The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (41 page)

Rather than attempting to learn about this reality, the West prefers to stick to the idea of the yellow peril, sensing intuitively something dark and ominous in the Asian soul. What is most exquisite in a national culture is tied closely to what may also be most disagreeable—just as in Elizabethan tragedy.

Japan has tried to show only one side of herself, one side of a moon, to the West, while pushing on busily with modernization. In no era of our history have there been such great sacrifices of the totality of culture—which must embrace lightness and darkness equally.

In the first twenty years of my life, national culture was controlled by the unnatural Puritanism of the militarists. For the past twenty years, pacifism has been sitting heavily on the samurai spirit, a burden on the easily stimulated “Spanish” soul of the Japanese. The hypocrisy of the authorities has permeated the minds of the people, who can find no way out. Wherever national culture seeks to regain its totality, almost insane incidents occur. Such phenomena are interpreted as the undercurrent of Japanese nationalism, intermittently bursting out like lava through cracks in a volcano.

Conspicuous radical action of the kind taken recently by the youth at Tokyo airport may be explained in such terms. Yet few people notice that both the right and the left wing in Japan are exploiting nationalism under all kinds of international masks. The anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan was predominantly left-wing, and yet appealed strongly to nationalism—a strange kind of nationalism by proxy. Until the war began, few Japanese would even have known where Vietnam was.

Nationalism is used one way or another for political purposes, and thus people often lose sight of the fact that nationalism is basically a problem of culture. On the other hand, the hundred samurai who attacked a modern army barracks with swords alone recognized this fact. Their reckless action and inevitable defeat were necessary to show the existence of a
certain essential spirit. Their ideology was a difficult one; it was the first radical prophecy of the danger inherent in Japanese modernization, which must damage the totality of culture. The painful condition of Japanese culture, which we feel today, is the fruit of what could only be vaguely apprehended by Japanese at the time of the Shinpuren Incident.

What was Mishima to do with his Tatenokai? On November 3 he invited a few foreign correspondents, including me, to witness the only public parade ever staged by his private army. It was held on the roof of the National Theater on a cold, blustery day. A striped tent had been put up on the roof of the building and chairs had been placed there for the VIP's who were to attend. One by one the dignitaries arrived. There was a scattering of senior officers from the Jieitai, among them a retired general who took the salute. Then the Tatenokai members streamed onto the roof in their yellow-brown uniforms. While Mishima watched from the side of the parade ground—a slim, short figure in his tight-fitting uniform—Morita gave the orders. For several minutes the men marched back and forth across the roof; they were inspected by the general. At the end of the parade, all faced east across the moat of the Imperial Palace, which runs below the National Theater, and gave a salute to His Majesty. Thereafter, everyone came downstairs into the theater, where a reception was held. While his audience nibbled at sandwiches, Mishima gave two short speeches, one in Japanese and a second, identical one in English, from which I took notes:

My reason for creating the Tatenokai is simple. Ruth Benedict once wrote a famous book,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
. Such are the characteristics of Japanese history: the chrysanthemum and the sword. After the war the balance between these two was lost. The sword has been ignored since 1945. My ideal is to restore the balance. To revive the tradition of the samurai, through my literature and my action. Therefore, I asked the Jieitai to give my men basic training, one month at a time.

The Jieitai is composed of volunteers. A quarter of a
million men is insufficient to defend this country. Therefore, some civilian cooperation is necessary. This is needed because twentieth-century war is fought by guerrillas; this is a new type of warfare, conducted by irregulars . . . My ideal is to give Japan a system like the Swiss system of military service.

Early in December 1969, Mishima set off for South Korea. The purpose of his journey was to see the South Korean Army in action. On his return he wrote to me that he was irritated by the calm situation he found in Korea. He said he had been to the east coast to see the place where guerrillas had landed from the north, the training of anti-guerrilla forces, and the coast-guard militia. The YS-II plane which had taken him back to Seoul was hijacked to North Korea the following day. If only, he said, he had been kidnapped to North Korea, he wouldn't be so bored. This letter gave a misleading impression of his actual state of mind. He was, in fact, secretly keying himself up to take the plunge, to organize the miniature coup d'état and his hara-kiri. So much is clear from a remark made in a discussion in December 1969 with a friend, Ichiro Murakami, which appeared in 1970 in a volume entitled
Shōbu no Kokoro
(“The Soul of the Warrior”). Mishima said—his words were hardly ambiguous: “One has to take responsibility for what one says once one has said it. The same is true of the written word. If one writes: ‘I will die in November,' then one has to die. If you make light of words once, you will go on doing so.”

Early in April 1970, Mishima secretly formed the group of students within the Tatenokai who assisted him in his twentieth-century version of the Shinpuren Incident. The members of this group were—in addition to Morita—Masayoshi Koga and Masahiro Ogawa, both twenty-one and students at universities in Tokyo. Chibi-Koga, as he was known to other members of the Tatenokai (the nickname served to distinguish him from another Koga in the Tatenokai), was the only son of a tangerine farmer from Arita in Wakayama prefecture; his father died in 1953 and his mother brought him up alone. She introduced the boy at twelve to a religious organization with a strong nationalist creed, the Seichō no Ie, and he developed right-wing views. He met Mishima in August 1968 and became a member of the Tatenokai after completing
a month's training at Camp Fuji; he was made a section leader in April 1969. Chibi-Koga was tiny but energetic; he was devoted to the Tatenokai and completely trusted by Mishima and Morita. Masahiro Ogawa was a different kind of youth, the son of an office employee, who lived at Chiba, close to Tokyo. He was Morita's closest friend and Morita introduced him to Mishima; he was made a section leader of the Tatenokai in April 1970. Tall and pale, with a toothbrush moustache, Ogawa was the standard-bearer of the Tatenokai; but although he made a conspicuous figure on parade, he was physically weak. This group of four—Mishima, Morita, Koga, and Ogawa—met in secret, frequently changing their rendezvous to avoid arousing the slightest suspicion. And they began to lay their plans.

The chief planners were Mishima and Morita. At the beginning of April, Mishima met Chibi-Koga at a coffee shop in the Imperial Hotel and asked him if he was willing to commit himself “to the very end”—without explaining what he was talking about. Chibi-Koga immediately agreed. A week later Mishima put the same question to Ogawa at his home in the suburbs of Tokyo; Ogawa hesitated and then agreed. In the middle of May, in the course of another meeting at his home, Mishima proposed to the three students that the Tatenokai, as a whole, should stage an uprising with the help of the Jieitai and occupy parliament; then they would call for revision of the Constitution. Mishima, however, was vague and seemed to have no precise plan of action. About three weeks later, on June 13, Mishima again met the three students—this time in room 821 at the Hotel Okura. He explained that they would have to carry out their plan by themselves, they could not rely on the Jieitai (presumably he had made soundings within the Jieitai, with discouraging results). Mishima then proposed a 180-degree change in course; instead of acting with the army, they would attack the army. He was still very much at sea as to their plans, however, and came up with a number of proposals. One idea was to attack a Jieitai arsenal. Another suggestion was to take an army general hostage—he proposed that their target might be a very senior general who had his HQ at a place of historical importance to the Imperial Army of prewar days, General Kanetoshi Mashita, commander of the Eastern Army at Ichigaya in central Tokyo. Mishima
was trying to find a means of forcing a Jieitai command to assemble an audience of young soldiers. His ultimate aim was to make a speech to these soldiers—he had confidence in young soldiers and officers—and induce them to stage an uprising with him and his Tatenokai students.

I assume that Mishima had forced himself into a state of mind in which he could believe in this incredible scenario; at the same time there must have been some cold and logical element within him quietly asserting that he was talking rubbish. One can only make sense of Mishima's determination to ignore this contradiction if one assumes that his ultimate purpose was to die, and that the means by which he achieved this aim, provided that they had a theatrical quality, were not all that important. In any event, at this meeting Mishima and the students agreed that they would take hostage General Kanetoshi Mashita; they would do this at the second anniversary parade of the Tatenokai, to be held in November. And they would create the opportunity to seize the general by inviting him to review the parade.

The next meeting was held at another Western-style hotel in central Tokyo. This time Mishima chose a writers' hotel, the Yamanoue (Hill Top) Hotel. He summoned the group eight days after the meeting at the Okura. And his first move was to inform the students that he had got permission for the Tatenokai to hold an exercise on a heli-pad at the Ichigaya military base. He also said that they would change their target from General Mashita to the commander of the infantry regiment stationed at Ichigaya (which was under Mashita's ultimate authority), a Colonel Miyata, whose office was closer to the heli-pad than that of Mashita (this was an altogether more modest target). He also proposed that they use Japanese swords as their arms and asked Chibi-Koga to buy a car for their use, in which the swords would be carried into the base. Everyone agreed.

What really was Mishima's goal? The three students with him believed him to be an ardent patriot, but he was much more complicated than that. Mishima was on the verge of his final decision to commit hara-kiri. The timing of his decision can be exactly specified—for at the meeting at the Yamanoue he had proposed that the weapons they would use at Ichigaya would be swords.
What he appreciated, I presume, is that there was no guarantee that he would die if he simply staged an attack within a Jieitai base (even if he used firearms); he realized that the army would not shoot him down or his men (since the war, the army has not been allowed to fire on civilians under any circumstances). Thus, he was brought to the decision to use swords in the attack at Ichigaya. Whatever happened there, with a sword in his hand and a dagger within reach, he could be virtually certain that he would die—by his own hand.

While all this was going on, I met Mishima, but I saw no sign of it. I met a different Mishima—the usual cordial and outgoing host. I saw him during his summer holidays at Shimoda. Showing no particular sign of tension, he relaxed by the swimming pool, his body turned a dark brown by the sun; and he went to the beach with his family in the afternoon. One day there was a phone call from Shigeru Hori, the right-hand man to the Prime Minister, proposing a meeting with Mr. Sato. Another day Yasuhiro Nakasone, the head of the Defense Agency (which controls the Jieitai), telephoned to ask Mishima to address a group of his supporters—his faction within the ruling conservative party. I was surprised by these signs of Mishima's popularity with conservative politicians. Mishima was caustic about them. He denounced Nakasone as a fraud and said that he had no intention of going to see them. There was an element of shibai (theater) in all this.

His boisterous talk of suicide also seemed to be an act. As he lay by the pool, basking in the sun, confidently predicting the suicides of other writers (e.g., Truman Capote) and speculating about the mysterious deaths of writers (Saint-Exupéry, who he insisted had flown his plane straight out into the Atlantic until he crashed), it was unimaginable that he was serious. One night I accompanied the Mishimas to a yakuza, gangster, movie and he insisted over coffee afterward, standing up in a snack bar, that the yakuza were the only Japanese who still possessed the samurai spirit. I couldn't help feeling that he was being silly.

Behind this frivolous mask Mishima continued with his plotting. From Shimoda he kept constantly in touch with the three members of the Tatenokai group. He sent them to Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, paying for their summer holiday. He also
asked them to recruit one more member; he knew how small the group was for the task he envisaged. (He decided to take only one more, as he gave first priority to security.) His choice was Hiroyasu Koga, Furu-Koga; he was the son of a primary-school headmaster in Hokkaido, a lecturer at the Seichō no Ie headquarters, who had introduced him to right-wing thinking. He was twenty-three, a year older than Chibi-Koga and Ogawa; and he had just started studying to be a lawyer. On September 9 Mishima met him at a restaurant in the Ginza and told him the whole plan in confidence. Mishima said that it would be impossible to find Jieitai men who would rise with them, that he himself would have to die whatever happened. The date would be November 25.

On September 15 the five had dinner together at Momonjiya in Ryōgoku, on their way back from watching a display of
ninja-taikai
, a feudal martial art performed by men in black garb—their art is to vanish into thin air. And ten days afterward they met at a sauna club in Shinjuku and Mishima said they must make firm arrangements for the monthly meeting in November. Tatenokai members who had relatives in the Jieitai must be excluded from the meeting; and he would personally sign all invitations. A week later they met at a Chinese restaurant in the Ginza, and Mishima described the plan in detail. The monthly meeting would start at 11 a.m. At 12:30 p.m., Mishima and Chibi-Koga would leave the meeting on the excuse that they had to attend a funeral. They would drive off and fetch the swords and also two reporters (friends of Mishima s), who would be waiting for them at the Palace Hotel—but would know nothing of the plan otherwise. They would return to Ichigaya and would park the car at the headquarters of the 32nd Infantry Regiment. The reporters would wait in the car. The group would then take Colonel Miyata hostage. By this time, the rest of the Tatenokai (the reduced contingent which had been invited for that day) would have started the exercise at the heli-pad. On October 9 the group held another meeting, from which Furu-Koga, who was traveling in Hokkaido—saying goodbye to his family—was absent. Ten days later they had a group portrait taken in full uniform at Tojo Hall, where wedding parties are the usual customers (Mishima joked to the others that the Tojo Hall cameramen had the art of making everybody look beautiful).