The Last Seppuku (Ritual Suicide)
Tidbit: History
November 25, 1970, around 11 in the morning.
A group of five men arrive at Camp Ichigaya of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force in Tokyo and are led to the Commander-in-Chief, Lieutenant General Kanetoshi Mashita. What started out as a friendly appointment took a dramatic turn when the men attacked Mashita and tied him to a chair.
A list with demands was slipped under the door, and the group’s leader stepped onto the balcony to give a speech. However, when he failed to rouse the soldiers outside to join his coup d'état, the leader returned inside.
He knelt in front of Mashita and cut his own stomach. Another of the five men then beheaded him in the traditional way of seppuku, ritual suicide long reserved for samurai warriors.
The man in question, however, was not a samurai, not even a member of the modern military. It was - then already famous - author Yukio Mishima, who is now considered one of the top literary figures of the 20th century.
Mishima’s life
Yukio Mishima, pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, was born on January 14, 1925 into a wealthy family in Tokyo, who could trace their lineage back to the Matsudaira clan, the family of the Tokugawa Shoguns.
He spent his early years under the tutelage of his grandmother, and he enjoyed reading and going to Noh and Kabuki plays. In school, he belonged to the literary society and at age 16, one of his stories was published - already under his pen name - in the national Bungei Bunka magazine to high acclaim.
After WWII, he became a full-time novelist and his work received high acclaim in Japan and internationally. In the 1960s, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature a total of five times.
From around 1941, Mishima met several right-wing figures, whose nationalist views and insistence to return to traditional Japanese values influenced him greatly. He was also deeply devoted to Shinto and believed in the emperor being central to Japanese culture. However, he would eventually denounce Emperor Hirohito for the renunciation of his own divinity, saying that this made the deaths of countless soldiers in the war meaningless.
In the 1960s in particular, Mishima’s work became more and more political. He published a number of essays and stories espousing his anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-consumerist views, believing that Imperial Japan was a spiritually rich and thus superior society.
In 1968, he founded and funded the Tatenokai (Shield Society), a private militia, whose 100 members were recruited mostly from right-wing students from Waseda University. The group focused on military training and fitness and was directly overseen by Mishima.
Four top members of the Tatenokai - Masakatsu Morita, Masahiro Ogawa, Masayoshi Koga, and Hiroyasu Koga - accompanied him to Camp Ichigaya on that fateful day in 1970. Morita, although he failed to cut off Mishima’s head and was replaced by Hiroyasu Koga, committed seppuku directly after Mishima’s death, also assisted by Koga.
The three survivors were sentenced to four years in prison in April 1972. They were all released in October 1974 after serving two and a half years of their sentence.
Mishima’s legacy
How Mishima experienced his final moments is anybody’s guess. It is fairly obvious that he himself did not believe in the success of his attempted coup. His suicide was meticulously planned for about a year, and he earmarked funds for the defense of his co-conspirators. Furthermore, he also arranged for birthday gifts and magazines to be sent to his children after his death.
But despite all his planning, he was not granted the romanticized easy death he had envisioned. While he cut his stomach with a knife with considerable force, his designated kaishakunin failed to completely behead him, not once, but twice. Only the third strike, administered by another man, finally brought Mishima’s life to an end.
Today’s views on Mishima are as complicated as was his death. Many people see him as the literary genius that he doubtlessly was, and in Japan, he is considered among the most important postwar stylists. Had he lived, it is very likely that eventually, he would have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
At the same time, Mishima’s extreme nationalist views are received much more critically, to put it mildly. His Tatenokai was one of the groups that launched the Japanese ethno-nationalist New Right movement which still exists today.
Whether his artistic merits would have overshadowed his political views in the long run can only be guessed. But maybe the best art is indeed made by people drawn to extremes, in life and in death.
The sheaths of swords rattle / As after years of endurance / Brave men set out / To tread upon the first frost of the year.
Yukio Mishima, death poem
Further reading (affiliate links):
The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes. A biography.
Patriotism, a short story by Yukio Mishima, centered on an “ideal” ritual suicide.
The Sea of Fertility. This series of four books is considered Mishima’s masterpiece, best expressing his views on life. It is said that he submitted the final volume in the morning of his day of death.