On 25 November 1970, the world-famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) committed seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment). Mishima left an impressive literary oeuvre that includes novels, short stories, plays, essays and poetry, and his novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is just one of a number of works that were adapted for the screen. In 1966 he produced, directed and starred in the short film The Rite of Loveand Death (Yūkōku), which is based on his short story “Patriotism”. He was cast in several other films including Hideo Gosha’s Hitokiri (1969), in which he acted alongside two big stars of the Japanese cinema – Shintarō Katsu and Tatsuya Nakadai. The fiftieth anniversary of his death is an appropriate occasion to direct renewed attention to a film in which Mishima is the central character – Kōji Wakamatsu’s 11:25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate (Jiketsu no hi Mishima Yukio wakamono-tachi, Japan. 2012).
Wakamatsu was a petty criminal and became a filmmaker in the early 1960s, leaving the world of crime to make use of the camera as a political weapon. He directed twenty films for Nikkatsu (one of the Japanese studios) between 1963 and 1965 and was a well-known figure of pinku eiga (exploitation cinema). Sexuality and brutality were the trademarks of these low-budget films in which he already expressed his political views. In 1966, Wakamatsu founded his own production company to free himself from studio regulations and films such as Violated Angels (Okasaretu hakui, 1967) and Go, Go Second Time Virgin (Yuke yuke nidome no shojo, 1969) use violence and sexuality in their strong social criticism. Adolescents are the protagonists in numerous films of his that deal with the identity crisis experienced by many young Japanese in the 1960s and early 1970s, a time marked by student revolts. In his later films, Wakamatsu continued to condemn the hypocrisy and corruption of Japanese society. United Red Army (Jitsuroku rengō sekigun Asama-Sansō e no michi, 2008), a blend of documentary and fiction film, examines Japan’s radical left and its decline after an internal purge in February 1972 during which fourteen members of the United Red Army were killed by their comrades. The anti-war film Caterpillar (Kyataira, 2010) is a criticism of nationalism in its treatment of sexual perversion and the abuse of women. In November 2012, a few months after the world premiere of 11:25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate at the Cannes Film Festival, Wakamatsu was killed in a car accident.
The individual and society
Wakamatsu’s film on Mishima and his ultra-nationalist views can be seen as the second part of a diptych on extremist ideology in Japan and a mirror to his United Red Army. An earlier film, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (USA, 1985), combines events in Mishima’s childhood and adolescence with archive footage of the film’s historical context, the dramatization of parts of three of Mishima’s novels, and moments in the last years in his life. Wakamatsu chose a different approach, avoiding biographical details. His film does not try to explain Mishima’s idiosyncratic ideology and political actions on the basis of childhood experiences, and it avoids any reference to Mishima’s homosexuality. Arata Iura, who plays Mishima in Wakamatsu’s film, was seven years younger than Mishima when he died at the age of 45, but he looks much younger and less muscular. Mishima was a sickly child, and the mid-1950s he started almost obsessively to train his body, showing off his muscular build in the films in which he was cast. He posed as a model for a series of photographs by Eikoh Hosoe that were published in Ordeal by Roses (Ba-Ra-Kei) and figured as a male model in a number of other books and magazines.As Iura states in the “Making of” of Wakamatsu’s film, he did not have time to develop a muscular appearance before the film was shot. However, the lack of physical resemblance between actor and character fits Wakamatsu’s decision not to explore Mishima’s sexual life and narcissism, creating instead an intimate portrayal of the writer and his relationship with several of the young students who formed his private army, the Tatenokai (the Shield Society), which he founded in 1968. This relationship is depicted in human terms but is closely linked to the social and political context of the time.
The importance Wakamatsu attaches to the volatile political situation in Japan during the 1960s is established in the film’s first sequence – a young man in a prison cell is knotting strips of a sheet from his bed into a makeshift rope to hang himself. The shots of this young man preparing for suicide alternate with televised archive material of the assassination of Inejirō Asanuma, the leader of the Socialist Party during a speech he gave in public in 1960. The young man in prison is his assassin, the 17-year-old ultra-nationalist Otoya Yamaguchi. The film suggests that hismurderous deed was the catalyst for Mishima’s decision to become politically active, expressed visually by a lateral tracking shot that connects the sequence in the prison cell with a close-up of Mishima framed against a neutral black background and thereby drawing attention to the human figure. The contrast between black and white (the white clothes worn by Yamaguchi and the white walls of his prison cell) seems to suggest that the two men and what they did are two sides of the same coin and Yamaguchi’s key role is emphasized in another brief sequence in which he – or rather his ghost – symbolizes Mishima’s subconscious self by appearing in his living room and asking the writer when he intends to die.
The relevance of the social context is strengthened by the frequent use of archive material. Press photographs and television footage are combined with fictional scenes from Mishima’s life, mainly the two years immediately before his death. The documentary parts and the sequences filmed five decades later by Wakamatsu are presented in chronological order – beginning with Yamaguchi’s suicide and ending with Mishima’s. The documentary shots accompanied by a narrator’s voice-over, establish a connection with the student revolts, and by showing protest marches, riots, and clashes between left-wing groups and the police, they are also reminders of the war in Vietnam and the protests against it by the Japanese left.
The use of a digital camera and natural lighting give a lack of depth and a uniformity of lighting to many of the interior shots that results in cold aesthetics. The sequences in a café where members of a right-wing student league meet and of Mishima’s debate with left-wing students in a crowded room create a feeling of immediacy that is well supported by the use of a mobile camera. There are several shots in which the protagonists are framed against a neutral black background as if they were detached from reality. A number of sequences take place in the elegant living room of Mishima’s house, a building inspired by European architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries with pillars flanking the doorway and a black and white tiled entrance hall. These architectural features reflect Mishima’s erudition and his admiration for Greek antiquity and European culture. The linearity of the way the living room is furnished and the predominance of white match the Japanese taste for emptiness.
Compared to the opulence of Schrader’s film, Wakamatsu’s mise-en-scène seems pared down to a minimum. However, it is in fact not less but more complex because it is multi-layered and subtle. Frequent bird’s-eye views of the living room show Mishima alone or in conversation with one of his many visitors (journalists, members of the Tatenokai, members of the Jietai/Japan Self-Defense Forces). A view from above that captures the human figures as if under a microscope creates a feeling of distance that works against identification with a hero figure. This imaginative camera position and the elegant and highly anaesthetized interior hint at the discrepancy between Mishima’s way of life and everyday reality in Japan.
This mise-en-scène, by no means simplistic, makes possible a detailed depiction of the main characters and of the political climate in Japan in the 1960s. In the sequences shot for the film, emphasis is placed on the mobilization of conservative and right-wing students who were members of the League of Japanese Students and, later, of Mishima’s Tatenokai. In a violent clash at the entrance to their university members of the League wreck the banners of left-wing protesters. Both the voice-over accompanying the archive footage and the events reconstructed for the fictitious part make it clear that there was some common ground between left-wing and right-wing groups. Although the protests in Japan against the Vietnam War were predominantly left-wing, their anti-Americanism was shared by some nationalists. In his speech shown at the beginning of the film, Inejirō Asanuma expresses strong criticism of the “Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan”, signed in 1951 and amended in 1960. Left-wing and right-wing activists both fought against what they saw as a corrupting American influence on Japan. Mishima had already focused on the alliance between money and power in his novel After the Banquet (1960), andin his political statements he denounced Japan as a country paralyzed by over-bureaucratization and corruption. His misgivings about the country’s political course were shared by left-wing writers such as Kōbō Abe, who, however, did not extol the same values as Mishima, and they did not choose violence as a course of action.
Beauty, purity and death
In its focus on his political views and his development into a violent activist, the film makes reference to the military training that Mishima underwent, although he had been declared unfit for service in 1944. It also contains sequences showing the military drill of the Tatenokai – sequences filmed in the barren landscape on the slopes of Mount Fuji, Japan’s sacred mountain. This setting adds a strong symbolic dimension to these shots, which show men eager to restore Japan’s lost values. One sequence early in the film starts with shots of the famous Magoroku katana (the katana is the long sword of a samurai) being presented to Mishima. Suggesting that the sword is an extension of the self, Mishima evokes values associated with the samurai, celebrating them as symbols of Japan’s identity and of a strong masculinity. Virtues such as honour, bravery and sacrifice are commonly associated with the samurai, who have remained popular figures in novels, manga and film until today even though their rule ended in 1868. For Mishima samurai values are an antidote to the emasculation of Japan after its defeat in 1945.
Mishima’s political convictions are presented in a series of dialogues with his followers, members of the Jietai, and journalists, and also during the debate with the left-wing students. These convictions are repeated in the speech he is giving to members of the Jietai on 25 November 1970 shortly before his suicide, in which he called them to overturn the government and to restore the power of the emperor. This was the same emperor – Hirohito, who reigned from 1926 to 1989 – who had put down the attempted coup d’état by a group of young officers in February 1936, a historical event that Mishima frequently refers to in Wakamatsu’s film and which inspired his short story “Patriotism”. Like Mishima, the young officers were eager to strengthen the emperor’s power in order to rescue Japan from a parliamentary system which they considered corrupt. Wakamatsu emphasizes Mishima’s identification with the rebels of 1936, who had the same ideal concept of innocence and purity and obsessive preoccupation with beauty and death. “To live beauty in Japan means dying for Japan,” Mishima says. The predominance of white in the first sequence in the film – the white clothes of the young assassin, the white walls of his cell – is a metaphorical statement. White is a symbol of purity as well as of death in Japanese culture, but the clinical coldness with which the sequence is filmed has a greater affinity with Brecht’s alienation effect than with idealization. The shots of cherry blossoms also have a symbolic significance. In the arts and in the popular imagination, the samurai are associated with cherry blossom, its fragile, ephemeral flowers symbolizing the purity of the warriors, many of whom died young. During World War II, this symbolic association was applied to young men sent on suicide missions. However, the use of images of cherry blossom in the film seems more like a comment on an overworked and misused but nevertheless still valid symbol.
Wakamatsu establishes a connection between these symbols of purity and death and the character Morita (Shinnosuke Mitsushima), Mishima’s most zealous disciple, who also committed seppuku on 25 November 1970. He represents the faithful retainer who follows his master even to death. Wakamatsu gives special emphasis to his relationship with Mishima, showing how an inexperienced young man lacking self-confidence becomes an enthusiastic follower of Mishima’s twisted political undertakings, never questioning them and defending them vehemently. In his writings,Mishima presents love and death as interlaced, with death purifying and intensifying love. There is no hint of homosexuality in the film, and the bond between Mishima and Morita is portrayed as an idealized albeit perverted relationship, with Morita, the malleable youth, drawn towards Mishima and wanting to become like him. Like a mirror, he reflects Mishima’s vulnerability as well as his desires. Death, according to Mishima, is the way of the samurai, and this is something Morita accepts and is prepared to follow. However, it is Morita who urges Mishima to perform the final deed and commit suicide. The close relationship between these two characters is further emphasized when Mishima orders the three other Tatenokai members who are going to participate in the coup d’état to: “Stay alive so that you can pass on Morita’s spirit to future generations.”
On 25 November 1970, Mishima and the four most trusted members of Tatenokai stormed the headquarters of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces in Ichigaya (one of the three branches of the Jietai and located in the eastern part of Shinjuku Ward in the western part of Tokyo), barricaded themselves in one of the offices and took the chief of staffas a hostage. At Mishima’s request, the members of theJietai service branchgatheredin front of the building while he called for an uprising. In this long sequence, Mishima is filmed on the balcony in low-angle shots while he delivers his emotional speech about samurai ethics and the restoration of the imperial power. Wakamatsu makes use of archive stills and film footage from 25 November 1970 to represent the soldiers in this sequence, which alternates between shots of the assembled members of the Jietai and Mishima addressing his speech to them. However, his attempted coup d’état is doomed from the very beginning. Nobody seems to be listening, and instead of being applauded, he is booed. A number of shots in this sequence show Morita standing stone-faced next to Mishima, a further reference to the strong bond between the two men. Realizing he has failed, Mishima rejoins the three other Tatenokai members and slices his abdomen open, in accordance with samurai tradition. The seppuku is filmed in a series of close-ups and medium shots, combining graphic violence and stylization by fragmenting Mishima’s body and showing the blood gushing out while a series of close-ups of the faces of Mishima’s acolytes reveals their emotions. Morita, Mishima’s kaishakunin – the person who assists someone commit suicide by cutting his head off once his abdomen has been opened properly in accordance with to the ritual – is unable to perform his task and it is one of his comrades, Hiroyasu Koga (Takatsugu Iwama), who administers the deathblow to Mishima and subsequently to Morita too.
An Ambiguous heritage
Wakamatsu succeeds in creating an intimate portrayal of his main character, depicting him as a man obsessed by his political ideas and obsessed with death. At a few points in the film, Mishima expresses doubts about the wisdom of his political actions, revealing the underlying fragility of his character. Arata Iura’s intense acting contributes marvellously to the portrayal of a man who is charismatic but at the same time haunted by doubts. With his emphasisonthe ideological and the human dimension, Wakamatsu shows that unlike Schrader he is less interested in exploring how Mishima’s writing was inspired by his life and how his life gradually became a kind of artistic manifesto. The strong link between his writing and his political activity is however evoked in one of the early sequences when Mishima asks during an interview with a journalist: “Why did his majesty renounced his divine status?” and then, changing the subject abruptly, asks: “Do you think that I will receive the Nobel Prize?”.
The ideal samurai was a warrior who was also versed in cultural matters, representing both the value of bu(themartial arts) and the value of bun (culture), and Wakamatsu’s film alludes frequently but indirectly to the irreconciliability of ideas and action. Whereas in United Red Army Wakamatsu expressed his disillusionment with left-wing militancy, in 11:25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate he focuses on the delirious and self-destructive aspect of Mishima’s character. Mochimaru (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), the first student leader of the Tatenokai, leaves the group because he wants to live the life of a normal adult. The narcissistic and immature side of Mishima’s character, something that Wakamatsu views critically, is revealed in a very playful manner in the scene in which Mishima and his four faithful disciples on their way to Ichigaya sing a song that reminds them of yakuza films, a genre Mishima was a great fan of.
Wakamatsu’s film reveals the obsessive nature of Mishima’s political activism, situating it in a broader social context and reminding the viewer that Mishima succeeded in recruiting to the Tatenokai about a hundred young men (mainly students from Waseda University in Tokyo). Wakamatsu is critical of militant engagement from both the left and the right, but he shows that both political groups were in search of identity – individual as well as national identity. Mishima’s seppuku is the expression of a profound malaise shared by many young Japanese men of the post-war generation. Moreover, it is a reminder that the most venerated hero in Japanese culture is the tragic hero, the “nobility of failure” (a phrase coined by Ivan Morris for the title of his book) being at the core of the Japanese concept of heroism. The film suggests that Mishima went to Ichigaya to meet his death and at the same time achieve posthumous glory. Not unlike Masashige Kusunoki, the famous samurai of the 14th century and ideal representative of the loyal retainer, he chooses a death that will ensure immortality. Kusunoki’s supposed last words – “Seven lives for my country” – are what Yamaguchi writes on the wall of his prison cell, and this same phrase also figures on the headbands worn by Mishima and the four young Tatenokai members on 25 November 1970.
Mishimas seppuku can also be understood as an outcry against nihilism. However, Wakamatsu, is interested in exploring the gesture beyond its meaning for Mishima as an individual, insisting that it is an anachronism. The Jietai colonel who helped Mishima to train his men reinforces this view when he says to Morita, that the sword is not a modern weapon. Another member of the Jietai underlines the anachronism of Mishima’s belief in the restoration of the power of the emperor with the help of a strong army by referring to the attempted coup d’état by the young officers in 1936, saying that it failed because Japan was already a modern state by that time. And Mishima himself wonders: “Could passion fade and turn into absurdity?”
Towards the end of the film and five years after her husband’s death, Mishima’s widow Yoko (Shinobu Terayama) is seen walking along the road below Mount Fuji where she once visited her husband during one of his military training sessions, and she says: “Nothing has changed.” In the final sequence, she meets Koga and asks him what he felt when he laid her husband’s dead body on the floor in the headquarters of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces in Ichigaya. The young man slowly raises his hands, palms up, as if holding a body, then shows that his hands are empty, and the camera freezes on that shot. The titles of Mishima’s novels appear against the background of this image, suggesting that despite his spectacular death, it is through his literary work that Mishima should be remembered. The song “Only you” (performed by the band Kiss) on the sound track create another playful moment. Appropriate phrases such as “in every age, in every time, a hero is born” represent an ironical final comment in a film that examines Mishima’s views and actions critically but also pays him due respect. It is as if Koga’s hands holding an invisible body bear both the weight of emptiness and loss and also the weight of immortal memory.
Andrea Grunert, PhD from the University of Paris Ouest, currently lectures film and media studies at the Protestant University in Bochum (Germany). She is the author of Dictionnaire Clint Eastwood(Paris, 2016) and the editor of Le corps filmé, L’écran des frontiers, De la pauvretéand Et les jeunes … published by Charles Corlet in France.