Philip Glass' soundtrack to the 80's film Mishima has become one of my favourite albums. The "Mishima VI, Closing" piece is some of his best work.
The author's final observation, "Perhaps we need a Mishima to shock us out of our complacency." is something he should be careful about wishing for. (Though the idea of Ian McEwan storming a military base was very funny, I thought Stephen Fry would be even better equipped. "...ah, well, right then, moving along..." )
What makes Mishima so dangerous today is that he produced beautiful art and culture from which the downstream political conclusions were unavoidable. This is one side effect of good art. Political theory itself is a kind of vulgar pseudo intellectual haggling compared to aesthetic truths and their self evidence that great art demonstrates. As an example from another of today's threads, a Chopin mazurka does more for Polish national identity than any explanation could do. Writing itself is an inferior (but necessary) form because it only describes in a narrow dimension instead of demonstrates over multiple senses. This is what I think Misihma also understood. I only read the Sea of Fertility books (in English some years ago) and they're demanding, but this muscular and humane expression of aesthetic truth and even divine power is the seed for the survival of the human spirit. A revolt against becoming the bland, homogenized "last man," may very well originate from the sentiments Mishima was able to bring words and life to.
I'd highly recommend the film you mention, Paul Schrader's Mishima[1] to anyone, not just those interested in the author, though of course especially them. It's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen, and Philip Glass' music (which I agree is some of his best work) just makes it that much better.
Also you don't find a lot of far right artists now, Mishima's works and his political stand is a really interesting combination.
Just watched the Mishima film a couple weeks ago, the Cinematography awed me the most, the director clearly studied a ton of Japanese cinema (I think he's going for that style), the theatre scenes are easily one of my top scenes of all time. The music on the other hand I think it's a little bit over-scored, like a lot of other Philip Glass' scores they sound amazing stand-alone but not always fit to the films, just personal taste..
The only thing different about him was that he came to his fascism in a kitsch fashion after it had otherwise been broadly repudiated for its destructive consequences (largely for psycho-sexual reasons, he was decapitated in his “coup” attempt by his young lover).
But in prewar Japan, there were plenty of avant-garde artists who turned fascist as it subsumed the country. In the postwar period, they were rightfully turned on by their fellow citizens who had watched their country razed to the ground and families destroyed by proponents of an irrational nihilism. Their recuperation only began in earnest when US intelligence services began purging leftists from the cultural sector and funding proponents of “traditional” Japanese culture in literature and the arts in the 1950s-60s. I know that Kawabata Yasunari received CIA funding through cultural front organizations and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mishima did as well (they were close friends and shared work with each other). All of this was intended to combat the otherwise widely popular emergence of leftist culture in the post-occupation period.
> What makes Mishima so dangerous today is that he produced beautiful art and culture from which the downstream political conclusions were unavoidable.
This is strange to me. I can see a line between the kind of characters young Mishima constructed (extremely perceptive in limited ways, weird, [sometimes literally] impotent, and prone to mixing shame and violence and adoration) and the pretty basic understanding I have of the political ideas of the older Mishima. But the political ideas hardly seem "unavoidable". It's certainly plausible to me that somebody (apparently) traumatized by childhood weakness and confused identity would take up right-wing politics. It's also plausible to me that they would take up bodybuilding (check), realize that physical strength wasn't totally the problem (not check?), and, I dunno, go see a therapist or something.
I guess I see the eventual politics as one natural way all that could have played out. But to me the root themes of Mishima's work aren't intrinsically political. This may also be biased because I've only read Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which Wikipedia tells me pre-date his political writings, in the former case by quite a while.
Some people go to therapists, some people form paramilitary cults to a divine monarchy, stage coups, accept failure with ritual suicide, and become immortal legends. Different strokes for sure.
So here's the thing: it's fairly clear that Mishima did not "die for his cause", or in fact have any expectation that his thoroughly half-assed coup would succeed. For one, there was no plan whatsoever for what they would have done next had the troops they addressed actually joined the putative rebellion.
Mishima had precisely one objective: to die like his own ideal of a warrior, at the peak of his physical prowess. And I know that sounds weird, but if you read his books, every single one harps on this theme almost obsessively, in particular his final "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy. He was born a sickly misfit, but he spent a good portion of his adult life bodybuilding and practicing martial arts to perfect his body, so he could die the perfect death. Fetishistic? Absolutely. Political? Not really.
> it's fairly clear that Mishima did not "die for his cause", or in fact have any expectation that his thoroughly half-assed coup would succeed... Political? Not really.
These are two separate things. I agree Mishima did not have any expectation his coup would succeed (at least not in any immediate sense), and was not in any sense an effective militia commander. But that doesn't mean he didn't die for his cause, nor that his cause wasn't political.
Mishima's aesthetic program is to attempt to fuse all these sometimes-conflicting things - anti-colonialism, conservative politics, "the Japanese spirit", homeroticism, his artistic method and particular output - into a singularity. "Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood."
Fetishistic? Absolutely. Political? Also absolutely.
For background, see the attempted coup of 1936[1], and the Imperial Way Faction.[2] Those were more serious attempts at a coup along much the same lines.
1970 was a bit late to be pushing "Glory or Death".
I think I was 12 or 13 when I stumbled upon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Till this day is easily in my top 10 favourite books. And oddly enough almost 20 years later the same copy is sitting right besides me on the shelf. I am very interested in getting a copy in another language and reading it just to see how I feel about it(sadly Japanese is out of the question): I've been surprised how different books feel in different languages. On the subject of Mishima, his biography really shocked me when I first read it. Most notably how the book and his life ended - incredibly similar, yet incredibly different. It's really hard to describe it but for anyone who hasn't read the book, I highly recommend it.
The conclusion made in this article resonates with a point made by George Orwell in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf that has never ceased to fascinate me:
"Also [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."
Bingo. In the language of economists and political theoreticians they discovered that the people attached radically different weights along their hyperbolically discounted Pareto frontier, i.e. that their optimization criteria were non-uniform -> highly lumpy.
Military parades as entertainment, perceiving national strength more vital than ease and comfort, living space out East more vital than peace, and many more examples attest to the societal consciousness back then.
And of course since Hitler et al wanted to upset the status quo as quickly as possible they would have realized that focusing on these areas yield exponential returns on investment. Or at least vaguely tried to in the case of Mishima.
I think the point that he was making is that America and much of Europe like to imagine wars as faraway struggles that we do our best to avoid thinking about at home, while Hitler made militarization the national pastime. Compare the Boy Scouts with the Hitlerjugend, for instance.
It’s not that the Allied nations were at the time less militaristic (although they were, of course, not also committing mechanized genocide against the Jewish people), but they didn’t conceptualize it as a form of entertainment like the Nazis did.
Mishima's late-life militarism and his death tend to overshadow his early work. Both "Confessions of a Mask" and "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" are masterpieces, and you can see the raw impulses that motivated him, before he sublimated them to a political agenda.
I agree, and I was disappointed that none of these two masterpieces was mentioned in the article. My personal favorite is "Confession of a mask" for its ambiguous feelings.
On the literary side, the article does mention the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy where the second volume is the most political, with a surprising depiction of an idealistic coup that cannot succeed. But the quality of this tetralogy clearly goes down with each volume.
There's a beautiful song by Owen Pallett (might be known for his string arrangements for Arcade Fire, or for writing the music for the movie Her) about Mishima:
Mishima is unfortunately pretty popular in the alt-rightish kinds of circles too (one of the few articles I could find about him in English were published on Quilette, for instance), but don't let that colour your impression too much. There's worlds of difference between the kind of nationalism and militarist creed that Mishima was espousing, and whatever people latch onto his work. (Which is not to say that the appropriation is not at least in part understandable.)
Nevertheless, I think Mishima is best interpreted completely on his own terms, as he essentially gave a blueprint for his life in his work - and vice versa. His personal life story and the themes he engages are both equally as fascinating and deeply intertwined, and I personally feel there's lots of beautiful and unique insights about the sorts of questions that are timeless.
I can only recommend Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (curiously not mentioned in this article.) It's obviously a rather poetic/movie-style retelling of Mishima's work and story, and I did go into it rather sceptical, seeing as its context is rather removed from Mishima's, but it actually holds together really well, and I never felt that at any point the movie did not give the material the time and depth it deserved. Check it out if the article piqued your interest.
Yes I'm sure Mishima would have loved to see his own country flooded with migrants. When you think about it, Mishima was totally a liberal ally, not like those other right-wingers. /s
>In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
I'm not aware of any left-leaning attempts to recuperate his image, but sure, if someone really claims that they're lying. But any adoption of his ideology into the modern alt-right, IDW, or nationalist populist movements currently in vogue are also firmly recuperation. Mishima was absolutely right-wing, but also would find no common ground with e.g. Quilette (at least nominally an extremely pro-Enlightenment, pro-capitalist, pro-West line), the materialist and populist aspects of Trumpism, or the crassness of the alt-right.
A quote from Spring Snow comes to mind:
"Your slow-witted friends—with their sentimentality, their vicious narrow-mindedness that condemns as effeminate anyone who is not like themselves, their harassment of the underclassmen, their fanatical worship of General Nogi... you with all your sensitivity will be seen cheek-by-jowl with these people when they stop to think about our times in years to come. You see, this is the easiest way to establish the essence of our era — to take the lowest common denominator. Once the churning water has settled to a calm surface, you can see the rainbow oil slick floating there. And that’s the way it will be. After we’re all dead, it will be easy to analyze us and isolate our basic elements for everyone to see. And of course this essence, the thought that is the foundation of our era, will be considered quite benighted a hundred years from now. And you and I have no way of escaping the verdict, no way to prove that we didn’t share the discredited views of our contemporaries. And what standard will history apply to that outlook? What do you think? The thoughts of the geniuses of our age? Of great men? Not at all. Those who come after us and decide what was in our minds will adopt the criterion of the uncritical thought patterns of your friends on the kendo team. In other words, they’ll seize upon the most primitive and popular credos of our day. You see every era has always been characterized solely in terms of such idiocies."
This is just a lazy attempt at character assassination. A Japanese guy who killed himself in 1970 is a fascist? Only if you completely redefine what words mean. "Fascism" in its modern usage means "person whose right-leaning political views I don't like". Completely ahistorical and intellectually bankrupt form of argument.
On the contrary, your reaction is some kneejerk response influenced by a perception of overuse of the word in modern politics. Mishima is unapologetically a fascist; much of the Japanese right was, some still even is.
> A Japanese guy who killed himself in 1970 is a fascist?
A Japanese guy who took over a government building to agitate for a sublimation of individuality and a return to an imperial ethnostate?
Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.
The Futurists dreamed of writing so well, and this is from his worst book by far!
I don't know if there is a formal term for the concept, but it seems like there is a quality of skilled authorship where an author's own prose impresses themselves to the degree they believe their own selectively edited metaphorically enriched version of their voice over than their actual, humble I-might-fart-my-tooth-is-sore base reality. They get gobsmacked by their own writer's voice and then their personality morphs to some monster. History has pivotal personalities that seem to fit this pattern of moderately intelligent authors being gobsmacked by the power of editorship, which causes them to elevate their personality into Uberman Insanity.
Maybe it's a vast over-simplification as the article notes, but you cannot get away from the fact that what Mishima did was carry out a right-wing reactionary attempt to incite a military coup against a democratically elected government over what was essentially a culture war.
The kind of person who looks romantically at that disgusts me. we need a Mishima? By all means, be the first to spill your guts and call for a violent military overthrow because radical violence is the answer to the culture-war not going your way. I'm sure the Nazis will be far less willing than the Paris Commune to hijack Zoom, Netflix, Uber Eats and future products of Big Data and AI to keep you singing the party's tune. The only kind of people who look romantically at that kind of violence are the ones who feel it will never touch them, who are so safe they can't imagine the suffering. I'm sure the author feels happy giving Nouveau-Mishima the thumbs up because he tacitly thinks he'll be on the last flight out to watch the fireworks from the safety of a Paris cafe.
Lets say the 'shock' against this 'Last Man' isn't a call from the author for violence and political revolution because the Culture War isn't breaking his way. What's the Nouveau-Mishima supposed to do here? Besides some old man grumbling about "them d*mn kids and their nebulous and scary AI" it's not really identified what exactly we're being complacent in. I'm afraid this feels like more angry impotent pot-stirring mixed with a bit of rehabilitation.
The conservative's "Last Man" seems to come and go every century unabated, and with it the reactionary conservative backlash that oddly only ever seems to seek to turn back the clock a decade or two. We're always so arrogant in thinking that the present is so different than the past.
The sentiment that the world will ever be devoid of struggle to me is naive. The fear of the "fall of struggle" is like fear of the "rise of productivity". We all thought that the rise in productivity would mean less work and thus laziness; instead productivity is sky-high and we're all working ourselves to death. More productivity just means more opportunity for work. Likewise, People are naturally tuned to find struggle and risk, and they will redefine their selves and situations until they have it. Free of our old burdens, we'll just find new vaster ones. If you need the Noble Savage stuff to create art, wisdom, or whatever other product your spoiled mind think society has to produce to have 'worth', it's gonna be there, I promise.
I believe calling the Japanese government of that era "democratically elected" is a bit of a stretch if you consider that the exact same party stayed in power from the mid-fifties to the mid-nineties [1]
For a long while after the war, Japanese politics were essentially controlled by the west, something Mishima and many like him - quite understandbly - resented deeply.
Both you and the parent are correct however. The LDP was a wholesale construction by the US, including being proved massive financing and intelligence operations conducted against their opponents. But it was also comprised of former war criminals and members of the fascist regime that led the country into the war that Mishima glorified in the first place.
Having read most of his books and a few biographies, the animating factors behind his politics were a sadism derived from years of abuse at the hands of his family and a self-hatred driven by the homophobia of his time and his failure to be conscripted. There’s very little well-though out critique of any of Japan’s political circumstances in his work. Instead, it’s largely just an appeal to theatricism and violence that he thought would rid him of these feeling of shame.
As I scan the comments, you're one of the few talking sense.
I'm a serious literature head. Mishima lives in a world that creates itself and then tries to impose that desired world on reality, dressing the entire essay in narrative poetry, like a ninja assassin he seeds poisonous concepts disguised as flowers in his readers heads. But their mental soil has none of the fertility of his mind, so they die in his fans, but his fans have fallen in love with his narrative poetry and that is what they cling.
Ideologically, politically and aesthetically Mishima was clearly a dead end, but I’ve always found him of minor interest because his aesthetic was so clearly Westernized in a way that earlier strains of Japanese fascism weren’t. The campy, macho-hysterical aesthetic elements that have been present in western far-right movements from D’Annunzio to Trump weren’t really present in the prewar Japanese military government, but Mishima was really almost their apotheosis. It’s kind of ironic - rather than being a throwback to a pure strain of Japanese masculine identity, he was really a syncretist.
Upvoting because although I disagree strongly with "dead end" (something more like "closed world", maybe), this is a critical aspect of Mishima. His policy was thoroughly anti-Western but his ideology was heavily influenced by German philosophy and he had many personal and professional contacts with westerners.
Mishima is among the first to embody his conception of Yamato-damashii in the same way Ta-Nehisi Coates labeled Donald Trump the US's "first white president" - not literally the first, but the first who needed to frame it explicitly in antithesis.
The author's final observation, "Perhaps we need a Mishima to shock us out of our complacency." is something he should be careful about wishing for. (Though the idea of Ian McEwan storming a military base was very funny, I thought Stephen Fry would be even better equipped. "...ah, well, right then, moving along..." )
What makes Mishima so dangerous today is that he produced beautiful art and culture from which the downstream political conclusions were unavoidable. This is one side effect of good art. Political theory itself is a kind of vulgar pseudo intellectual haggling compared to aesthetic truths and their self evidence that great art demonstrates. As an example from another of today's threads, a Chopin mazurka does more for Polish national identity than any explanation could do. Writing itself is an inferior (but necessary) form because it only describes in a narrow dimension instead of demonstrates over multiple senses. This is what I think Misihma also understood. I only read the Sea of Fertility books (in English some years ago) and they're demanding, but this muscular and humane expression of aesthetic truth and even divine power is the seed for the survival of the human spirit. A revolt against becoming the bland, homogenized "last man," may very well originate from the sentiments Mishima was able to bring words and life to.