The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (36 page)

From the beginning, this little organization, which was to become the Tatenokai, was a personal vehicle for Mishima. In the early spring of 1968, Mishima, who was organizing his first party to train at Camp Fuji with the Jieitai, appealed to the Waseda students to send a dozen of their number as members of his party. A number of his own men had dropped out—youths who had enjoyed associating with a famous man but whose desire to participate in any form of action was minimal; some had been put off by the requirement that they cut their hair. The Waseda students were reluctant to follow Mishima and only at the last moment did half a dozen students join him in the party which trained at Camp Fuji in March 1968. Morita, who had broken his leg a month before in an accident, joined the group last of all. Mishima took an immediate liking to him and singled him out for praise in front of the others, commending him for his willingness to train despite the fact that his leg was in a cast. In a letter written to a friend from Camp Fuji, Morita referred to Mishima by the honorific term
sensei
(“teacher”), a clear sign that he acknowledged him as leader. The two men became friends.

Morita is the key to subsequent events. He was born the youngest child in the family of a poor secondary-school headmaster two weeks before the end of the war. His first name, Masakatsu, which is “Victory by All Means” in a literal rendering of the characters, reflected his father's patriotic belief that Japan would win the war. The boy was orphaned at the age of two. He was looked after by his older brother, Osamu, and sent to a Catholic missionary school at Yokkaichi, where he proved himself to be a leader. He was made head of his class in the senior school, although his academic work was no better than average. Morita preferred judo, a Japanese sport, to baseball, a popular game in Japan; and his ambition was to become a conservative politician, an extraordinary
aim in one so young. Most young Japanese of his age were radical or non-pori, unpolitical, in their attitudes. Morita, advised by a younger brother of Ichirō Kōnō, the leading independent conservative politician of the day, to attend the university before taking part in politics, entered Waseda at his third attempt, in the spring of 1966, at a time when left-wing students had overrun the university. Waseda, the place of Morita's dreams, was the center of ultra-left student activity in the nation. He reacted against the Zengakuren by joining a new, right-wing student club in the university, the Nichigakudō (Japan Students Movement), a tiny organization.

Morita and Mishima came together, originally, because their political views were similar. Both were among the few Japanese who held that the Zengakuren must be opposed by force. Both wanted to lead groups to do battle with the left-wing students; both were zealous imperialists and wrote pamphlets—independently—calling for Japan to have the H-bomb. People of such character were bound to drift into association with one another, as they were so few; and Mishima and Morita, realizing how much they had in common, cooperated with each other after the spring of 1968. Mishima attended rightist student meetings at which Morita took the chair; and Morita ensured that the Waseda students stayed with Mishima. Kuramochi, the
Ronsō Journal
man, was the official student leader of the Tatenokai at its establishment on October 5, 1968, when its principles were laid down:

  (i)  Communism is incompatible with Japanese tradition, culture, and history and runs counter to the Emperor system.

 (ii)  The Emperor is the sole symbol of our historical and cultural community and racial identity.

(iii)  The use of violence is justifiable in view of the threat posed by Communism.

Morita gradually emerged as the effective student leader of the Tatenokai under Mishima. He had unshakable determination, and his slow, steady character appealed to the other students. He was not disturbed by Mishima's flashiness—many of the best recruits
left the organization in the summer of 1968 when Mishima showed them the new Tatenokai uniform. He was also untroubled by the infighting that went on between Tatenokai members under Mishima. His stolid temperament and his position as a favorite of Mishima's kept him from becoming embroiled in the bitter disputes between rival factions.

Mishima organized the Tatenokai into eight independent sections, whose leaders were responsible to him alone. Each section had roughly ten members—making a total membership of about eighty. Almost all the recruits were students at universities in the Tokyo region; Mishima would have liked working men as well, but the demands he made on the members' time made it inevitable that most of them be students. Mishima's organization of the Tatenokai into sections, each one of which he controlled independently, was skillful; but his leadership was poor. The private army was nominally imperialist; however, as Mishima's thinking about the Emperor was muddled, he could not give his students the kind of realistic leadership which would have made a reality of the Tatenokai.

In the summer of 1968 he wrote an essay which showed how muddled he was about the Emperor. This essay was “Bunkabōeiron” (“On the Defense of Culture”), which he labored over for nearly a year. It concluded: “Military honors, also, must be awarded by the Emperor, as a cultural concept. As I think it legally feasible under the present Constitution, the Emperor's prerogative to grant honors should be revived in substance. Not only should he receive military salutes, he should award regimental colors in person.”

The weakness of “Bunkabōeiron” is that Mishima makes no attempt to connect the main theme of the essay—that the Emperor is a cultural symbol—to the militaristic conclusion, reminiscent of prewar imperialism, when the Emperor was the divine symbol of the nation and also supreme commander of the armed forces (and did, in fact, present regimental colors).

Mishima made a chatty and unimpressive defense of the Tatenokai in
Queen
magazine (in January 1970): “My Shield Society (SS) [the literal translation of “Tatenokai” is “Shield Society”] has only one hundred members: it is the smallest army in the world, and I do not intend to enlarge it. My men receive no pay, but
twice a year they are given a new uniform, cap, and boots. The uniform, especially designed for the SS, is so striking that passers-by stop on the street in amazement. I designed the flag, which shows two ancient Japanese helmets in red against a white silk background; this simple design also appears on our caps and on the buttons of our uniforms.

“Members of the SS are usually college undergraduates . . .

“The SS is a stand-by army. There is no way of knowing when our day will come. Perhaps it will never come; on the other hand, it may come tomorrow. Until then, the SS will remain calmly at the ready. No street demonstrations for us, no placards, no Molotov cocktails, no lectures, no stone throwing. Until the last desperate moment, we shall refuse to commit ourselves to action. For we are the world's least armed, most spiritual army.

“Some people mockingly refer to us as toy soldiers. Let us see. When I am on duty, the bugle call gets me out of bed at the crack of dawn . . .”

Mishima's attitude toward the Tatenokai is reflected in the anthem which he composed for it (a translation of which was given to me by Ivan Morris):

In the summer the lightning,

In the winter the frost—

To the foot of Mt. Fuji

We have come in good trim.

Here we stand, we young warriors,

Here we stand, fully armed.

Old Yamato's pure spirit

Is the weapon we bear.

On our swords finely tempered

Gleams the hue of the sky.

Let us boldly go forward

With our shield to the fore!

We must hide our great sorrow

And conceal our great dream—

In our land so low fallen

We all frown with dismay.

For what son of Yamato

Can just idly stand by

While the enemy rages

And pollutes our dear land?

The true soul of Yamato

Is the blood of our youth

Who so bravely step forward

With our shield to the fore!

The proud crest on our helmets

Is the shield that we bear—

To protect our loved Emperor

From the storms of the night.

The red glimmer of daybreak

On our warriors' fresh cheeks

Is the color that glitters

On our Flag of Great Truth.

From the night's dark corruption

We bright youths have leapt up

To march gallantly onward

With our shield to the fore!

P
ART
T
WO
P
ICNIC ON
M
T
. F
UJI

Early in March 1969, Mishima invited me to watch the Tatenokai in training at a Jieitai (Self-Defense Forces) camp on Mt. Fuji. So far as I know, I was the first, and last, journalist to see the Tatenokai in the field. After my visit to Camp Fuji and the publication in
The Times
of an article describing the Tatenokai, the training program was closed to journalists.

I remember being in a reluctant frame of mind as I made my way through the crowds at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo en route to Mt. Fuji. I was to observe an all-night exercise of the Tatenokai; and my worry, the source of my reluctance, was the weather. On the previous night, eighteen inches of snow had fallen on Tokyo, and heaven only knew how much snow had fallen on Mt. Fuji.
The snow hung heavily from the trees in my garden in central Tokyo, and around midday had begun to drip; but on Mt. Fuji it would be much colder, and really bitter at night—these were not ideal conditions for an all-night exercise. I was reluctant, too, because I was not sure that the excursion would yield anything of great use to me as a journalist. I could see Mishima virtually any time in Tokyo; it was not necessary for me to go all the way up to Mt. Fuji to meet him. The only argument for going had been to see the Tatenokai in training, but was it worth it in such weather?

At that time, like almost everyone else in Japan, I knew very little about this recently created organization, beyond what Mishima had told me in a short conversation or two. “Tatenokai” he had translated as Shield Society from
tate
, meaning “shield,” and
kai
, “society.” He had named the Tatenokai after a short poem taken from the eighth-century classical Japanese anthology, the
Manyōshu
—a poem in which a warrior pledges his life to shield his lord and master, the Emperor, from the enemy. It was a poem which had been popular with soldiers during the war.

Today I depart

Without a care for my life,

A shield to the Emperor.

The Tatenokai was to shield the person of the Emperor from the threat of Communism.

I knew that the Tatenokai had been established by Mishima not long before, and was largely financed by him; that the membership was small; and that the Jieitai were training members of the group. It was that fact which intrigued me. From what Mishima had said, the training program was unique—but why should the Jieitai be training such an organization as the Tatenokai, “the world's smallest and most spiritual army,” as he had described it? By doing so, the Jieitai appeared to be breaking the basic rule which had governed relations between the armed forces and civilians since the end of the war: that the Jieitai should have no political role of any kind. However one looked at it, the Tatenokai had the odor of a right-wing organization. Although Mishima was
not connected with the traditional right in Japan, who tend to be not much more than highly refined gangsters, he had established a reputation for holding right-wing political views, and it was he who had founded the Tatenokai. The Jieitai was in fact giving training facilities to a group organized by a writer whose views on politics in Japan, if accurately expressed by his writings, were in many respects virtually indistinguishable from those held by the Japanese military before and during the war.

I was aware that a political view of the Tatenokai was not the only one possible, and that many people doubted the seriousness of Mishima's politics. In Tokyo the Tatenokai tended to be dismissed as a wild joke. One view was that the organization had been created by Mishima on a personal whim, and was nothing more than the colorful toy of one much given to exhibitionism. A second theory, retailed by Japanese journalists, was that the Tatenokai was simply a homosexual club. Accustomed as I was, however, to allowing for the playful extremes to which Mishima would go in his non-literary enterprises, I could not quite imagine that he had created the Tatenokai to meet beautiful boys; it would have been altogether too roundabout an exercise. That he had homosexual tendencies had long before been suggested by his novels
Confessions of a Mask
and
Forbidden Colors
with its “gloomy evocations of the sodomite underground of Tokyo”—as Donald Keene puts it. But I knew no more about this aspect of his private life, and I was certainly not about to write for
The Times
on the subject. As a journalist, my question was whether the Tatenokai was a right-wing organization or merely the writer's plaything. I had in fact almost made up my mind on a hunch, more or less deciding on the former; but it hardly seemed necessary for me to participate in an all-night exercise on Mt. Fuji to check my conclusion. There was no hurry; even the Japanese press was completely ignoring the Tatenokai, and
I
had got interested only because I knew Mishima personally.

Mishima, however, had anticipated my reluctance to see to a conclusion the eccentric idea of midnight reporting on Mt. Fuji. Regarding me as unpunctual and unreliable, which I certainly was by his rigid standards, he had made arrangements which made escape difficult. At the beginning of the week he had phoned to
double-check that I would be making an appearance at Camp Fuji, the Jieitai establishment, on Thursday, March 13; he had said that I would be the only journalist taking part. Having lured me with this bait, and having then confirmed my intention to participate in the exercise, he had sprung the trap. In five years of reporting in Japan I had not been given such detailed instructions, a multitude of arrangements and safety checks. I was to catch the 3:10 p.m. train from Shinjuku, arriving at Gotemba station, on the south side of Mt. Fuji, at 4:46. I was to be put on the train by two young assistants of his, Maeda and Nakatsuji, whom I had once met in a karate gym with Mishima and knew vaguely; and at Gotemba I was to leave the platform by the exit on the Mt. Fuji side of the station, where I would be met by a Jieitai sergeant called Imai, who would escort me to Camp Fuji. In case these arrangements failed, Mishima gave me the phone number of the inn at Gotemba, the Fujimotoya, the Inn at the Foot of Mt. Fuji, where he had booked me a room, and suggested that I should ring there in the event of trouble. Even the Sōka Gakkai, the very active and efficient Buddhist movement, did not give one instructions as elaborate as these.