Death in Tokyo

Thirty six years ago, Japan’s best known novelist and dramatist, Yukio Mishima, cut open his own stomach and was then beheaded with an antique sword, in the notorious ritual of hara-kiri, or more correctly, seppuku — a form of suicide traditionally reserved for samurai, Japan’s extinct feudal warrior caste.

The context for this anachronistic act of self-destruction was truly extraordinary. Four years earlier, in 1966, Mishima had formed a militia, naming it the Tate no Kai, or Shield Society, to signal its mission — to provide a shield to protect the Emperor from presumed left wing revolution in the riot torn streets of late 1960s Japan — and it was as commander of this small military band, not as a world famous author, that Mishima sought to fashion his epitaph.

There were never more than one hundred members of the Shield Society and through his political contacts, including the incumbent Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, Mishima gained permission for the student cadets to train with Japan’s army at various military bases in the Tokyo region.

On the 25th November 1970, on a bright sunny morning, dressed in the winter uniforms he had commissioned from Tsukumo Igarashi, a designer who had created uniforms for General de Gaulle, Mishima and four Shield Society cadets drove to the headquarters of the Eastern Army Group on Ichigaya Hill, in central Tokyo, not far from the Imperial Palace. Mishima had an appointment to see General Mashita, the base commanding officer, on the pretext of presenting his cadets whom, he explained, had performed in a commendable manner on a military exercise on Mount Fuji.

Mishima was also wearing a Japanese sword in a leather military scabbard. The sword was legendary, a meito, a famous sword, by the sixteenth century smith, Seki no Magoroku.

After some polite conversation, on a signal from Mishima, the Shield Society cadets seized the general, gagged him and tied him to his office chair. The general’s staff in an adjacent office quickly discovered that instead of a quiet meeting between their commander and the famous author something terrible was occurring. They tried to storm the inner office, but were repeatedly rebuffed.

Twelve officers and soldiers were injured, one suffering the near severing of his left hand at the wrist, slashed by Mishima’s sword. Eventually after shouted negotiations through the thin partitions it was agreed that Mishima would address the assembled base personnel from a large balcony outside the general’s office window which overlooked a courtyard; by such an appeal Mishima hoped he might rouse the listening soldiers to join with him in staging a coup.

To ensure compliance Mishima threatened that any further attempts at rescue would result in the general being killed and Mishima committing seppuku.

Instead of being roused to mutiny the nearly one thousand soldiers gathered beneath the balcony heckled and jeered. The police and media helicopters hovering above made it next to impossible to hear what Mishima was saying. His comments about the need to restore the spirit of the samurai, to revive the real soul of Japan, of his love for the army who were his brothers, had no effect whatsoever.

After just a few minutes of this impotent address and the distribution of leaflets which summarized his gekibun, or last appeal, Mishima returned to General Mashita’s office determined to die.

Mishima had long before written that he had intended to make a poem of his life. The last verse, he had more recently resolved, would be written in blood.

After cutting deeply into his stomach with a yoroidoshi, or armour piercing knife, Mishima signaled to his kaishaku, or second, to end his suffering by beheading him with a single stroke. Unfortunately the young cadet selected to do this, Masakatsu Morita, had insufficient experience and made a hash of the first cut, missed on a second attempt and cut only part of the way through Mishima’s neck on the third swing. Another more expert cadet took the sword and finished the job.

Botched no doubt, but Mishima was dead and had died as he intended, bravely and demonstrating his sincerity and self-mastery.

Thirty years after Mishima’s suicide I went to Japan to see if I could find the sword Mishima had worn to visit the general on his last day alive, the sword which had been used to behead him, the Seki no Magoroku blade. It had been produced in court as evidence in the trial of the surviving Shield Society cadets. (Morita had also killed himself by seppuku, immediately after Mishima.) The three were sent to prison for four years. No one seemed able to confirm what had become of the sword.

In ancient tradition it is though that the spirit of anyone who dies under a Japanese sword is absorbed into the blade. So I went in search of the sword in order to try to rediscover Mishima’s spirit — and to understand more generally the place, if any, in modern Japanese society of such notions as bushido, the way of the Samurai, and makoto, the purity of absolute sincerity of action.

In the event I discovered Mishima had become an almost impenetrable collage of taboos and found myself going in circles as I searched for Mishima’s sword and those who had known the author. But the journey changed me and helped to exorcise an obsession with what Camus called the only philosophical question: why not kill yourself? I was now firmly on the side of life.