In memory of Yukio Mishima, on the anniversary of his death

Yukio Mishima, born Kimitake Hiraoka, embodies a unique Japanese aesthetic which, while rejecting many Western influences, especially political ones, is perhaps a unique example of aesthetic fusion between East and West.

A prolific artist, first of all a writer nominated for the Nobel Prize with "Confessions of a Mask", a strongly autobiographical novel from his youth, he was also a journalist, author of plays, actor and model, also because he dedicated himself to taking care of his body with extreme diligence after being rejected from the Japanese army's draft visit in 1945, which was a shame for him, but a fortune for the art.

Mishima hated communists and leftists and believed that the 1947 Japanese constitution, imposed by the Americans, was a searing humiliation for his country. His vision of politics was frankly right-wing, a road he followed throughout his life with great consistency. He had founded a kind of militia, the Tatenokai (Shield society) which, in his ideas, was to be the basis for a people's national guard for the defense of Japan from the commons. Mishima also did, as a volunteer, a short period in the self-defense forces just to understand how military life worked, but his proposal was never accepted.

On November 25, 1970, Mishima was 45 years old and had just finished writing his trilogy, The Sea of ​​Fertility. What he did suggests a suicide organized for a long time to leave a mark on history and overcome the decay of time. Mishima and four Tatenokai members, Masakatsu Morita, Masahiro Ogawa Masayoshi Koga, and Hiroyasu Koga used a pretext to visit Commander Kanetoshi Mashita at Camp Ichigaya, a military base in central Tokyo and headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces Eastern Command. They then barricaded the office and tied the commander to his chair. Mishima wore a white hachimaki sash with a red hinomaru circle in the center with the kanji “Reborn seven times to serve the country,” which was a reference to the last words of Kusunoki Masasue, the younger brother of 14th-century imperial loyalist samurai Kusunoki Masashige. died with his brother defending the Emperor. Mishima stepped out onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below him. His speech was intended to inspire a coup to restore the emperor's power, an absurd, impossible claim. He only succeeded in irritating the soldiers, and he was taunted, with taunts and the noise of helicopters obscuring some parts of his speech. In his speech, Mishima chastised the JSDF for its passive acceptance of a constitution that "denies (their) very existence" and extolled them: "Where is the spirit of the samurai?" Morita and Ogawa threw copies of the speech to the soldiers, but in reality Mishima only spoke for a few minutes.

Mishima then committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment associated with samurai. Morita had been instructed to act as Mishima's second (kaishakunin), cutting off his head with a sword at the end of the ritual to spare him unnecessary pain. However, Morita proved unable to complete his task, and after three failed attempts to sever Mishima's head, Koga had to step in and complete the cut.

Then Morita committed ritual suicide, despite Mishima's attempts to dissuade him, and Kouga again beheaded him. The other three comrades agreed to surrender, but Mishima, who knew the end of the story, had already arranged funds to pay their legal fees, so that they would not suffer from the story. the body was reassembled very well and was buried in the Tatenokai uniform.

The event, known in Japan as "the Mishima incident", did not diminish Mishima's literary fame. in 1988 the Mishima Literary Prize was established, while in 1999 the Yukio Mishima Literary Museum was opened. Currently the body of the writer is in the Tama cemetery in Tokyo and every year the Yukio Mishima Study Group holds a memorial service in his honor.

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The article In memory of Yukio Mishima, on the anniversary of his death comes from Scenari Economici .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/in-ricordo-di-yukio-mishima-nellanniversario-della-sua-morte/ on Fri, 25 Nov 2022 22:07:04 +0000.