views:

Not long ago, in early August, a young Japanese tried to attack the American Secretary of State, Mr. William Rogers, with a knife, at Tokyo airport. The reaction of the Japanese press was to heap abuse on this individual and totally to condemn his action.

The man explained that he had intended to injure an American representative by way of retaliation; Japanese who took part in the anti-American [military] base campaign on Okinawa had been wounded by American bayonets, he claimed. He had held no personal grudge against Rogers, he said. Nor had he belonged to any right-wing organization.

I do not myself support terrorism; nor do I support the spirit of this young man's action. However, the fact that every Japanese newspaper heaped abuse on him, all displaying the same hysterical reaction, interests me a great deal. Whatever the political persuasion of the paper—left, neutral, right-wing—the reaction was the same. Such hysteria is displayed only by people who have something to hide. Just what is the Japanese press trying to hide under all this anger and abuse?

Let us look back a little. For the past one hundred years the Japanese have been making enormous efforts to make their country a paradigm of Western civilization. This unnatural posture has betrayed itself many times; the cloven hoof has been all too visible! After the Second World War, people thought that Japan's biggest defect had been exposed. Thereafter, Japan came to rank among the leading industrial nations and need no longer fear self-betrayal. All that is felt to be necessary is for our diplomats to advertise Japanese culture as peace-loving—symbolized by the tea ceremony and by ikebana, flower arrangement.

In 1960 when Inejirō Asanuma, chairman of the Socialist Party, was assassinated in Tokyo, I was in Paris. Asanuma was stabbed to death by a seventeen-year-old right-winger, Otoya Yamaguchi; the boy killed himself almost immediately afterward
in jail. At that time the Moulin Rouge in Paris was showing a Revue japonaise which included a sword-fight scene. The Japanese Embassy in Paris hurriedly proposed to the Moulin Rouge that the scene should be cut from the revue, in order that “misunderstanding” be avoided. Fear of misunderstanding is sometimes fear of disclosure.

I always recall the Shinpuren Incident of 1877—that incident which retains today among Japanese intellectuals the reputation of having displayed Japanese fanaticism and irrationality; a shaming thing, indeed, which should not be known to foreigners. The incident occurred during a revolt led by about one hundred stubborn, conservative, chauvinistic former samurai. They hated all things Western, and regarded the new Meiji government with hostility as an example of the Westernization of Japan. They even held white fans over their heads when they had to pass beneath electric lines, saying that the magic of the West was soiling them.

These samurai resisted all forms of Westernization. When the new government enacted a law abolishing swords, collecting up these very symbols of samurai spirit, one hundred rebels attacked a Westernized Japanese army barracks with nothing but their swords and spears. Many were shot down by rifles—imported from the West; and all the survivors committed hara-kiri.

Arnold Toynbee wrote in
A Study of History
that nineteenth-century Asia had only these alternatives: to accept the West and to survive after complete surrender to Westernization; or to resist and perish. This theory is correct, without exception.

Japan, in fact, built a modern and united nation by accepting Westernization and modernization. During this process the most striking pure act of resistance was that of the Shinpuren revolt. Other resistance movements were more political, lacking the ideological purity and cultural element of Shinpuren.

Thus Japanese ability to modernize and to innovate, sometimes in an almost cunning way, came to be highly praised—while other Asian peoples could be looked down on
for their laziness. Yet people in the West understood little of the sacrifices that the Japanese were obliged to make.