On November 25, 1970, one of Japan’s greatest modern writers, Yukio Mishima, cut open his midsection with a sword at an army base in Tokyo in accordance with the precepts of the medieval ceremony of “seppuku” (ritual suicide). Mishima, accompanied by four members of his paramilitary association, had called on the base’s soldiers to overthrow what he considered to be the corrupt Japanese government so that the Emperor could be reinstated to his rightful place of status and power. In response, the soldiers mercilessly heckled him, making it clear what they thought of his idea. Hence, the author’s dramatic gesture of death; it was a gesture of loyalty and devotion to a venerated way of life that had almost been forgotten.
Mishima, whose real name was Kimitake Hiraoka, took his own life as a way of paying homage to the “samurai” heritage—the “samurai” were the warrior class that dominated Japan for centuries—the standards of which he believed were being eclipsed by the Westernization and modernization of his country. He bemoaned the harm that consumer and corporate capitalism, both derivatives of Westernization, were causing and how it had permeated through to the farthest reaches of Japanese society. Mishima once predicted that Japan, as the result of pursuing a Western-style capitalist ethos, “will disappear” and that it would “become inorganic, empty, neutral-tinted; it will grow wealthy and astute.”
Mishima, the author of more than one hundred novels, essays, poems, and plays, was heavily-influenced by the 18th century text known as the “Hagakure.” The Hagakure was a spiritual and functional guidebook for samurai warriors. It emphasized extreme discipline, an appreciation of both the cultural and martial arts, and being prepared at any moment for an honorable death, a death that is remembered for a warrior’s uncompromising devotion to the values of pride, bravery, austerity, selflessness, and fidelity. As Mishima said about the Hagakure, it is “the womb from which my writing is born.”
In his final novel, “The Decay of the Angel,” Mishima depicts themes that visualize the decomposition of the samurai tradition and the eventual collapse of the traditional cultural and moral order in Japan. In theatrical fashion, as he was wont to do, Mishima chose to make himself into a public spectacle by his act of formal suicide. The act demonstrated his respect and strict observance of Japan’s warrior heritage as well as his heartfelt objection to Japanese society’s spiraling descent into unbridled materialism and complacency.
For Mishima, his appalling tour de force was the culmination of a lifetime of flamboyance, nonconformity, pathos, and romanticism. It was also a final, dreadful ode to a cultural and philosophical inheritance that primarily owed its survival to the cinematic and literary arts. As gifted a writer as he was, Mishima was in denial about the extent that the Japanese people felt indebted to their traditions. The unqualified rejection of his impassioned appeal on that fateful November day in 1970 revealed the unbearable truth to his face: Japan’s moorings to tradition and to its autonomous sense of national identity were being inexorably cast off in the name of progress and prosperity.
It is telling of Mishima’s delusionary idealism that he tried to convince his Japanese brethren to turn back the clock to a nobler period in their country’s history when in fact, their hearts and minds were set on the future. Blinded by his zeal and dedication to the past, Mishima would painfully discover that there was a severe disconnect between his high-minded ideals and what a new Japan in the throes of modernity was aspiring to.
Few Japanese at the start of the 1970’s harbored genuine desires to return to pre-modern aspects of their nation’s history. Mishima had obviously hoped otherwise, but it was an undeniable fact that even well-ahead of his suicide, Japan already personified the very country he feared it was becoming.
Mishima may have fallen into what turned out to be nothing more than a shallow well of nostalgia for a purer, more wholesome, more patriotic age in Japan’s history. But there is something to be said for the meaning behind his literal portrayal of self-destruction.
It is important to bear in mind that Mishima’s anti-materialist grievances were hardly the idiosyncratic expressions of a raving and isolated individual. While not necessarily anti-Western or anti-modern, Mishima was just one voice in a long historical continuum in which Japanese activists, intellectuals, politicians, soldiers, writers, and artists had railed against, to varying degrees, what they branded as Western/capitalist decadence and degeneracy in Japanese society. His self-immolation, despite the skepticism of respected Japanologists like Ian Buruma, was illustrative of Japan’s interminable struggle between adhering to its traditional narratives and responding affirmatively to the allure and benefits of modern civilization.
It was once easy to think that the outcome of this struggle had been decided. Japan’s rise as a global economic power seemed to confirm that. Not even the bursting of its economic bubble in the late 1990s could make anyone see otherwise. Now however, the world is entering an economic decline that is unprecedented in history. In the wake of this decline, Japan recently made the unsettling announcement that its economy was weakening at its fastest pace since the 1970s.
History has shown us that with economic instability comes the potential for political upheaval. When these types of conditions arise, people become vulnerable to all sorts of toxic ideologies. A burgeoning ethnocentricism and xenophobia can come into play in the national psyche, leading the desperate and disillusioned to contemplate gratuitous, if not entirely irrational, ideas and solutions. Japan has been down this road before during the tumultuous 1930’s and we all know what happened next.
Of course, there is no need for undue alarm. The re-emergence of an extreme form of nationalism, for example, that can take root in wide sections of the Japanese polity are highly-remote at this stage. At a certain point in a society’s prolonged bout with anxiety and insecurity though, such ostensibly-antiquated perspectives can mutate into something relevant and legitimizing. With the deep socio-economic uncertainty enveloping Japan, who can self-assuredly profess that obsolete discourses like those of Mishima’s are beyond being prophetic?
ALLEN GABORRO
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