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Yukio Mishima, one of the giants of twentieth-century Japanese literature, was born on this day in 1925. He has exercised an enduring influence on the post-World War II New Right, not just for his ideas but also for his public images and actions, including his spectacular suicide at the age of 45.

I deal with his death in my essay “The Meaning of Mishima’s Death,” written in honor of its 50th anniversary, which I reprint below, followed by a list of other writings on Mishima, both at Counter-Currents and elsewhere.

On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four followers wearing the uniforms of his private militia group the Shield Society (Tatenokai) visited the Ichigaya Barracks of the Japan Self-Defense Force (the Jieitai). They took the commander, Kanetoshi Mashita, hostage then demanded that the troops be assembled so Mishima could address them. He had alerted the press in advance. He stepped out onto a balcony to harangue the assembled troops, calling them to reject Japan’s American-imposed postwar materialism. You can read Riki Rei’s translation of Mishima’s speech here.

I don’t know how much of his speech Mishima managed to give. His voice was largely drowned out by circling helicopters and the jeering of the troops. But what happened next ensured that many thousands would pore over every word of the written text. Mishima returned to the commander’s office, where he and one of his followers, Masakatsu Morita, committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide involving self-disembowelment with a dagger followed by decapitation with a sword wielded by one’s second.

Mishima’s suicide is often portrayed as motivated by the failure of his attempted “coup.” But this is silly. The so-called “coup” was merely a prelude to a suicide that Mishima had been thinking, talking, and writing about, as well as meticulously planning and rehearsing, for years. Mishima’s speech and suicide were two acts of a single propaganda drama: first, propaganda of the word, then propaganda of the deed.

What was Mishima’s message?

From the start, Japan was a military aristocracy. The highest value was honor. The individual’s sense of honor was deeply connected to his national identity, his place in society, and the duties connected with his station. Thus the honor cult upheld the entire social order.

How did one demonstrate the sincerity of one’s devotion to honor? By being willing to risk one’s life in battle over honor. The samurai preferred death to dishonor. If one is victorious, one can wear one’s laurels in good conscience. If one is defeated, one can express one’s devotion to honor through suicide.

The samurai’s preferred method of suicide is called hara-kiri or seppuku, which means cutting (kiri) the belly (hara). The English idiom “spilling your guts” connotes candor and sincerity. The Japanese have a similar idea, which they take quite literally. Mishima wrote that “a person’s sincerity is said to be symbolized by his internal organs.” To expose one’s internal organs shows that you are hiding nothing, holding nothing back. Thus to commit suicide by spilling one’s guts is, as Mishima said, a form of “exhibitionistic persuasion.” [1]

So what thesis was Mishima arguing for when he plunged a dagger into his abdomen? He wanted to persuade his audience — the soldiers before him, the Japan Self-Defense Force in general, and the Japanese people as a whole — to turn away from American-imposed materialism and parliamentary democracy and back towards Japan’s traditional culture and way of life, the mainstay of which was the aristocratic cult of honor.

Feudalism was abolished in Japan and political sovereignty concentrated in the hands of the Emperor after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The samurai caste was abolished, but samurai who cooperated with the Restoration were given positions in the new order. In 1873, seppuku was abolished as a form of execution, and voluntary acts of seppuku became rare. Seppuku came to be seen as archaic and transgressive.

However, even after the Meiji Restoration, the militaristic ethos that gave rise to seppuku remained powerful in Japan. During the Second World War, countless Japanese longed to prove their devotion to the Emperor by risking death for victory and committing suicide in defeat. The most terrifying expression of this ethos were the kamikaze pilots who committed suicide by crashing their airplanes into American warships.

After Japan’s surrender in the Second World War, the United States sought to abolish Japanese militarism. The Japanese military was abolished and replaced by the Japan Self-Defense Force, which was little more than a police force and auxiliary of the American military, which guaranteed Japan’s external security.

Beyond abolishing the Japanese military, the United States sought to uproot the honor culture that sustained it by making a different part of the human soul sovereign in Japan, namely desire. Post-war Japanese society is highly bourgeois and materialistic, based on the idea that the highest value is a long and comfortable life, to be purchased even at the price of honor.

You can find this essay and many others in Greg Johnson’s book Novel Takes: Essays on Literature, available for order here

Aristocratic politics is based on the contrary idea that the highest value is honor, to be purchased even at the price of our lives. The spiritual aristocrat, therefore, must be ready to die; he must conquer his fear of death; he even must come to love death, for his ability to choose death before dishonor is what raises him above being a mere clever animal. It is what makes him a free man, a natural master rather than a natural slave. It is ultimately the foundation of all forms of higher culture, which involve the rejection or subordination and stylization of merely animal desire.

A natural slave is someone who is willing to give up his honor to save his life. Thus modern politics, which exalts the long and prosperous life as the highest value, is a form of spiritual slavery, even if the external controls are merely soft commercial and political incentives rather than chains and cages.

Throughout his writings, Mishima cultivated what can only be called an erotic relationship to death. By loving death, he no longer feared it. By ceasing to fear death, Mishima became free to lead his life, to take risks other men would not have taken. He could preserve his honor from the compromises of commerce and politics and the ravages of old age. He could enter and sustain the realm of freedom that is the basis of all high culture. By ceasing to fear death, Mishima struck a death-blow at the foundations of the modern world.

But all that could be dismissed as mere talk until Mishima actually put his words into action.

Did Mishima hope to encourage his followers to commit suicide? Of course not. He even tried to persuade Morita, his second, to live on. He wanted Morita and the rest of the Shield Society — and anyone who cared to imitate them — to prefer death to dishonor, to overcome their fear of death, and then to fight for the restoration of Japanese civilization.

I was once asked what the most honorable form of suicide is. My answer was to give up the pursuit of personal happiness and devote one’s life to the nationalist cause. Mishima’s death inspired countless people around the world to similar lifetimes of devotion. We remember his death so that it might inspire similar devotion today.

For further reading on Mishima, I wish to draw your attention to the following works on Counter-Currents:

By Mishima:

• “A Call to Arms.”
• “The Anti-Revolutionary Manifesto.”
• Mishima’s last words (Czech translation here)
• “Voices of the Heroic Spirits.”

About Mishima:

• Kerry Bolton, “Yukio Mishima” (Portuguese translation here).
• Jonathan Bowden, “Yukio Mishima.”
• Mark Dyal and Nick Fiorello, “Overcoming the Bourgeois Mind and Body” (Portuguese translation here).
• Alex Graham, “Beauty and Destruction in Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.”
• Alex Graham, “Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.”
• Alex Graham, “Mishima’s Life for Sale.”
• Nicholas Jeelvy and Rich Houck, “Mishima’s My Friend Hitler,” (podcast).
• Greg Johnson, Mishima’s English-Language Videos on YouTube.
• Greg Johnson, Guillaume Durocher, Ty E, and Fróði Midjord, “Poetry with a Splash of Blood,” (podcast).
• Emi Mann Kawaguchi, “Yukio Mishima and Richard Wagner: Art and Politics, or Love and Death.”
• Trevor Lynch, Review of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Spanish translation here).
• Trevor Lynch, Review of Mishima: The Last Debate.
• Trevor Lynch, Review of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.
• Christopher Pankhurst, “The Immortal Death of Yukio Mishima.”
• Quintilian, “Yukio Mishima’s My Friend Hitler.”
• Riki Rei, “In Defense of Mishima.”
• Riki Rei, “Naoki Inose’s Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima.”
• Turan, “Sun and Steel: The Tatenokai Phenomenon in Brief.”
• Dominique Venner, “Zen, the Samurai Ethos, and Death.”
• Romano Vulpitta, “Yukio Mishima, Yojuro Yasuda, and Fascism,” Part 1, Part 2 (Czech translation: Part 1, Part 2; Greek translation here).

Making substantial reference to Mishima:

• Buttercup Dew, “Hungry for Substance.”
• Nicholas Jeelvy, “Nicholas Jeelvy’s Reading List to Stimulate the Imagination.”
• Counter-Currents Radio Podcast no. 266, “Pulp Fiction.”

See also posts tagged Yukio Mishima for those that reference him in passing.

I strongly recommend the English-subtitled documentary Mishima: The Last Debate which includes archival footage, previously thought lost, of the famous debate between Mishima and members of the Left-wing student group Zenkyoto.

I also recommend Paul Schrader’s beautiful and moving dramatic portrait Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, now available in a stunning new edition from the Criterion Collection.

Many English translations of Mishima’s writings are available.

His novels can generally be divided into serious literary works and more popular ones. I recommend beginning with The Sound of Waves, a novel that transcends that distinction. It is one of his most naive, charming, and popular novels, yet it is also acclaimed as a literary masterpiece. Those drawn to his studies of nihilism should read The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (the latter is partly dramatized in Schrader’s Mishima). In recent years, two of Mishima’s popular works have been translated: Life for Sale, Star, and Beautiful Star. They are highly entertaining and also beautifully written.

The best collection of Mishima’s stage works is My Friend Hitler and Other Plays. (My Friend Hitler is about the Röhm purge.)

Mishima’s most important quasi-autobiographical work is Confessions of a Mask. I say “quasi” because Confessions is a novel, thus it would be a mistake to treat it as a straightforward autobiography. Sun and Steel is an essay on Mishima’s relationship to his own body, as well as a meditation on the relationship of art to reality and thought to action. Mishima’s philosophy of life and death is found in his Way of the Samurai, a commentary on the Hagakure.

Starting in the late 1950s, Mishima also dabbled in acting and directing. In 1966, he directed and starred in a 30-minute film adaptation of his short story “Patriotism,” about the ritual suicide of a military officer after a failed coup. (Also a theme of Mishima’s 1969 novel Runaway Horses.) After Mishima’s death, the film of Patriotism was withdrawn by his widow, but after she died, it was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection.

Mishima’s charismatic performance as a swaggering tough guy in Masumura Yasuzo’s entertaining 1960 gangster movie Afraid to Die is available on disc. He also appears as a human statue in Black Lizard, a movie so weird and wonderful that it is worth seeking out on VHS. (It highly deserves a disc release.) Black Lizard is based on a play by Mishima, but I was unable to determine how faithfully it follows the original.

There is very little good secondary literature on Mishima in English. The best I have read are Andrew Rankin’s Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist and Naoki Inose’s massive Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima.

Rankin’s Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist is a superbly researched and written account of Mishima’s largely untranslated writings on aesthetics, literature, and politics. These are interesting in their own right and also cast light on his novels and his political actions, culminating with his suicide.

Inose’s Persona is an exhaustively researched volume that will probably stand for a long time as the definitive biographical work on Mishima. It contains too much information for the casual reader, but for Mishima fans like me, it is essential reading, filled with detailed and tantalizing accounts of Mishima’s many untranslated writings — fiction and non-fiction — including his many political statements. For the first time, it is possible for people who do not speak Japanese to gain a clear and detailed picture of Mishima’s politics.

I can also recommend Henry Scott Stokes’ biography The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mishima: A Vision of the Void, and Roy Starrs’ Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima. Yourcenar and Starrs deal with Mishima in relation to philosophy and religion, and although the theses and arguments of both authors strike me as confused, they still manage to ferret out a lot of interesting information.