The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes Page A

They valued ‘purity of sentiment,’ though they never defined this; and they called for ‘preservation of the nation’ by purging selfish party politicians and
zaibatsu
[business] leaders. They believed that self-destruction would be followed by reincarnation, linked mysteriously with the benevolence of the Emperor. The Japanese, they considered, were superior to all other peoples.”
    The young Mishima was intrigued by the Roman-ha. The movement, which derived its name from
Nippon Roman
, a magazine edited by Yasuda from 1935 to 1938, took its ideas from the nineteenth-century German romantic movement. (Hence Roman;
ha
in Japanese means “group.”) It had great influence in Japan during the war, incorporating elements of the traditional
kokugaku
(the nationalistic thought of the great eighteenth-century thinker, Norinaga Motōori), and also Marxism; it was eclectic, in a peculiarly Japanese way. The Roman-ha was encouraged by the military leaders of Japan, and Yasuda gave the movement an inspired leadership. His statements now seem unintelligible, however, and even at the time his notion of irony, a key Roman-ha concept, was vague. His well-known, ironic prewar comments include: “I am saying this purely as an observer. I think it would be more
interesting
if Germany were to win the war, I want her to win. I look at culture from a historical point of view, and it seems to me that the Gods seek to make history more interesting and amusing as one epoch succeeds another.” “Even if this war [the Sino-Japanese War] should end with defeat, Japan will have succeeded in accomplishing the greatest step forward in world history. From an ideological point of view, to imagine defeat is the greatest romance.” Yasuda held that historical reality was unimportant and that the emotion aroused by events was more “interesting” than the events themselves. He argued that it was irrelevant whether a hero was righteousor not. The enlightened man would not commit himself. For such a being, there could be neither decisive defeat nor complete victory; he would be both winner and loser in any game.
    Mishima was attracted by the Roman-ha emphasis on death and destruction. The conclusion of “irony” was that death—the world’s destruction—was the ultimate value. His own fantasies had run on similar lines since childhood. However, he was not influenced solely by the Roman-ha in his thinking. The young Mishima had a highly rational side to him—and an ideology tailor-made for a nation plunging toward catastrophe was insufficient for him. He was attracted at this time not only by the Roman-ha but also by a stoic moral tradition, that of the early twentieth-century Japanese writer, Ōgai Mori.
    Mishima imitated Ōgai Mori as a man and as a writer, especially after 1950, as he recounted in his essay
Sun and Steel
(published by Kodansha International in a translation by John Bester). This book-length essay was finished in 1968, and Mishima, discussing his literary style, then clarified his debt to Mori: “In my style, as hardly needs pointing out, I progressively turned my back on the preferences of the age. Abounding in antitheses, clothed in an old-fashioned weighty solemnity, it did not lack nobility of a kind; but it maintained the same ceremonial, grave pace wherever it went, marching through other people’s bedrooms with precisely the same tread as elsewhere. Like some military gentleman, it went about with chest out and shoulders back, despising other men’s styles for the way they stooped, sagged at the knees, even—heaven forbid!—swayed at the hips.”
    That the young Mishima had an inclination toward the Roman-ha is suggested by some passages in
Confessions of a Mask
: “During this time [the early war years] I learned to smoke and drink. That is to say, I learned to make a pretense at smoking and drinking. The war had produced a