“Dress my body in a Shield Society uniform, give me white gloves and a soldier’s sword in my hand, and then do me the favor of taking a photograph. My family may object, but I want evidence that I died not as a literary man but as a warrior.”
Yukio Mishima, letter, 24 Nov 1970.
Mishima, Japan’s literary star and self-designated last samurai, must have been extremely angry when he started to write that harsh manifesto just before dying. This anger was intertwined with his unique approach to life’s drama and performance, positioning him as both a cultural icon and a cautionary tale. And, actually, he died in the most dramatic way one could think of. Japanese television covered the incident live from the Self-Defense Forces’ headquarters on November 25, 1970, as Mishima carried out his ritual suicide in front of a bunch of shocked soldiers.
He thrust a sword into his belly, and the whole world was watching, terrified but, at the same time, somehow fascinated. At such a very moment only, Mishima was not just a writer anymore; he had turned into an extravagant symbol, become a part of Japan’s collective memory forever.
The morning developed in a way that seemed to be a silly, long-forgotten play. Mishima had gathered a few soldiers and, with a dramatic gesture that could only be compared to a scene from a comedy, even made the commander of the troops his captive.
In post-war Japan, the Self-Defense Forces were established as a way to maintain peace and stability, having a significant role grounded in both protection and national identity after the dissolution of the Imperial Japanese Army. Therefore, capturing their commander was not just a theatrical move but a strike at the heart of Japan’s new military framework.
After that, the raving, fire-starting speech, which was to the soldiers who were stunned into silence as well as to the cameras that were always hungry, came. He roared that Japan was “prospering but spiritually dead,” denounced the U.S.-Japan treaty, and asserted that the army was a partner in the country’s disgrace.
In Mishima’s skewed reasoning, only heroics and death could bring back the dying spirit of the nation. The belief that dramatic action was a remedy for Japan’s perceived spiritual desolation reveals an inherent contradiction; while at odds with modern sensibilities, it underscores a longing for a mythical past. He made his dramatic exit with a last, exaggerated step, believing that his loud goodbye would be nothing less than a shock, a wonder, and a memory imprint.
Madness has its reasons, though they are not always clear. Mishima was furious with only one person—the Emperor. The Imperial House, although Hirohito had lost all his divine characteristics during the post-WWII period, carrying the whole nation’s identity, was still the longest-lasting symbol of Japan in Mishima’s opinion. The Emperor was, in Mishima’s view, the last divine spirit in the world that was morally and spiritually impoverished and decaying, that was still approachable to humankind.
He established the Tate no Kai, the Shield Society, to defend and honor this remnant of sacred power. As a private samurai group, it was completely devoted to the Emperor and always prepared to counter both real and imaginary threats. In 1970, Mishima and his acolytes attempted the so-called Showa Restoration, a fictitious coup to reinstate imperial reign. This ill-fated attempt marked the culmination of Mishima’s resolve, leading him to make the ultimate sacrifice, which he believed served the Emperor.
His fixation had already infiltrated his literature. In Yukoku (Patriotism), the author narrates the story of a young officer and his wife in the year 1936. Following the defeat of their rebellious companions, the lovers see no point in living, neither separated from each other nor without honor. They pray at the household altar, beg the Emperor, and after that, they commit suicide together. Mishima depicts their last seconds as an exquisite mixture of love, honor, and eternity, a solitary, rebellious death that cannot be disentangled from the Emperor’s spirit.
His fascination with death and beauty had already appeared in his previous novels. An ugly young monk in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion attacks a perfect golden shrine out of jealousy and despair. He persuades himself that the temple’s beauty would set him free if he could destroy it. The novel is practically a warning: if the destruction of beauty is the only way to pure perfection, then perhaps Mishima’s own optimistic end was not a surprise at all.
Mishima personally went through the experience of the nation, which he later characterized as “schizophrenic.” He was born in 1925 and saw the end of WWII when he was just twenty. That pivotal August of 1945 has become synonymous with Emperor Hirohito’s defeat and his renunciation of divinity. The whole imperial cosmology got broken down. Americans were sending a new constitution and Western pop culture to Japan. The old Japanese system and its living “manifestation of the gods” were gone, and the Emperor was left as a powerless and almost decorative relic.
The society was split into two parts; some young people welcomed democracy and modernity, while others, including Mishima, grieved over the loss of something that could not be defined but was still very sacred. According to him, one could either surrender to this new world or take a last, heroic way back to honor.
The struggle within Mishima was the reason for his change of art into fiery political statements. He reached the point in the 1960s when he was no longer just a novelist, but a writer of revolutionary and almost theatrical literature. His literature was packed with samurai imagery and ultranationalist passion, and the Emperor was continuously present, not as a person but as an idea that was abstract and almost divine.
Mishima was frequently associating beauty with sacrifice, and his protagonists were nearly Platonic perfect: good-looking, a little bit crazy, and totally willing to give up their lives for Japan. With his bold lyricism, he mixed the Imperial Family up with the themes of honor, bravery, and the overcoming of death.
In the year of 1968, Mishima started working on the masterpiece of his life, the saga of four novels called The Sea of Fertility. The four books (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel) cover several decades of the turbulent Japanese history. They follow one spirit, which is reborn over the course of the century, symbolizing Mishima’s interpretation of the country’s fate. The very title suggests the meaning: “Sea of Fertility” was the designation of a lunar area that is now recognized as dead and unproductive.
Mishima took a playful approach to Zen concepts regarding the void; no matter how wonderful a life may be, after four lives it is reduced to nothing. At the end of the narrative, he emphasizes the message: the lack of soul and culture transforms all those vibrant lives into a neutral and indifferent nothingness.
The 1960s continued to be vibrant and entertaining. Mishima already had the interest brought to the surface. In the year 1969, he confronted the radical students and argued his point regarding the Emperor being a mythical and almost unattainable ideal. The leftists would not t let him speak, but later on Mishima made a joke that he and the radicals had almost the same hands, he just had a Joker: the Emperor.
He wrote a nationalistic play called Voices of the Heroic Dead, in which ghostly kamikaze pilots admonish the Emperor for betraying them by giving up his godhood. In a very real sense, Mishima called upon the souls of Japan’s fallen soldiers to accuse the present age.
Afterward, Mishima acted out his dreams. His Shield Society was not a mere paper organization. It was practiced with real army men and practiced silent discipline in a very creepy way. He claimed that it was “the world’s least armed, most spiritual army”: no street protests, no posters, no Molotov cocktails, just preparedness.
According to Faith & Witness, Mishima’s final act can be seen as a form of performance art, displaying both immense will and imagination. The young men who followed him, relying on their faith until the end, embodied qualities of both soldiers and performers, which resonated with the kind of spectacle Mishima admired.
While Mishima was dreaming, Japan was doing just the opposite. The land was alive with tech and wealth, but Mishima labeled it as a lack of spirituality. He envisioned the West’s thought infiltrating Japan in the form of toxic smoke from a factory and thus suffocating its spirit. In his diaries, he mentioned that one “clouded stream” brought the “scum of humanism” which was stifling Japan’s will to fight, “withering the green of the [sacred] sakaki tree.” He considered modernization and American influence as the factors that had turned Japan into a consumerist shell.
The younger generation in Japan had left behind bushidō for bubblegum, which was bourgeois, money-centered, and powerless. Mishima took an opposing stance. He depicted the present-day Japanese as the last men in the world (to refer to Nietzsche) who were completely devoid of any grand aspiration. In his view, only an extraordinary man—a “man of anger” endowed with thymos, could possibly rouse Japan from its spiritual hibernation.
Mishima was a living paradox. He adored the principles of the samurai, but at the same time enjoyed Western art. He started his life as a weak and timid boy, then after visiting Greece in 1952, he started to work out his body. While in Athens, he became infatuated with Apollo’s statues and the thought that morality and beauty could be one. “Greece cured my self-hatred,” he confessed afterwards.
From then on, he would be Apollo in the flesh: white, austere, chiseled. He spent up to six hours a day in fitness centers and martial arts training halls, regarding his physique as a masterpiece. He referred to his daily routine as an “orchard” of muscles growing under the sun and sword, an undertaking in Nietzschean self-overcoming. He gradually convinced himself that every muscle contraction made his death one step closer to being worthy.
Mishima’s life experiences led to his fixation with death. He constantly looked for exhilarating moments in every situation. Once, he described the sensation of jumping from a jet traveling at Mach 2, saying he felt intensely alive while plummeting through the sparse atmosphere. In this extraordinary state, he imagined seeing a massive snake coiled around the earth, endlessly devouring its own tail and erasing all opposites, according to Mishima’s writing. His myth was nourished by every act, every storm of thought, every figurative travel: death was not the opponent; it was, to be precise, the greatest adventure.
In his demeanor, he was even a samurai: he would every morning imaginatively die, by stabbing, burning, drowning, so that when the time came, he wouldn’t hesitate. The “Hagakure,” the samurai code he consumed, suggested to fighters to “die every day,” and Mishima understood this as a command. He thought, as one of the Hagakure’s sayings put it, “The way of the samurai is death.”
Mishima’s obsession with seppuku was apparent not just in his writings but also in his daily life. He incessantly wrote about the ceremonial death by disembowelment, which made the readers wonder whether it was simply a morbid indulgence or a well-thought-out practice for his own death. It is reported that every morning, he would get up already picturing the worst possible deaths, preparing himself mentally for the ultimate experience of death.
He longed to be prepared for the day of his death, to face it with dignity and, if possible, a little bit of grace. For Mishima, death was like a canvas without the artist’s last strokes; it was nothing short of his ultimate masterpiece.
The performance that was meant to be the last one had come. On the 25th of November 1970, Mishima climbed the stairway of the Defense Forces HQ not to come back again. The whole world was watching him live through cameras. He made a very short but very emotional speech in which he said that Japan’s restoration to dignity and its loyalty to the Emperor would determine the future of the country.
Then, in his full-dress uniform, carrying the sword, he plunged it into his own belly. His assistant then beheaded him to finish the ritual a moment later. The picture is eerie: the headless corpse of Mishima lying on the red carpet, a grim proof that he had died exactly the way he had declared, an adamant combatant, not just a writer.
When all was said and done, the majority of the Japanese was revulsion. The media and the common people condemned it as an absurdity of the highest degree, a peculiar fusion of faith and performance. No school was willing to recognize it, and the media regarded it as just a deception. They labeled it “frenzy for popularity,” a disreputable display put on by a man who was just about to lose his mind.
Taking Mishima seriously would have faced one with the whole postwar complacency, and it was much more comfortable to consider it as a joke. Even his nearest and dearest maintained that it was just a show. But for the ones that wanted to be quiet for a moment, Mishima showed a fractured mirror. His dead body was a loud, tortured scream: was Japan supposed to be proud or ashamed of him?
Mishima saw himself as nothing less than a philosopher of Japan’s soul or even a writer or a rebel in the low ranks. He took history apart; he had moral principles, but at the same time, he did it always artistically. His suicide note was not just a letter but rather a scene where he was holding a sword. The only thing he said was: “Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.” It is undeniably eerie.
Mishima was indeed scared of being forgotten, and the fate of a man’s life that was just ordinary and mediocre. Therefore, he made his death a piece of art—his last written in blood, the essay, was really an attitude of his life.
Mishima is a striking paradox that stands within one single person. A prophet of beauty and fate or just a tragic egoist in fancy dress? The solution is likely to be somewhere in between. What is certain is that he was a legend in death as much as in life. He made one last performance of painting with pride, the art, sensuality, and the sublime. He posed us a blood-spattered enigma: would you die handsomely for the sake of honor, or would you retreat into ease and lapse into the forgetfulness of that warrior’s calling?
Nonetheless, Mishima guaranteed his death would not be an expensive waste, an abominable, bizarre spectacle that would forever disturb Japan’s memory.
References
- Abelsen, P. (2008). Irony and Purity: Mishima. Modern Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press.
- Inose, N., & Sato, H. (2012). Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima. Stone Bridge Press.
- Johnson, L. (2013). Yukio Mishima, the Unambiguous, and Myself: Living through a Writer’s Legacy. Advances in Literary Study, 1(4), 50–53.
- Mishima, Y. (1956/1959). The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku‑ji) (R. McFarland, Ed.). Vintage.
- Mishima, Y. (1961). Patriotism (Yūkoku). In Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories (E. Seidensticker, Trans.).
- Mishima, Y. (1965–1970). The Sea of Fertility (tetralogy: Spring Snow; Runaway Horses; The Temple of Dawn; The Decay of the Angel) (various translators). Shinchosha/Alfred A. Knopf.
- Mishima, Y. (1970). Sun and Steel (J. Bester, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1968)
- Scott‑Stokes, H. (1974). The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Yourcenar, M. (1986). Mishima: A Vision of the Void (English ed.). Éditions Gallimard.
