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Mishima in the Twenty First Century

petertasker.asia

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Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century

#21

Post by rafram »

disown wrote: post #18
ctchocula wrote: post #5

The conclusion made in this article resonates with a point made by George Orwell in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf that has never ceased to fascinate me: "Also [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a…

[flagged]

I think the point that he was making is that America and much of Europe like to imagine wars as faraway struggles that we do our best to avoid thinking about at home, while Hitler made militarization the national pastime. Compare the Boy Scouts with the Hitlerjugend, for instance.

It’s not that the Allied nations were at the time less militaristic (although they were, of course, not also committing mechanized genocide against the Jewish people), but they didn’t conceptualize it as a form of entertainment like the Nazis did.

Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century

#22

Post by morelisp »

howlgarnish wrote: post #11

So here's the thing: it's fairly clear that Mishima did not "die for his cause", or in fact have any expectation that his thoroughly half-assed coup would succeed. For one, there was no plan whatsoever for what they would have done next had the troops they addressed actually joined the putative rebellion. Mishima had precisely one objective: to die like his own ideal of a warrior, at the peak of his physical prowess.…

> it's fairly clear that Mishima did not "die for his cause", or in fact have any expectation that his thoroughly half-assed coup would succeed... Political? Not really.

These are two separate things. I agree Mishima did not have any expectation his coup would succeed (at least not in any immediate sense), and was not in any sense an effective militia commander. But that doesn't mean he didn't die for his cause, nor that his cause wasn't political.

Mishima's aesthetic program is to attempt to fuse all these sometimes-conflicting things - anti-colonialism, conservative politics, "the Japanese spirit", homeroticism, his artistic method and particular output - into a singularity. "Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood."

Fetishistic? Absolutely. Political? Also absolutely.

Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century

#23

Post by morelisp »

kthxbye123 wrote: post #16

Ideologically, politically and aesthetically Mishima was clearly a dead end, but I’ve always found him of minor interest because his aesthetic was so clearly Westernized in a way that earlier strains of Japanese fascism weren’t. The campy, macho-hysterical aesthetic elements that have been present in western far-right movements from D’Annunzio to Trump weren’t really present in the prewar Japanese military government…

Upvoting because although I disagree strongly with "dead end" (something more like "closed world", maybe), this is a critical aspect of Mishima. His policy was thoroughly anti-Western but his ideology was heavily influenced by German philosophy and he had many personal and professional contacts with westerners.

Mishima is among the first to embody his conception of Yamato-damashii in the same way Ta-Nehisi Coates labeled Donald Trump the US's "first white president" - not literally the first, but the first who needed to frame it explicitly in antithesis.

Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century

#24

Post by MichaelZuo »

ctchocula wrote: post #5

The conclusion made in this article resonates with a point made by George Orwell in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf that has never ceased to fascinate me: "Also [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a…

Bingo. In the language of economists and political theoreticians they discovered that the people attached radically different weights along their hyperbolically discounted Pareto frontier, i.e. that their optimization criteria were non-uniform -> highly lumpy.

Military parades as entertainment, perceiving national strength more vital than ease and comfort, living space out East more vital than peace, and many more examples attest to the societal consciousness back then.

And of course since Hitler et al wanted to upset the status quo as quickly as possible they would have realized that focusing on these areas yield exponential returns on investment. Or at least vaguely tried to in the case of Mishima.

Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century

#25

Post by slmjkdbtl »

motohagiography wrote: post #9

Philip Glass' soundtrack to the 80's film Mishima has become one of my favourite albums. The "Mishima VI, Closing" piece is some of his best work. The author's final observation, "Perhaps we need a Mishima to shock us out of our complacency." is something he should be careful about wishing for. (Though the idea of Ian McEwan storming a military base was very funny, I thought Stephen Fry would be even better equipped.…

Also you don't find a lot of far right artists now, Mishima's works and his political stand is a really interesting combination.

Just watched the Mishima film a couple weeks ago, the Cinematography awed me the most, the director clearly studied a ton of Japanese cinema (I think he's going for that style), the theatre scenes are easily one of my top scenes of all time. The music on the other hand I think it's a little bit over-scored, like a lot of other Philip Glass' scores they sound amazing stand-alone but not always fit to the films, just personal taste..

Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century

#26

Post by idoubtit »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #8

Mishima's late-life militarism and his death tend to overshadow his early work. Both "Confessions of a Mask" and "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" are masterpieces, and you can see the raw impulses that motivated him, before he sublimated them to a political agenda.

I agree, and I was disappointed that none of these two masterpieces was mentioned in the article. My personal favorite is "Confession of a mask" for its ambiguous feelings.

On the literary side, the article does mention the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy where the second volume is the most political, with a surprising depiction of an idealistic coup that cannot succeed. But the quality of this tetralogy clearly goes down with each volume.

Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century

#29

Post by jeffreyrogers »

poxwole wrote: post #27

I mean he was a fascist. Never forget that.

This is just a lazy attempt at character assassination. A Japanese guy who killed himself in 1970 is a fascist? Only if you completely redefine what words mean. "Fascism" in its modern usage means "person whose right-leaning political views I don't like". Completely ahistorical and intellectually bankrupt form of argument.

Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century

#30

Post by morelisp »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #29
poxwole wrote: post #27

I mean he was a fascist. Never forget that.

This is just a lazy attempt at character assassination. A Japanese guy who killed himself in 1970 is a fascist? Only if you completely redefine what words mean. "Fascism" in its modern usage means "person whose right-leaning political views I don't like". Completely ahistorical and intellectually bankrupt form of argument.

On the contrary, your reaction is some kneejerk response influenced by a perception of overuse of the word in modern politics. Mishima is unapologetically a fascist; much of the Japanese right was, some still even is.

> A Japanese guy who killed himself in 1970 is a fascist?

A Japanese guy who took over a government building to agitate for a sublimation of individuality and a return to an imperial ethnostate?

Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.

The Futurists dreamed of writing so well, and this is from his worst book by far!

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