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Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) was one of the giants of Japanese letters as well as an outspoken Right-wing nationalist. Mishima shocked the world on November 25, 1970, when he and members of his private militia, the Tatenokai or Shield Society, took hostage the commander of the Japan Self-Defense Force’s Ichigaya Camp. Mishima then delivered a speech to the assembled soldiers and press, exhorting the Japanese to turn away from American-imposed consumerism back to their traditional aristocratic culture, which prized honor above life and comfort. Then, to show that he really meant it, Mishima committed ritual suicide along with one of his followers, Masako Morita.
Mishima: The Last Debate, directed by Keisuke Toyoshima, focuses on an event that took place on May 13, 1969: Mishima’s debate with the radical student protest group, the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee or Zenkyoto, which had mounted violent protests against the government, the educational system, and the American occupiers. Interestingly enough, Zenkyoto was anti-communist as well as anti-capitalist and anti-American. They drew more inspiration from phenomenology and existentialism than from Marxism.
Mishima despised Marxism and probably would not have debated communists. But Zenkyoto’s third positionist stance overlapped significantly with his own Right-wing nationalism. Thus he accepted the invitation to debate in the hope of winning over some of the students. This was not a Quixotic hope, given that the Shield Society consisted mostly of college students.
The debate took place in Lecture Hall 900 of the University of Tokyo in front of an audience of 1,000 including Mishima’s Tatenokai security detail. The event lasted two hours and was filmed by the broadcaster TBS. The footage was long thought lost. When it was rediscovered, it was given to Toyoshima to create a documentary, which runs for 1 hour, 51 minutes and incorporates 45 minutes of debate footage plus contemporary news footage of student unrest and recent interviews with debate participants and eyewitnesses, as well as academics and two prominent novelists. The novelists are Mishima’s friend Jakucho Setouchi, a Buddhist nun who was 97 years old at the time of the interview, and Keiichiro Hirano, an outspoken admirer of Mishima. The film is fundamentally respectful of Mishima and all other participants in the debate. The documentary premiered in Japan in late 2020, and only now has a version subtitled in English leaked onto the internet.
Mishima’s performance in the debate is masterful. Dressed in black polo and white slacks, he is conspicuously fitter and more stylish—and even more youthful—than the students, who are half his age but often look frumpy, slovenly, and defensive. Mishima is remarkably diplomatic and respectful in dealing with the students, even when they are rude and abrasive. He is relaxed throughout: smoking, laughing, and cracking jokes with the audience. He seeks to find common ground and then bring the students around to his way of thinking.
Mishima could win on charisma alone, but his arguments are even more impressive. He knows his phenomenology and existentialism better than the students yet keeps his remarks firmly grounded while his interlocutors often float away in abstractions. At the 29-minute mark, Mishima answers a question about the status of the “other” in his thought that is the high point of the film. He begins by saying that he hates Jean-Paul Sartre—probably because he was a communist—then explains Sartre’s phenomenology of the obscene as objectification in Being and Nothingness—bringing the house down with a joke about the Prime Minister—before arguing that non-objectifying relationships with others are fraught with the potential for enmity and violence, which of course give rise to the political. He states that when he wished to move away from a literature that merely objectified others, he had to choose an enemy, which for him is communism. It is a rather deft transition from abstract philosophy to concrete Rightist politics.
There’s a good deal of back and forth between Mishima and a hippy actor and director named Masahiko Akuta, who shows up with his infant daughter in his arms. Akuta is often quite muddle-headed and overly abstract. He frequently comes off as a phony. But Mishima patiently tries to interpret Akuta’s remarks and respond to them. Akuta is also quite rude at times, but Mishima never takes umbrage.
When Akuta brings his arguments down to earth, it is usually in the form of accusations premised on goofy cosmopolitan pieties. “You are nothing without Japan,” he asserts, to which Mishima replies by inventing the “yes” meme in 1969: “That’s me.” When Akuta accuses Mishima of being unable to transcend being Japanese, Mishima says, “That’s okay.” As Akuta waxes cosmopolitan, Mishima just responds, “Ah so,” holds out the microphone, and lets Akuta dig himself into a deeper hole.
Mishima defends his Japanese identity as simply a fact, as a destiny that cannot be avoided. His only choice in the matter is to own up to it or not. In Heidegger’s idiom, being Japanese is Mishima’s “thrownness,” and owning up to that fact is “authenticity.” By contrast, Akuta’s claim that one can transcend one’s nationality is inauthenticity: phoniness. We do not create our identities, nor can we recreate them, but try telling that to an actor. Mishima is quite comfortable with philosophical abstractions, but being a novelist, he is also masterful at making them concrete. At one point, he tells the audience that if they don’t know what it means to be Japanese, they need to go abroad for a spell.
Mishima makes frequent reference to the emperor, telling the students that he would have joined their movement if they had mentioned the emperor just once. At one point, he states that the students are wrong to think the emperor is “bourgeois.” The bourgeois ethos places life and comfort above all else, whereas the aristocratic ethos embodied by the emperor puts honor above life and comfort. Mishima recounts how the emperor presided over the graduation ceremony of his elite high school, remaining as rigid as a statue for three hours. Mishima wished to communicate that there is an aristocratic critique of bourgeois society from above, not just the Marxist critique from below.
The documentary ends with Mishima’s suicide, which includes actual footage from Mishima’s final speech plus the announcement that he and Morita had killed themselves. I did not know that this footage existed, and although it was brief, I found it surprisingly moving. I hope it will be the seed of its own documentary. Many of the soldiers who heard Mishima are alive today. I would like to know their thoughts after more than fifty years.
I was also quite amazed to see interviews with three members of the Shield Society, all of them in their 70s, as well as to learn that they still meet every November 25th to honor Mishima and Morita. As one would expect, they are a very dignified lot.
Several things are remarkable about Mishima’s debate. First, it is carried on at a very high level of abstraction, with remarkable earnestness. Today’s student radicals are inane and infantile by comparison. Second, Mishima’s performance is impressive in both substance and style. Third, it is astonishing that such a meeting took place at all, although in the 1960s, George Lincoln Rockwell was invited to speak on American university campuses. Such events would never happen in academia today. If they were scheduled in the first place, they would rapidly be shut down by angry mobs.
At the beginning of the debate, Mishima says he is there to test whether words can still bridge the gap between opposed political camps. It was possible at the University of Tokyo in 1969. It scarcely seems possible today, but the documentary itself proves that it is. When Toyoshima was offered the project, he had a one-sided and negative image of Mishima. Thus when he viewed the footage, he was shocked at Mishima’s graciousness, humor, and fair-mindedness. I think he tried to emulate these qualities in the film, with great success, since it is scrupulously decent and respectful in its portrayal of all parties. Mishima: The Last Debate is an excellent documentary. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in Mishima, Japanese culture, and radical politics where the extremes really can meet from time to time.
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An interesting read, Trevor. I’m still divided on Mishima as an artist and as a person. For the former, from what I have read, it is poor existentialism which doesn’t go far enough in its thoughts to stand out from the other texts of the period. And for the latter, I still find Andrew Joyce’s essay on him provocative and insightful and one of the few I come back to now and again. I liked Schrader’s film when I saw it years ago, but it is only a film (albeit a pretty fitting one for Yukio).
I’d have to give him another go and may watch this to see if I missed something about him, but by gut feeling I don’t think I have.
Speaking of Schrader, have you ever thought of reviewing Affliction? Talk about the downtrodden working class, Nick Nolte spends his entire life by being pushed by his ex-wife (she turning his own child against him), his supposed friends, and even his father. Great stuff, I wonder if Priss Factor (the best commenter of your reviews) has an opinion on it.
It is great that you found this work and are promoting it. Mishima is certainly an interesting but troublesome figure: and one of the troublesome aspects of him is that he is too readily perceived by his opponents in a pre-packaged, superficial way — his thinking is more complicated than his enemies would like to credit, hence he often comes off as a cartoon character instead of the urbane, serious thinker that he was. I think he did himself and his thought a great disservice by committing seppuku, an action that was very easy to misunderstand, and which was exploited cartoonishly in a way which he should have anticipated. For sheer comical levels of expertise alloyed with sincerity, I would have loved to see a conversation between Mishima and Bobby Fischer.
Personally I think that for all his seriousness, he was very naive about Japan’s place in the world, and he couldn’t really process it. I prefer Tanizaki Junichiro and Oe Kenzaburo for a more complex and rounded conception of what was going on there.
From a literary (not an intellectual) view, the only thing I actually like from Mishima is “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea” (I think Nihongo-de, the title is something like “Gogo no eiko” which is untranslatable, hence the zany but colorful title Eigo-de.) It actually works as both a novel and as a diatribe, but I prefer the novel aspect.
Where can this film be seen?
Schrader’s film is arty gimcrack. It’s contrived and lifeless. And the actor Ken Ogata, though a very fine actor, looks nothing like Mishima. Worst of all, it is humorless whereas Mishima was a charming figure all his life.
That said, KMG’s high marks for the film are nicely presented.
Video Link
Speaking of Schrader, one of his most interesting works is PATTY HEARST. Cinematic without the artiness.
The problem with literature is so much is lost in translation. Especially true of poetry but also of literary art and slangy popular fiction. (It’s hard to imagine appreciating CATCHER IN THE RYE in another language. That is so American.) Mishima was considered a prose master, so I’m guessing a lot was lost in translation.
Mishima has been much suppressed in Japan, but he’s been a haunting presence, not least for the Left. Japan’s most celebrated film-maker since the 60s, Nagisa Oshima, though associated with the radical left, made his two greatest films in the shadows of Mishima-ism: MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE and GOHATTO(Taboo), both of which delve into martial culture and homosexuality. Especially GOHATTO could have been a work by Mishima himself. Oshima’s IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES is somewhat like Mishima’s more perverse works.
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What sets Mishima apart from much of the Western Right(closely linked with Christian moralism) is the penchant for perversity and decadence, the sado-masochistic thing. Not my cup of tea though. I prefer the world of Kurosawa, humanism with national honor.
Kenzaburo Oe, who eventually won the Nobel Prize(much coveted by Mishima despite his increasing anti-Westernism), wrote a scathing yet somewhat empathetic satire of Mishima.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_He_Himself_Shall_Wipe_My_Tears_Away
https://www.dropbox.com/s/npwzq67pqirdzrl/Mishima.The.Last.Debate.2020.720p.WEB-DL.AC35.1.H.264.mkv?dl=0
Some Mishima-related stuff.
https://www.eastasian.ucsb.edu/a-reluctant-translator-reflections-from-john-nathan/
http://goytalk.com/mishima-political-struggle-as-spiritual-struggle/
http://www.cosmoetica.com/B1005-DES757.htm
John Nathan, the Jewish translator, had a huge falling out with Mishima and once dismissed his ritual suicide as an act of vanity. But later, pondering the problems facing modern Japan, he grew more empathetic(if not outright sympathetic) of what Mishima was aiming at. That there was something truly soulless and sick about modern materialist Japan.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-618-13894-4
Today, Japan, along with the ‘tigers’ are nearly over. They are plastic toon lands that robotically copy and imitate all the inanities of the West.
Mishima is one of those interesting cases, like Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Arguably, writing is the least manly of the arts. Jane Austen could do it as well as any man. And most male authors just write and are known for their books. But a handful of writers created public personas, mystiques. Usually, they tended to exaggerate their manly qualities, like Hemingway with hunting and fishing. And Mailer with war and violence. Some authors gained fame via political commitment. Mishima was one of those.
Boy, I never considered that Oe’s novella “He Himself” was a direct swipe at Mishima. Oe grew up in an entire generation that thought like that, he was massively traumatized by it, that’s what informs most of his early work. So I always thought of it as a generalization, but to think of it as a direct hit piece at Mishima is an interesting thing to contemplate. I guess you’d need to see it in the original, since Oe and Mishima had very different prose styles, but they get homogenized in translation.
Did Oe ever say that out loud?
What is a “non-objectifying relationship”?
Someone has been skipping gibberish classes again!
And now to disembowel myself honorably to own the libs…
What is that philosophy jibberjabber? “Non-objectifying” is “fraught”, eh.
You mama am fraught.
Boy, was that a botched affair. Mishima idealized a pure death ritual, but the pain overcame him and he hunched over. Morita, squeamish with fear and rather weak of muscle, swiped with the sword several times but failed to behead Mishima. Another guy stepped into the finish the job. Then, it was Morita’s turn. He was so stricken with horror that he didn’t even sink the blade into his abdomen. He merely scratched his stomach before being beheaded.
This is what was most unforgivable about Mishima’s final act. If he’d committed ritual suicide on his own, okay. But he persuaded a naive country boy to follow along. Of course, the young man, star-struck with Mishima’s cult, said yes. In theory, it seemed so honorable and patriotic. But in practice, when Morita was face to face with horror, he was just a scared puppy who barely scratched his abdomen and lost his head for an idea he was too simple-minded and young to understand.
However one regards Mishima’s act, as noble or nutty, it would have been acceptable if it only sealed his fate. But to involve a young man who had a whole life ahead of him in the scheme, that was a terrible thing to do. This is where Honor Culture can be crazy. Honor demanded that Morita obey. It meant certain death in the service of an obsession of an older man of higher status and prestige. If Morita had sense, he would have said No. But he couldn’t because of Honor.
In the humanist war films of post-war period by Masaki Kobayashi, theory crumbles in the face of practice. Young Japanese who pledge to fight to the end and die for honor are stricken with fear when the Russian tanks roll in. Hubris of theory is met with nemesis of practice. All those speak so highly of honor never met horror face to face. It’s like John Milius pontificating about the glory of war without having gone anywhere near, like Oliver Stone has.
Mishima sought to live life like performance art. He even made a short film called PATRIOTISM depicting his idea of a perfect death. But when push comes to shove, life is messy and chaotic. It doesn’t conform to choreography. In this way, Mishima’s end was more tragicomic than tragic.
As Kawabata said, what a waste. At the very least, he should have left Morita out of it.
Maybe it had something to do with Sartre being an ugly weakling who only wrote. Mishima the homo-narcissist-fascist had a revulsion for ugliness and weakness. He hit the gym because he didn’t want to be yet another bookish writer who was all mind and no muscle.
Also, Mishima’s animating spirit was iconography whereas Sartre was driven by ideology. For all his knowledge, literary prowess, and intellect, what moved Mishima was was the sense of Japan, its myths and beauty, the ‘spiritual’ connection between the people and nature. Its ghosts. Something of this can be found in SPIRITED AWAY and PRINCESS MONONOKE by Miyazaki.
In contrast, Sartre was all about ideology. That said, Sartre wasn’t without romantic notions of his own. He called Che Guevara the perfect man. Che had the features of a thinker and man of action. He was theorist and warrior. He was handsome and dashing. He was strategic but also passionate. And he was willing to put his life on the line for the revolution. Unlike most communist leaders who remained in their offices and handed out orders, Che went out with the men and fought with them and shared their fate in victory and defeat. Like Strelnikov in DR. ZHIVAGO.
Given that both the Japanese Left and Mishima were anti-American, why couldn’t they see eye-to-eye? Because the Japanese radical left was committed to destroying Japan. They hated the US as propping up the ‘nationalist’ forces inside Japan. In contrast, Mishima hated the US for propping up the merchant class, the false ‘nationalists’ who sold Japan down the river for thirty pieces of silver.
Japanese Left wasn’t like the Vietnamese Communists who were genuine patriots and nationalists. Japanese Left was into Japanese War Guilt and Japanese Shame and mocked everything Japanese.
Japanese Left was actually very bourgeois. Like their counterparts in Europe and America, they were the product of prosperity. Middle class kids who could play at revolution in college in the postwar boom.
Also, Mishima was an aesthete and obsessed with beauty. Beauty in art and expression was the product of aristocracy, social or natural. In contrast, communism sought to level everything and disparaged of the cult of beauty as narcissistic. Communists took this too far, especially in China where all men and women wore blue Mao suits. On the other hand, excessive narcissism leads to decadence and degeneracy as evinced all over the modern world today. Narcissism goes from appreciation of beauty to the insistence that everything be celebrated as equally beautiful.
So, we have fat black women and trannies in fashion ads today.
While Mishima was right to be disdainful of far left’s war on beauty and natural hierarchy, he was overly disdainful of humanism. Beauty-obsessed, he dreaded growing old and withered. It was almost as if he wanted to be a sculpture made of marble than a man made of flesh.
The concept of Emperor goes way back, way before bourgeois modernity came to Japan. But Hirohito was a rather bourgeois person. He led a very bourgeois life with his personal hobbies. He was a rather humdrum person.
Also, the fact that he didn’t kill himself but instead served himself up to be used by MacArthur as the Tokyo Shoeshine Boy of the Occupation shows that he wasn’t much into honor either. Now, one can argue that Hirohito did the right thing for the good of the nation. But if he really had honor, he should have killed himself in defeat.
This was what pissed off Kenzaburo Oe about Hirohito. Japanese were told by the leadership that the whole nation would fight to the very end. They would live, fight, and die together. It was only right that so many Japanese die for the Emperor. But when defeat loomed, what did Hirohito do? He had so many die for him but he saved his own skin by scurrying to MacArthur as the new shogun of Japan. He was made into Jappy Happy version of Charlie Chaplin, a yellow monkey boy of the Occupation. Did all those people die for him just so he could save his own skin and play this bourgeois role as the absent-minded emperor who isn’t really guilty of war crimes because he was misled by others? All bosh.
And if being bourgeois is defined as comfort and security, Mishima sure had a lot of that before his death. He made a lot of money writing pulp for women’s magazines. He basked in celebrity, built himself a fancy mansion. He lived in relative luxury. He had a certain decadent side.
To be sure, the traditional bourgeois wasn’t about leisure and comfort but work ethic and earned privilege. In contrast, aristocracy was about unearned inherited privilege. One was born aristocratic and enjoyed comfort simply by blood. Bourgeoisie worked to earn their keep. Aristocrats didn’t, which is why so many of them became useless playboys and borrowed lots of money from Jews to throw more parties and collect more useless art like the clowns in BARRY LYNDON.
The Stranglers musical tribute to Yukio Mishima. Death and night and blood (Yukio).
Starts at 4:41.
Video Link
Right-wing age 17 student Otoya Yamaguchi, assassinating Japan’s communist-friendly Socialist Party chairman Inejiro Asanuma with a samurai sword, at a televised public event on 12 October 1960
I won’t address Mishima, Japan, Emperor … Just:
Actually- both are right. No one exists outside of a national culture, as de Maistre had noted: Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.
So, universality & transcendence are embodied in a national culture. If one is all about particular trappings of a culture, he falls into parochialism; if he forcefully wants to “transcend” it, he ends up in mental derangement & sterility.
As Aristotle knew almost 2500 years ago: Man is a social being.
The more-understandable version is 1985’s Paul Schrader film which was narrated by Roy Schneider.
Nobody here seems to really know much about the film industry but that is was a well-received film back in 1985.
Schrader had a spotty career & nobody liked any film he did besides American Gigolo with Richard Gere & in the end of his sad career he was making films with James Deen & a drug-ravaged Lohan but at his peak after Cat People he did do an interesting bio on Mishima.
…. Third, it is astonishing that such a meeting took place at all, although in the 1960s, George Lincoln Rockwell was invited to speak on American university campuses. Such events would never happen in academia today. If they were scheduled in the first place, they would rapidly be shut down by angry mobs….
Japanese-ness is complicated due to the various influences that made Japan. Japan took Confucianism from China, Buddhism from India(by way of China and Korea), and various other influences from abroad. And Japan was the first non-white nation to industrialize in a modern way. Japanese began to regard themselves as honorary whites and exhibited the same kind of prejudice against other Asians(while at the same time claiming to protect fellow Asians from whites).
So much of Mishima’s literary influences are from the West. His house was neo-classical with Greek sculptures. He hired a French guy to design the suits for the Shield Society. Japan didn’t merely borrow Western technology but designs, aesthetics, and attitudes.
So, Mishima was far from purely Japanese. And yet, despite all those changes, he sensed a connective thread all throughout Japanese history and culture. Something that remained constant and made Japanese unique. This is why he valued the Emperor. He was too modern and secular to believe in the literal divinity of the Emperor. But it was through the Emperor that all the various strands of Japan came together. Emperor was the ‘intersectionality’. Emperor was the bridge between pre-literate mythic Japan and the rise of civilization. After all, the Emperor was said to be descended from the gods before mankind arrived on the scene. So, through the Emperor, Japanese had a connection to distant myths. Shinto, a native religion of Japan, also had a link with the Emperor as the Emperor wasn’t merely a monarch over mankind. His lineage had been one with the very nature of Japan. Shintoism is a kind of animism that believes everything is sacred and alive in nature. So, the Emperor stands for Japan before the Japanese even existed and is tune with the spirits of nature. He represents a deep connection for the Japanese. And despite the coming and goings of various dynasties, the one constant in Japanese History was the Imperial line, even though Emperors didn’t wield much power. Even as feudal Japan made way for Modern Japan, the divinity of the Imperial Throne was the one constant. The samurai caste was abolished, but all Japanese, elites and masses, were bound through the Emperor. So, even though Japanese took much from India, China, and the West, they had something unique and sacred through the worship of the Emperor. Mishima was a very modern man, very Westernized. Despite his romanticization of samurai reactionaries, the actual reactionaires in the 19th century would have rejected him as a gaijin-imitating traitor. Still, what the 19th century reactionaries and Mishima had in common was the devotion to the Emperor. Japanese might wear different clothes and adopt different social and political systems, BUT they were unified under the Emperor. There was also a racial element as Japanese regarded themselves as linked to the Emperor. As the Emperor was divine, the blood of Japanese also had an element of divinity. It was the power of myth. Jews have the Covenant, and Mishima thought what made Japanese uniquely Japanese was their connection to the wholly Japanese Emperor.
This is why what the Americans did to the Emperor seemed so degrading to people like Mishima. Emperor just became a man. Now, American justification was that such irrational worship of the Emperor led Japan to war and destruction, but this is mostly bogus. While it’s true that Japanese culture made the Japanese more fanatical in war, Japan’s war-mongering and imperialism had nothing to do with Emperor Worship. After all, Japan had Emperor worship as long as they could remember, but they hardly fought wars with other Asian nations. The one big attack on Korea/China under Hideoyoshi was an anomaly, and he was encouraged by Westerners who supplied him with the latest guns. And the invasion had nothing to do with the Emperor. And the main reason why Modern Japan got into the imperialist game was because the US and UK forced it to open and held a gun to its head. Japan looked at the humiliation of China and figured it too had to become an imperial power to compete with the West. Japanese Imperialism was an imitation of British and American Imperialism. But of course, Americans were loathe to take any responsibility over why Modern Japan embarked on imperialism and war, and instead cooked up some nonsense about how the irrational cult of the Emperor exploited by the military class led to all that mess.
In a way, what happened to Japan was akin to what happens to the priest in Shusaku Endo’s SILENCE. Japanese authorities, in order to stamp out Christianity, cause great agony for the believers and emotionally pressure the Catholic priest to step on the image of Jesus.
Likewise, US demanded unconditional surrender, which meant that Japan wouldn’t merely lose the war physically but surrender itself spiritually. US threatened to nuke many more cities unless Japan surrendered. Japan was soul-murdered, which was a terrible thing to do. But then, Jews have now soul-murdered the Christian West by defiling churches with globo-homo and BLM idolatry.
Today, only Jews, blacks, and homos are sacred. Both white westerners and Japanese are soulless cucks and tards. To the Japanese, the Emperor is just some silly old guy. To many whites, George Floyd and some homo are holier than Jesus. Whites and Japanese are now into jungle fever and Afro-Colonization of White Wombs. Japanese elites and business highlight mulatto Japanese, the products of Japanese women going with black men. Sumo has been taken over by Mongolians and foreigners. How long before blacks also take over sumo? And Japanese culture is all video games and teen garbage.
Given all these factors, Mishima, for all his faults(and he had many glaring ones), was a noble and heroic figure of Modern Japan.
Pauline Kael didn’t think too much of Schrader as director, and they had a falling out. She helped him early in his career, but he didn’t take her criticism kindly. (They later made up.)
http://paulschrader.org/articles/pdf/2001-FCKael.pdf
But Kael did like COMFORT OF STRANGERS and thought Schrader finally graduated into genuine director-hood with that one.
Video Link
Japan had a sense of distinctiveness from other East Asian countries long before they industrialized. Under the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan as the only country in East Asia refused to pay tribute to China, and as a consequence had no formal diplomatic or trade relationship with China. Japan refused to do because they refused to acknowledge China as being superior to Japan (unlike other East Asian countries).
Very interesting. This helps to explain to people why mostly rational people have seemingly irrational attachments to an institution. For example, I dislike the British queen but I have taken the time to understand the English attachment to this institution and I can understand why they are this way. Likewise, personally I am not religious and consider myself an ultra-rationalist and naturalist, but I deeply respect the Orthodox Church. Likewise, outsiders should understand the religious, cultural and national role the Orthodox Church plays in the two Hellenic states of Greece and Cyprus – the advice of mostly US-sponsored NGOs is not welcome.
Comfort of strangers was just really weird. Why does he slash the guy’s throat at the end? Made no sense to me.
Thanks for your comments on Mishima. Thanks to Trev for the review.
Have either of you read Confessions of a Mask, in which Mishima describes his inner fantasy life? He fantasized about killing and cooking and eating young men constantly. I think his seppuku was an autoerotic reification of his twisted inner fantasy life. Agree that the inclusion of a dumb bumpkin was the most atrocious aspect.
Which is to say that he didn’t do it for any higher purpose—it was something he wanted to do and looked for an excuse.
I have no plans to review Affliction.
Judging from your comment, I think Mishima: The Last Debate would be a waste of your time.
If Mishima is misunderstood and misrepresented, those are not his problems. They are the problems of his audience, which can be cleared up simply by trying harder to see the truth or being more honest in representing it.
I don’t think seppuku is easy to misunderstand. The whole point of spilling one’s guts is as proof of sincerity.
Treating a person as a person, not as a thing.
Confessions of a Mask is an exploration of nihilism in the form of a novel. When you read Crime and Punishment, did you conclude that Dostoevsky was a murderer?
The Ettrick Shepard was my guide. It’s true.
Oh, I thought it was autobiographical. I didn’t realize it was a novel. Is it not supposed to be an honest portrayal of himself? I mean why else would one write something like that? I actually discarded it about halfway through as boring. Would have done so sooner had I realized it was fiction.
Perhaps hate is less objectifying than capitalist ambivalence, but it is also not the result of a thorough understanding.
I have no idea what you are talking about or how it relates to the film or my review.
From your review:
He states that when he wished to move away from a literature that merely objectified others, he had to choose an enemy, which for him is communism. It is a rather deft transition from abstract philosophy to concrete Rightist politics.
This seems like the most important determining decision for Mishima’s outlook, once he realised that he was too sensitive to merely objectify others.
What way out is there but death once you have decided to define yourself by your enemy? Mishima’s story is a beautiful tragedy.
Yes. He relates of the emergence of childhood sexuality with a pic of St. Sebastian.
It haunted him to the end. Sado-masco-nihilo-spiritualism.
https://influx.themissive.com/post/35151646416/yukio-mishima
=narcissist egomaniac!!
As a true psychological portrait of himself, confessions of a mask would be interesting scientifically, but as pure fiction it would be schlocky and tiresome. It seems American Psycho derives from this, as a vulgarization of confessions. Or does Brett Easton Ellis share Mishima’s psychological peculiarities? Could this be a psychological type prevalent in Japan with all the hideous tortures we hear of and excruciating seppukus having an erotic genesis? More data is needed.
I have heard from some Japanese dude long time back that the Japanese Imperial Family is now secretly Left Winged!!! The Americans did some weird shit there behind the scenes.
Not truly leftist as true leftism is more dead than true rightism.
Today, ‘leftist’ means globo-homo Negrolatry nonsense pushed by Jewish supremacist capitalists.
Japan is on America’s leash, and America is on Jewish leash.
Even when Japan or any other Asian nation takes the lead, it is as a dog walking in front its master. Though out in front, it always heads in the direction desired by the master.
Difference was Mishima did believe in high culture and took his works seriously(the literary ones).
Ellis is just a sensationalist and clown. I tried to read LESS THAN ZERO but it was just trash.
The movie is trash too but at least has a story one can follow.
Trevor, thanks for the insightful article. However, the link has been taken down. Can you provide another?
This movie anticipated the ‘woke’ military.
Video Link
“I don’t think seppuku is easy to misunderstand.”
Well I suppose it all depends on whom one is addressing with such a gesture, and what they think they understand. Or at the very least whom one THINKS one is talking to, as opposed to whom one is actually talking to.
“The whole point of spilling one’s guts is as proof of sincerity.”
There are all sorts of different flavors of sincerity. Yoshida Shoin would like to have a word with you.
Iron Maiden did as well. Bruce Dickinson was a champion fencer, apparently inspired by Mishima’s fanatical commitment to the sword. https://youtu.be/2ZPWbkR2BbE
Video Link
Gosh, if only Mishima had encountered Betty Page as a young man, the dreck we would have been spared………
Off the topic of Japan, there was an excellent debate at Cambridge University in England: “This House Believes Israel is a Rogue State”. The first speaker, Ben White, nicely demolishes most of the arguments of the “is” supporters, before they even say anything. 2m10s to 12m15s, but the whole thing is good.
The articles you have linked are worth reading. Thanks.
The link says it’s been deleted .
Suppression du docu…
Inaudible, désolée.
Have the Japanese given up their American-imposed consumerism and reverted back to their traditional aristocratic culture? I don’t think so!
Be as it may:
1. a country can never succeed if it literally follows intellectuals and various scheme- makers. Life is richer.
2. Mishima’s, and his opponents’ claims are discarded by history and reality (technology, “unseen forces” etc.)
Sooner or later, any ideology either becomes a world-view or self-destructs. Or both.
Mashima is, of course, correct. You can only love the local. Your local.
Hirohito was caught between a rock and a hard place, thus condemning him for actions beyond his control is infantile.
Japan had been attempting to surrender for more than a year before the stage managed puppet theatre on the USS Missouri was forced on the Japanese.
The US war mongers who had forced war on Japan by terminating oil supplies and stopping their use of international finance, much as the US is doing with Iran today, had decided to drop three atomic bombs on innocent civilian populations just to see the results.
Everyone knew, including the Japanese, by January 1944, that the Japanese had lost the war and everyone within the upper echelons of national Establishments knew the Japanese had offered to surrender numerous times.
The Jews that ran the US and most of the Allies wanted Japanese blood just as they had German blood, from the bombing that was planned for Dresden and a hundred other towns and cities. Only this time they wanted to fry the innocents in an atomic atrocity.
Hirohito did what he did because he had no other option. Where as the subject of this article was driven by a misplaced sense of honour that was closer to vanity than anything else.
Suicide is suicide no matter whether you jump in front of a fast moving train or stupidly stick yourself with a sharp metal blade.
Suicide is vanity. ‘Here, look at me’ is what the suicider is saying. ‘Aren’t I honourable’, falsely claims the Harakiri proponent. ‘Aren’t I forced to do this’, says the depressive.
The act of suicide is vanity in excess. Choosing life, especially to benefit others, is a much greater sacrifice, far more honourable and far less selfish than suicide.
I mentioned that Jewish comedy ( at least I thought it was a comedy) “Marathon Man” on another thread. “Szell” a former bad Notsee comes to America to do what Notsees did in the mid 1970s which was apparently hunt some Jew played by Dustin Hoffman. The most hilarious scene is when good ole “Larry” Olivier who plays the evil “Szell” is recognized by some Jewess on a crowded NYC street. Think of the odds?? haha. We are talking a man who gave himself a Terry Bradshaw haircut at the beginning to go incognito and a man who has aged 30 years being INSTANTLY recognized by a Super Jewess with remarkable powers.”Szell,” “Szell,” the man is a beast oy vey. The geeked out Jewess runs out and attempts to follow “Szell” only to be crunched by a taxi. But “Szell” is not home free, not by a long shot, another old Super Jew with superpowers recognizes the former Notsee. Good ole “Szell” had some sort of Batman gimmick, a blade that shoots out of his sleeve and slices the Jew guy’s throat and escapes for the time being. Maybe review this movie sometime. Yet another Hollywood Notsee Classic.
That’s not what the text actually says, though. It says choosing an enemy is a necessary consequence of rejecting objectification, not that it is equivalent to it or that it is how you must define yourself. Even necessity strikes me as probable hyperbole on the author’s part and is better read as something like rejecting objectification strongly conduces to choosing an enemy.
Said another way, Communism has lots of enemies, including Capitalism.
It may say that it is “necessary”, but people are always confusing their “necessary” for a universal rule.
It obviously isn’t “necessary” in an objective sense, because plenty of people manage to engage in non-objectifying relations, without picking an enemy.
In fact, having an enemy is engaging in objectifying relations. It is just that hate is less objectifying than cold ambivalence, but it is hardly understanding.
It might be hyperbole, but once you pick an enemy you inevitably begin to define yourself against them, rather than defining yourself as you. This is necessary for many, many people, but it is a distortion that can lead to some pretty extreme confusion.
Perhaps it even leads to the type of confusion, which could cause you to disembowel yourself, while having your friend hack off your head, to zero productive effect?
Could you repost that link the files have been deleted
In Fukusaku Kenji’s “Black Lizard”, Mishima DOES play a “human sculpture” in the Black Lizard’s ocean-going personal art gallery, where she preserves her captives frozen in time in lovely poses in their beauty of perfection forever.
I always lumped Mishima with Camus.
By the way, Priss, I’m somewhat awestruck by your comments in this entire thread. Really fine.
It’s becoming depressingly clear that movies such as the one you’re talking about–and yes, I too remember the improbable scene of the street recognition–are the best Jews can do. They really believe that that stuff is high art. Were it not for Jews exposure to the canon of high European Art, just think how mediocre their output would be. Truly, we have civilized them. And yet, in spite of our best efforts, they still persist in producing the most idiotic schmaltz and predictable low-brow crap. For the longest time, I wrote off the inferior quality of their art as being the byproduct of its being crude propaganda. But now, as I say, it is becoming nightmarishly clear that what we see is the best they’ve got. Sharing a nation-space with them is like being locked in a cell with a crazy person.
I’m confused: the first speaker lists reasons for maintaining why Israel IS a rogue state, nicely substantiating rather than demolishing arguments for that position. Did you type “is” while actually intending “isn’t”?
I have read very little by Mishima. I think I watched the short movie he made. Japanese culture is interesting, although definitely non-Western (but with lots of Western influence).
Japan is in a strange moment now. It is interesting to watch Japanese films from the 60s (Ozu, Kurosawa, Matsumoto, others) and see how already then the country was very much Westernized or Americanized (at least in superficial aspects); I thought it was more traditional then, but it seems the 60s was a watershed moment in most of the world, Japan included.
Perhaps feminism hasn’t been as bad in Japan as in the West, and I think they have a different view of homosexuality there (not sure), but things such as the end of the traditional arranged or semi-arranged marriages have been a disaster for the country. Now most people don’t marry, and few have children. They are obsessed with manga and anime but have little in terms of a view to the future. In some ways, they are better than the West, but not by much.
Much is wrong with this, just a few points.
This is only true among a small sector of the samurai and nobility from the late 18th to mid-19th centuries, and only generally true from the very late 19th to the mid-20th century.
The very existence of an emperor was largely forgotten during many periods of the shogunates.
Whether it was a ‘line’ is debatable. Fujiwara activities, for example. The origin is fifth century, a fallen kingdom in the south of what is now Sth. Korea.
Most of those 19th century reactionaries were against the emperor, initially for the Tokugawa, and later for any kind of restoration of the former system, for example, Saigo Takamori’s rebellion and the Boushin war.
Compare Mishima, a towering intellectual who actually knew what he believed and is willing to die for his convictions, to the bloated imbeciles that govern the US today. The vast majority have no clear idea of what they believe, only a vague notion of whites bad, non-whites good, Israel good. Serve Israel, get money, sex, booze, drugs and big house.
SEA OF FERTILITY is his magnum opus. Especially the first two novels are magnificent.
Man can only actualise himself within his ethnos or nation. All else ultimately leads to nihilism and despair.
In LAST SAMURAI, they are not against the Emperor but the men around him.
Regarding “The Last Debate”, of course Mishima would be triumphant, he was a middle aged man and a deeply accomplished writer of fiction in Japan, a sophisticated nation of masters of the art of Presentation. Presentation of a finely crafted image was his forte, the scruffy kids he was matched against didn’t stand a chance. But Political Philosophy, Comparative History, and Military Knowledge is not Fine Art(ie Formalism). Judging from his activities in his “private army”, a sub-set of the SDF, and his speech before his bungled attempt at seppuku, Mishima, perhaps intentionally, confused the two. I write “perhaps intentionally” because the Japanese are so sophisticated it is not clear to an outsider what is image and what is reality in Japanese Culture. I do not think it is wise to take seriously Mishima’s stated goal of inspiring The Army to rise up against an imaginary Leftist tide and “restore the Emperor”, it is too goofy and betrays an almost willful blindness to Japanese history. Everything in Mishima’s life in his final years, the body building and pseudo-fascist political posturing and actual posturing in ridiculous outfits and uniforms, is all about going out in a blaze of glory that ensures his immortality in a fixed image of perfection. This is entirely understandable. A man at age 45 is looking, without the delusions of immortality that besot a young man, at his inevitable physical decline. Mishima did not want a future as the wise old man hunched in a wheelchair. But that was Mishima’s delusion, he was a writer, a man of the mind not the body, and his greatest works were still ahead of him: “the mills of a writer grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine”. Of course, in the end, all Artists no matter how great, feel they have failed, but that is a delusion that is the price of choosing to be an Artist, an Artist must be aware of that and not be crushed by that lurking shadow. I cannot judge Mishima, but must judge him, his final act was simply absurd and pointless politically, but utterly magnificent as Performance Art. In the end he succeeded, there can be no equal to Mishima as an Artist that lived Life As Art, but do not confuse that with a political and historical thinker.
A movie clip demonstrates nothing.
Well, obviously, they couldn’t oppose the emperor, but did oppose the Imperial forces.
The reactionaries sure wanted the imperial station to go back to being an empty, and near invisible figurehead, and to restore shogun”s and samurai rule.
Other rebellions post-Perry had the same idea, a few others, different aims, one that interests me is a Buddhist uprising on the west coast, I forget the name of the rebellion, but the relevant Buddhist sect is still strong there, so many commemorative signs are around now.
A fictional movie is not a document of truth, shame on you for presenting it as such.
The Heisei emperor stepped down. The right-wing in polithcs hated him for many years, mainly because he made a statement about having some Korean ancestry many years ago.
However, that is true.
He may just have been tired of being Emperor, to step down, but I suspect that, like with Pope Benedict, the only comparable case lately, he was forced out.
I agree with you C.G. what irked the reactionaries was the fall of the Shogunate. With the total loss of power of the Shogun, all who depended on the Shogun: the Daimiyo and the Samurai hereditary classes, lost everything. It was those people that rebelled. They couldn’t consciously attack the Emperor, but unconsciously they knew the Emperor was against them, so it provoked an irrational reaction. Really what the Meiji Restoration was about was a smooth transition to a Constitutional Monarchy, the alternative would have been a bizarre endless civil war. In the end Japan got something in between, but heavily weighted towards a smooth transition, quite remarkable considering the explosive political and social situation in the waning years of a decayed and obsolete Shogunate. The United States, not forgetting the lesson of the Meiji Restoration, retained the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1945 as the persona of the Emperor guaranteed a smooth transition from the defeat of the militarists to a postwar peaceful Japanese society. So Mishima was entirely correct that The Emperor is Japan, but he still could not resist the urge to act out a pointless rebellion like the Samurai did in the 19th Century. The why of such acts is inexplicable to a non-Japanese, hence(part of) our facination with Japanese Culture.
Sadly, in the end, all that history is neither here nor there as Japan is finished.
1. Its men are perpetual boys who won’t grow up. Their culture is video-games, cartoon porn, and rap. Also, socio-economic breakdown(due to globalist forces and competition from other parts of Asia) have done away with security and trust. Lifetime employment and loyalty to a company are a thing of the past. This is especially harmful to Japan because Japanese don’t function well as hustling-bustling individuals. Especially as Japanese are timid and shy, they have a hard time finding mates without social networks that do the match-making for men and women. Most Japanese men are like Yohei(in SEVEN SAMURAI) and totally lost in a globalist-individualist order.
2. Japanese women are insipid twerps and whores, but then Japan have long raised their women as skanks. Sexually less restrained than the rest of Asia(apart from freakish Thailand, aka Thighland), Japan has developed a sexually deranged society where it’s deemed proper for girls to enter into the sex trade of prostitution and porn. This culture encouraged women to be sexually experimental. In the past, Japan was closed, so its sexual kinks were limited to Japanese men and women. But in globalized Japan, things are different. After defeat in WWII, Japan was turned into a pooter of US power, both literally and metaphorically. Japanese Democracy was really just a puppet play of US power. And Japanese women were whores of US G.I.s. And good many married Americans or Europeans whenever they had the chance. White guys back then spread the message, “Go to Japan, and you will get a whore-bride because, given the choice, the Japanese woman will choose over their Yohei-men.” Japanese worshiped whites back then. Japan was whore of the White World.
3. Japan’s whoredom took a darker turn because Japan follows the White West. Japanese are too limited, restrained, and anxious to think for themselves. They can’t draw their own conclusions. So, they still look to the West for answers. As Japan has come to look to the white West as the gold standard, it unquestioningly does whatever the West does. Lately, white people have come to obey Jews, celebrate homos, and worship Negroes. So, Japanese feel they must do likewise. So, if the white world cucks to Negroes, Japan also cucks to Negroes. If white world puts on homo parades, Japan also does. In a way, Japanese elites are just being the toadies they usually are. They know they depend on US markets and support. Japanese elites must know Jews now rule the US and they must appease Jews to be on good graces. But it’s not entirely cynical. Unimaginative and intellectually limited — Japanese have higher IQ than world average but low independent-mindedness — , many Japanese elites sincerely believe whatever is written on the pages of NYT and WSJ, Japanese edition. Yellows especially look to authority and power for the answers. Their idea of ‘trust’ is less mutual than submissive to authority. So goes the West, Japan does also.
4. The internet made things worse. Prior to the internet, Japan had an enclosed culture. Today, a whole generation has grown up with ready access to the West and the world. Japan’s bound to lose out in globalism because Japanese are timid than assertive. So, if Jews and blacks are assertive about their identity and interests on the world stage, Japanese are like Hirohito who is saying ‘aso, aso’ all the time. Japanese lack the pushy personalities of Jews or the funk of blacks(even though many Japanese ape black rappers). So, Japanese are mere sidekicks in world affairs.
5. With the cancer of jungaru feebah, Japan’s fate is now sealed. It was bad enough that Japan allowed Hawaiians and Mongolians to take over sumo. Sumo isn’t just any sport but a kind of sacred ritual for Japan. It should never have been globalized, especially as Japanese are small runts who can’t stand up to other peoples. How long before blacks take over sumo? But even worse than gaijin taking over sports and kicking Japanese ass in Japan, Japanese women are now globalized and follow the Western trend of jungle fever. There are plenty of unmarried single Japanese men, but these women go to the trouble of flying off to Atlanta, Africa, and even Haiti to mate with some Negro. Jungaru Feebah used to be a sexual fetish among some Japanese women, but now it’s been nationalized. What is truly cancerous is the Japanese elites and establishment are now promoting that stuff. In the past, such things happened, especially beginning with US occupation of Japan. Many Japanese women became whores of whites and blacks and even had kids with them. But Japanese establishment and masses didn’t look favorably to such things. So, it was there but in the shadows. But now, the very establishment is putting the spotlight on such things as the new essence of Japan. This is cancerous because it’s become mainstream. But what does this mean? It means Japan now blesses Japanese women who reject Japanese men and have Negro kids who beat Japanese in sports, a very symbolic spectacle in the modern world. So, what is the Japanese ideal? Japanese women going with Negroes, Japanese men cucking to Japanese race-traitors, and Japanese cheering for mulattos who defeat Japanese athletes and embracing these Negroes as the heroes of Japan. When Japanese women went with Negroes in the past, it was a problem but not cancerous as the elites and majority looked askance at such things. But now, the top power centers of Japan say THAT IS GOOD. So, Japanese women will be more encouraged to go with foreign men, with whom Japanese cannot compete with because Japanese men are mostly timid and runty Yoheis. First the Mongols in sumo, then the Negroes in Japanese pooters. And Japanese elites celebrate this. Cuckpan is the New Japan. And with low birthrates, Japan is now okay with mass immigration. This will further undermine what is already an atomizing and fraying society. And as more Japanese men go with foreign men, Japanese men will become demoralized and more cucked. Also, Japanese men will seek out poor women from other parts of Asia, like Philippines. But as Japanese men are shy and dorky, these Filipino women will find ways to run circles around them, flirt with others, and drive the Yohei-men to despair and suicide. Also, race mixing will lower Japanese IQ.
So, Japan’s fate is sealed. Japan is still overwhelmingly Japanese, but that doesn’t matter. Europe was mostly European in the 70s and 80s but look how fast things changed. It’s like a man with even early signs of cancer is doomed. The cancer has yet to spread and ruin his health and he still looks healthy and hale, but cancer, however small, will keep growing and taking over the body. Europe developed cancer in the late 60s and 70s when it began to tell itself diversity is great and that immigrants matter more than natives and Negroes are magical. Also, when it ceded moral authority to Jews whose grand plan was to turn Europe into Eurafrica.
Likewise, Japan is still mostly Japan now but has developed cancer. The new core programming for Japanese society is (1) mass immigration good (2) Japanese racial unity bad (3) celebrate diversity (4) obey Jews and worship globo-homo (5) promote jungaru feebah and praise Japanese women who reject Japanese yohei-men and go with Negroes (6) unquestioningly follow the suicidal West and go over the cliff like lemmings behind the white race. And South Korea and Taiwan seem to be competing with Japan in the national suicide, just like UK and Ireland seem to be competing in which nation is more ‘woke’ and moronic. Irish pride isn’t based on its independence from Britain but on its total submission to globo-homo-Negro celebration.
Japan has had a fascinating civilization and what it did with modernity was also distinct and creative. But Japanese culture has ceased to be interesting since the 80s with a few exceptions. But now, the globalist dam has burst in Japan. Nothing is more fundamental to a people than defense of land and unity of man and woman. No people can survive for long until the men are tough and defend the land and have command over their women. Though Japanese men as individuals have been timid and runty Yoheis, Japan as a nation was strong because all those Yoheis were loyal to the nationalist elite that stood for Japanese homogeneity and preservation. Even a nation of Yoheis can be tough in unified support of patriotic elites. But Japan’s elites are now globo-homo and useless, and that means Yoheis will go along with the national suicide.
So, the Japanese are agreed that they need mass immigration so that birth-dearth Japanese will be replaced. And the sexual ideal of Japan is now Jungaru Feebah. This is far worse than Vanilla Hunger as Eurasian kids are pro-civlizational. But a blackening Japan will lead to blacks terrorizing Japan. Because there are, as yet, few blacks, they tend to go along with Japanese social norms. It’s like black kids who grow up in white communities tend to be less crazy. But as there will be more and more blacks, they will cause more problem and demand that Japan open to even more blacks. As Japan as adopted Western Retardation, it will tell its people that it’s ‘racist’ for Japanese to say Japan belongs to the Japanese. No, Japan’s main role is to accommodate the demands of Noble Negroes, sassy foreign homos(who come to bugger Japanese in the ass), and pushy Jews. Just like whites would rather die than be called ‘racist’, Japanese elites live for the approval of the editors of NYT. Whites are bigger than Japanese but get whupped by blacks. So, imagine what blacks will do to runty and timid Japanese. And as blacks are globo-holy, any Japanese complaint will be construed as ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’. Notice how the Western Media celebrate anything Negro. Simian Biles quits, and it is a more heroic, noble, and awesome feat than non-blacks actually winning in sports. West is all about changing the goal-posts to elevate and praise blacks. Globalism and Diversity aren’t about racial equality but hierarchy where certain groups are favored over others.
Currently, there are tensions between Japan and Korea, much like there are tensions among Ireland, England, and Scotland. But instead of boosting one’s side with nationalism, each side seek to outdo others with globalism, not least because the elites of all those entities have become globalized and can conceive of good-and-bad only in terms of globalist priorities. Globalism says Jews, blacks, and homos are the best. Even criticism of Jews(in relation to Zionism) is premised on Jewish Superiority, i.e. “Oh my, Jews are such holy holocaust people. They are so pure and noble. So, how can they treat Palestinians so badly?” So, the greatest good or the highest moral pride is a matter of how ‘woke’ your nation is. So, Japanese defending and championing Japan is secondary to how far Japan has come in the globo-homo-negro competition.
No wonder the competition among England, Scotland, and Ireland is really about which side is more cucked to globalism. And same between Japan and Korea. Japan takes pride in Jungaru Feebah while South Korea promotes K-gay-pop. UK says, “Look, we got a Muslim mayor in London.” And Ireland, “Hey, we got a hindu-homo prime minister.” It’s like Republicans trying to outdo the Democrats with Lady Maga the tranny and Kanye West: “Hey, we got our trannies and negroes too.” Trump never mentioned white interest. It was always, GOP lowered unemployment for blacks(and browns).
This is all gonna end badly. One thing for sure, Japan is over… just like the West. Cancer spreads and spreads. Of course, radical chemo can stop the spread, but there is no will for radical measures in the West. Just endless cuckery, and Japanese are yellow dogs who trail white horse with Jew on top.
When 99 year mortgages to buy a house and people regularly work three jobs to live the life of renting a shoebox apartment are the brutal reality, not many consider having children to be a realistic dream.
Gawd, Tom Cruise is a sub-mediocre actor, all the more absurd considering how many films he has been in. Sanada Hiroyuki is a sub-mediocre actor too, but at least he doesn’t mumble his lines like Tom Cruise. Sanada’s great gift was as an athlete and martial artist. He has, or had, a magnificent physique(way better than Bruce Lee), that rarely got exposed on film. I suspect he was Sonny Chiba’s boyfriend. I have no proof of that, but Fukusaku Kenji in “Makai Tensho”, makes a few very sly jokes around that. Fukusaku likes to gently satirize the homo scene. Sanada Hiroyuki in both Makai Tensho and Twilight Samurai(the first done when he was around 20, the second when he was around 40) just can’t fake liking girls, it’s comical if you know what to look for.
What? He’s a butt-bang boy?
Thanks, BC. I disagree only on two points, the obsolescense of the shogunate, they would have been capable of modernising in a different way with much the same end result.
The Showa emperor should have beem in Sugamo prison （for many years now, a giant, by inner Tokyo standards, shopping mall）as a class A war criminal, along with at least two of his close relatives. Of course, a few of the ‘class A war criminals’ were nothing of the sort, but still executed.
Curtiss Lemay and Bomber Harris, among others, including Gen. Eisenhower, for his treatment of German POWs and civilians, should have been in prison elsewhere on the same basis, but as victors, that was never a possibility.
Back to the point, Preservation of the Showa emperor was something of a vanity project for Macarthur （sp?）, perfect for the theatre of the big white shogun with the corn-cob pipe. This worked. In an indy band Ì know, they all dress as historical or mythical figures, one member does Macarthur quite well, corn-cob pipe and all. This over seventy years later.
The other obvious reason, the coming Cold War. The only plausible and popular alternative was a prince who had been much more directly involved in war crimes, mainly but not only big-scale looting.
So if the Americans wanted to preserve an emperor for Cold War reasons, they only had one realistic choice at the time.
Priss, I can’t agree with it all, but you make some good points on cultural realities and trends.
The jungle fever is quite new. Since the mid-90s, pop culture here has been pushing it hard, mainly in the form of local acts aping certain black music styles, rap, the horrid sick tones of what is now called R＆B , but it is not huge. While not huge, it is noticeable in Tokyo, maybe also in the huge urban area around Osaka, but I didn’t notice any signs of it last time I was around there.
Do you know of Natsume Soseki? The great novelist of late Meiji and Taisho periods.
His book, I am a Cat in English, the Japanese title also means ‘We are cats’ is very good satire of the time. You should be able to get it through inter-library loan.
If you haven’t read it, it will make you LOL.
Like I wrote, I have no proof Sanada is “poofter”, he did get married to a girl very late in life, which proves nothing. Look at Twilight Samurai and Sanada’s scenes trying to act like he loves Tomoe, he is ridiculous, sputtering in frustration, he looks like he is irritated he has to look at a girl, no heterosexual man would act like that. Look at Makai Tensho, the scene where he makes out with Amakusa Shiro he looks genuinely into it, but when he goes, at Shiro’s urging, to rape his young girlfriend, he doesn’t seem to know what to do with her, or want to do anything to her. Then when Yagyu Jubei(played by Sonny Chiba) appears Fukusaku lines up Sanada’s head with Chiba’s crotch, it’s hilarious. Chiba is very tenderly involved with Sanada in every scene of Makai Tensho. Sanada was part of Chiba’s “Japan Action Club”, and Sanada has said Chiba was a “father figure”. I have my suspicions about Chiba as well. Look at Fukusaku’s “Sure Death IV”(a marvelous film), Fukusaku plays cleverly on Chiba’s rejection of his daughter when she falls in love with him, meanwhile he is overly obsessed with his son Choji. I have noticed that Fukusaku likes to gently satirize the homo scene, but he does it in that subtle Japanese Way, such a fine wine, the Japanese Way.
Nonsense. There is no need to hate your enemies.
You’re just making it up as you go along. There is nothing inevitable about that. You can define yourself as in favor of the good all you want, and that will pick you enemies.
Interesting thesis, that the Shogunate would have been successful at a modernization reform of Japan. Perhaps technologically, by abrogating the isolationist policy, but hadn’t the Shogunate instituted that policy because Japan in the sixteenth century was not only getting useful stuff like muskets and soap from Europe, but also European ideas, and wouldn’t the same problem arise again? And it would be worse in the 19th century when The West would bring ideas like Representative Democracy, the abolition of slavery and serfdom to feudal lords? The Shogunate was bound to the Daimiyo system and the hereditary Samurai class as enforcers of law. The Emperor, with his divine authority and no ties to the Daimiyo(in fact his exclusion from that system was a critical advantage) could simply disenfranchise the Daimiyo, replacing them with elected governors of provinces, and disband the Samurai, replacing them with a government police force. The Emperor easily replaced the Shogun because the Emperor’s authority had never been abrogated de jure only de facto, so the Emperor could easily slip into the role of Constitutional Monarch, with an elected National Diet assuming lawmaking powers. I disagree that retaining the Emperor was a vanity project by MacArthur. Dugout Doug didn’t have that authority(although he liked to pretend he did), that decision was solely the authority of The President Of The United States with the advice of The Department of State. MacArthur was an incompetent jackass that caused nothing but problems for America and should have been cashiered in 1942 after his screwup in the Phillipines. The Emperor guaranteed his survival by declaring surrender against the will of the militarist clique. We wanted above all, after the horrors of Peliliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, to avoid an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, which would have been a disaster for both the Japanese and American peoples. We wanted Japan to return to the community of nations and live in peace and prosperity with The United States, and all our postwar policies in Japan worked toward that end(Americans bought lots of Nikons, Toyotas, Hondas, Panasonics, and Sonys to accomplish that). The Emperor demonstrated he was a man we could work with to a common goal, and he had the rock solid divine authority and trust of the Japanese people to make that happen. Yeah he was a war criminal too but stuff gets ignored if bigger issues are at stake. BTW, I really dislike that famous photo of Dugout Doug MacArthur with his patronizing arm around the Emperor’s shoulder.
Pure delusion
I just know about samurai behaving very un-rationally at court (as if they were starring in some theatrical drama) and very dis-honorably out of court (vampirizing the peasants). Honor culture more like typical “warrior culture”, i.e. something that has to be covered in napalm for a society to become somewhat viable. Actual instances of lack of a “honor” can be seen in depredations in Manchuria and other places well into the 20th.
Apparently all of the “honor” culture has been created out of whole cloth at the start of the 20th when Inazo Nitobe wrote “Bushido: The Soul of Japan” in the same way as some Hollywood appendage today might write a deep examination of the Indomitable Spirit of Wakanda. Then after Blacks get nuked a coupled of times and driven back to their homelands, they will wax lyrical over their ancient Vibranium traditions etc.
Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit
Everything Tom Cruise taught you about samurai is wrong
Well, duh!
etc. etc.
Went to the beach this summer and had to move when a “family” came and turned on some rap or hiphop stuff. Yankee-looking daughter and boyfriend seemed to be calling the shots. Yellow trash, just like the white trash wigger culture in America.
I would just push “agree”, but many similar experiences in public places. Not so much recently, with corona bs.
I will stick by my thesis. Clockwork, medicine, other points, continued to advance under the Tokugawa. As of now, and as of then, the descendants are still very upper class.
All a joke, really.
The rank of Commodore Perry no longer exists, it is now rear admiral, second grade.
A typical example of U.S. grade inflation.
Perry was an impolite drunk, didn’t live much after his impolite actioms here.
The 28-minutes ritual suicide film Mishima made, “Yokkoku” (Patriotism) mentioned by Priss Factor above is a depiction of Mishima, acting the role of an officer who has taken part in an abortive coup (and is honor-bound to commit suicide) is really breath-stopping in its graphic depiction of seppuku–an odd portent of Mishima’s actual suicide years later. As an extreme artifact in the Mishima canon, it is worth seeing but very graphic and bloody. Skopros
The Japanese were using guns long before the Meiji era. Check out Metatron on YouTube for more information on this.
You overestimate the masses. The idea that napalm ended Japan’s honor culture is hilariously misinformed. You’ve clearly never been to Japan.
Arty, yes, but lifeless? True, Ken Ogata looked nothing like Mishima, but some of Mishima’s reputed charm comes through. The theatrical depictions within the context of the cinema may be a bit jarring, but the newsreel-like b & w depictions of Sixties-era Japan, especially that of his confrontation with those student radicals and the color format of his last day on Earth were affecting–not viscerally but aesthetically. I can’t say that it was a cinematically perfect work, but I was “wowed” by it, and it remains one of my favorite films, even if I may not regard Mishima as an exemplar of nationalism or of the Right. Kudos to Lucas, Coppola, the Schraeders, and those Japanese actors and crews who collaborated on this film.
So, Mishima made a name for himself by his act of self-immolation, but did he gain anything worthwhile by it?
How many Japanese people were impressed by this act? Not enough to make a difference.
Blending historic , cultural , and common ideology with experience related to events and time … and of course personal experience: I would say many ideas are bias on those facts alone. Mental and emotional depreciation , perception , impression , and relativity can create outcomes in many situations. Experience is the only true way to form a true opinion on any matter. To be patient and willing to see the results , ripples , and outcome is another matter depending on numerous values and the future goals of an individual according to his environment. Free will and the chains that bind always paint a different picture from the human heart , dreams of the mind , and reality.
I think tate no kai 楯の会 could also be translated as assembly of the bulwark. See how 楯の会 also uses the kanji of 楯突く “to defy; to disobey; to rebel against; to oppose; to resist” and that 会 kai can be read as “athletic meet”, too? The literal translation can be Shield Society, but during my humble kanji studies I already discovered a strong use of poetic harmonies in the writings of Mishima, in the relation between his use of Kanji and the stylized images of his prose. Given the nature of his para-military and also the event itself, I think this could fit the spirit of the original meaning more appropriately.