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.
https://www.ubcpress.ca/glorify-the-empire
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.