Pop History Moment: The Death of Yukio Mishima

The author of poetry, prose, and plays, Yukio Mishima's literary tendencies earned him abuse as a youth and acclaim as an adult; as respected as Mishima's works are for their philosophical mysticism, throughout the 1960s his hard-line nationalist views began to make even his admirers uneasy. More than his politics, though, it's the manner of his death that has cast a pall over his achievements as a master of Japanese post-war literature...

On this day in 1970 Mishima and four members of the private army he founded, Tatenokai, paid a visit to General Kanetoshi Mashita, the commandant of the Ichigaya Camp, which is the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japan Self-Defense Forces; after seizing control of the camp, Mishima tried to rally the assembled troops to undertake a coup d'etat in order to bring about the restoration of divinity to the Emperor, Hirohito, which had been stripped from him by the US as a condition of peace following World War II.

For his efforts, Mishima was jeered.

Returning to the commandant's office he committed seppuku - a form of ritual suicide specified as a face-saving alternative to capture by the bushido code of the Samurai, to which tenets Mishima had become obsessed - with the assistance of Masakatsu Morita (who was unable to complete the task) and Hiroyasu Koga (a kendo master who was not only able to finish off Mishima but Morita as well).

Mishima had secretly planned his suicide for at least a year, probably aware the whole time that post-war Japan would never again embrace such anachronisms as a divine emperor and the bushido code. His own twisted sexuality surely played a part, as did his disdain for Western influence upon Japanese society, in creating an unresolvable dichotomy between an idealized past and an unwillingness to accept change in the present. While many conservatives prefer to sadistically lash out at progressives over just such a conflict of their own making, Mishima was a masochist, and instead took his frustrations out on himself.

If there's a moral to this story, I can't quite bring myself to spell it out...
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