As War Minister, Anami was outspoken against the idea of surrender, despite his awareness that Japan's losses on the battlefield and the destruction of Japan's cities and industrial capability by American bombing meant that Japan had lost the war militarily. Even after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Anami opposed acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration and instead called for a large-scale battle to be fought on the Japanese mainland that would cause such massive Allied casualties that Japan would somehow be able to avoid complete surrender and perhaps even keep some of what it had conquered.
Eventually, his arguments against what he perceived to be the dishonor of surrender were overcome when Emperor Hirohito ordered an end to the war. Anami's supporters suggested that he should vote against surrender or resign from the Cabinet. Instead, he ordered his officers to concede and later said to his brother-in-law, "As a Japanese soldier, I must obey my Emperor."
He informed the officers of the War Ministry of the decision and that as it was an imperial command, they must obey. His refusal to support any action against the imperial decision was a key point in the failure of the Kyūjō incident, an attempted military coup d'état by junior officers to prevent the surrender announcement from being broadcast.
On 14 August, Anami signed the surrender document with the rest of the cabinet and committed seppuku early the next morning. His suicide note read, "I—with my death—humbly apologize [to the Emperor] for the great crime" (一死以て大罪を謝し奉る).
My first real impression of the Harakiri ritual was from this film, 日本のいちばん長い日 (1967). That scene really shocked me a lot. Even until now, I still retain that shock.
Before that, I never really got to know about it. In class, my Japanese teacher would joke about it (謝罪(しゃざい)する), at the same time making a gesture of harakiri (腹切り). And classmates laughed.
But when I saw it for the first time at this distance, I was like… I don’t have a word to describe it. But their spirit and bravery shocked me. Whatever that based on what kind of emotion, hatred or loyalty, there is a huge emotional power to affect audience deeply.
It reminds me of monks or religion believers burning themselves to express their opinion. Like 法轮功 or monks in Tibet. Or Gandhi’s Satyagraha Movement (非暴力不合作运动).And Chinese 死谏.
But I think Seppuku(切腹) has more than that. It’s not just an information under extreme protest and indignation. I would use two examples try to explain it.
First of all, Here are explanations from Britannica(大英百科全书):
Seppuku, the honorable method of taking one’s own life practiced by men of the samurai (military) class in feudal Japan. The word hara-kiri (literally, “belly-cutting”), though widely known to foreigners, is rarely used by Japanese, who prefer the term seppuku (written in Japanese with the same two Chinese characters but in reverse order).
The proper method for committing the act—developed over several centuries—was to plunge a short sword into the left side of the abdomen, draw the blade laterally across to the right, and then turn it upward. It was considered exemplary form to stab again below the sternum and press downward across the first cut and then to pierce one’s throat. Being an extremely painful and slow means of suicide, it was favoured under Bushidō (warrior code) as an effective way to demonstrate the courage, self-control, and strong resolve of the samurai and to prove sincerity of purpose. Women of the samurai class also committed ritual suicide, called jigai, but, instead of slicing the abdomen, they slashed their throats with a short sword or dagger.
Staged seppuku with ritual attire and kaishakunin(介錯人) assistant, 1897
There were two forms of seppuku: voluntary and obligatory. Voluntary seppuku evolved during the wars of the 12th century as a method of suicide used frequently by warriors who, defeated in battle, chose to avoid the dishonor of falling into the hands of the enemy. Occasionally, a samurai performed seppuku to demonstrate loyalty to his lord by following him in death, to protest against some policy of a superior or of the government, or to atone for failure in his duties.
There have been numerous instances of voluntary seppuku in modern Japan. One of the most widely known involved a number of military officers and civilians who committed the act in 1945 as Japan faced defeat at the end of World War II. Another well-known occurrence was in 1970, when the novelist Mishima Yukio disemboweled himself as a means of protest against what he believed was the loss of traditional values in the country.
Samurai about to perform seppuku
Obligatory seppuku refers to the method of capital punishment for samurai to spare them the disgrace of being beheaded by a common executioner. That practice was prevalent from the 15th century until 1873, when it was abolished. Great emphasis was placed on proper performance of the ceremony. The ritual was usually carried out in the presence of a witness (kenshi) sent by the authority issuing the death sentence. The prisoner was usually seated on two tatami mats, and behind him stood a second (kaishakunin), usually a relative or friend, with sword drawn. A small table bearing a short sword was placed in front of the prisoner. A moment after he stabbed himself, the second struck off his head. It was also common practice for the second to decapitate him at the moment that he reached out to grasp the short sword, his gesture symbolizing that the death was by seppuku.
Perhaps the best-known instance of obligatory seppuku is tied to the story of the 47 rōnin, which dates to the early 18th century. The incident, famous in Japanese history, relates how the samurai, made masterless (rōnin) by the treacherous murder of their lord (daimyo), Asano Naganori, avenged his death by assassinating the daimyo Kira Yoshinaka (a retainer of the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi), whom they held responsible for Asano’s murder. Afterward the shogun ordered all the participating samurai to commit seppuku. The story soon became the basis of the popular and enduring Kabuki drama Chūshingura, and it later was depicted in numerous other plays, motion pictures, and novels.
Let’s dive into first story I want to dig. The death of 阿南惟幾.
Mishima's nationalism grew towards the end of his life. In 1966, he published his short story The Voices of the Heroic Dead (英霊の聲, Eirei no koe), in which he denounced Emperor Hirohito for renouncing his own divinity after World War II. He argued that the soldiers who had died in the February 26 Incident (二・二六事件, Ni-Ni-Roku Jiken) and the Japanese Special Attack Units (特攻隊, Tokkōtai) had died for their "living god" Emperor, and that Hirohito's renunciation of his own divinity meant that all those deaths had been in vain. Mishima said that His Imperial Majesty had become a human when he should be a God.
In February 1967, Mishima joined fellow authors Yasunari Kawabata, Kōbō Abe, and Jun Ishikawa in issuing a statement condemning China's Cultural Revolution for suppressing academic and artistic freedom. However, only one Japanese newspaper carried the full text of their statement.
In September 1967 Mishima and his wife visited India at the invitation of the Indian government. He traveled widely and met with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Zakir Hussain. He left extremely impressed by Indian culture, and what he felt was the Indian people's determination to resist Westernization and protect traditional ways.
Mishima feared that his fellow Japanese were too enamored of modernization and western-style materialism to protect traditional Japanese culture. While in New Delhi, he spoke at length with an unnamed colonel in the Indian Army who had experienced skirmishes with Chinese troops on the Sino-Indian border. The colonel warned Mishima of the strength and fighting spirit of the Chinese troops. Mishima later spoke of his sense of danger regarding what he perceived to be a lack of concern in Japan about the need to bolster Japan's national defense against the threat from Communist China. On his way home from India, Mishima also stopped in Thailand and Laos; his experiences in the three nations became the basis for portions of his novel The Temple of Dawn (暁の寺, Akatsuki no tera), the third in his tetralogy The Sea of Fertility (豊饒の海, Hōjō no Umi).
In 1968, Mishima wrote a play titled My Friend Hitler (わが友ヒットラー, Waga tomo Hittorā), in which he depicted the historical figures of Adolf Hitler, Gustav Krupp, Gregor Strasser, and Ernst Röhm as mouthpieces to express his own views on fascism and beauty. Mishima explained that after writing the all-female play Madame de Sade, he wanted to write a counterpart play with an all-male cast. Mishima wrote of My Friend Hitler, "You may read this tragedy as an allegory of the relationship between Ōkubo Toshimichi and Saigō Takamori" (two heroes of Japan's Meiji Restoration who initially worked together but later had a falling out).
That same year, he wrote Life for Sale (命売ります, Inochi Urimasu), a humorous story about a man who, after failing to commit suicide, advertises his life for sale. In a review of the English translation, novelist Ian Thomson called it a "pulp noir" and a "sexy, camp delight", but also noted that, "beneath the hard-boiled dialogue and the gangster high jinks is a familiar indictment of consumerist Japan and a romantic yearning for the past."
Mishima was hated by leftists who said Hirohito should have abdicated to take responsibility for the loss of life in the war. They also hated him for his outspoken commitment to bushido, the code of the samurai in The way of the samurai (葉隠入門, Hagakure Nyūmon), his support for the abolition of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, and for his contention in his critique The Defense of Culture (文化防衛論, Bunka Bōeiron) that preached the importance of the Emperor in Japanese cultures. Mishima regarded the postwar era of Japan, where no poetic culture and supreme artist was born, as an era of fake prosperity, and stated in The Defense of Culture:
In the postwar prosperity called Shōwa Genroku, where there are no Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ihara Saikaku, Matsuo Bashō, only infestation of flashy manners and customs in there. Passion is dried up, strong realism dispels the ground, and the deepening of poetry is neglected. That is, there are no Chikamatsu, Saikaku, or Basho now.
In other critical essays, Mishima argued that the national spirit which cultivated in Japan's long history is the key to national defense, and he had apprehensions about the insidious "indirect aggression" of the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. In critical essays in 1969, Mishima explained Japan's difficult and delicate position and peculiarities between China, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
To put it simply, support for the Security Treaty means agreeing with the United States, and to oppose it means agreeing with the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communist Party, so after all, it's only just a matter of which foreign country to rely on, and therein the question of "what is Japan" is completely lacking. If you ask the Japanese, "Hey you, do you choose America, Soviet Union, or Chinese Communist Party?", if he is a true Japanese, he will withhold his attitude.
In regards to those who strongly opposed the US military base in Okinawa and the Security Treaty:
They may appear to be nationalists and right-wingers in the foreign common sense, but in Japan, most of them are in fact left-wingers and communists.
Throughout this period, Mishima continued to work on his magnum opus, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy of novels, which began appearing in a monthly serialized format in September 1965. The four completed novels were Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (published posthumously in 1971). Mishima aimed for a very long novel with a completely different raison d'être from Western chronicle novels of the 19th and 20th centuries; rather than telling the story of a single individual or family, Mishima boldly set his goal as interpreting the entire human world. In The Decay of the Angel, four stories convey the transmigration of the human soul as the main character goes through a series of reincarnations. Mishima hoped to express in literary terms something akin to pantheism. Novelist Paul Theroux blurbed the first edition of the English translation of The Sea of Fertility as "the most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century" and critic Charles Solomon wrote in 1990 that "the four novels remain one of the outstanding works of 20th-Century literature and a summary of the author's life and work".
In August 1966, Mishima visited Ōmiwa Shrine in Nara Prefecture, thought to be one of the oldest Shintō shrines in Japan, as well as the hometown of his mentor Zenmei Hasuda and the areas associated with the Shinpūren rebellion (神風連の乱, Shinpūren no ran), an uprising against the Meiji government by samurai in 1876. This trip would become the inspiration for portions of Runaway Horses (奔馬, Honba), the second novel in the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. While in Kumamoto, Mishima purchased a Japanese sword for 100,000 yen. Mishima envisioned the reincarnation of Kiyoaki, the protagonist of the first novel Spring Snow, as a man named Isao who put his life on the line to bring about a restoration of direct rule by the Emperor against the backdrop of the League of Blood Incident (血盟団事件, Ketsumeidan jiken) in 1932.
From 12 April to 27 May 1967, Mishima underwent basic training with the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF). Mishima had originally lobbied to train with the GSDF for six months, but was met with resistance from the Defense Agency. Mishima's training period was finalized to 46 days, which required using some of his connections. His participation in GSDF training was kept secret, both because the Defense Agency did not want to give the impression that anyone was receiving special treatment, and because Mishima wanted to experience "real" military life. Accordingly, Mishima trained under his birth name, Kimitake Hiraoka, and most of his fellow soldiers did not recognize him.
From June 1967, Mishima became a leading figure in a plan to create a 10,000-man "Japan National Guard" (祖国防衛隊, Sokoku Bōeitai) as a civilian complement to Japan's Self Defense Forces. He began leading groups of right-wing college students to undergo basic training with the GSDF in the hope of training 100 officers to lead the National Guard.
Like many other right-wingers, Mishima was especially alarmed by the riots and revolutionary actions undertaken by radical "New Left" university students, who took over dozens of college campuses in Japan in 1968 and 1969. On 26 February 1968, the 32nd anniversary of the February 26 Incident, he and several other right-wingers met at the editorial offices of the recently founded right-wing magazine Controversy Journal (論争ジャーナル, Ronsō jaanaru), where they pricked their little fingers and signed a blood oath promising to die if necessary to prevent a left-wing revolution from occurring in Japan. Mishima showed his sincerity by signing his birth name, Kimitake Hiraoka, in his own blood.
When Mishima found that his plan for a large-scale Japan National Guard with broad public and private support failed to catch on, he formed the Tatenokai (楯の会, "Shield Society") on 5 October 1968, a private militia composed primarily of right-wing college students who swore to protect the Emperor of Japan. The activities of the Tatenokai primarily focused on martial training and physical fitness, including traditional kendo sword-fighting and long-distance running. Mishima personally oversaw this training. Initial membership was around 50, and was drawn primarily from students from Waseda University and individuals affiliated with Controversy Journal. The number of Tatenokai members later increased to 100. Some of the members had graduated from university and were employed, while some were already working adults when they enlisted.
Mishima delivering his speech on the balcony
On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai—Masakatsu Morita (森田必勝), Masahiro Ogawa (小川正洋), Masayoshi Koga (小賀正義), and Hiroyasu Koga (古賀浩靖)—used a pretext to visit the commandant Kanetoshi Mashita (益田兼利) of Camp Ichigaya, a military base in central Tokyo and the headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Inside, they barricaded the office and tied the commandant to his chair. Mishima wore a white hachimaki headband with a red hinomaru circle in the center bearing the kanji for "To be reborn seven times to serve the country" (七生報國, Shichishō hōkoku), which was a reference to the last words of Kusunoki Masasue, the younger brother of the 14th-century imperial loyalist samurai Kusunoki Masashige (楠木正成), as the two brothers died fighting to defend the Emperor. With a prepared manifesto and a banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped out onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below. His speech was intended to inspire a coup d'état to restore the power of the emperor. He succeeded only in irritating the soldiers, and was heckled, with jeers and the noise of helicopters drowning out some parts of his speech. In his speech Mishima rebuked the JSDF for their passive acceptance of a constitution that "denies (their) own existence" and shouted to rouse them, "Where has the spirit of the samurai gone?" In his final written appeal that Morita and Ogawa scattered copies of from the balcony, Mishima expressed his dissatisfaction with the half-baked nature of the JSDF:
It is self-evident that the United States would not be pleased with a true Japanese volunteer army protecting the land of Japan.
After he finished reading his prepared speech in a few minutes' time, Mishima cried out "Long live the Emperor!" (天皇陛下万歳, Tenno-heika banzai) three times. He then retreated into the commandant's office and apologized to the commandant, saying,
"We did it to return the JSDF to the Emperor. I had no choice but to do this."
Mishima then committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment associated with the samurai. Morita had been assigned to serve as Mishima's second (kaishakunin), cutting off his head with a sword at the end of the rite to spare him unnecessary pain. However, Morita proved unable to complete his task, and after three failed attempts to sever Mishima's head, Koga had to step in and complete the task.
According to the testimony of the surviving coup members, originally all four Tatenokai members had planned to commit seppuku along with Mishima. However Mishima attempted to dissuade them and three of the members acquiesced to his wishes. Only Morita persisted, saying, "I can't let Mr. Mishima die alone." But Mishima knew that Morita had a girlfriend and still hoped he might live. Just before his seppuku, Mishima tried one more time to dissuade him, saying "Morita, you must live, not die." Nevertheless, after Mishima's seppuku, Morita knelt and stabbed himself in the abdomen and Koga acted as kaishakunin again.
This coup attempt is called The Mishima Incident (三島事件, Mishima jiken) in Japan.
Another traditional element of the suicide ritual was the composition of so-called death poems by the Tatenokai members before their entry into the headquarters. Having been enlisted in the Ground Self-Defense Force for about four years, Mishima and other Tatenokai members, alongside several officials, were secretly researching coup plans for a constitutional amendment. They thought there was a chance when security dispatch (治安出動, Chian Shutsudo) was dispatched to subjugate the Zenkyoto revolt. However, Zenkyoto was suppressed easily by the Riot Police Unit in October 1969. These officials gave up the coup of constitutional amendment, and Mishima was disappointed in them and the actual circumstances in Japan after World War II. Officer Kiyokatsu Yamamoto (山本舜勝), Mishima's training teacher, explained further:
The officers had a trusty connection with the U.S.A.F. (includes U.S.F.J), and with the approval of the U.S. army side, they were supposed to carry out a security dispatch toward the Armed Forces of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. However, due to the policy change (reversal) of U.S. by Henry Kissinger who prepared for visiting China in secret (changing relations between U.S. and China), it became a situation where the Japanese military was not allowed legally.
Mishima planned his suicide meticulously for at least a year and no one outside the group of hand-picked Tatenokai members knew what he was planning. His biographer, translator John Nathan, suggests that the coup attempt was only a pretext for the ritual suicide of which Mishima had long dreamed. His friend Scott-Stokes, another biographer, says that "Mishima is the most important person in postwar Japan", and described the shackles of the constitution of Japan:
Mishima cautioned against the lack of reality in the basic political controversy in Japan and the particularity of Japan's democratic principles.
Scott-Stokes noted a meeting with Mishima in his diary entry for 3 September 1970, at which Mishima, with a dark expression on his face, said:
Japan lost its spiritual tradition, and materialism infested instead. Japan is under the curse of a Green Snake now. The Green Snake bites on Japanese chest. There is no way to escape this curse.
Scott-Stokes told Takao Tokuoka in 1990 that he took the Green Snake to mean the U.S. dollar. Between 1968 and 1970, Mishima also said words about Japan's future. Mishima's senior friend and father heard from Mishima:
Japan will be hit hard. One day, the United States suddenly contacts China over Japan's head, Japan will only be able to look up from the bottom of the valley and eavesdrop on the conversation slightly. Our friend Taiwan will say that "it will no longer be able to count on Japan", and Taiwan will go somewhere. Japan may become an orphan in the Orient, and may eventually fall into the product of slave dealers.
Mishima's corpse was returned home the day after his death. His father Azusa had been afraid to see his son whose appearance had completely changed. However, when he looked into the casket fearfully, Mishima's head and body had been sutured neatly, and his dead face, to which makeup had been beautifully applied, looked as if he were alive due to the police officers. They said: "We applied funeral makeup carefully with special feelings, because it is the body of Dr. Mishima, whom we have always respected secretly." Mishima's body was dressed in the Tatenokai uniform, and the guntō was firmly clasped at the chest according to the will that Mishima entrusted to his friend Kinemaro Izawa (伊沢甲子麿). Azusa put the manuscript papers and fountain pen that his son cherished in the casket together. Mishima had made sure his affairs were in order and left money for the legal defence of the three surviving Tatenokai members—Masahiro Ogawa (小川正洋), Masayoshi Koga (小賀正義), and Hiroyasu Koga. After the incident, there were exaggerated media commentaries that "it was a fear of the revival of militarism". The commandant who was made a hostage said in the trial,
I didn't feel hate towards the defendants at that time. Thinking about the country of Japan, thinking about the JSDF, the pure hearts of thinking about our country that did that kind of thing, I want to buy it as an individual.
。
The day of the Mishima Incident (25 November) was the date when Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) became regent and the Emperor Shōwa made the Humanity Declaration at the age of 45. Researchers believe that Mishima chose that day to revive the "God" by dying as a scapegoat, at the same age as when the Emperor became a human. There are also views that the day corresponds to the date of execution (after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar) of Yoshida Shōin (吉田松陰), whom Mishima respected, or that Mishima had set his period of bardo (中有, Chuu) for reincarnation because the 49th day after his death was his birthday, 14 January. On his birthday, Mishima's remains were buried in the grave of the Hiraoka Family at Tama Cemetery. In addition, 25 November is the day he began writing Confessions of a Mask (仮面の告白, Kamen no kokuhaku), and this work was announced as "Techniques of Life Recovery", "Suicide inside out". Mishima also wrote down in notes for this work,
This book is a will for leave in the Realm of Death where I used to live. If you take a movie of a suicide jumped, and rotate the film in reverse, the suicide person jumps up from the valley bottom to the top of the cliff at a furious speed and he revives.
Writer Takashi Inoue believes he wrote Confessions of a Mask to live in postwar Japan, and to get away from his "Realm of Death"; by dying on the same date that he began to write Confessions of a Mask, Mishima intended to dismantle all of his postwar creative activities and return to the "Realm of Death" where he used to live.
