In January 1968, following the release of the Ōshima film Double Suicide: Japanese Summer the previous year, Nagisa Ōshima and Yukio Mishima, the two giants in their respective fields, had a frank, stimulating and (as anticipated) sometimes spicy conversation hosted by the film magazine The Art of Cinema. After Mishima’s suicide, Ōshima wrote another article Mishima Yukio: The Road to Defeat of One Lacking in Political Sense in reminiscence of their encounters and further responded to some of the issues raised in this conversation. English version of this article is available in Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956-1978, translated by Dawn Lawson.
Originally published in The Art of Cinema [Eiga Geijutsu], January Issue, 1968
Host: Tōru Ogawa, chief editor of The Art of Cinema
English translation by Stella Hsieh
1. Two Questions Regarding Double Suicide: Japanese Summer
Ogawa: I don’t need to introduce you to each other for this New Year’s Issue since you met at the trail of [Tetsuji] Takechi*, but I think people are paying a lot of attention to how the two of you mesh with each other and how similar you are.
Mishima: I guess this is what happens when you stick your nose in the deep consciousness of the Japanese people. (laughs)
Ogawa: You’ve probably been watching films all the time. How about Mr. Ōshima’s works?
Mishima: I’ve seen Mr. Ōshima’s films from The Cruel Story of Youth to The Sun’s Burial. And although there was a short break in the middle, I’ve watched his upcoming film Double Suicide: Japanese Summer. So, I don’t know how Mr. Ōshima leaped forward, because it’s cut off a bit in the middle. I’ve got two questions to ask Mr. Ōshima about that film. One is the issue of women and sex- whether sex solves anything, or whether sex can be a comfort or a solace in the opposing political issues. Another thing I wanted to ask you was what you think about internationalism.
There was a woman appearing at the beginning of this film, and no matter how she made a scene, all the men there were not interested in her. She wanted to sleep with anyone, even a hitman, and there was no ideology whatsoever. The next time she hears that an American is killing people in town, she wants to sleep with someone again. Her only interest in people would be to have sex with them. It is more straightforward and more abstract than in The Insect Woman, for example. In Double Suicide: Japanese Summer, she sleeps with a man at the end, but there is one problem with that.
The reason why I said “internationalism” is that I was watching closely to see what would happen when the American man came to Japan and killed Japanese people, but then the main characters come and get along with him. I was wondering what was going to happen to this drama, and then I saw the TV show that they were going to turn around and go over there with the Japanese flag, and then they would do it. I thought, “Oh, so that’s what this is all about,” but then I realized that what I couldn’t understand was that there were no white people on the police side. So, if you want to turn your internationalism upside down, there has to be a white person on the defensive, or on the alert. Otherwise, the act of carrying the Japanese flag in the film would not be possible. I wanted to ask you about that. If you could explain these two things to me in a comprehensible way, I think it would help me understand.
Ōshima: I’ll answer from the easier one, the later question: it would have been better to have an outsider. But that kind of thing was never thought of, because the budget was there. The flag is waved at the policemen, but of course it would have been better if the Self-Defence Forces had been there.
Mishima: Yes, then I might cry a bit because of the isolation of the Hinomaru flag [national flag of Japan]. I mean, the image of Hinomaru is repeated from the beginning. At the beginning, when the Hinomaru is seen on the bridge and the military band comes, I thought that satire was a bit superficial for Mr. Ōshima, and that it was not right to show such people and not the Hinomaru, but then the Hinomaru does not appear, and some mysterious people come. At the end of the film, Hinomaru appears again and I thought that the TV man was trying to save his life. In order for that to be turned upside down, I thought that there were white people on the other side, and it needed a white person to kill a white person. I understand the budget part though.
Ōshima: Well, put the budget issue aside, I think that’s true. You can’t really write about the enemy side, especially in a case like that. It should be so for a wannabe internationalist like me.
Mishima: As a logical development of the theme, it should be. Internationalism on this side is weak. However, it is no good if the weak one is international, so it is tactically understandable if the enemy side is coming with nationalism, and our side will do the same. I think that is the concluding part of the film.
*The Trial of Takechi: The Japanese film director and critic Tetsuji Takechi (1912-1988) was arrested in 1965 for the obscenity of his pink film Black Snow. Mishima and Ōshima both testified in Takechi’s defense at the trial, and Takechi eventually won the lawsuit.
2. I Want the Ideology of the Man Who Wants to be Killed.
Ogawa: What about Patriotism*?
Mishima: It’s nationalism. Though with Wagner in it, maybe it’s internationalism? (laughs) I’d like to ask about that previous question on sex.
Ōshima: I hold a kind of skepticism regarding sex. That is, I don’t think sex serves as a medium for anything; on the contrary, it’s the act itself that makes sex possible. So the woman is the kind of being Mr. Mishima describes, but what’s important is that there are men who want to die more than wanting that woman, or who are searching for someone to kill them—if I say everything here, it’s somewhat like Shichirō Fukazawa.
Mishima: Ah, I see, I see.
Ōshima: In other words, this is a man walking with some kind of premonition, and the fact that he meets that kind of woman—I thought the tremendous discrepancy we find ourselves in now might lie within that very one. So, when the man finally realizes what it is that kills him, he discovers it for the first time, and that’s where something truly begins, I suppose. As a starting point, perhaps the efficacy of sex might come into play again.
Mishima: I had two questions. One was that I found the scene incredibly interesting—how someone who wants to be killed could become such a dramatic factor within the political situation. I couldn’t help but find it fascinating. So, that man’s desire to be killed ends up being completely nullified. That desire won’t be tied to sex, and I thought the drama would unfold just as it had been building up until now. But in the end, he acts. As you said, it’s the principle of action that emerges—it’s not that he acts because there is a principle of action. This is almost like Zen. And I understand that sex could be integrated into that. But then, I was terribly disappointed, thinking, “Isn’t that just boring?”
I thought the issue in that film was whether the man who wants to be killed fulfills his role under some special political circumstances. But if that man takes a gun and shoots, in a sense, the quality of the act becomes indistinguishable from the pure act of the protagonist in La Chartreuse de Parme or the pure act in Gide’s Les Caves Du Vatican.
In the end, it seems that what he discovered and acted upon was nothing more than the quandary of discovering and acting upon the enemy that is within himself. I saw the desire to be killed as an even deeper quandary. So I don’t understand how it could be resolved on the level of pure action and result in sex.
The desire to be killed is quite an interesting thing. That idea is brilliant.
Ōshima: That work began from that very idea.
Mishima: It’s something no film has ever depicted before. You find yourself sympathizing with that man—but his desire to be killed must be from something more metaphysical. If we look beyond mere political despair, that man won’t flinch whether facing a pistol or a Japanese sword. This is your satire, Mr. Ōshima—a man who needs neither money, nor honor, nor life. You’re portraying him negatively as a yakuza-like hero archetype and trying to navigate him through some situation, I suppose. That’s how you’d depict a man’s expression in such a situation.
There are people holding demonstrations at Haneda Airport. I don’t think they actually want to be killed, but maybe they, too, harbor the desire to be killed. Everyone says they don’t understand that movie, but if it’s about wanting to be killed, I think the method is wrong. There must be better ways and situations to be killed. In that sense, if I could express my wish, I wanted them to create an ideology about wanting to be killed. Then I would have empathized with it tremendously.
Another thing is that in both Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun’s Burial, there was definitely a certain visual aesthetic. This time, I don’t quite understand why you deliberately and clearly excluded anything aesthetic. Even looking at how you used the actors, the way those guys were dressed; as for that woman, while her boobs were magnificent, she was never beautiful. I kept wondering why everything had to defy conventional notions of beauty so completely. After all, if beauty is about sex, wouldn’t it be more interesting if it were aesthetically pleasing people having sex? If it were me, I’d definitely cast only handsome men and beautiful women—to gather every single one of them. And then, it would be more interesting if the girls made advances but the guys didn’t go for it. The way it is, it just feels like they’re creating a situation where there’s no mutual attraction driving the sex.
Ōshima: When it comes to the issue of handsome men and beautiful women, I think there are new meanings that emerge from casting them, but there are also aspects that get spoiled by it. If it’s just beautiful men and women described abstractly in writing, that’s clearly fine. But in reality, you have to use actual people and film them on screen. If you end up only being able to use a certain level of beautiful men and women, it’s actually better to avoid them altogether to bring out a sense of overall depth.
Mishima: Honestly, it costs an arm and a leg if you go looking for beautiful men and women, and they’re terrible actors. With ugly men and women, at least you can find some who are good at acting. But when you go that far, I think acting itself just gets in the way of the theme. It’d be more effective to pick out some ridiculous people from the movie studio’s ōbeya, or even from the porn production crew.
Ōshima: I’m not so sure about that. Isn’t there a certain fantasy surrounding beautiful men and women in film? Personally, I can’t feel that kind of thing. In fact, aside from the actors I put on screen, I don’t really have any particular beautiful men and women in mind.
Mishima: That’s what it’s called to be fed up with too much fine food. As a simple movie-goer, I’d still want to try any cheap lunch sold at a department store.
*Patriotism: The 1966 film directed by and starring Mishima, based on his short novel of the same title.
3. Are All TV Employees Fascists?
Mishima: Mr. Ōshima, please explain that “Television Guy”. It’s interesting how he brings a machine and ends by raising the Hinomaru flag. What kind of concept do you have in mind…
Ōshima: To put it simply, I think he’s a kind of fascist—a converted fascist, perhaps—emerging in this new era.
Mishima: But if he’s a fascist, I wonder whether the guy watching TV to track down the murderer is a fascist. That man appears with his TV, playing the role of introducing a condensed image of society to the people there. He presents the situation of murders happening this way or that way, becoming a kind of information. What is the mission of information within that man?
Ōshima: It’s the opposite—that information itself is becoming a kind of fascist.
Mishima: So you’re saying the transmission of information is fascist?
Ōshima: My view is that information in the modern age plays a kind of fascist role.
Mishima: That man isn’t the one providing information; he’s strictly the receiver, the transmitter who receives and relays it.
Ogawa: Keeping it abstract…
Ōshima: Receiving and giving means the actual entity that should be providing the information is someone else doing it, right?
Mishima: Exactly. It would be interesting if everything that man was doing were a lie. For example, he carries that TV around like that, but it’s filled with completely false information, the state of emergency is a lie, and there’s no murderer either. He would be a fascist if that were the case. But if you call someone a fascist just because they have a machine and informing people of the facts, you’ll lose your allies. All TV company employees are fascists. Everyone involved in mass communication today is a fascist. Anyone who writes is a fascist. Because we’re all arguing based on inaccurate information. No matter how left-wing or right-wing you are, the source of information is somewhere inaccurate. Even the police are inaccurate. Take the recent Haneda Incident involving the Three-Party Alliance—the police information was truly appalling. Utter nonsense. That first Haneda Incident*? I think that was my responsibility. If everyone’s relaying information based on such inaccuracies, everyone becomes a fascist.
Ōshima: If the concept of transmission spreads that far, it still doesn’t explain things. In that case too, the role assigned to television is rather narrow.
Mishima: The question is why television specifically. There are facts, there is information, and television transmits it. But the very function of television in that chain is itself suspect. …From there, all the way down to the masses, where exactly does this “Television Guy” fit in? Is he just the one holding the TV?
Ōshima: That “Television Guy” is probably positioned within the concrete television—the real television, that is.
Mishima: I see. So can we equate him with the machine itself?
Ōshima: Yes, but not the receiver itself. Rather, he represents what is transmitted through television.
Mishima: So then, is that man being a fascist merely an illusion, something that doesn’t actually exist?
Ōshima: I don’t think it’s an illusion.
Mishima: If it’s not an illusion, then do you acknowledge that fascism is rooted in reality?
Ōshima: I do acknowledge that.
*Haneda Incident: A series of protests occurred on October 8 (“the first”) and November 12, 1967.
4. Fascist is the Voidness That Consumes All Reality
Mishima: Is there any real basis that makes a fascist a fascist?
Ōshima: I think there is.
Mishima: That’s where our opinions differ. I thought fascists absolutely lacked that. I believe a fascist is someone who creates something from nothing. For example, the political situation that produced Hitler certainly had elements of that—the Communists even brought out tanks. But what came after was different. Fascism began when Hitler created something from nothing, moved the masses with fictional propaganda—essentially doing through politics what should be done through art. If the root of that “Television” was an illusion, I thought it might align with my theory of fascism.
Ōshima: But if fascism arises from creating something from nothing, without any necessary basis, isn’t that itself a basis?
Mishima: I don’t interpret it that way. Essentially, the very notion of nothingness is inherently appealing. Nothingness appeals to the intellectual.
Ōshima: I acknowledge that nothingness exists. But isn’t the appeal of nothingness derived from some actual existence?
Mishima: They use up all reality, every bit of reality. For example, suppose someone is killed here. No, suppose they commit self-immolation. That isn’t a fact for the fascist. It’s propaganda material, something they can replace with anything else from that very moment.
The state of being a fact, of something presenting the appearance of being a fact, lasts perhaps one ten-thousandth of a second. Fascists seizes that and uses it for propaganda. I think that’s where political principles originate.
So why did fascists win over intellectuals? Because intellectuals, by long habits, don’t believe the news. Even if something’s reported in the paper, they don’t trust it. That’s the first premise. Even if someone was killed. If a fascist says it, intellectuals first think, “Well, they probably didn’t die.”
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Intellectuals are satisfied when someone who supposedly doesn’t die is declared dead. The foolish masses follow along, convinced it’s true.
One side lures by absence, the other by presence—that’s the fascist two-pronged strategy. Take Hitler, for instance; I think he really pulled it off well.
But the “Television” fascist, from what I saw in that film, carries reality with him. That machine is real, after all. The people gathered there—they don’t seem like the masses, they’re intellectuals.
Ogawa: Control changed the fascists—in short, it wasn’t the Imperial Way Faction [of the Imperial Japanese Army], but the Control Faction…
Ōshima: I think the image of fascists in his mind shifted from the Imperial Way Faction to the Control Faction—he’s describing that kind of bureaucratic fascism. Because people like that are emerging now.
Mishima: A miniature version of the new bureaucrats is emerging.
Ōshima: When you say “fascist,” Mr. Mishima, is that an image that overestimates fascism?
Mishima: I don’t think so. Read Mein Kampf carefully, and you won’t think that. Japanese fascists are different. I strongly disagree with Masao Maruyama’s claim that there are no fascists in Japan. Japanese people are a nation attached to the reality of things, so I don’t think fascists in that sense exist here.
Ōshima: I see what you mean. I didn’t intend to portray fascists in the ideal or conceptual sense you describe. That man certainly has his dull aspects. But I think that Japanese fascists, as we imagine them, might emerge in precisely that dull form.
Mishima: I see. So, a real-world type of fascist. But since he’s a pseudo-fascist, he lacks the true terror of a real fascist.
Ōshima: But don’t all such things emerge in a pseudo-form?
Mishima: But I don’t think Japan is merely pseudo. This strays from the film, but Masao Maruyama’s definition of fascism varies. Then, when you read Kikuo Nakamura’s book on Japanese imperial fascism, it’s purely an accumulation of data and lacks a theoretical framework comparable to Maruyama’s. It’s all just negative data piled up. For example, didn’t [Hideki] Tōjō step down in accordance with the Japanese constitution? And while such people might have held power while in office, ultimately, they couldn’t overcome the Diet, could they? Moreover, when the Diet itself became a one-party state under the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, didn’t it actually provoke a backlash from the right wing? And wasn’t there opposition concerning the national polity? Consequently, didn’t the one-party dictatorship fail? In this way, he uses data to completely dismantle the framework derived from Maruyama’s fascism. He focuses extensively on questions like: How was it connected to capitalism? Didn’t they initially expel monopoly capital from Manchukuo? But this approach is weak, I think. My view is that to truly understand Japanese fascism, you absolutely must study Yōmeigaku through Kokugaku. I used the term “Japanese fascism” just now, but what emerged from it wasn’t fascism at all. If you think it’s dangerous, that’s another matter. It’s your freedom to think it dangerous, Mr. Ōshima. But it wasn’t fascism at all. What was it? I keep thinking about that, but I just can’t figure it out.
I’ve always been interested in such things. Even through my own work, I’m just feeling my way. I know writing such things might make people think I’m a fascist, but what it is exactly is what interests me most.
At a certain point, it’s easy to declare, “This is fascist, our enemy!” Tactically speaking, yes. But even if we call it our enemy, how can we deny it if we ourselves possess such elements?
Ōshima: What are your thoughts on being called a fascist now?
Mishima: I couldn’t care less. Let’s say someone is earnestly researching issues like “Special Communities”or the “New Citizens”. That person must be prepared to be suspected of being a “New Citizen” himself. No matter how distinguished his family background is, if he devotes himself to the New Citizen issue, it’s only natural and unavoidable that he’ll be seen as one.
Ōshima: That’s a good point. I’ve been working on the Korean issue for a long time, and now that I’m finally doing a comprehensive study, I’m worried people might say I was born in Korea…
Mishima: You have to be prepared for that. It’s only natural. Otherwise, you can’t really dig deep into things.
Ōshima: I understand you have considerable interest in past fascism, Mr. Mishima, but in the future tense—for example, if some strange people in this generation were to adopt your ideology… your ideas could be expressed in the future tense, couldn’t they?
Mishima: Yes.
Ōshima: What about the responsibility for that?
Mishima: I’m absolutely irresponsible about that sort of thing. For example, if someone influenced by me becomes a true fascist, I couldn’t care less. In that sense, I’m terribly irresponsible and feel no social responsibility whatsoever. Calling someone a fascist and someone becoming something like a fascist because of me are the same problem as a political reaction. I think they are both the same.
Ōshima: I don’t think many people become fascists just because they’re influenced by you.
Mishima: There are some pretty strange people out there, so they might be.
Ōshima: That’s a very fragmented way of looking at it, and it’s completely different from how Japanese society actually moves forward.
Mishima: No. That’s a completely lower-level concern. But if you broaden the definition, I think Japanese bureaucrats are the most fascist of all. More so than military men, more than anyone else… That’s a kind of nihilism that believes in nothing.
Ogawa: What about artists?
Mishima: Is there even one truly admirable nihilist among artists? Aren’t they just desperately trying to believe in something?
Ogawa: I think artists inherently have a tendency to become fascists…
Mishima: No, precisely because there are no nihilists among them, they don’t become fascists.
Ōshima: What Mr. Mishima said about bureaucrats being fascists is certainly true in Japan’s case. For instance, that kind of man like the “Television Guy” in Double Suicide feels to me like a precursor to a certain kind of fascism. But he’s only a third-rate figure in the sense that he’s avant-garde. So naturally, he couldn’t possibly be a fascist with the power to drive things forward. He’s merely a fascist as a symbol…
Mishima: If you end up waving the Hinomaru flag at the very end, you’ll never be the boss.
5. The Communist Party Has Forgotten the Imperial Colors Incident
Ogawa: There’s the matter of the Emperor. How do you feel about the current Emperor? He’s referred to as a human Emperor, but what does “human” mean in this context? Is he the same as an ordinary person? If you take that away, there’s nothing left, right? That leads me to think the current Emperor might be far more nihilistic than Emperors of the past. What about the Emperor himself?
Mishima: Well, I don’t think the Emperor himself has changed at all. Rather, based on my speculation, I believe he probably thinks this current situation is exactly what he had hoped for, seeing how things are now. Didn’t I strive wholeheartedly to be a constitutional monarch? Didn’t I oppose the military? And now, in this state, we’ve become a democratic nation. Aren’t the people happy? Isn’t it true that no one is starving? And, well, I feel sorry for those who died, but this is at least the Japan I wished for—that’s what I think.
Ogawa: So, what kind of nihilism do you think the most Japanese form of fascism, as you mentioned earlier, exists within?
Mishima: Yes. That’s why I bring up the February 26 Incident* now. The Emperor during that time displayed an admirable attitude, determined to uphold the constitutional monarchy. That’s why the Old Liberalists praise it as truly splendid. They say it was the first time the Emperor demonstrated the achievements of the constitutional monarchy through his actions. That has become the established view among the Old Liberalists.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m saying that unless we acknowledge radical actions driven by all forms of loyalty, we lose sight of the essence of the imperial system. In some cases, even a communist revolution—if it were a revolution under the imperial banner—the Emperor would have to recognize it, wouldn’t he? That might be the very essence of the imperial system. And to think the postwar Communist Party did that—it just makes me want to say the Communist Party is stupid. Instead of saying things like, “In times when there was no rice, I ate my fill while you, my subjects, starved,” why didn’t they wave red flags in front of the palace and shout “Long live His Majesty the Emperor”? Why didn’t they chase after those waving the Emperor’s hat and succeed in the revolution? It’s precisely because they didn’t do that we’re suffering like this now.
That’s why Thailand’s Communist Patriotic Front—I heard this when I visited Thailand recently—sings Praise the King at the end of their rural rallies. They truly sing it with tears streaming down their faces. Laos’s Pathet Lao genuinely loves their king. If the Communist Party had even one prophet back in 1947, I believe the Imperial Colors Incident would have flourished remarkably.
Ōshima: There was no prophet, but now the Communist Party has that mentality, so their numbers are growing remarkably, aren’t they?
Mishima: It’s been ten years since they stopped calling for the overthrow of the imperial system, right? They still can’t bring themselves to openly advocate preserving it. That’s why Japan’s Communist Party is useless. If they could have gone as far as supporting the imperial system, they would have succeeded and become the leading party. In their own words, well, they missed their chance. But it’s too late now.
Ogawa: Did the imperial system weigh heavily on your experiences as a boy, Mr. Ōshima?
Ōshima: I didn’t feel it much. The Emperor and war were almost irrelevant to me. That’s why your film reviews, Mr. Ogawa, are so weak when it comes to war movies.
Mishima: I find that utterly fascinating. Now I immersed myself in your Blow Up the Ideology of the Bridge and Spirit and Flesh in War Films.*
Ogawa: Did you see Kihachi Okamoto’s Japan’s Longest Day?
Ōshima: No. I’ve decided not to watch that sort of thing.
Mishima: I saw it. It was interesting.
Ogawa: Why couldn’t they get any closer to the Emperor after going that far?
Mishima: Indeed.
Ōshima: But lately, a lot of wartime material has surfaced, hasn’t it?
Mishima: It certainly has. It’s hard to tell how much of it is genuine, but most of it presents some version of “this is the truth.” It’s just a reaction to the postwar version of the truth, nothing more. The real truth probably lies somewhere in between.
Ōshima: You yourself have recently, somewhat suddenly, embraced fascism in works like Patriotism and others.
Mishima: Yes, I find myself utterly perplexed by what it means to be Japanese, truly perplexed. And when I start thinking about it, that’s where my thoughts lead. Doing flower arranging, tea ceremony, kabuki—it feels like there’s more to it than just that. I’ve given up on the cultural approach to Japan as a nation. Nothing comes out no matter how much you dig. I love and respect Nō*, but if you dig into Nō, all you find is Buddhist dregs. Aesthetically, it’s incredibly delicate and wonderful, but there’s nothing beyond that. If you go down that path, you’ll end up as nothing more than a dilettante writer or critic.
Ōshima: I really like Kyōko’s House and Beautiful Star*, but right now I don’t have the budget [to make film adaptations]. Still, I’m planning to ask you if I can do these two someday when conditions allow. So, were they cut off around that point?
Mishima: Yes, they were cut off around that point. No matter how much I tried, it wouldn’t come out. I intended to end it with Kyōko’s House, but a bit made my way into Beautiful Star, too. I thought I understood myself—that pursuing that way of life, those issues, would only get me this far. Others say it’s insufficient, but now I’m interested in the one thing Japanese people most don’t want others to see, the shameful thing they least want foreigners to know about—the one thing they beg me not to acknowledge within myself. Besides, I’ve developed a macabre taste. When I watch your films, I can’t help but want to make you confess you’re actually a right-winger. (laughs) That kind of interest has really emerged in me. I suppose I have to endure being thought of as right-wing. It doesn’t bother me no matter how much people say it.
*The February 26 Incident: The attempted coup d’état organized by a group of young Imperial Japanese Army officers from February 26th to February 29th, 1936.
*Blow Up the Ideology of the Bridge and Spirit and Flesh in War Films are both collections of film essays by Ogawa.
*Mishima also wrote modern adaptations of traditional Nō plays, collected in Five Modern Noh Plays, available in English translation by Donald Keene.
*Kyōko’s House is a 1959 novel by Mishima and Beautiful Star , published in 1962, is his rare science fiction work.
6. Despise Originality
Ōshima: To say something harsh about Patriotism, I thought the title could be changed to General Nogi and His Wife Shizuko. Young people today wouldn’t even know who General Nogi is, after all.
Mishima: Foreigners who couldn’t read the subtitles would assume it was only about General Nogi. My aim lies in that continuity. In other words, you can take the pattern of one person and look at what happened before that, and what happened before that, and so on.
But if you take the Haneda Incident of the Three-Party Alliance as one pattern, what came before it was the previous Haneda Incident, before that the Anpo Protests*, before that the Ōsu Incident*, and if you go further back, it breaks off. There’s no connection whatsoever to the prewar communist movement here.
But I despise originality in its entirety. I consider anything original to be nothing but a fake. If the Three-Party Alliance is original, then it’s a fake. When you examine right-wing issues, they often appear childishly insane at first glance. Yet they follow patterns all the way through, which is fascinating. It’s common for the mummy hunter to become the mummy. But I don’t mind becoming a mummy myself.
Ōshima: The fact that the Three-Party Alliance is fragmented does have an original aspect to it.
Mishima: Being fragmented is truly backwater democracy.
Ōshima: Self-immolation is a rather unusual form in Japan.
Mishima: I think that’s a Western influence. Going from Vietnam to America and then to Japan is quite internationalist. When that old Esperantist guy died, he must have had fierce confidence that his ideology wouldn’t be seen as nationalism. It’s an internationalist pattern, that one.
Ōshima: Speaking of that, I recently read that Daisuke Nanba, who attacked the Crown Prince Regent [Hirohito], acted entirely alone. That’s a rare case in Japan; usually there’s always some form of solidarity. I was struck by how he did it completely alone. I wish you’d write about something like that, Mr. Mishima.
Mishima: I’ve always believed that Japan’s morality lies in this sweet, gentle familial solidarity that can justify any cruelty. Take the statement by Shō Onuma from the League of Blood Incident, published by Misuzu Shobo—reading it, you see the ideal father and mother, you see him moving to Tokyo to work at a kimono shop and becoming socially conscious, then meeting Nisshō Inoue*. There he discovers something even more beautiful. Of course, he was also indoctrinated, but the foundation of his actions was this beautiful, gentle Gemeinschaft that was Japan. Its cruelty was never rational cruelty. It was entirely different from the organized logic of something like the Nazis. Even the February 26 Incident—I don’t think you’ll find another such mild, gentle coup d’état anywhere in the world’s revolutions. Not a single woman or child was killed. 600,000 communists were killed recently in Indonesia, right? They were all killed with farmers’ hoes and spades.
Ōshima: I understand that gentleness. Compared to that, Daisuke Nanba wrote a pretty harsh suicide note to his father. But he figured his father would immediately tear it up and throw it away, probably after reading only halfway through. So he sent it to his older brother, asking him to read it aloud in front of their father when showing it to him, and it’s filled with some seriously nasty insults. That’s really wild. It’s not very Japanese, is it?
Mishima: What year of the Taishō era was this? I think it might be influenced by the Taishō Democrats.
Ōshima: Since the earthquake* is included, it must be a little later than that.
Mishima: There’s a pattern emerging around that time, as seen in Naoya Shiga’s Reconciliation too—this persistent pattern of rebelling against one’s father. I think it emerged from the late Meiji period. The pattern where rebelling against one’s father, being absolutely isolated and without support, equates to rebelling against the entire society, the entire nation, and the national polity—I don’t think this is unique to Daisuke Nanba. This influenced various things; Shiga probably did it in literature, and someone else did it in something else. But the rebellion against the father taking on social significance was probably just a short twenty-year span, from the late Meiji through the Taishō and early Shōwa periods. After that, rebellion against one’s father didn’t carry such weight anymore. There was the communist movement, but… Since it was just one phenomenon born within that context, I question whether he was truly that lonely, original, and isolated.
Ōshima: But I think the difference lies in the fact that people in Japan, starting with the Shirakaba School, all settled their relationship with their fathers by rebelling against them and did nothing more beyond that.
*The Anpo Protests: 1959-1960
*The Ōsu Incident: July 7, 1952.
*Shō Onuma, the League of Blood Incident and Nisshō Inoue : An extremist assassination plot targeting liberal politicians in 1932. Inoue, the founder of the League of Blood, was also a radical Nichiren Buddhist.
*The earthquake: the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake.
Between Thought and Expression 