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Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) was one of the giants of Japanese letters as well as an outspoken Right-wing nationalist. Mishima shocked the world on November 25, 1970, when he and members of his private militia, the Tatenokai or Shield Society, took hostage the commander of the Japan Self-Defense Force’s Ichigaya Camp. Mishima then delivered a speech to the assembled soldiers and press, exhorting the Japanese to turn away from American-imposed consumerism back to their traditional aristocratic culture, which prized honor above life and comfort. (more…)
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David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is not just a great film, it is a nearly perfect one. Even better, it was recognized as such from the start by virtually everyone. The critics lionized it and continue to include it on their “best” lists. The movie business showered it with prizes. Bridge won seven Oscars, including best picture and best director. Audiences made it the biggest film of 1957 and a perennial favorite ever since. (more…)
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Spanish translation here
Yukio Mishima was one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. He has exercised an enduring influence on the post-World War II European and North American New Right. In commemoration of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to the following works on this website:
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Ferdinand Lindner, Altnordisches Julfest, from Die Gartenlaube magazine. 1880.
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Christmas is my favorite time of the year. From Christmas decorations to Christmas songs, I always get into the holiday spirit wherever my travels and adventures take me. Although I prefer spending Christmas with friends and family, I have spent a few holidays by myself in various countries. While I was never one to question (more…)
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In post-1945 Japan — as in most of the states that lost in World War II — American occupation brought about radical political and social changes. In the 1946 to 1948 Tokyo trial (similar to Nuremberg), several leaders of the war cabinet were sentenced to death or long prison terms. It was also stipulated in the constitution that Japan cannot have its own armed forces, only Jieitai (Japan Self Defense Forces), a small number of volunteers for self-defense purposes. (more…)
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It was fifty years ago today that Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s most celebrated men of letters and an ardent man of the Right, committed suicide at the age of forty-five. What happened, and what did it mean?
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). (more…)
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Spanish translation here
Yukio Mishima was one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. He has exercised an enduring influence on the post-World War II European and North American New Right. In commemoration of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to the following works on this website: (more…)
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It would be easy to make Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece Ikiru into something trite and hopeful — like an existential affirmation of life. But that wouldn’t be right. Despite the film’s title translating into English as “to live,” the film poignantly demonstrates how any real meaning life has is barely hanging by a thread. In fact, you would have to be a little crazy — or on death’s door — to act upon this meaning at all. You will be going against the grain, you see. Humanity is organized in such a way to impede meaning. (more…)
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Yukio Mishima’s 1963 novel The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is one of his darkest works. Set in post-War Yokohama, it is the story of Fusako Kuroda, a thirty-three-year-old widow who runs a boutique selling Western luxury goods, and her thirteen-year-old son Noboru Kuroda. (See Alex Graham’s discussion of the novel here.)
Fusako’s world is entirely feminine, bourgeois, modern, and Western. She is also deeply lonely. Then she meets Ryuji Tsukazaki, the second-mate on a steamship. (more…)
Mittie Maude Lena “M. M. L.” Gordon.
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During the tumult of the 1930s, there emerged a mass movement among American Negroes to separate from the USA and reestablish their roots in Africa. In contrast to the NAACP and the National Urban League, the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, aka Ethiopia Pacific Movement (EPM), did not receive sponsorship from Jacob Schiff, Lehman, Rockefeller, Carnegie, et al, but subsisted on nickels and dimes from its supporters. (more…)
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Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave was an exhibition of Hokusai’s works mounted by the British Museum in the summer of 2017. This ambitious event sought to contextualize Hokusai’s famous In the Hollow of The Wave, better known as “The Great Wave,” (more…)
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Like most Westerners, I got to know Akira Kurosawa through his classic samurai films: Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Kagemusha, and Ran. Thus I was surprised to discover that fully half of his thirty films are actually set in contemporary Japan over the stretch of Kurosawa’s long lifetime (1910–1998). High and Low (1963) is one of the best of these films, along with Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, and Ikiru. (more…)
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Yomawari: Night Alone is a survival horror videogame from Nippon Ichi Software, released in fall 2015 in Japan before being rapidly localized into English in 2016. It has enjoyed commercial success across multiple platforms (PC, Nintendo Switch, and PS Vita) and spawned a sequel, Midnight Shadows. The player character is a little girl with a red bow drawn in simple anime style; a sort of Minnie Mouse from a more mature world. (more…)
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Yukio Mishima, one of the Right’s most celebrated authors, took part in a debate at the University of Tokyo in 1969 with members of the radical Left-wing student group Zenkyoto. The debate was filmed, (more…)
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Translated by Riki Rei
Translator’s note: Mishima penned this essay titled “Anti-Revolutionary Manifesto” in early 1969, almost two years before his suicide, at the peak of Leftist protests, demonstrations, and riots, which were sweeping not just across Japan, but throughout the entire Western world. (more…)
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Translated by Riki Rei.
Translator’s Note:
This text, entitled A Call to Arms, was left on the spot when Yukio Mishima committed seppuku in the General’s office of the East Japan Division of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force at the Ichigaya military base, Tokyo, on November 25, 1970. (more…)
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Translated by Riki Rei.
To the members of Tatenokai [Shield Society]:
Among you there are both those who have stayed with us consistently since the founding of our organization and those of the fifth class who have been with us for only nine months. Yet as far as I’m concerned, regardless of the degrees of your involvement and experience, we are all comrades of a shared identity who have gone beyond the difference of ages (more…)
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It’s February 14th, and love is in the air. What better way to soundtrack today’s romantic escapades than with Alessandra Mussolini — the granddaughter of Il Duce himself — and her sultry, Japanese-released city-pop record, Amore?
Released in 1982 exclusively for the Japanese market, (more…)
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I have read Andrew Joyce’s article “Against Mishima” at The Occidental Observer with great interest and mixed feelings. I admire Dr. Joyce’s writings on the Jewish question, but to be candid, his critique of Mishima is on the whole tendentious and shallow. It is also overly emphatic on some topics while neglecting or downplaying other equally, if not more, important ones. (more…)
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We can’t say we weren’t warned. Around the time of the First World War, when Europe ruled nearly every part of the Earth, Theodore Lothrop Stoddard wrote a series of highly regarded books and articles about the global racial situation that argued European global rule was coming unglued. Stoddard, a Harvard-educated scholar, was also pro-white figure; he was consequently memory-holed by the establishment after World War II and his death in 1950. It’s precisely because of this we need to continue listening to his words.
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It was with mixed feelings that I finished reading the highly articulate and skillfully presented review of the film Midway by Robert Hampton. I had similar feelings about the article by Anton.
On the one hand, I heartily agree with their sensible views on the film’s refreshing depictions of American soldiers fighting for a White country, the comparison between Midway and The Patriot, and the rightful place and role of women with White Nationalist and traditionalist overtones. (more…)
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Spanish translation here
Yukio Mishima was one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. He has exercised an enduring influence on the post-World War II European and North American New Right. In commemoration of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to the following works on this website:
By Mishima:
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It is now approaching the end of the fall semester here in the US, and a teacher’s job becomes busy in preparation for final exams and other academic work. I definitely fall in this category at the US institution where I am temporarily employed. (more…)
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Yukio Mishima
Life for Sale
Translated by Stephen Dodd
London: Penguin Books, 2019
This past year has seen three new English translations of novels by Yukio Mishima: The Frolic of the Beasts, Star, and now Life for Sale, a pulpy, stylish novel that offers an incisive satire of post-war Japanese society. (more…)
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Translated by Guillaume Durocher
Translator’s Note:
This text is drawn from Dominique Venner, Un samouraï d’Occident: Le Bréviaire des insoumis (Paris: Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2013), 101-15.. I have previously reviewed this work at The Occidental Observer.
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Spanish translation here
Yukio Mishima was one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. (more…)
Jared Taylor and Grégoire Canlorbe
— Paris, September 2018
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Samuel Jared Taylor is a Japan-born American white advocate. He is the founder and editor of the online magazine American Renaissance. Taylor is also the president of American Renaissance’s parent organization, New Century Foundation.
Grégoire Canlorbe: With the benefit of hindsight, what was the Golden Age of race relations in the USA? May it have been segregation? (more…)
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Kiki’s Delivery Service
Written & directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Studio Ghibli, 1989
Kiki’s Delivery Service is a fantasy anime film from the world-famous Studio Ghibli, (more…)
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Author’s Note:
As we’ve come to appreciate with each passing year, World War Two was the most evil manifestation in human history. No other conflict even comes close in matching that war for its sweeping, sadistic and unspeakable crimes. Mass murder of surrendering soldiers, mass starvation of helpless civilians, mass rape of women and children, (more…)
Envy’s Tetsuya Fukagawa
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Opening remarks
οὐδαμοῦ γὰρ κινοῦνται μουσικῆς τρόποι ἄνευ πολιτικῶν νόμων τῶν μεγίστων (Plato, Republic 424c)
“The forms of music are not changed without the most significant socio-political mores and laws being changed with them.” So writes Plato in his chef-d’œuvre. This insight is borne out by history, and perhaps never more so than in our own time, the post-war twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (more…)
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