Identity crisis

Although most famous for his ‘income-doubling plan’ and for being called a ‘transistor salesman’ by Charles de Gaulle, Ikeda was certainly one of the most important prime ministers in the history of postwar Japan. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was the achievement of a ‘politics of patience

and reconciliation’ that unified the Japanese people behind the project of economic growth. Under Ikeda, the question of Japan’s military role was side-lined and society occupied itself with getting rich peacefully.

However, as became apparent in the 1980s, man cannot survive on affluence only, and after the drama of the 1950s, with the sun-tribe a decade older, the question of Japan’s national identity was once more on the agenda. At this time, the nation’s mood was well reflected in the work of the famous novelist Kawabata Yasunari, who was awarded the Bunka kunsho (medal of culture) from the emperor in 1961 and then the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 (making him the first Japanese writer to receive it).

Kawabata’s often beautiful novels have been described as elegies to a lost Japan. Critics often point to Snow Country and Thousand Cranes as his masterpieces. They contain traditional aesthetics and serve as romantic re-imagings of Japan as a specific type of traditional beauty that is endangered, or at least sullied, by the modern world. Indeed, Kawabata appears to have thought of himself as a conduit through which traditional Japanese culture could be preserved and transmitted to the postwar

generations. Furthermore, Kawabata’s work was easily palatable for an international audience, since it represented Japan in an exotic and unthreatening way that appealed to Western audiences.

The 1950s and 1960s saw many of his novels translated into English, and ironically his international fame was part of the reason for his domestic fame. The contrast with Ishihara’s work in the 1950s could not be more stark.

An indication of the way in which attitudes had changed towards a Japanese identity that rested upon martial valour and violence is the case of Kawabata’s contemporary and friend, the writer Mishima Yukio. Mishima had shot to fame in the 1950s after a series of astonishing and complex novels, such as Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Forbidden Colours, and Confessions of a Mask.

He dealt with daring themes, such as homosexuality and the relationship between sex and violence. As the 1950s drew on, Mishima became increasingly interested in his body and the martial arts; he took up body-building, kendo, and boxing, and started to present himself in the manner of a movie star. In

hindsight, various biographers have wondered whether this was the onset of some form of masochistic, narcissistic disorder.

Like Kawabata, Mishima also believed that his life and work should somehow represent Japan. However, whilst the two great novelists shared a delicate sense of beauty, their visions of Japan were radically different. For Mishima, the Ampo was a real turning point. Rather than representing the end of a problematic and violent decade that risked undermining Japanese democracy – which was the realization that encouraged many readers to turn to Kawabata – Mishima was mostly concerned with the way that Japanese society had recoiled from Kishi’s vision of Japan as a land of martial valour. Immediately following the crisis, Mishima published a little volume called Patriotism, in which he set out what he thought it should mean to love Japan. 

His next works, The Sword and Sun and Steel, were devoted to explorations of the aesthetics of violence, and he announced that the goal of his life was to acquire the characteristics of a true

Japanese warrior – bunburyodo (the way of the warrior and the scholar combined). At about the same time, his book Patriotism was made into a film, produced and starred in by Mishima himself.

So great was his fame that when he requested special permission to train with the Jieitai (the Self Defence Forces) from his friend Prime Minister Sato, he was granted it. At the same time, the

literary establishment started to distance itself from his views.

In interviews he spoke about the tragedy that the emperor had been forced to renounce his divinity after the war, and asserted that the wartime kokutai (national polity) had been the authentic Japan – the Americans had emasculated the country and ruined its spirit. He argued that the postwar period had left the Japanese confused about their values, and that this was the perfect time to revive the traditional Japanese ideal of bushido (the way of the warrior). Finally, in 1967 he founded a secret, paramilitary

society called the Tatenokai (the Shield Society). Prime Minister Sato even gave Mishima some funds to help run the group, and future prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, then defence agency chief, granted the Tatenokai free access to all Jieitai facilities in Japan in 1970.

Meanwhile, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations pulsed around Japan’s cities, overflowing into peace rallies, and running parallel to student activism. In the spring of 1969, many university campuses were closed down because of student protests about Vietnam, about Ampo, and about tuition fees. On the campus of Tokyo University, the protests were violent and a number of professors were literally held hostage and interrogated in lecture halls, including the eminent political scientist Maruyama Masao.

Excited by the activism, Mishima visited the students in Tokyo, but was disappointed by their motives.

On 25 November 1970, Mishima and a group of Tatenokai infiltrated a military base in Tokyo and took General Mashita Kanetoshi hostage, while Mishima himself stood out on the balcony to speak to the assembled troops. He told the Jieitai that the real Japan had been killed by talk of liberty and democracy, that the emperor had been humiliated by the Americans, and that they – the military – held the future of Japan in their hands. As an example of the weakness and ignorance of the politicians, he stated that the Jieitai should have been sent in against the student demonstrators at Tokyo University in the previous year (instead of the riot police). 

His dramatic speech received no response from the troops, who could barely hear him. Then he returned to the general’s office, where he committed seppuku in the traditional way and killed himself, apparently because he could not live in a Japan that had been so polluted and compromised by Western modernity. It must be said that Mishima was an extreme case, and that neither his actions nor his views elicited much support in Japan.

Indeed, the overall reaction appears to have been one of incomprehension. Prime Minister Sato, Mishima’s friend and benefactor, was reputed to have responded that he assumed that Mishima had gone insane. And Mishima remains a controversial figure to this day. However, the existence of a cultural space between Kawabata (who also committed suicide a couple of years later) and Mishima serves to indicate the dimensions of Japan’s identity crisis throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Both called for a return to traditional Japanese values amidst rapid economic development and the creation of a consumer society, but they could not agree on what those values might be.