The Mishima Incident: “A Wasteful Way to Die”

Tokyo –

It happened while Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, a few blocks away, was addressing the opening of an extraordinary session of the Diet.

“Despite her economic power,” Sato said, after welcoming seven newly-elected Dietmen from Okinawa, “Japan will never again become a military power….”

At that moment, in the Eastern Corps Headquarters of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force In Ichigaya, novelist Yukio Mishima and four members of his Tate-no-Kai(Society of the Shield) army were enacting a Samurai drama that was to shake not only Japan but the rest of the civilized world as well. When the scene had played Its gruesome course, Mishima and one of his young ultra-rightist followers lay disemboweled and beheaded on a blood-stained red carpet in the office of the commanding general of the GSDF garrison near the Shinjuku district of Tokyo.

Here, in approximate chronological sequence, is what happened:

10:45 a.m. – Mishima and four of his student subalterns – Hissho Morita, 25; Masahiro Ogawa, 22; and the brothers Koga, Hiroyasu, 23, and Masayoshi, 22 – drove to the GSDF’s headquarters and asked for an immediate interview with the bass commandant, Lt. Gen. Kanetoshi Masuda. All five wore the colorful uniform of the Society of the Shield, designed and paid for by Mishima who liked to refer to his 95-man cadre as “the world’s smallest army without arms.”

The uniform trousers and tunic were brown with bright green trim at the cuffs and neck, and a red sash around the waist. Mishima, a veritable fanatic about physical fitness since his rejection as a weakling by the Army during World War II, looked leathery and supple in his mandarin-collared jacket. And, for this most honorable of occasions, he and his youthful henchmen wore white hinomaru headbands emblazoned with the Rising Sun of Japan.

Since Mishima had made an appointment the previous day, November 24, he and his followers had no difficulty in entering the heavily guarded GSDF headquarters of General Masuda. Further, the general was on friendly personal terms with the 45-Year-old writer and playwright. Mishima’s small but dedicated “army” had undergone intensive training at the GSDF school located at the foot of Mt. Fuji, drilling in the martial arts (especially kendo, or stave fighting, Mishima’s favorite “imperial” sport and conditioner), all-night marching, strike tactics and squad leadership. Although Mishima’s Society of the Shield was one of the largest groups to be given access to the GSDF training facilities, the practice of allowing civilians to use the Mt. Fuji complex was not at all unusual. Many business organizations send newly-recruited employees to GSDF units to give them a taste of tightly-organized – and highly disciplined – military life, It is simply another of the myriad incongruities in a country that vows never again to take the violent road to military adventure….

(There is an additional facet to Mishima’s casual entree to the Ichigaya fortress, an outpost always on the alert for attack from leftist students and other hot-blooded demonstrators. Although the writer as a champion of the “cultural defense theory” which exhorts the Japanese people to sacrifice their lives to defend the “history and tradition” of their nation in time of crisis, Mishima had repeatedly assured the National Police Agency that the Society of the Shield would “act only when the Self-Defense Forces and the police are found incapable of coping with the movements of the Leftist elements.” This – plus the fact that the Tate-no-Kai had never been on any police blacklist, had avoided violence and was therefore thought to possess a character far nobler than that of a “conventional” rightist organization – seemed to assuage any misgivings on the part of the gendarmerie.)

11:15 a.m. – Mishima and his four lieutenants were admitted to General Masuda’s office on the second floor of the headquarters’ main administrative building. The general, a burly, bluff-spoken judo-ka, bowed and greeted his guests politely.

Suddenly, Mishima and his men drew short Japanese swords from under their coats. The four students grabbed the general’s arms and forced him into a chair, where they tied and gagged him. But Masuda managed to quickly loosen his gag.

“Why do you do such a thing?” he demanded. But Mishima was in no mood for logic. He was preparing himself mentally for the supreme moment of his life.

Then, three of Masuda’s subordinates, having heard the commotion, dashed into their commander’s office. Mishima and his four young Samurai charged them, waving their swords and shouting maniacally. The GSDF officers tried to fend them off Frank Buck style, with upturned chairs, urging them all the while to give up their madness. But they were no match for the iron-muscled Mishima and his frenzied squad. Within minutes the GSDF men were routed from the room. The Invaders barricaded the door with a heavy desk and some metal chairs.

Mishima stood before the trussed-up General Masuda.

“I wish to make a speech to all of the men in your camp,” he said. “I want them to assemble in the courtyard to hear me out.”

Masuda knew now that he was not dealing with a man who had often been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literatures a brilliant craftsman recognized as the youthful peer of Gide and Genet and considered to be Japan’s leading contemporary writer. No; he was dealing with a man possessed.

“Your demand is absurd,” the general said. “Give up this madness while there is yet times Mishima-san.”

12:15 p. m. – By now an agreement had been reached, Mishima, his legs braced wide, stood on the balcony of the headquarters building. Below, in the square, approximately 1,200 uniformed GSDF officers and men waited expectantly. Mishima’s manifesto, written painstakingly by brush on a large white sheet# flapped from the balustrade at his feet.

The manifesto, authored by Mishima, was in six parts:

1. All personnel at the Ichigaya base should assemble in the courtyard to listen to Mishima’s speech.
2. Remaining members of the Tate-no-Kai, who had been waiting in reserve at nearby Ichigaya Hall, were to be called to the main building at the GSDF garrison.
3. Any attack on the Mishima group was not to be launched before 1:10 P. M. (Thereby giving them at least two hours to incite the GSDP Force soldiers to joining Mishima in a coup d’etat.)
4. No obstruction of any kind was to be made against the Society of the Shield forces before 1:10 p. m.
5. Mishima promised to spare the life of General Masuda, even if the commandant wished to commit hara-kiri ritual suicide, if the first four demands were met.
6. If the demands were not met, or there were indications that they would not be met, Mishima would immediately kill the general and himself.

Mishima had no loudspeaker, but relied on his considerable lungpower to make himself heard over the taunts and shouts of his angry audience.

“Listen to me carefully, very carefully,” he shouted, “I’ve come here with a feeling of sadness and indignation, Japan’s politics have been marked only by intrigues….”

“Shut up, you clown,” some of the soldiers responded. Mishima ignored them.”

“…I had believed,” he continued, “I had believed only the Defense Forces retained the real Japanese soul in Japan. My dream for the Defense Force has been shattered. We will take our lives to protest the Constitution which prohibits Japan’s rearmament…”

“Go ahead!” came the shouts from below. “Nobody cares if you do or not.”

Mishima went on to say that the police had demonstrated, particularly during the Anti-War Day protests of last October in Shinjuku that they were able to deal alone with internal rebellion. Thus, he reasoned, the Defense Forces were useless and vestigial.

“Can you not see this logic?” he asked, “You have been degraded into nothing but a mere protection of the present Constitution, a Constitution that makes your very existence illegal.”

“No!” the massed troops replied, their anger growing. “Come down from the balcony.” Some of the younger Japanese GSDF soldiers began a loud criticism of their superiors for “collusion” with the Society of the Shield that had made the storming of the headquarters and the abduction of their chief possible. They were in a lynch-mob mood.

Mishima delivered his parting shot:

“I have waited for the past year for the Defense Forces to rise up and assert themselves. You are fools.”

The soldiers jeered. Mishima shouted, “Tennoheika, banzai!” (Long live the Emperor!) and disappeared back into the building. He had spoken for a little over ten minutes. He had fourteen minutes left to live.

12:40 p.m. – Mishima, stripped to the waist, his bronze muscles rippling, sat cross-legged on the red carpet directly In front of General Masuda. The general sensed that Mishima was steeling himself to commit hara-kiri. He begged the novelist to reconsider. Mishima would not listen.

Suddenly, he gave a loud scream and drew his Samurai sword across his bare stomach. As he fell forward Hissho Morita, one of his student aides-de-camp, performed the role of kaishaku-nin (assistant to hara-kiri.) With a scream of his own, he beheaded Mishima from behind. Morita, a former Waseda University student, proved somewhat inept at the task. He had to hack at his general’s body three times before the decapitation was completed.

Aghast, General Masuda urged the four students to pray for Mishima’s soul. They immediately began to chant Buddhist prayers for their beheaded sensei.

Now, as agreed the day before in a drama-packed meeting of the Tate-no-Kai inner circle in Room 519 of the Imperial Hotel in downtown Tokyo, it was Morita’s turn. Following Mishima’s example, he slashed his sword across his abdomen. But he lacked the iron will of his leader. He did not push the blade deep enough. All he did was make a superficial scratch on the flesh. But the Bushido Code must not be broken, even though he was still very much alive and aware (unlike Mishima, who had inflicted a mortal wound on himself) of what must happen next. Another student swung his sword. This time it took only one stroke. Morita’s head rolled onto the carpet, alongside that of Mishima’s.

By one o’clock that afternoon some one hundred riot police had raided the Tate-no-Kai headquarters in the Kobayashiso apartment house in Juniso, Shinjuku, and disarmed a number of Mishima’s compatriots there. By this time, it seemed that all of Tokyo was in an uproar. In coffeehouses and whisky bars, in offices and department stores, on college campuses and dormitories one name was on everyone’s tongue: Mishima.

By Thursday, the shock had reverberated around the globs. Prime Minister Sato, his address before the historic “pollution” session of the Diet completely upstaged by Mishima’s dramatic suicide, said: “Mishima went mad. That’s the only reason I can think of to explain this outrageous incident.” He added that the fabric of the Japanese society is “sound and healthy,” and attempted to dismiss fears that violence might spread throughout Japan.

But, internationally, Sato’s apparent optimism was not echoed. From a series of global datelines came reports that the Mishima Incident had invoked a slumbering fear that Japan might now revert to the militaristic madness of the 1930’s and early ’40’s:

Washington – Yomiuri correspondent Kazuo Minato wrote that Mishima’s hara-kiri suicide had “caused Americans to regard inscrutable Japan with deep uneasiness and suspicion.

“Generally, the Americans view the incident as an abnormal form of eccentric spiritualism born of a materially rich but spiritually poor society….”

Also from the American capitals another Japanese correspondent quoted former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin 0. Reischauer as saying that the death of Mishima was “a tragedy, but the danger was that the incident could be linked with the alleged revival of Japanese militarism.”

Moscow: “A symbolic Incident heralding the revival of militarism in Japan…an anachronistic, barbaric act.”

London: “An impulsive and indiscreet action, especially by an author often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.” (However, it was reported by Japanese newsmen in London that Britons who know Japan well doubted if the hara-kiri would have any affect on Japan’s younger generation.)

Paris: Asahi Shimbun correspondent Yoshiro Mutaguchi reported: “A Catholic priest, well acquainted with the works of Mishima, was so surprised that he was momentarily speechless. After some time, he summed up his Impressions as follows:

“He has been directing his life as if it were a play. He probably decided on a directed, aesthetic way of death to end his life.”

“I wonder If he had In mind the martyrdom of St. Sebastian whom he described in his work ‘Kamen no Kokuhaku’ (Confessions of the Mask) and took the action to save the honor of Japan? Still, it’s Incomprehensible.”

Singapore: A Chinese Intellectual was quoted as saying that, “I cannot help thinking of the Feb. 26 coup d’etat. (This reference Is to the great slaughter of Feb. 26, 1936 – the so-called “2/16 Incident” – when 1,400 young officers and their troops attempted a coup, took control of key government buildings In downtown Tokyo and murdered Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Saito Nakoto, Inspector General of Military Training Okada Keisuke, and Colonel Matsuo Denzo.) Especially when a man such as Mishima, with all his riches and celebrity, suddenly takes such a violent action. I have the impression that he acted out of the ancient habit of the Japanese. I have a very bad premonition.

“I wonder why the Japanese think only of their own country. Foreigners cannot understand their egoism. The Chinese, of course, have self pride, but theirs is not so narrow-minded as the Japanese.”

Seoul – “The incident carries with it the strong smell of blood….”

The majority of Mishima’s countrymen, however, seem to see little connection between his bizarre death and the possibility of a resurgence of militarism in Japan. In a spot survey taken by a mass circulation newspaper two days after the Ichigaya hara-kiri, only about 11 per cent of those polled sympathized with Mishima’s avowed concern over the “spiritually corrupt” state of the nation. And a mere 3.9 per cent felt that his suicide “reflected the beauty of the Bushido spirit.”

It would be interesting, though, to canvass those Tokyoites again and ask them two additional questions: 1) What is your opinion as to why Mishima committed hara-kiri? and 2) What is the meaning of “Bushido spirit?”

Obviously, a wide range of answers would be elicited; partly because Mishima’s action was so anachronistic, almost obscenely so it seemed to many, and partly because people in a society intensely concerned with such abstractions as Gross National Product, the cost-of-living spiral or the latest futurological pronouncement of Herman Kahn have little time or inclination to dwell on anything as feudal as the Imperial Way or the Bushido Code. Bushido, literally, means the “way of the Samurai,” and is a term popularized during this century to designate traditional Japanese ideals of conduct. Dr. Inazo Nitobe, in “Bushido, the Soul of Japan,” Itemizes as Bushido the qualities of rectitude or justice, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honor, loyalty, and self-control. There is little doubt that Yukio Mishima, in varying degrees of course, exhibited each of those traits in his 45 years of life. And there is even less doubt that his violent death was looked upon by many thousands of Japanese – especially those of his generation and older – as an act of honor not barbarism. This segment of the populace, however, seems less inclined to confess their views. Hara-kiri, unlike the mini, the midi and the maxi, simply is not in vogue at the moment in Japan.

The unresolved questions linger on naggingly: Was Mishima really attempting to stir the GSDF ranks into staging a full-fledged coup d’etat or even a bloody re-enactment of the “2/16 Incident?” Was he merely protesting the spiritual “bankruptcy” of the Japanese people and what he considered to be the intrigue-mired corruption of their elected representatives? Was he, through the medium of the sword blade, simply trying to demonstrate the honor and nobility of the Bushido Code (and the hoped-for return to Imperial rule, which he long advocated), hoping that his example would inspire the younger generation from what he called its technological lethargy?

Or was it but the megalomaniacal act of a mad literary genius who, seeking the Artaudian ultimate, decided to play out In the flesh the suicide motif that threaded through so many of his fifteen-odd novels and thirty-three plays?

It is tempting to speculate about the long-range effect of the Mishima Affair on Japan, her people, and her destiny. History, as always, will preside as the final judge; but the guessing game goes on. Yet even Mishima’s last recorded interview sheds little light on the true motives behind his ritualistic demise.

In a conversation with Jun Ishikawa, a fellow novelist, a few days before committing seppuku (hara-kiri), Mishima said resignedly: “If there is a tragedian who has failed, I think maybe that’s what I am. I appear on the scene making my best efforts to make the spectators cry, but they burst into laughter instead.”

Nobody is laughing at Yukio Mishima now. Most people, it seems, agree with Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, Mishima’s patron and the go-between in his marriage. “It was a wasteful way to die,” Kawabata said, wiping the tears from his eyes.

The one constant that has emerged in the wake of Mishima’s death is the incremental phrasing of the question abroad: “Will militarism be revived in Japan?” To many observers that is like asking if the Japanese drink tea. The bare fact is that Japan already is a potent military power. Director General Yasuhiro Nakasone of the Japan Defense Agency (“I always regarded Mishima as a man of common sense,” he was quoted as saying following the novelist’s suicide), in announcing Japan’s fourth defense budget, pointed out that military expenditures account for less than one per cent of the Gross National Product. He failed to add, however, that Japan’s gross outlay for defense is the sixth largest In the world; or that, with the U.S. in the process of withdrawing troops from South Korea, Okinawa and the home Islands as well, Japan’s military obligations (leaving aside the question of aspirations) can only multiply.

And, finally, where does all of this leave the restless revolutionary students of the New Japan? Has the Mishima Incident given them the martyr, the folk hero, they have thus far lacked?

That, too, remains to be seen. A poll of higher-echelon officialdom and the Watanabes-on-the-street would probably lean heavily toward the negative register.

But I do know this, first-hand: The other day I paid a visit to the Shinjuku pad of a young Zengakuren student of my acquaintance. I sensed immediately that the decor of his tiny four-tatami cubicle had been altered. Books still lay scattered about on the straw-matted floor, and an empty Kirin beer bottle made walking or squatting – as usual – hazardous for the unwary. What had been changed?

Then, much to my host’s satisfaction, I spotted it. The large poster of Che Guevera, which had formerly occupied the place of honor on the one-papered wall of the room, was gone. in its place was an even larger poster – of Yukio Mishima.

– the end –

Received in New York on December 4, 1970.

©1970 Darrell Houston

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Darrell Houston is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This article may be published with credit to Darrell Houston, the Post-Intelligencer, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.