More Artists of the Right

by K. R. Bolton

  In early 1966, Mishima systemized his thoughts in an 80-page essay entitled Eirei no Koe,518 again based on the Ni ni Roku rebellion. In this work he asks, “why did the Emperor have to become a human being?”519 While the work remained obscure, it provided the basis for the founding of his paramilitary Shield Society two years later.

  In a 1966 interview with a Japanese magazine, Mishima upheld the imperial system as the only type suitable for Japan. All the moral confusion of the post-war era, he states, stems from the Emperor’s renunciation of his divine status. The move away from feudalism to capitalism and the consequent industrialization disrupts the relationships between individuals. Real love between a couple requires a third term, the apex of a triangle embodied in the divinity of the Emperor.520

  THE TATENOKAI

  In 1968 Mishima created his own militia, the Tatenokai (Shield Society) writing shortly before of reviving the “soul of the Samurai within myself.” Permission was granted by the army for Mishima to use their training camps for the student followers he recruited from several Right-wing university societies.

  At the office of a Right-wing student journal, a dozen youths gathered. Mishima wrote on a piece of paper: “We hereby swear to be the foundation of Kokoku Nippon.”521 He cut a finger, and everyone else followed, letting the blood fill a cup. Each signed the paper with their blood and drank from the cup. The Tatenokai was born.522

  The principles of the society were:

  1. Communism is incompatible with Japanese tradition, culture, and history and runs counter to the Emperor system;

  2. The Emperor is the sole symbol of our historical and cultural community and racial identity; and

  3. The use of violence is justifiable in view of the threat posed by communism.523

  The militia was designed to have no more than 100 members, and to be a “stand-by” army concentrating only on training, without any political agitation. The metaphysical basis of Mishima’s thinking for the militia was expressed by his description of the Tatenokai as “the world’s least armed, most spiritual army.”524 They were following the path of tradition, which had sustained the Japanese during World War II against overwhelming material forces, as described by Ruth Benedict.525 Mishima referred to Benedict’s book when explaining that his reason for creating the Tatenokai was to restore to Japan the balance of the “chrysanthemum and the sword” which had been lost after the war.526 The emblem that Mishima designed for the society comprised two ancient Japanese helmets in red against a white silk background.

  By this time, Mishima felt that his calling as a novelist was completed. It must have seemed the right time to die. He had been awarded the Shinchosha Literary Prize in 1954 for The Sound of Waves

  and the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1957 for The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

  . His novels Spring Snow

  and Runaway Horses

  had sold well, but he was aggravating the literati, amongst whom his sole defender at this time was Yasunari Kawabata, who had received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. (Mishima missed out because the Nobel Prize committee assumed he could wait awhile longer in favor of his mentor.) Kawabata considered Mishima’s literary talent to be exceptional.

  Mishima characterized the intelligentsia as “. . . the strongest enemy within the nation. It is astonishing how little the character of modern intellectuals in Japan has changed, i.e., their cowardice, sneering, ‘objectivity,’ rootlessness, dishonesty, flunkeyism, mock gestures of resistance, self-importance, inactivity, talkativeness, and readiness to eat their words.”

  HAGAKURE

  Mishima’s destiny was shaped by the Samurai code expounded in a book he had kept with him since the war. This was Hagakure

  , the best-known line of which is: “I have discovered that the way of the Samurai is death.”

  Hagakure was the work of the 17th-century Samurai Jocho Yamamoto, who dictated his teachings to his student Tashiro. Hagakure became the moral code taught to the Samurai, but did not become available to the general public until the latter half of the 19th century. During World War II it was widely read, and its slogan on the way of death was used to inspire the Kamikaze pilots. Following the Occupation it went underground, and many copies were destroyed lest they fall into American hands.527

  Mishima wrote his own commentary on Hagakure

  in 1967.528 He stated in his introduction that it was the one book he referred to continually in the 20 years since the war and that during the war he had always kept it close to him.529

  Mishima relates that immediately following the war, he felt isolated from the rest of literary society, which had accepted ideas that were alien to him. He asked himself what his guiding principle would be now that Japan was defeated. Hagakure was the answer, providing him with “constant spiritual guidance” and “the basis of my morality.” Like all other Japanese books of the war period, Hagakure had become loathsome in the democratic era, to be purged from memory. But Mishima found that in the darkness of the times it now radiated its “true light.”530

  It is now that what I had recognized during the war in Hagakure began to manifest its true meaning. Here was a book that preached freedom, that taught passion. Those who have read carefully only the most famous line from Hagakure still retain an image of it as a book of odious fanaticism. In that one line, “I found that the Way of the Samurai is death,” may be seen the paradox that symbolizes the book as a whole. It was this sentence, however, that gave me the strength to live.531

  THE FEMINIZATION OF SOCIETY

  One of the primary themes of interest for the present-day Western reader of Mishima’s commentary on Hagakure is his use of Jocho’s observations on his own epoch to analyze the modern era. Both 17th-century Japan and 20th-century Japan manifest analogous symptoms of decadence, the latter due to the imposition of alien values that are products of the West’s cycle of decay, while those of Jocho’s day indicate that Japanese civilization in his time was also in a phase of decay. Therefore, those interested in cultural morphology, Spengler’s in particular, will see analogues to the present decline of Western civilization in Jocho’s analysis of his time and Mishima’s analysis of post-war Japan.

  The first symptom considered by Mishima is the obsession of youth with fashion. Jocho observed that even among the Samurai, the young talked only of money, clothes, and sex, an obsession that Mishima observed in his time as well.532

  Mishima also pointed out that the post-war feminization of the Japanese male was noted by Jocho during the peaceful years of the Tokugawa era. Eighteenth-century prints of couples hardly distinguish between male and female, with similar hairstyles, clothes, and facial expressions, which make it almost impossible to tell which is which. Jocho records in Hagakure that during his time, the pulse rates of men and women, which usually differ, had become the same, and this was noted when treating medical ailments. He called this “the female pulse.”533 Jocho observed: “The world is indeed entering a degenerate stage; men are losing their virility and are becoming just like women . . .”

  CELEBRITIES REPLACE HEROES

  Jocho condemns the idolization of certain individuals achieving what we’d today call celebrity status. Mishima comments:

  Today, baseball players and television stars are lionized. Those who specialize in skills that will fascinate an audience tend to abandon their existence as total human personalities and be reduced to a kind of skilled puppet. This tendency reflects the ideals of our time. On this point there is no difference between performers and technicians.

  The present is the age of technocracy (under the leadership of technicians); differently expressed, it is the age of performing artists. . . . They forget the ideals for a total human being; to degenerate into a single cog, a single function becomes their greatest ambition . . .534

  The spectacle of Hollywood and everything that the words “star” and “celebrity” suggest epitomize the cultural banality of the world today.

  THE BOREDOM OF PACIFISM
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  Under pacifism and democracy, the individual is literally dying of boredom, rather than living and dying heroically: “Ours is an age in which everything is based on the premise that it is best to live as long as possible. The average life span has become the longest in history, and a monotonous plan for humanity unrolls before us.”535

  Once a young man finds his place in society, his struggle is over, and there is nothing left for youth apart from retirement, “and the peaceful, boring life of impotent old age.” The comfort of the welfare state ensures against the need to struggle, and one is simply ordered to “rest.” Mishima comments on the extraordinary number of elderly who commit suicide.536 Now we might add the even more extraordinary number of youth who commit suicide.

  Mishima equates socialism and the welfare state, and finds that at the end of the first, there is “the fatigue of boredom” while at the end of the second there is suppression of freedom. People desire something to die for, rather than the endless peace that is upheld as utopia. Struggle is the essence of life. To the Samurai, death is the focus of life, even in times of peace. “The premise of the democratic age is that it is best to live as long as possible.”537

  THE REPRESSION OF DEATH

  The modern world seeks to avoid the thought of death. Yet the repression of such a vital element of life, like all such repressions, will lead to an ever-increasing explosive tension. Mishima states:

  We are ignoring the fact that bringing death to the level of consciousness is an important element of mental health . . . Hagakure insists that to ponder death daily is to concentrate daily on life. When we do our work thinking that we may die today, we cannot help feeling that our job suddenly becomes radiant with life and meaning.538

  EXTREMISM

  Mishima states that Hagakure is a “philosophy of extremism.” Hence, it is inherently out of character in a democratic society. Jocho stated that while the Golden Mean is greatly valued, for the Samurai one’s daily life must be of a heroic, vigorous nature, to excel and to surpass. Mishima comments that “going to excess is an important spiritual springboard.”539

  INTELLECTUALISM

  Mishima held intellectuals in the same contempt as Westerners also in revolt against the modern world, such as D. H. Lawrence, who believed that the life force is repressed by rationalism and intellectualism and replaced by the counting house mentality of the merchant, not just in business but in all aspects of life. Jocho stated that:

  The calculating man is a coward. I say this because calculations have to do with profit and loss, and such a person is therefore preoccupied with profit and loss. To die is a loss, to live is a gain, and so one decides not to die. Therefore one is a coward. Similarly a man of education camouflages with his intellect and eloquence the cowardice or greed that is his true nature. Many people do not realise this.540

  Mishima comments that in Jocho’s time there was probably nothing corresponding to the modern intelligentsia. However, there were scholars, and even the Samurai themselves had begun to form into a similar class “in an age of extended peace.” Mishima identifies this intellectualism with “humanism,” as did Spengler. This intellectualism means, contrary to the Samurai ethic, that “one does not offer oneself up bravely in the face of danger.”541

  NO WORDS OF WEAKNESS

  The Samurai in times of peace still talks with a martial spirit. Jocho taught that, “the first thing a Samurai says on any occasion is extremely important. He displays with this one remark all the valor of the Samurai.”542 Jocho stated: “Even in casual conversation, a Samurai must never complain. He must constantly be on his guard lest he should let slip a word of weakness.” “One must not lose heart in misfortune.”

  THE FLOW OF TIME

  Jocho’s reference to “the flow of time” indicates that he recognized the cyclic nature of the life of a cultural organism four hundred years before Spengler explained it to the West.543 Mishima points out that while Jocho laments “the decadence of his era and the degeneration of the young Samurai,” he observes “the flow of time,” realistically stating that it is no use resisting that flow.544 As Jocho stated: “The climate of an age is unalterable. That conditions are worsening steadily is proof that we have entered the last stage of the Law.”545

  Jocho employs the analogy of seasons just as Spengler did in describing the cycles of a civilization: “However, the season cannot always be spring or summer, nor can we have daylight forever. What is important is to make each era as good as it can be according to its nature.”546 Jocho does not recommend either nostalgia for the return of the past, or the “superficial” attitude of those who only value what is modern, or “progressive” as we call it today.

  A SAMURAI’S DESTINY

  Mishima’s literary output was like his own personal military plan of attack upon the modern era, in keeping with the Way of the Samurai. Mishima would not have expected a final act of defiance against the modern world to end in “victory” in any conventional sense. Having been imbued with the traditional ethos of Japan during the war, it was the spiritual dimension that mattered. Against vastly superior material forces, this spiritual dimension had sustained Japan’s “mission” to bring hierarchy to the East and to the Pacific, as the only nation that had maintained this traditionalist outlook. Benedict records that this belief was retained in the immediate post-war era and that this was still motivated by a spiritual outlook:

  Japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. She would win, she cried, a victory of spirit over matter. America was big, her armaments were superior, but what did that matter? All this, they said, had been foreseen and discounted. . . .

  Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers, repeated that this was no contest between armaments; it was a pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit.547

  November 25, 1970 was chosen as the day that Mishima would fulfill his destiny as a Samurai, pitting his faith in spirit against the modern era. Four others from the Tatenokai joined him. All donned headbands bearing a Hagakure slogan. The aim was to take General Mashida hostage to enable Mishima to address the soldiers stationed at the Ichigaya army base in Tokyo. Mishima and his lieutenant, Masakatsu Morita, would then commit hara-kiri. Only daggers and swords would be used in the assault, in accordance with Samurai tradition.548

  The General was bound and gagged. Close fighting ensued as officers several times entered the general’s office. Mishima and his small band each time forced the officers to retreat. Finally, they were herded out with broad strokes of Mishima’s sword against their buttocks. A thousand soldiers assembled on the parade ground. Two of Mishima’s men dropped leaflets from the balcony above, calling for a rebellion to “restore Nippon.”

  Precisely at mid-day, Mishima appeared on the balcony to address the crowd. Shouting above the noise of helicopters he declared: “Japanese people today think of money, just money: Where is our national spirit today? The Jieitai549 must be the soul of Japan.”

  The soldiers jeered. Mishima continued: “The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is why you don’t agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your tiny world. You do nothing for Japan.” His last words were: “I salute the Emperor. Long live the Emperor!”

  Morita joined him on the balcony in salute.

  Both returned to Mashida’s office. Mishima knelt, shouting a final salute, and plunged a dagger into his stomach, forcing it clockwise. Morita bungled the decapitation leaving it for another to finish. Morita was then handed Mishima’s dagger but called upon the swordsman who had finished off Mishima to do the job, and Morita’s head was knocked off in one swoop. The remaining followers stood the heads of Mishima and Morita together and prayed over them.

  Ten thousand mourners attended Mishima’s funeral, the largest of its kind ever held in Japan.550 “I want to make a poem of my life,” Mishima had written at the age of twenty-four. He had
fulfilled his destiny according to the Samurai way: “To choose the place where one dies is also the greatest joy in life.” Mishima wrote in his commentary on Hagakure: “The positive form of suicide called hara-kiri is not a sign of defeat, as it is in the West, but the ultimate expression of free will, in order to protect one’s honor.”551

  After his death, his commentary on Hagakure became an immediate best-seller.552

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right

  January 14, 2011

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  K. R. BOLTON holds Doctorates in Theology and a Ph.D. h.c. He is a contributing writer for Foreign Policy Journal and a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research in Greece.

  His books include Revolution from Above (London: Arktos Media, 2011), Artists of the Right (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012), Stalin: The Enduring Legacy (London: Black House Publishing, 2012), The Parihaka Cult (London: Black House Publishing, 2012), The Psychotic Left (London: Black House Publishing, 2013), The Banking Swindle: Money Creation and the State (London: Black House Publishing, 2013), Babel Inc.: Multicultralism, Globalisation, and the New World Order (London: Black House Publishing, 2014), Perón and Perónism (London: Black House Publishing, 2014), and Zionism, Islam, and the West (London: Black House Publishing, 2015).

  His articles have been published by both scholarly and popular media, including the International Journal of Social Economics; Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies; Geopolitika; World Affairs; India Quarterly; The Occidental Quarterly; North American New Right; Radio Free Asia; Irish Journal of Gothic & Horror Studies, Trinity College; International Journal of Russian Studies, and many others.