The conundrum called Mishima Yukio

Showa 40 Born in the year of 1965

Reiwa 5th in the year of 2023.
It is an early Summer.

It was all started in
Wuhan,China in 2019.

I am reluctant to even spell the word,
because the introduction has became such a cliche.

We are finally reaching the point of the:
“wearing face-masks is your own choice” phase in Japan,

It is a historical phenominon
in the last three years
all the people in the world
have been on a same page.

I think it will take sometime
to look it back and grasp what was
acutually happned to us.

We were in some kind of a moratorium period.

It was officialky OK to be being dazed,
because we were forced to be stopped.

Meanwhile, like many others in this period,
I immersed myself into activities:

sorting out old pictures
practicing guitar,
taking a walk all over the City,
reuniting with a friend and
trying to untangle the old dispute,
intervewing people to find out the story of thier life.

---

Today, I am standing
in front of my Taiko drum set
with school children
to play some pieces toghether
in the Taiko orchetra
to celebrate the pre-opening
of the new school building in Kamiya-cho, Tokyo.

We are on the roof of still constructing
7th floor school building.
The space is looks like a balcony which
stick out from the high rise attached behind.

Arrival of the Ambassder and
the Secretary of the State has been delayed.
So we are waiting in the position then
being little ennuied I am looking up at the sky.
Sound of a Cessna plane flying avove us
and I see a beautiful blue sky in a middle of May.

Then I am recalling
the discriptions of the four kinds of skies
from the book I read recently.

The Four Skies between
Showa 20 1945 to Showa 45 1970

The first sky is discribed as he undertook
to help in shouldering a portable shrine
with a crowd of young men parade through
the streets at the local shrine festival.

“They were simply looking at the sky.
In their eyes there was no vision:
only the reflection of
the blue and absolute skies of early autumn..
Those blue skies, though,
were unusual skies such as
I might never see again in my life:
one moment strung up high aloft,
the next plunged to the depths;
constantly shifting, a strange compound
of lucidity and madness.”

The second sky
“….was in the summer of the defeat,
in the year 1945.
A relentless sun blazed down on
the lush grass of that summer
that lay on the borderline
between the war and the postwar period—
a borderline, in fact, that was nothing more
than a line of barbed wire entanglements,
half broken down, half buried in the summer weeds,
tilting in all directions.”

And another sky was in
a one early Summer on 25th of May,
probably somewhere between 1968 to 1970,

“I sensed in it an absolute rest for the spirit,
a beatification of the flesh.
Summer, white clouds, the empty blue of the sky
following the final lesson of the day,
and the touch of nostalgic sadness
tinging the glitter of sunlight filtering through the trees,
induced a sense of intoxication.”


And the last one was
the discription of the space,
when he was even went through
the white clouds and the blue sky
and looking down the Sun and the Earth
from the height of 45,000 feet.

“The takeoff of the F104 would be decisive.
The upper regions at 10,000 meters
that the old Zero fighters reached
in fifteen minutes would be reached
in a mere two minutes. “

“From thirty-five thousand feet and
a subsonic speed of mach 0.9,
we climbed with a slight vibration
through the speed of sound,
to mach 1.15, mach 1.2,
and so to mach 1.3 at
a height of forty-five thousand.”

“…the clouds far below,
the sea gleaming between the clouds,
even the setting sun, might well be events,…”

The book is titled 『Confession』
which was published in 2020 and it is contains
the interview between Mishima Yukio
and the late British translator John Bester
which apparently took place in February 1970,
nine months before Mishima took his own life
in Tokyo's Ichigaya district.

The conundrum called Mishima Yukio

I did’nt know much about
this world famouse writer.

One sleepless nigtht in the moratorium days,
I bumped into a snapshot of Mishima Yukio
while serching something on the internet.

He was standing with Kawabata Yasunari
Another famous author.
I was intrigued by the combination
of this two gentlenen toghether.
I didn’t know the author was
Misima’s mentor.

There are many more images
of Misima on the internet.
I saw a photo of him
in a suit with holding a cigarette in his hand,
I was impressed by how well build
and photogenic he was.

I saw an interview video of him
talking to a forign jounalist in English.

And in the documentatry I saw
“Misima versus the All-Campus Joint Struggle League
open debate” in1969 at
Tokyo University Komaba campus.
He was interacting with 1000 students audience
from on the stage in such a way
The forum is still remembered legendary.

the documentary was
closed by the comments
of the people who know him
as a friend,
as a fellow writer.
as a colleague.

He was like a super rock star.
I have never seen such a
charismatic Japanese public figure.

The famous portlait of him and his members
of Tateno-kai in their uniform.
That edgy image of him was giving off
a fragrance of taboo and until now
I have never read his book properly.

Once you are intreagued by something
the subject matter wolud
appeals to you more visibly.

One day I found the book
in a book cafe in Karuizawa, Nagano
which is a collection of letters
corresponding between
Mishima and Kawabata,

Letters used to be
such a normal communication tool
in our social life.
Yet so many of them were exchanged
bewtween two of them.

Mishima’s frankness and assiduity
towards Kawabata in those
correspondences shows
their close friendship and his personality.

My second encounter to his book was
in a Museum suvenier shop in Shizuoka
the book is titled
『Mishima Yukio Letter Class』
It is happned to be
another letter format story
but this one is a fictional.

The story is progressing by the
corresponding amongst
five people-two women and three men.

Intimacy, adversary, intentions,
spontaneous generations.

Each person exposing
their personality in their letters
as the story progress.

I was impressed by Misima’s
accurate human insights
and his English literacy
as one of the character
discribed bilingual.

As I have been reserching
about Mihima on and off
on the internet,
my curiosity is condensing into
one question:
why he did it the way he did it?

The books answering my question

After finish reading the letter story,
I was bumped into
a peculiar curio shop in the spring
during my trip to Ueda city in Nagano.
The displays of single cut records and
posters of J-pop stars in 80’s and
old magazines and books.

I bought local history books and
three books by and about
Mishima in the total of ¥3500

『Misima Yukio Incident』was published in 2020
by Bessatu-Takarajima editorial.

It is examine the incident of 25th November in 1970
commemotaring its 50th anniveary.

The contents goes by chronological order:
describing the era of Showa 45
the journalistic point of view
the forensic report
3survival Tateno-kai members testimonial court records
The Court Judges conclusive statement etc..

If the first book is the objective explantion of the incident,
『Confession』is literary the subjective one.
in this secobd book contains
the interview between Mishima Yukio
and the late British translator John Bester.

The interview audio tape was apparently
found about three years ago from
among a collection of tapes that
are banned from going on air
at the broadcaster's archives of TBS promotion division.

The book is also contains
『Sun and Steel』transleated by Jhon Bester
which was described by Mishima himself as:
“..a kind of hybrid between confession and criticism,
a subtly equivocal mode that one might call ‘confidential criticism’,
I see it as a twilight genre between
the night of confession and the daylight of criticism. “

I was lucky to found these three books
『Misima Yukio Incident』
『Confession』
『Sun and Steel』

Because now I have the antidote
to decode the conundrum.

Mishima told John Bester in the interview

“I am confident that my act is
more incomprehensible than my novel”

“If you don’t understand that’s fine,
if you want to comprehend then read 『Sun and Steel』
that is all I would say.”

Collage of Mishima Yukio
:his act and his chronology

So if you want to know,
you can find it in the books.

But for those who want to know
the summary of it.

Or more truthfully, I will summarize it
because of my strong desire to sort out
the things I found out from the books.

So to decode the conundrum,
I am going to make a collage out of it.

Taisho14 in the years of 1925.
Hiraoka Kimitake was born in Yotuya, Tokyo.
He lived with Showa era
so his age coincides with it.

In the interview he sounds relaxing.
He talks freely with Jhon Bester.
He cracked up about his name saying
“My name in kanji means literary
Plain hill and a public dignity..ha ha ha..!”

He was sickly as a child and
stayed mostly indoors with books
growing up an imaginative
and a precocious child.

He was recalling his childhood
“My composition teacher would often
show his displeasure with my work,
which was innocent of any words that
might be taken as corresponding to reality”

He was enrolled Gakushuin
Primary School at age six
his short tanka poem
and two haiku poem
were published on the school journal.

Showa 13 in the year of 1938
he wrote his first novel 『Sukanbou』

Showa16 in the year of 1941
He wrote his novel 『Hanazakari no Mori』
with his pen name Mishima Yukio
The U.S-Japan war started with
the Attack on Pearl Harbor.

Showa 19 on 27 April in the year of1944
During the final years of World War II,
Mishima received a draft notice
for the Imperial Japanese Army.

On16 May 1944,
He barely passed his conscription examination
with a less desirable rating of "second class" conscript.

Showa 19 on 9th September in the year of1944
Mishima graduated Gakushuin High School
at the top of the class,
and became a graduate representative.
Emperor Hirohito was present at
the graduation ceremony,
and Mishima later received a silver watch from
the Emperor at the Imperial Household Ministry.

Showa 20 on 10th February 1945
on convocation day he had a cold
during his medical check
and the young army doctor
misdiagnosed Mishima with tuberculosis,
declared him unfit for service,
and sent him home.

The day before his failed medical exam,
Mishima wrote a farewell message
to his family, ending with the words
"Long live the Emperor!"
(天皇陛下万歳, Tennō heika banzai)
and prepared clippings
of his hair and nails
to be kept as mementos by his parents.
The troops of the unit that
Mishima was supposed to have joined
were sent to the Philippines,
where most of them were killed.
Mishima's parents were ecstatic
that he did not have to go to war,
but Mishima's mood was harder to read;
Mishima's mother overheard him say
he wished he could have joined a
"Special Attack" (特攻, tokkō) unit.
Around that time, Mishima admired
kamikaze pilots and other "special attack" units
in letters to friends and private notes.

---

Quotes from 『Sun and Steel』

“If my self was my dwelling,
then my body resembled
an orchard that surrounded it.
One day, it occurred to me
to set about cultivating my orchard
for all I was worth.
For my purpose, I used sun and steel. “

“Unceasing sunlight and implements
fashioned of steel became
the chief elements in my husbandry.
Little by little, the orchard began to bear fruit,
and thoughts of the body came
to occupy a large part of my consciousness.”

---

This is welknown fact that
in1955, Mishima took up
weight training to overcome
his weak constitution,
and his strictly observed workout regimen
of three sessions per week was not disrupted
for the final 15 years of his life.
He later became very skilled (5th Dan) at kendo
(traditional Japanese swordsmanship),
and became 2nd Dan in battōjutsu,
and 1st Dan in karate.
In 1956, he tried boxing for a short period of time.

---

“When I examine closely my early childhood,
I realise that my memory of words
reaches back far farther than
my memory of the flesh.
In the average person, I imagine,
the body precedes language.
In my case, words came first of all;
then—belatedly, with
every appearance of
extreme reluctance,
and already clothed in concepts
—came the flesh.”

“Words are a medium that reduces reality
to abstraction for transmission to our reason,
and in their power to corrode reality
inevitably lurks the danger that the words
themselves will be corroded too.
It might be more appropriate, in fact,
to liken their action to that of
excess stomach fluids that
digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.”

“I should openly admit the existence
of reality and the body only in fields where
words had no part whatsoever;
thus reality and the body
became synonymous for me,
the objects, almost, of a kind of fetishism.

---

in the intervew with Jhon Bester
Mishima explains:
“The act can be seen therefor
it is harder to be comprehend.
On the other hand the literature
is an art of abstructive idea
so we use words as medium
to make people comprehend.
But, the act is like
this coffee pot right here for example,
this is incomprehesible,
because it won’t explain itself that
‘I am a coffee pot’
it is stays silent.
that is what the act is like , I think.”

---

“The groups of muscles that have become
virtually unnecessary in modern life,
though still a vital element of a man’s body,
are obviously pointless from
a practical point of view,
and building muscles are
as unnecessary as a classical education
is to the majority of practical men.
Muscles have gradually become something
akin to classical Greek.
To revive the dead language,
the discipline of the steel was required;
to change the silence of death
into the eloquence of life,
the aid of steel was essential.
The steel faithfully taught me
the correspondence between
the spirit and the body: thus feeble emotions,
it seemed to me, corresponded to flaccid muscles, “

“Yet, as I have already pointed out,
words for me came before the flesh,
so that intrepidity, dispassionateness, robustness,
and all those emblems of moral character
summed up by words, needed to manifest
themselves in outward, bodily tokens.”

“The romantic impulse that had formed
an undercurrent in me from boyhood on,
and that made sense only as
the destruction of classical perfection,
lay waiting within me.
Like a theme in an operatic overture
that is later destined
to occur throughout the whole work,
it laid down a definitive pattern for me
before I had achieved anything in practice.
Specifically, I cherished
a romantic impulse towards death,
yet at the same time I required
a strictly classical body as its vehicle;
a peculiar sense of destiny made me believe
that the reason why my romantic impulse
towards death remained unfulfilled in reality
was the immensely simple fact
that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications.
A powerful, tragic frame and
sculpturesque muscles were
indispensable in a romantically noble death.
Any confrontation between weak,
flabby flesh and death seemed
to me absurdly inappropriate.”

“Longing at eighteen for an early demise,
I felt myself unfitted for it.
I lacked, in short,
the muscles suitable for a dramatic death.
And it deeply offended my romantic pride
that it should be this unsuitability
that had permitted me to survive the war.”

“It is common experience that
no technique of action can become effective
until repeated practice has drummed it
into the unconscious areas of the mind.
What I was interested in, however,
was something slightly different.
On the one hand, my desire
to have pure experience of consciousness
was staked on the body-strength-action series,
while on the other hand my passion
for pure experience was staked
on the given moment when,
thanks to the reflex action of
the pre-trained subconscious,
the body put forth its highest skill.
And the only thing that truly attracted me
was the point at which these two
mutually opposed attempts coincided—
the point of contact, in other words,
at which the absolute value of consciousness
and the absolute value of the body
fitted exactly into each other.”

“Why should a man be associated
with beauty only through
a heroic, violent death ?
In ordinary life, society maintains
a careful surveillance to ensure
that men shall have no part in beauty;
physical beauty in the male,
when considered as an “object”
in itself without any
intermediate agent, is despised,…”

“It is this: a man must under normal circumstances
never permit his own objectivization;
he can only be objectified through the supreme action
—which is, I suppose, the moment of death,
the moment when, even without being seen,
the fiction of being seen and
the beauty of the object are permitted. “

“I discovered, then, that
the profoundest depths
of the imagination lay in death.
It is natural, perhaps, that quite apart from
the necessity to prepare defenses
against the encroachments of the imagination,
I should have conceived the idea of
turning the imagination that had
so long tormented me back on itself,
changing it into something that
I could use as a weapon for counterattack.”

”Much later, I realized that if
the psychological life of this
excessively decadent youth
had happened to be backed up
by strength and the will to fight,
it would have constituted a perfect analogy
with the life of the warrior.
It was an oddly exhilarating discovery. “

”To this, however, required the nurturing of the body,
of the strength and will to fight,
and the techniques to fight with.
Their development could be entrusted
to the same type of methods as
had once served to develop the imagination;
for were not the imagination and swordsmanship
the same insofar as they were techniques
nurtured by a familiarity with death ?
Both were techniques, moreover,
that led one closer and closer towards destruction
the more sensitive they became.”


”...Quite possibly, what I call happiness
may coincide with what others call
the moment of imminent danger.”

“I reasoned that if one wants
to identify seeing and existing,
the nature of the self-awareness should be
made as centripetal as possible.
If only one can direct the eye of self-awareness
so intently towards the interior and
the self that self-awareness
forgets the outer forms of existence,
then one can “exist” as surely as the “I” in Amiel’s Diary.

But this existence is of an odd kind,
like a transparent apple whose core is
fully visible from the outside;
and the only endorsement of
such existence lies in words.

It is the classical type of existence experienced
by the solitary, humanistic man of letters. . . .

But one also comes across a type of
self-awareness that concerns itself
exclusively with the form of things.

For this type of self-awareness,
the antinomy between seeing
and existing is decisive,

since it involves the question of
how the core of the apple can be seen
through the ordinary, red, opaque skin,
and also how the eye that looks
at that glossy red apple from the outside
can penetrate into the apple
and itself become the core.

The apple in this case, moreover,
must have a perfectly ordinary existence,
its color a healthy red.

To continue the metaphor,
let us picture a single, healthy apple.

This apple was not called into existence by words,
nor is it possible that the core should
be completely visible from the outside
like Amiel’s peculiar fruit.

The inside of the apple is naturally quite invisible.
Thus at the heart of that apple,
shut up within the flesh of the fruit,
the core lurks in its wan darkness,
tremblingly anxious to find some way
to reassure itself that it is a perfect apple.

The apple certainly exists,
but to the core this existence
as yet seems inadequate;
if words cannot endorse it,
then the only way to endorse it is with the eyes.

Indeed, for the core the only sure mode of existence
is to exist and to see at the same time.

There is only one method of solving this contradiction.

It is for a knife to be plunged deep into the apple
so that it is split open and
the core is exposed to the light

—to the same light, that is, as the surface skin.
Yet then the existence of
the cut apple falls into fragments;

the core of the apple
sacrifices existence for the sake of seeing.

Mishima Yukio and Showa 40’s

I was born im Showa 40 in the years of 1965.
So I always convert years with my age.
Like, if it is still in the era,
now it is in Showa 98.

I am 58 years old now.
I grew up learning about
the previous World war
from direct conversation
with my elder family members,
or with the people who
lived through the war in general,
or from books and movies
and various other cultual medium.
Yet, now I aknowledge my ignorance.

Mshima’s case as his
“memory of words reaches back
far farther than my memory of the flesh,
so the physical disciplines that
later became so necessary to my survival.”

As an average person,
the body precedes language.

So in my case may be as
“a person for whom the body has been
the only means of living launches into
a frantic attempt to acquire
an intellectual education
when her youth is on its deathbed.”

The post war genaration
of Showa 40 were
came right after the defeat and
the huge constitutional change in Japan

From the Imperialism to the Capitalism.
The Emperor’s suject has became the economic animal.
Virture was transfers from
a thrift to a dispensability
elder genaration was forced to
face 180 degree change of the national policy.

Our generation’s cynicism
was a universal attitude of youth rebellion,
and the attitue of apathy coud be
a convinient disguise for helplessness
to live in the society which was
under the rapid transformation.

My father was born in Showa 2
in the year of 1927 so
he was in the same generation
as Mishima.

My father was a Jazz Drummer
and his stage name was Eddie Iwata.
He was a one of those Jazz musician who was
started his music carrier at the Camp of
American Occupational Military Army.

And Mhisima’s two childrens are close to my age,
that made me feel a sense of affinity with him.

When I saw his documentary
without any particular bias,
I thought that his final act was may be
a part of his art as an playwriter.
And I found actually
some people perceived it as may be it was.

With his very strict sence of aesthetics,
and his fastidiousious nature and his stoicism
and dignity, and oviously, his fate as
being a war generation child
made himself a one of the only
artist called Mishima Yukio.

The life under the Second world War
must had been an abnormal circumstances,
and one of the collective setiment I hear
from the people who left behind as a war surviver,
is an apologetic feelings
towords those who died for the cause.

And the normal life in the peacetime
supposed to be the one should be cherised
yet I still hear the collective sentiment
of those who painfully acknowldege the fact
but missing the moment between
the life and the deth and its lyricism,
and despise our shallow spirituality
at the present peacetime in our society.


I once belatedly acknowledge the fact
by a casual comment of a news anchor
in some news show of MSNBC

that we are the Nation
which once had been “corrected”
its trajectry by the Allied Forces
because of our act during the previous war.

I was astonished how
the collective memory of the defeat
had been printed in to my brain
without even acknowledging about it.

And I was landed on the fact
that I am the part of the Nation
which I am not particullary
feel proud being a part of,

May be I have been
serching the residue of the dignity
in somewhat illusional and
the theatric beauty of Mishima.

He would have been
present well in the World of the year 2023
with his Universal manners
of the gentlrmanship
and his extra ordinally intelligence.

Yet in his book of
the ideal views of the World
has toally lacks the
discription of a women
as a fellow human being.

A word from Mishima’s dairy life

“I have my growing fear that I may act cowardly
when I have to make a choice of my life time
as a man to risk my own life
because of my growing attachement to my own child.

I am afraid that
I may compromising my desision
when I have to act to protect
my ideology because of
my growing attachement to my own child.

In the quiet night way back home
the street light reflect
the little shadow beween my wife and myself
that appearance of the shadow
astonish me though noting so astonishing
about that forming family is
a nature of a living creature,
yet this is a mystery of our life.

I was so moved by this profound reality and
I thought now I have to surrender.“

Mishima Yukio『Aout my children』

Egawa Hiroki, the assistant instructer
of Mishima and Tateno-kai members
Miritary training at JSDF
asked Mihima to name his first baby daughter.
Mishima recommended three possible names and
sent him a gift of pink and blue baby clothes
with his message,

“Congratulations on the birth of your
beautiful baby girl to love and spoil..

first child of your own is everything,
joy and suprises…
it’s almost like heavenly revelation.”

In the morning of 25th November
Showa 45 in the year of 1975
The day of self-determination,
Mishima commennted about his daughter
who is taking a class at the
Gakushuin Elementary School
as the car passing by on the way
to the Ichigaya
with other 4members of Tateno-kai.

The night before the incident,
Misima visited his parents
in their annexed house room
and had a quite short and simple
excange of the words with his mother.
his fahter Azusa recalled in his book;

“Yes, I am so tired tonight mother…
I want to go to bed soon.”

“Yes, you look tired indeed…,

you are working so hard recently…

lie down and get some rest."

“Yes, I will do that. Good night mother.”

Hiraoka Azusa 『My son-Mishima Yukio』

On 12th May Reiwa 5 in the year of 2023

Our guest the Ambassador Julian Longbottom
and secretary of the state for education
Gillian Keegan has finally arrived on the roof.

Our Taiko teacher Igarashi Tomoko is
a person filled with bundles of energy.

And she has been organizing her
Taiko School with her partner Sherry in last 26years.

She is delighted to welcome
two female officers from UK and hoping that
we also have more female politicians in Japan soon.

Our ceremonial piece is called 『着到』
It means to come to the point of arrival
it is appropriete title for the day.

The conundrum called Mishima Yukio