Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 33 - Yukio Mishima and the Suicidal Crossfit Cult

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

On this episode Joe and Rich talk about Yukio Mishima, one of the greatest writers Japan has ever produced, as well as a psychotic devotee to the Japanese Emperor who created his own right wing militia based around working out in thongs and fucking. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys buy some merchandise: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Follow the show @lions_by Follow Joe: @jkass99 sources: https://www.stonebridge.com/sbp-blog/death-in-mid-autumn-the-art-and-artifice-of-yukio-mishima-s-final-moments https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan-news/breaking/scarred-memory-ex-gsdf-member-remembers-sword-attack-by-yukio-mishima/ http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2013/02/04/persona-a-biography-of-yukio-mishima/

Mishima himself had samurai ancestry and he was extremely proud of it. You can easily find two contradiction characteristics of Japanese cultures or Japanese characters. One is elegance, one is brutality. But these two characteristics are very tightly combined sometimes and our brutality I think comes from our emotion it is never mechanized or systematized like Nazis brutality and I think the brutality might come from our feminine aspects and elegance comes from our nervous side. Sometimes we are too sensitive about defilement or elegance or sense of beauty or such aesthetic side. And sometimes we are tired of it.

And we need sometimes a sudden explore. Hello and welcome to another episode of Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today is Rich. Hi, guys. Nick is still in Japan as we were recording this. I think he's supposed to be back next week or something. Hopefully, back by Christmas. Yeah, I don't believe or trust it. So I wrote an episode about Japan that he could not be on because he's in Japan.

I feel like that's fitting. that he could not be on because he's in Japan. I feel like that's fitting. And I brought you on because along with being a true crime aficionado and junkie, you're also really into cults. If there's anything I love more than serial killers, it's cults. Yeah. And so I guess I'll let you be the judge at the end of this. If this really was a cult or something else,

we're going to talk about how a strange group fitness class turned into something of an Imperial death cult and try to take over a country. Intriguing. All led by one of Japan's greatest authors and a harem of gay samurai. So the samurai thing is arguable because samurai is a class that technically no longer exists and didn't exist then but they certainly considered themselves samurai and uh pretended to be as much uh i guess that that part's up for debate uh but uh the episode is about uh yokio mishima or how he was actually born his real name is kimitaki hiroka but uh

mishima is his pen name that his teachers thought of it thought of for him and so that's what we're gonna call him because that's what he's known as does that mean something uh no uh well his his name does mean something uh but his pen name was thought of uh we'll talk about in a little bit but uh he was something of a prodigy and uh his teachers were afraid that his writing was going to get him picked on for being so successful so they just came up with a new name for him to be published in or like a pen name kind of like uh was it jk rowling thought of robert galbraith to try and see if she could separate herself from a female identity as a writer yeah i mean pen names are are pretty common i mean stephen king had a pen name for a while to try to because he wanted to write

under a different name but i mean it's not exactly uh comparable because they just didn't want this poor kid to get picked on they didn't really work out but we'll talk about that i think that's i think that's more comparable to the to the female writer because a female writer wants to see if she can stand alone in a man's world versus Stephen King, who probably just wanted to try something new. Yeah. And Mishima was about 12. So no one would read a 12 year old writing. I know nobody read mine. I'm 30 and barely anybody reads mine now. But Mishima was born to an aristotic family in Tokyo in 1925 to a high ranking government official and a relative to the principal of the Kasai Academy.

That doesn't mean a whole lot to Western people, but this is pretty much like being born to like, if you're like the grandkid to a former like head of Yale. So it's a, it's a pretty big deal. And more importantly than that, he was kind of tentatively connected to japanese royalty um and that if that wasn't prestigious enough for you he was uh descended from the maeda samurai clan

and uh they are once feudal lords of the entire kaga domain domain where his family still lived uh and even though the caste system was technically abolished it was still definitely a thing his family was obsessed with and so is everybody else so i'm sorry if this is not in your uh script here but i have no like clue about anything about japan's government is it a royalty-based government um they still have an emperor today it's either he's even less than a constitutional monarch than like the queen is um but he is still a super central figure to their shinto religion which is why the emperor is such a big deal uh during world war ii he was considered something of a uh of a godlike figure like kind of like a

god on earth type deal he was supposedly descended directly from the sun god i think it was um i'm sure if i'm wrong somebody will tell me um which is why world war ii was such a big deal at the end um when uh emperor hirohito actually uh made a speech i know that doesn't sound like a big deal but uh the vast majority of japanese people have actually never heard the emperor speak before uh he was considered so high above, they weren't good enough to hear his voice. Which is kind of funny because he was very soft-spoken and kind of had a bit of a stutter. And he spoke in a kind of Japanese that was so much different than everybody else, they actually had a hard time understanding him. Like Metatron and Dogma.

Yes. Yes. Metatron and dogma. Yes. Yes. And it was such a big deal because in his surrender speech to the allies, one of the things he had to do is renounce his divinity. So it's kind of like the Pope coming out and saying like,

Jesus was just a carpenter. That was it. But also a lot of this has to do with, this is pre-World War II. When militarism was very popular and they're trying to kind of rebirth the samurai feudal system but not their imperial desires uh which is how world war ii kind of happened so their their government structure is very very highly based on religion it it was back then okay um since the since their defeat in world war ii uh religion has definitely fallen off significantly in Japan because the emperor had to make that speech renouncing his divinity, which is why Mishima ended up having such a huge internal conflict. Mostly due to his family, which we'll talk about, but it kind of tore at the soul of the country.

If that doesn't sound dramatic enough, it definitely was. It made a fundamental reformation of religion, government, and society all at once, all while their government was firebombed and atomic bombed to the ground. So, it was a pretty crazy time. But this is 1925, so we're not quite there yet. Pretty crazy time. But this is 1925, so we're not quite there yet. At the time, there's still – I mean, even though when you read Western history books, it makes it sound like the emperor was an absolute monarchy, and he was not. He had a prime minister and an entire parliament known as the Dite. And the emperor was super, super important, and people revered him.

And in Mishima's family case, they absolutely worshipped him. But he was not actually the head of state in practical terms. But in this family, it was super important because while his mother and father were, like, professionals, they weren't in deep in the government or anything like that but they were uh far too busy to take care of mishima so they hand him off to his grandmother a woman named natsuko um who pretty much brainwashed him into uh loyalty to the imperial family this isn't super uncommon at the time as i mean eventually people were suicide bombing people in the name of the emperor so So like this is, this is normal. Um, I mean, is it common to be like, yeah, I gave birth to this child, but I really don't have time to take care of it. So can you just kind of take this on? No, no. His dad was a huge piece of shit. Um, yeah, his dad was a very, very traditional,

uh, like he only wanted to raise his child through like physical and uh emotional abuse but he was too busy for that quite quite now so he just ditched him on grandma sounds very american of them yeah yeah uh what doesn't though is uh so uh natsuko was actually raised in the imperial household of Prince Tarahito. So not only was she the normal amount of brainwashed into the dynastic and godliness of the imperial household, she was actually raised with them, which makes their family super important and him very well connected. family super important and him very well connected um and this is despite the fact uh since she married away from the imperial family um in japan like most monarchies uh in the east and actually in the west for the most part um all titles and power is carried on the on the man's side of the family like even today uh if a princess an imperial princess marries away she loses title

she loses money she no longer has any privileges or anything uh yeah and uh you know total side note but this uh up until very recently they were actually going to have a constitutional amendment in japan that would have allowed an empress to take over because there were no male heirs um but that ended up changing but uh so when she married away she lost all of her titles and everything, but she never actually abandoned any of her bougie Imperial pretenses. And if anything, they actually got stronger to try to connect her to something she thought was

really important, which she then forced on young Mishima. She would never allow him to forget their direct descendants of the Tokugawa Ieyasu, who his family line ruled Japan for 200 years. So it is pretty important. She sounds absolutely insufferable. As I'm sure most royal debutantes.

What do you call them? The young women? She wasn't a princess. I don't know. Just a rich woman. Heiress? No, she wasn't there to anything. She wasn't a princess. I don't know. Just a rich woman. Heiress? No, she wasn't there to anything.

She gave all that up. She was just some old bitch who wouldn't give it up. Wouldn't, like, forget about stuff. I mean, I think you're still always an heiress, though. Not in Japan. In the sense of the term where you are... I don't know. I think there's a certain connotation to heiress in America where... She's certainly privileged.

Yeah. there's a certain connotation to Eris in America where she's certainly privileged. Yeah. Natsuko is also very prone to violence and random outbursts about death and morbidity. It's really strange.

She believed that sunlight was unhealthy for him, for young Mishima. So he was forbidden of going outside. Well, that's not good. Strike number one. Yeah. He was also not allowed to play sports or meet other kids his age strike two uh and i think this is something she carried over from the imperial household like young royalty are rarely allowed to go outside they're not allowed to talk with any commoners um it's it's a super closer to existence even for other like if you compare it to other royalty um like the japanese uh imperial household is super conservative uh to the point that uh

like the current prince like his what he married a commoner and uh she was actually having severe mental issues because of it i feel like even using the word conservative, which definitely has a negative connotation in these times in America, especially in this podcast, but even using the word conservative is a bit harsh there because not letting your kid go outside or associate with other kids his age is borderline abuse. I mean, I don't mean conservative in a political aspect because they're, you know, literal royalty. I consider it conservative as far as morals, morals, ethics and everything.

I get it. But even in the most conservative morals, you are allowed to associate with other people your age. I guess I could consider it. It's it's conservative for a strange imperial aristocracy uh where people literally think you're jesus uh there's really no uh modern day comparative thing except maybe like the the kim family from north korea where like they believe he was born on a mountain and like there's double rainbow and like he invented the hamburger weird shit like that.

It's like he still needs sunlight though. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently not. If you're, uh, if you're the Imperial household, uh,

but again, they technically were not, uh, she was just living her golden days. Uh, she was just raised around them. She was not blood related to them at all. She was just pushing all her,

uh, her own childhood beliefs onto her grandchild. Is that? Yes, grandson. So because of this, the real only interaction he got with other kids and the only kind of mental exercise he got

was he was forced to play only with his cousin and her dolls, which is a little weird. I always liked playing with my cousins. These aren't action figures. What kind of dolls are they? I don't know. Are they like those creepy porcelain?

They have to be porcelain with no faces. Something super weird. Any porcelain doll is creepy. Yeah. I guess the only good thing that came from this is it gave him time to dive into his new hobby, which was writing. And this is the origin story of every writer, actually. Everyone. We're all weird shut-ins when we're young, and that's why we start writing.

Actually, I know I wrote this as a joke, but it's not really a joke for me. all weird shut-ins when we're young and that's why we start writing um i actually like i know i wrote this as a joke but uh it's it's not really a joke for me like i like didn't really do a whole lot as a kid so i would read a lot and then like once you start reading a lot you think hey maybe i can give this a shot and then i started writing and i think i i think i showed you some of those very first writings that i did like those shitty little books about like – I don't remember what all of them were, but they had really bad illustrations too. They weren't good. They certainly weren't Mishima good because he was – like I said, he was like a prodigy. We were all – like I said, all writers have the same origin story.

We're all, like I said, all writers have the same origin story. We're all aristotic shut-ins who yearn to please the shogunate while being utterly terrified of the sun touching our pearl-like skin. That might be a little bit of hyperbole. While his grandma may have been a lunatic, she was also very well connected. So she got Mishima enrolled in the best school in the country um and he he probably would have made it in any way uh because he was just so goddamn good at everything he touched like he's one of those weird guys that even though he's like very troubled he was good at fucking everything um before he left grade school he'd be the editor of the school's literary

society which by the way his grade school had a fucking literary society um did he finally get to play with other kids i would assume so uh but they probably had like weird reading circles about like death poetry i don't know he was a i mean he was a weird kid no that's what he so he wrote about a lot of dark shit uh around the same time i was debating like around the same time he was doing this i was debating which pokemon to select as my first one i mean i was reading like charlie and the chocolate factory and i mean i think i i read the giver yeah that's that's that's pretty dark as dark as i probably got as a grade school kid right i mean i picked charmander so I mean, I picked Charmander. So, like, I guess that's one point for me. My whole world is fire. It burns so hot and so fast.

So, during this time, he wrote a short story titled Forest in Full Bloom. It described the feelings of his ancestors still within him. They lived within him and uh were in control of his destiny while at the same time driving him towards his own death he was 10 years old uh so i have a funny story uh tragic uh maybe maybe not so funny but uh so i was writing a ton in middle school uh i mean i i was older than 10, but I'm going to assume my developmental arc is significantly beyond his at this point. And it made me immediately think like, wow, nobody thought to tell this 10-year-old like, this kid's got issues. When I was in middle school,

I had to write a creative story, a creative writing story. And at um, at the time, uh, me and my sister were watching scream over and over and over again. So yeah. Yeah. So I wrote a story based on scream, but like there was a killer in the school because, you know, you're a kid, you spend more time in school and do it through family, uh, about, but like, it was, it was incredibly descriptive and also got and all I got was CPS to visit my mom's house. Oh, your poor mom. She had enough on her plate, Joe. Like I thought like it was like the greatest thing I ever wrote and CPS is like, we think your son has like, needs to talk to somebody.

I think that probably speaks a lot to your writing. Like that probably means it was actually pretty great. Yeah, like I would like to think the same thing as far as, like, it was so well-descripting in the horrible acts of violence I was writing about. That they're like, holy shit, this kid. I mean, it probably also speaks to all the issues that you had as a young child with your parents and everything. I don't know. I just don't know what you're talking about. Yeah.

So instead of calling CPS, his teachers published it in a national magazine. And that's when they gave Mishima his pen name. They were afraid his fellow students would make fun of him

for his success in his writing. All of those teachers' worries were ignored by Mishima himself. And he was so excited about becoming a published writer, he went and told all of his friends on the school's rugby team. They did not think this was cool, and because kids are the fucking worst, they beat the shit out of him and kicked him off the team. Kids are the fucking worst. Like, why can't you just celebrate each other's successes? What? You think you're so smart now, you fucking nerd?

Kids are so fucking insecure. Like, okay, you're on the rugby team. You're probably a pretty cool, like, athlete, like, popular kid. Yes. But you can't be happy for this other kid for his success in this completely separate arena that you don't even have a fucking toe in. Yeah, again, he was 10? And he was published in a national yeah letter or a national magazine of literature let him be great okay i'm gonna go ahead and say this this is this is very early on but i'm gonna say it these fucking rugby rugby

kids who beat his ass they were the reason why he fucking became a cult leader and murdered people which i'm assuming he did i don't know what the end of this story is but i'm assuming that's it and it's the rugby kids fault i'm gonna say it's weirder than you think it is at the end but i won't go so far as saying it's a rugby kids i'm gonna blame dad nope blaming the rugby rugby kids oh my god why can't i say rugby because we have been drinking armen Armenian brandy for several hours. Right. That is the fact.

So that is when Mishima finally returned to his family when he was 12. And if you thought his grandma was bad, it actually turned out returning to his family was even worse for him. Unfortunately for Mishima, his dad thought his writing was effeminate. Sissy. And he destroyed all his writings. thought his writing was effeminate sissy and uh he destroyed all his writings how can writing be effeminate was he writing about like i don't even know how do you write effeminately i don't know which is weird uh because his family uh all thought of themselves as like descendants of samurai all those other things and uh poetry and writing was actually super important to samurai um like they wrote death poems uh before they went to battle and everything yeah they were

super i mean as far as warrior casts go they were super artistic uh they had i mean there's entire parts of the hagekure um that are about flower arranging i mean i'm guessing it's not just like ugh and then i stabbed that fucker like you have to have a little bit of art with it. You know, it certainly started out that way. And then, like, when wars, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, but when wars stopped becoming so prevalent in Japan, that's when, like, the way of the samurai was kind of pulled out of somebody's ass to kind of keep them relevant. But, yeah, I mean the the samurai these guys are attaching themselves to wrote poetry they arranged flowers they wrote whole novels they painted uh they they did all of that more than fighting with their swords but no writing

is totally gay uh so we should probably destroy all this shit clearly this included some of his earliest manuscripts so like the the best sight we would see in Amishima, his psyche is gone because his dad was an asshole. This never really slowed Amishima down though, but when he was caught, he was beat ruthlessly and then held up alongside speeding

trains. What? Yeah, to just scare the shit out of him. That, what? Yeah, I mean imagine being 12 years old and just being held up next to a speeding fucking train. I mean, I just recently rode on my first train when I was 30. I can't imagine being held up alongside one. Yeah, yeah. Like close enough to legitimately scare him half to death.

That's not okay. No. That could be the tagline this whole episode. That's not okay. That's not okay. No. That could be the tagline this whole episode. That's not okay. That's not okay. His mother, though, was significantly more supportive than his father. She would bring him writing supplies

and hide his writings from his father when he would get drunk and toss his room apart looking for any of that sissy-ass written word shit. She would also smuggle him books by people like Oscar Wilde, which is, do you know much about Oscar Wilde? I've heard the name before. Super prolific writer and also very closeted gay man,

which will definitely sound familiar later on. And he was decades ahead of his time, much like Nishima himself but it's because his father banned all non-school books from the house like if he was at school if he was home from school the only thing he was allowed to do was to fucking study for school jesus so okay so in his early days he's not allowed to see sunlight or other children in his school days he's not allowed to see sunlight or other children and his school days he's not allowed to read anything outside of school books like jesus give this kid a fucking break of course he's gonna turn into a psycho cult leader like they're just they're asking for it uh yeah i would

say that they couldn't have seen this coming because nothing like it existed before uh but i definitely think his dad would have been like yeah probably should have saw that coming if he lived long enough uh yeah uh i mean again you have to remember this whole time and mishima's already nationally known um he was a generational writing talent uh he was accepted pretty much immediately into the university of tokyo uh and thankfully for him he got the fuck out of the house uh and the course load was brutal and something like double that of a modern day American student. And as someone, there's something that we have both experienced and are currently experiencing.

It was probably two times that. And that didn't stop him from staying up until the early morning, writing all night, finally free of his dad and not having to hide. So he'd spend all day studying and all night writing. He hardly slept. He hardly slept. He ate like shit, chained smoke, and drank like pretty much every college kid. So he's really

fucking unhealthy at the time. Then, because this is now the 1940s, Mishima received a draft notice in the mail from the Imperial Japanese Army as World War II began to rapidly grow out of control. Oof. Yeah.

Well, good news and bad news. This wasn't an outlier by any means. The army was pretty much always conscription-based, and before the war, there was a good chance Mishima's family connections would have actually gotten him out of it if he wanted to. But as the war started creeping up, wasn't going to happen. So Mishima's rich ass was sent to the draft office anyway. Because his life as a college student and he was super unhealthy, like I just said, he was really unhealthy and he had a pretty bad cold going when he went into the office. So when he went into the medical checkup

area like you know even back then they do medical checkups um to make sure that they're not drafting some horrible sick bastard that's gonna die the second you put him in uniform um you know and that's kind of surprising because the japanese military was notoriously brutal and he probably if he if he really was this sickly he probably would have just died um but the doctor heard rails in his lung it's kind of like a rasping noise um that can mean all kinds of horrible shit uh it can mean a cold it can mean pneumonia uh the apparently the doctor is really overworked or just didn't give a shit and he just diagnosed him with tuberculosis which which definitely makes him unfit for military duty um as the

japanese are going to suffer millions of dead and wounded from the war there's a very good chance this half-assed doctor saved his life um i imagine mishima got the last laugh on those asshole rugby players though who are all probably drafted and died in the war for being a bunch of healthy bastards. Those fucks. Take that, you good breathing fucks. Mishima's draft rejection did not help his relationship with his dad because his dad totally knew he didn't have tuberculosis. Everybody knew he didn't have tuberculosis everybody knew he didn't have tuberculosis i mean i feel like his relationship wasn't great to begin with when his dad like just decided he didn't want to raise him from the very beginning yeah if your dad

ever uses trains as punishment there's a good chance you're not gonna have a good relationship with him um so like everybody knew he was faking it and they lit into him and uh mishima did not take this well it was considered something of like a dishonor that he couldn't serve even though it wasn't his fault he got a doctor who apparently was not very good at his job and nobody really accepted that um thankfully though he just ran back to college and away from his parents uh while still in school he continued to accumulate writing accolades he wrote novel novels novellas short stories and essays he wrote several highly regarded kabuki plays and musicals dude literally never stopped um many of these writings had a very common theme, death and suicide.

He never in his life wrote anything that could be considered lighthearted. From the time he was like 10 years on, he was just writing heavy shit. This included his first full-length novel, which he began writing in 1946, called Thieves. It was about two young members of the aristocracy drawn towards suicide. Yeah, there's a theme there. Most people who study Mishima put his obsession with death and suicide squarely in the shoulders of his grandma. Her rants and abuse had a belly effect on the young boy, but it was also considered pretty much acceptable for the time period in Japan. Suicide and death was pretty common in the 1940s in the country.

Being common doesn't mean acceptable. Not acceptable as much as his attitude is very acceptable. It's considered like if you're surrounded by dark shit all the time, like a good example is Robert Evans, who runs the Behind the Bastards podcast. He did a thing earlier where he was talking about Iraqi art coming out from since the war 2003 started. And it's just super fucking dark. A lot of us do a death and destruction and PTSD and things like that.

It's it's just considered a product of your atmosphere. So more of like a therapeutic thing than a concerning thing. Right. It's like I'm never going to write something that's super happy thing than a yeah it's an outlet concerning thing right it's like i'm never gonna write something that's super happy but that's it's an outlet um it's kind of you know it makes me really wonder what happened to stephen king when he was a kid but actually i would like that question answered now yeah um i mean living in tokyo through massive air raids during world war ii meant mishima was pretty much surrounded by death at all times. And if he wasn't, he was very familiar with it. He was also raised during the Bushido Age or the rebirth of the Japanese Imperial Army, which in effect had a total control of the civilian government of Japan.

When the underlying areas of Bushido was service to the emperor and suicide being a means of retaining one's honor. the underlying areas of Bushido was service to the emperor and suicide being a means of retaining one's honor. So you can imagine when he's going through all of these, these things that are considered dishonorable to him, he would constantly think of suicide. That wouldn't be super surprising if he just, if he, even though he wasn't doing it or attempting he was,

he was certainly musing with it. No, that makes perfect sense. Like a lot of, a lot of kids who do anything that they have been told their whole lives is shameful or whatever. And they think probably even if that's who they feel that they are as a person, they think that the consequences that they've been told their whole lives they should suffer for doing that thing is you know is what they should be suffering then that seems perfectly reasonable that that's what they would be thinking about the whole time yeah he's probably doing with a lot of self-guilt like every christian who thinks they're going to hell for doing everything that is enjoyable in life

every like poor religious someone from a religious family who who discovers that they're gay or accepts that they're gay the very very sad bohemian rhapsody movie that we just watched freddie mercury was just so ashamed of himself his whole life for being the poor little packy boy he wasn't pakistani though but that's what they called him that's just the england thing it was very sad joe yeah england just racist as fuck i think it has a lot to England thing. It was very sad, Joe. Yeah, England's just racist as fuck. I think it has a lot to do with this. It was just very sad that he hated himself and he was so lonely. Yeah.

Yeah. But on the bright side, he wasn't part of a giant suicide death cult. He did die of AIDS, though. Yeah, that's sad. Let's get back to the story. Way to bring it down. You know what?

You really took this episode about a death cult and made it real, real upsetting. Yeah, because Freddie Mercury dying is the saddest thing to happen in history. So this death cult could only just be a side note. Okay. Bringing me back to Mishima. So it's actually not about Mishima there's a small uh side note here a lot of people um amateur historians people who teach themselves history based on the discovery channel what have you uh they they talk a lot about bushido and the way the samurai uh as as this this code that was the reason for a lot of the brutality and the suicides

and uh stuff like that from the imperial japanese army during world war ii the pashido is bullshit it turns out uh it's generally framed as being an ancient code of the samurai that guided them through the sengoku period uh which is known as like the time of war and continued unobstructed through world war ii and the empire of japan the truthobstructed through World War II and the Empire of Japan. The truth is significantly less cool. It turns out Japanese samurai were a lot like medieval knights in that they did tons of fucked up shit, constantly oppressed people, enslaved people, raped people, committed crime, and pretty much killed people on a whim.

And they just wrapped it up in a really cool thing to make themselves sound good. And now in the Middle Ages, they called it chivalry. The main difference being like chivalry was actually written around this, like the codes of chivalry were kind of written around the same time knights existed in their heyday. Bushido was not.

The truth is the Bushido code was not actually codified into a book until 1899, well after samurai were actually outlawed. So that would, yeah, I can't think of a comparison to that. But it's like, I mean, you weren't allowed to carry a sword anymore. Those are all during the the meiji reformation decades before that um if you if you want a really bad comparison it's around that time when samurais are out loud when the tom crews me the last samurai is based in not entirely accurate uh though they it's more accurate than you could imagine what a japanese movie with a white guy as the last samurai is not accurate? Yeah. In the true story, he was French. Yeah, that actually happened. Anyway, not Tom Cruise.

But, you know, the idea of Bushido became a thing well after samurai were no longer legally a thing. There's also something called the eight virtues of Bushido, which a lot of people constantly talk about. They were not written by a samurai or anybody else of any importance. They were actually written by a guy named Nebotate Inazo, who was a economist. It was used as a militaristic means of control during a time where Japan rapidly wanted to become a first world power.

And they thought the best way to do that was become kind of an imperial militaristic fascist state. And it worked. It worked really well. It worked so well, people still believe it to this day. So good on them for that, I guess. Yeah. And it didn't really become popular until the government itself took control of it and used it to build its army.

It made war look purifying and death just another duty to the god emperor. It's really weird how well it worked, like within 50 years. Like within 50 years. The spin worked so well that it galvanized the Japanese military into what resembled something of a death cult where entire divisions conducted suicide charges rather than surrender. And because the very concept of surrendering was dishonorable. There was actually a, you know, it's one of the few wars where nobody kind of tried to negotiate POW transfers because Japan didn't want them back. I mean, did they,

they at least get like virgins or something when they died? Like what's, what's the draw here? You got to die for the emperor, man. It was, uh, like a good example is I recorded an episode with Mike,

you know, Mike, um, where. Love you, Mike. Yeah. I don't know if he listens. I hope he does. Cause he's on the fucking know, Mike, um, where. Love you, Mike. Yeah. I don't know if he listens.

I hope he does. Cause he's on the fucking show. But, uh, uh, when somebody went missing, uh, like they were taken POW and the Kwantung army,

which is an army group of the Japanese imperial army. Uh, they just reported them dead. That's that. That just seems unreasonable. It was, it was a way for the family to keep their honor your kid's dead he didn't surrender he's not a bitch like i said uh as mishima did not fight

in the war it is telling that he too became super obsessed with these concepts uh there's another theme that cropped up in mishima's writing homosexuality which is surprising in 1948 um now that he graduated college he followed the book thieves with a book known as the confession of a mask a story about a young gay man who must hide his true feelings in order to blend into society uh this is so far ahead of its time like it's insane uh it's known as like a seminal work in like homosexual writing to this day. This came out in the 1940s in Japan. So I know that he's a bad guy here, but I feel really sorry for him at this point. He's a conflicting character because if you remove...

No, I have to admit, I never read any of his books. I know Nate has. A long time ago, we talked about it. If he feels like editing in a bit here about what he thought about the books, be my guest. But... Yeah, the one thing I'll say is that in Confessions of a Mask, the protagonist has two major events with regard to his development as both an artist and a person. Number one, he beats off to a painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Number two, he finds himself enraptured with a photo of Joan of Arc in all his masculine glory and masculine beauty, and then is massively disappointed, heartbroken to the point of suicide when he realizes that Joan of Arc was a woman. I don't know if that gives you any insight into Yukio Mishima's character,

but I will say the books are actually quite good. So definitely read them the same as you would a book by Saline or any other insane right-wing writer who was actually a talented fiction writer. Nate from the Hell of a Way to Die podcast? Yeah, my producer. His writing is almost universally acclaimed by everyone. It would be like if, I mean, there's no comparison. I can't think of anything else that's remotely

close to this. It's one of those things where you really do have to separate the art from the artists because Mishima is a very problematic character as a whole. But his writing is magnificent. I mean, OK, problematic, yes. But. OK, as as a psychology student.

Right. Like you have to. I know it. Okay. It's how, can I, can I plug another podcast here without. Be my guest. Okay. So Dax Shepard's podcast, I listened to a lot and he.

I don't think he needs any of my traffic, but that's fine. No, absolutely not. But I love it. And he's very, he's very good. Okay. For an actor, he's very good at looking into the psychology of a situation. He's a member of AA. He is very, very open about his addiction and all of that stuff.

And often quotes stuff from his AA practices and things like that. And one of his best, um, or I guess most often quotes is talking about excuses versus, um, explanations. And, um, and that goes into a lot of psychology of people, of, of, of people who do bad things. They, whether they excuse themselves for doing those bad things or explain themselves for doing those bad things. And i'm hearing a lot of explanations for why this man is about to do some very bad things right and that's that's why i i chose to go back and read just a ton of shit from the japan times who constantly reports on them um just because like almost everybody who's listening this has probably heard about how this episode ends. It's not a secret. What isn't known is how the fuck we ended up there, which is the important part, in my opinion. Because most people, and I'm not going to ruin it yet, because you have no idea how it ends.

Nope, not a clue. Most people have no idea that he was this, like, internationally known writer who was so close to what he was one person away from being named a Nobel Nobel Prize winner three times for his writing. The only time he did not get it is because they recently picked a different Japanese writer and they didn't want to pick two people from the same country back to back. So he kind of just got fucked out of it. Like, it would be like Stephen King or like J.K. Rowling flying a plane into a building in the name of Al Qaeda. Like, you just don't fucking see it coming. J.K. Rowling would never do that, by the way.

Let's just make that known. The woman who won't give up on her own series and just keep. She's a wonderful fucking woman. Don't don't don't you dare. So how was that last movie? I don't want to talk about it. That's I thought she's going to she's going to figure a way out of this mess. All right.

OK. Instead. All right. Okay. Instead, so the Confessions of a Mask became so popular that Misha became not only a national celebrity, but an international celebrity as the book was translated in English. His new fame and fortune allowed him to travel across the world. Now, again, he became internationally famous, writing a book on homosexual fiction in 1948. That's nuts. I don't think someone could have done that 20 years ago in the United States. No. That is nuts. I mean, that's impressive. Extremely impressive.

And that's very progressive. And also very telling. Yeah. So his travels made his writing expand in new territory. This included some early sci-fi concepts in 1962, which is pretty revolutionary. Sci-fi was very, very, very new at the time. And a book that followed a local politician during his run to be governor of Tokyo. of what mishima wrote about the book uh was so detailed that the politician actually sued him for invasion of privacy so he's a good journalist when he wanted to too um now that politician was named harichi harichi arita uh and just before i anybody feels sorry for this weird guy stalking him and writing a book about him he was actually credited for the origination of the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere this was also known as the imperial japanese philosophy

for the entire second world war so uh don't feel too sorry for him he was an asshole uh it was around this time that mishu became obsessed with his physical health maybe it was because before he was considered too sickly to join the army, which had to still be gnawing at him. This included eating as well as anybody would imagine, but also a nearly religious devotion to lifting weights.

He would work out multiple times a day every day. It was claimed he did not miss a single day of working out for the last 15 years of his life. And he is fucking yoked. You can pull up some pictures of him. I'll post them on the Twitter page.

But like always take rest days. Yeah, he never did. The closest thing he took to rest days is just writing in between workouts. No, you should. You should definitely. If you're out there listening to this, rest days are very important to your workout regimen. I'm in the mode of you need to go full Mishima, never quit doing anything, and then ritualistically kill yourself. False. None of that is true, listeners.

He also devoted himself to kendo, or Japanese sword fighting, and would eventually become an expert in that as well. Because again, he literally never failed at anything until the end of his life. He wrote multiple essays that decried his fellow writers and intellectuals for putting the mind over the body. I think that we should allow the listeners to have their own opinion on whether he failed

at the end of his life or not. He succeeded in something. So let's all listen here and let's all make our own conclusions the the concept of success is relative uh i will assume uh this is the kabuki theater way of asking uh do you even lift bro like when he like he looked around all like the pencil neck dorks who wrote books at like his whatever publishing company he worked and he worked at and was like you'd be cooler if you did some fucking bench do you even love yosa uh all of this uh lifting left him pretty fucking huge

and ripped so he naturally also became a model and actor because why not uh this guy's really got it going on uh one of the magazines he modeled for was called Young Samurai Bodybuilders of Japan. And an American photographer designated an entire photo shoot that had Mishima standing in the snow wearing nothing but a loincloth and swinging a sword around. Hot. I mean cold, but hot. It doesn't have to make sense. It's fucking art. He was also considered but ultimately passed for the Nobel Prize in three different occasions, like I just said.

By this point, Mishima was so famous and rich and well-connected that other families began to approach him to set up a marriage. Like I said, he was still technically connected to the aristocracy, and they still very much believed in arranged marriages for power-broking and stuff like that. Always got to love a good arranged marriage. Yeah. Someone who did not love a good arranged marriage was Mishima. Probably because he was gay. Yeah. He was at least bi.

We can't say for sure he was gay. No, but I mean, all of the gay literature probably points to a strong... Hey, his sexuality was very fluid throughout his life i'll say that much i mean do we have like um facts of him having sexual relations with anyone oh yeah he had two kids oh that's good congratulations mishima uh now while his ideas and homosexuality and sexual validity are very progressive his his thoughts on women were not. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. Most closeted gay men don't like women.

You know, I'll say it's probably because he learned to hate women at a very young age from his very abusive grandmother. I think that had a lot to do with it. So he did not want to get married um but one of the women uh that was presented to him for marriage was a young woman named michiko shoda who is a very successful woman from a very powerful family in japan mishima did everything he could to sink this proposal as fast as he as he humanly could uh he purposely missed dates and did not shave before meeting for the first time. He also put out increasingly harsh terms for marrying him. So he grew a sexy beard?

No, I would assume if he grew it to look bad, I assume it's like a bunch of patchy pubes. Like if you can grow a good beard, you're not gonna grow a good beard to try to piss somebody off. Yeah, but it depends on your culture, good beard to try to piss somebody off. Yeah. But it, it depends on your culture, I guess,

because. Yeah, true. I don't know. He was, I mean, I would assume, uh,

I never saw any pictures of any Japanese emperors with beards. So maybe it's like passe. I don't know. I liked having a beard. Um, you had a nice beard at one point. I miss it. Uh, so he decided to put out terms for marrying him and this is outside the normal terms that like arranged marriages would

have and this included that she could absolutely never interrupt his workouts his writing or his reading uh and that meant like pretty much she just couldn't come around him because that's all he did speak to me look at me or enter the room that I am in. Those are literally the only three things he did. Eventually, the proposal withdrawn because the family, her family got sick of his shit. Now, I know none of you are wondering whatever happened to Miss Shota. And I will say that she definitely won the breakup because Miss Shota would go on to marry one imperial prince, Akih and become empress of japan in 1989 yeah uh her son will be the next emperor of japan uh so she won yeah i mean if we're keeping score yeah i think i think we should in that case

like she's like hey remember that time i almost married a fucking Pulitzer Prize winning writer? Still came out on top of that one. So, though he tried as hard as he could, Mishima could not escape marriages for long. And he ended up being forced into one in 1958 to a woman named Yoko Sugamiya. And if you're wondering why he had to be forced into marrying a woman, it was because around the same time he got married, he spent his free time hanging around Japan's gay bars. At this point... I feel like you're just proving my point here. I don't know. I think he's more complicated than that.

I think he's a very complex character that you can't just label in the closet a gay man. Okay, I'm going to let you keep telling the story and then I'm going to give you my opinion at the end. Now, this is something Yoko, who who is still alive vehemently denies uh it's hard to argue though um i feel like she's just trying to defend some outdated sense of honor and i don't blame her because it's hard to accept you married a guy who is also into other people, uh, who you in no way can please him in the way that he is looking for. I think most women who married closeted gay men feel that way. So it is hard to argue that Mishima was in those gay bars because he entire, he published an entire book about it.

Uh, it is called forbidden colors. While the previous confessions of a mask was considered semi-autobiographical, Colors went even further. Its main character is a gay middle-aged writer trapped in a loveless marriage. You're not doing much to prove your own point here. I'm sure some people are wondering

why he got married at all. Honor. Kind of. I think it had a lot to do with his career. I mean, if you think America was sexually repressive in the 1950s, Japan was even worse. I think America is still sexually repressive.

America is absolutely still sexually repressive. And again, Japan is still worse. Also, he was a man who was near 30 years old and not getting married was a reason to eye you a suspicion or doubt and possibly not give you work

to make matters worse his mother was diagnosed with cancer and he I mean his dad and his grandma were giant pieces of shit but he loved his mother and he knew one of the last things his mom wanted to see before she died was to see him get married so he took the plunge

that's very nice uh so i mean at this point mishima sounds kind of normal right like sure he has some personal issues going on with the conflict of his sexuality which we can all understand um and in a quasi forced marriage but i assume all of that was really common for a a gay man or bisexual man the 50s and 60s and even today so for all of the shit that he's been through yes absolutely he seems very normal so he's so normal you might be asking why in the fuck are we talking about him well i'm very overly intelligent which oh yeah yeah yeah he he is incredible he is a very very critical deep thinker to the point that like i don't like making fun of him even though he did a lot of

dumb shit late in his life um so good news everybody this is where shit's gonna fly off the rails um first and foremost mishima was a rigid insane imperial nationalist um so extreme was his beliefs in japanese imperialism that after world war ii he denounced the emperor himself for renouncing his divinity contrary to what your president might say nationalism is not a good thing no no i mean we're a pretty outspoken left-wing podcast so it's not a hot take now like i said before renouncing his divinity was uh an unconditional part of the surrender to the the allies at the end of world war ii even though he still considered like he completely ignored what hirahito said about renouncing his divinity he still absolutely

believed the imperial throne was the source of divinity but he still was also like shame on you jesus um yeah i mean he believed the emperor was a living god on earth and by denouncing his godliness the millions of japanese soldiers who died during the war had all died in vain because remember they're all fighting in the name of the god emperor i can see that i mean that that that actually seems reasonable yeah uh he was also a hardcore believer in a concept known as kokatai i might be pronouncing that wrong my japanese is a bit rusty uh the idea was that the divine emperor embodied the national soul of japan in human form and without a god emperor on the throne of japan the entire country was lost and directionless uh it was considered state dogma until the end of the war, at which point it began kind of

illegal to circulate. Like the Supreme Allied Command, like the occupation force, made literature about Kokutai illegal because they needed to dethrone the emperor without putting him in trial for war crimes because they needed some kind of figurehead to keep the country together. But they didn't want him to be God. So what he believed was literally illegal. Now, most of the entire nation had moved on from these beliefs,

or at the very least, they kept them to themselves. According to Mishima's biographer, a guy named John Nathan, this intense extremism was born by his grandmother's brainwashing and abuse as a child. But many Japanese kids at the same time had the same kind of upbringing.

The main difference, most of those kids went on to fight, get wounded or die in World War Two. So they eventually, like a lot of people who end up fighting in wars, become incredibly disillusioned to what they were fighting for. And then when things came crumbling around around them, they're like, yeah, all right. I kind of figured this is all bullshit. Not really really is bullshit mishima never got to go do that uh since that bad tuberculosis diagnosis he didn't have the opportunity to go get disillusioned uh his failure to serve the emperor was made worse by his entire family telling him he was a disappointment for not being able to fight and die like all of his neighbors um according to nathan that deep shame never left mishima and instead of getting on with his life he over corrected to the extreme and ramped up his

imperial loyalty long after the rest of japan let it die um for the rest of mishima's life he'd attempt to fix that shame like he he swung so far over to make up for like that dishonor that he flew far off the fucking deep end of rationality um to that end mishima enlisted in the japanese ground self-defense force in 1967 how old was he at this point 42 why was he allowed to do this also mind you this he is a multi-millionaire celebrity why is he allowed to do this uh and remember he always wanted to serve in the imperial army this is not the imperial army is this like a like so like he he finally got to do what he always wanted to do and that was being the Right. But there wasn't an army anymore. It was a self-defense force.

Only in recent years was the Japanese self-defense force allowed to have jets and a navy and all this other stuff. They were possibly one step above a National Guard. But in the traditional concepts of the national guard like only there for disaster relief or if you get invaded i think it was very recently that they were allowed to have like jets and a navy and stuff like that um but like in the 60s light infantry at best but also remember he's a 42 year old millionaire enlisting as a private so he's like an honorary member except he actually went out and like trained with them yeah i mean imagine being in basic training class and like a three-time nobel prize nominee an international celebrity

fucking shows up i mean the way that like tom cruise would show up like trying to get ready for a movie role or something. Right, except he's your bunkmate now. Because he actually went through basic training and shit when he was fucking 42 years old. I mean, it didn't matter though, right? He was finally going to do what he always wanted to do. Serve the God Emperor. Except he wasn't anymore.

Except none of his ideas jived with the new J jsdf at all and so like mishima got pissed like he showed up he wanted to serve the emperor do all the shit he wanted to do when he was a fucking teenager and like everybody just kind of laughed at him so he got fucking disillusioned and angry so he did what any other adult does he wouldn't create his own goddamn army he should be used to people laughing at him and making fun of him at this point he's 42 yeah well i mean he's been super famous for like over a decade i guess but his childhood wasn't easy yeah i guess it was like weird fucking i don't know he he thought way too deep about like everything and that's why like well clearly the army isn't what I need to do

I'm gonna go make my own army and that's what he did he fucking made his own army you don't just make your own army you make your own army if you have a lot of money I mean he called it the Tatanokai or the shield society it would be based on the band ideas of Kokutai and the veneration

of the emperor so I mean I get that he's super famous. I mean, but who the hell would join this fucking militant emperor cult? Like, I can't think of a comparable thing here in the US. But, like, who would join, like, a Stephen King-based militia? A lot of people. Like, so many people. Are you kidding me?

That's fair. A Stephen King... I might join that. You do basic training in the sewers with Pennywise? Fuck yeah. Well, he mostly poached college students. Mishima knew where his ideas circulated the most, right-wing student groups.

No, that's got to be super easy. College students who have read his work before and who are, I mean, college students are especially vulnerable and impressionable because they're extremely stressed out, especially in Japan where the education standards are so fucking high anyways.

And ultra competitive. fucking high anyways ultra competitive yeah and ultra competitive and and they're extremely stressed out and they're looking for any little way to validate what they're doing so yeah if you if you come up and tell a college student hey this you know especially if you're extremely educated and smart like he is like this is you know exactly what you need to validate everything that you've been through like yeah absolutely yeah and he went around the groups of students that probably would be receptive to his ideas i mean right i mean right wing in japan isn't right wing in the u.s not how people think of it today well in college students are still they're they're

testing the waters they're away from their parents for the first time and they're testing the waters of their own belief systems and their own thoughts and their own, like, it's so easy to get in there and say, I know that this is what you think your thoughts are and your belief systems are, but this is what actually should be. And especially like he was a very intellectual person and he knew where he could find people who thought they were as intellectual as him. Oh, yeah. And so he went to right wing writing groups, more specifically a college newspaper called the Ronso Journal at Kanagawa University. Almost all of his recruits came from that one place and he got fucking over 90 people uh so i mean his ideas weren't super receptive but like i can't think of an idea getting 90 people to follow me to do anything uh his group would gather at his house which i'm sure is super popular with his wife or retreats out in the woods where they had listened to mishima speak for hours on end about nationalism,

the holiness of the emperor and the betrayal of Hirohito sexuality and working out. He also designed their own uniforms because what cult is complete without a uniform? And because of his obsession with the army, they were based on the old Imperial army officer uniform that was no longer used in the JSDF. It would be paired

with white gloves and a sweet headband that said seven lives for the nation written across it every good uniform needs a headband mishima and his men would also wear swords which again was totally illegal uh so mishima's philosophy changed from uh being conflicted about his sexuality to leaning into it pretty hardcore. He preached that being gay wasn't just the way that he was born, which is progressive for the 60s. It made him stronger. Now, this is where I told you before that he didn't – he wasn't just gay. He legitimately did not like women.

To him, women made you weak and were nothing but extra weight that needed to be cast off as soon as possible. Like the very literal ball and chain. It wasn't that he was sexually attracted to men as much as he really fucking hated women. Not surprising. So in between long sermons about emperor and fucking, the tent no-kai constantly worked out as the rest of the recruits were expected to work out

just as hard as Mishima himself that's right yokio mishima created the world's first crossfit gym um and i know and i know that we both used to do crossfit um i still do crossfit just by myself instead of in a gym yeah uh i mean think about it though the flags everywhere while people preach about shit they only half understand constantly working out and half the people are only there to fuck like it's crossfit look they didn't understand like he never fucking worked out he never took a rest day his form was probably terrible i've been doing crossfit for about six years i accepted a long time ago that CrossFit is absolutely a cult.

It's just a very good one where you get healthy and fit and have a great community behind you. I mean, that's every cult, right? Up until revolutionary suicide, yes. Okay, so. It's revolutionary suicide. So CrossFit hasn't gone that far yet. Yet. Yet.

It took Jonestown like a decade. But it's definitely a cult. Like it absolutely is. And much like CrossFit in Mishima's world, the approach worked. Not only did his students develop an undying loyalty for the emperor, but also to Mishima himself. One of them, a Masakatsu Morita, wrote a pledge to the man declaring his willingness to die for him. It is also heavily implicated by Nathan that Morita and Mishima began a relationship after this.

They were nearly inseparable. Multiple eyewitnesses saw them dating, things like that, but there's no writing by Mishima or Morita himself that said like, this is my boyfriend or anything like that. There's no, they neverishima or marita himself that said like this is my boyfriend or anything like that there's no they never made any outward declarations like that i have to say at this point that i'm rooting for him that might change i don't know that it will now this is normally where you think mishima would probably have gotten in trouble uh he was an enlisted

soldier who ran off into the woods to build his own weird militant imperial sex cult that swore to reinstall the emperor to absolute power, which is treason. His officers were also, you know, they had to like bring the hammer down on them, right? Like imagine if you're an active duty military, run off to the woods and make your own militia. See how that works out. Yeah, no, I'd definitely be arrested. Yeah, like fame or no fame you're at least gonna get kicked out uh well the japanese government thought differently uh in fact they allowed these crazed bastards to actually start training alongside the self-defense force

that's right i mean i remember technically not mishima's in the army self-defense force whatever uh and i mean he's super famous it's it's like when elvis fucking and get drafted and didn't defer it he was a recruiting goal like look you could serve alongside the greatest writer in the country uh so they were just like yeah whatever your fucking weird dudes can come join with us too it It should be noted that Japan has a very long history of right-wing groups. They're actually kind of famous for driving around heavily populated areas in weird box trucks,

outfitted with very loud sound systems and blurring pro-imperial slogans for hours. This goes on to this day. Sounds pretty cult-like to me. Yeah, they wear headbands and carry flags everywhere but they're also like a super minority like they're not popular uh but it should be noted that um none of these groups were ever allowed to go train with the army uh mishima's was different uh one year and some change after the formation of the tententenokai, Mishima and his small arm began to plan the takeover of Japan.

Now, they lacked firearms as firearms ownership is incredibly rare in Japan to this day and was even more rare back then and the JSDF kept all of their weapons tightly secure and mind you, they didn't have a ton of weapons. They also lacked popular support. 90 people is

only a lot when you think of how crazy it is Mishima was able to find 90 people who agreed with him. It isn't a lot when you are thinking about taking over a country of 100 million people. Also, for a small group of 90 people to take over a government, you have to think a couple dozen of them

have to actually be members of the government or high ranking members of the military. He had none of those things. He had a whole bunch of college journalists with swords uh but they wouldn't need numbers either though mishima's plan was to lean on his strengths uh those of course being writing and entertainment uh the only thing they would need to do is get him in front of an audience of soldiers and surely they would swoon on every single one of his words and march to tokyo to put the emperor back in uh power there's kind

of a fair amount of validity i'm willing to give that i mean look how much power celebrities have over the political discourse of the united states um at this point japan's a pretty young democracy i mean this is our president is a celebrity right he was given the stone cold stunner once on monday night raw i uh we i we do have um now you can say a lot of things about america and most of them are true uh good and bad um you can also say that we have the highest number of people in a political cabinet that Stone Cold Steve Austin has fought. Which is two. So there's that.

But I mean, if you think of how much power celebrities have. And the JSDF is all enlisted. Most voluntary enlistment militaries, they come from a lower social economic background they they kind of would be into this sort of thing hypothetically um he ended up being very fucking wrong but like i could kind of see why he thought this would work um so even though he had 90 people at his disposal mishima would only use four. As his plan required them to be inconspicuous. You couldn't just walk into somewhere with 90 people

behind you. It was like, oh, this is normal. Yeah, I could see that. It was hard to roll into a military base with 100 people behind you and not get stopped. I mean, he was a really smart guy. So Mishima brought only his most loyal followers. Morita, his boyfriend slash second in command, Matsuyoshi Koga, Hiroyasu Koga, and Matsuhiro Ogawa.

Those would be the four people he'd bring with him to attempt to take over the entire country. It should be noted that none of them had any military training or anything outside of what they did at the JSDF. They'll be right. Also, they didn't have guns. Minor detail. They have their brains, Joe. That's right. So on the morning of November 25th, 1970, Mishima and his band

of cross-fitting samurai drove through the gates of the Ichigaya camp. It was the entire JSDF Eastern Command and held the entire army of Eastern Japan. Okay, let me just say something right here. As I said, I've been a cross crossfitter for about six years now but you're not a samurai no i know at least four crossfitters who think that they could take over your country with it with just their crossfitting skills i at least yeah you're probably right yeah like there are definitely crossfitters out there who

have such high opinions of themselves that think that they that this is possible yeah i'm gonna kettlebell swing my way into power yeah let me do some handstand walks through this uh base here yeah uh now this was not a master plan or anything they just drove through the fucking gates this was not a master plan or anything. They just drove through the fucking gates. This was not Fort Knox. Actually, you know, I wrote that, but it's not entirely true. I once got onto Fort Knox with just a pair of dog tags. I was also smuggled onto Fort Knox in a trunk because I was drunk and underage. Hey, I smuggled a few people in a... I'm not going to say that.

Retract that previous statement. You said it. You can't unsee it nobody knows what i was going to say so once they are inside the base they hired to the commander's office where they ran to one general masuda and then they took him prisoner at sword point oh yeah right the swords they had swords on them uh which is something that the person at the front gate probably should have noticed like no four dudes with swords, that's normal, in a completely different uniform.

Because they're wearing their fucking Shield Society uniform, and he's not wearing his JSDF uniform. But also, the other guys with him were not the JSDF. So he has, like, the worst gate guards in human history. The really salty guys that had to work the weekend. Yeah. They pushed the general back into his office and demanded that he order the entire eastern army to form up in a parade field just outside of his office uh the general's accountant who was a major lunged out and tried

to protect masuda and he was awarded by getting slashed across the back with a sword and then he ran down the hallway because he was being fucking attacked with swords. Yeah, reasonable. After seeing that, the general, probably not wanting to get fucking shanked, obeyed and called all of his soldiers into a formation so they could be addressed by Mishima. You know, I feel at this point Mishima kind of felt like a dog who actually caught the truck that he's chasing. Because, like, do you really think he was going to get this far? Like, even in his wildest dreams, did he really think he was going to get to talk to an entire army? Because like a thousand fucking soldiers were formed up pretty quickly just below the balcony. I mean, do they have guns?

No. None of, nobody's armed. The army doesn't have guns? They're all locked away. I mean, they're, I mean i mean imagine i know when i was in the army um and much like you probably deal with now how long do you does it take for a company to get weapons from an arms room okay to get the actual weapon and is there is there any ammo in the arms room no yeah that the the ammo the ammo is a key there you can and since the jstf

is being trained and advised by the united states military you can assume they have pretty much the same protocols because i can go and get my weapon in about five seconds but the ammo takes like paperwork at least three months in advance now imagine there's a thousand people whoa anybody out of the country listening to this we are very highly i don't even know i can't even say this with a straight face yeah you can just walk right in our military is mostly just drunk and asleep so it's all good um so uh with the entire army uh like formed up ready to talk to uh you know i feel like this is a pretty big condemnation for the strength and the security of the jsdf or just how goddamn famous mishima was like i can't believe this

actually worked uh on you know this is like if like uh name a famous writer like james patterson or something walked into fort lewis carrying a sword and kidnapped the fucking post commander i honestly don't think that anybody knew what James Patterson would look like. Yeah, I couldn't pick him out of the lineup. And most people in the American army don't read, unfortunately. Yeah, they just read Chris Kyle's books. I don't even think they do that. They just watch the movies.

Yeah. Slowly, the army assembled. And just like any group of soldiers forced to do anything, they bitch and complain the whole time. They showed up out of uniform and half-dressed, which is kind of a hilarious contrast to mishima himself in his tent no kai uniform like with white gloves and a headband and yeah so according to the japan times at least a thousand people showed up uh mishima being a natural performer stepped up onto the edge of the balcony and began his speech by screaming all of you are unconstitutional and the rest of his men started throwing off fistfuls of

leaflets to like tell them the message like the other four men yeah yeah it was a strong start i mean now the the belief pretty much boiled down to he thought the entire japanese government was unconstitutional because it wasn't blessed by the emperor and led by the emperor. There's a lot more to that, but that's pretty much what it boils down to. Mishima's speech did not

have the effect he thought it would. Almost immediately, the gathered soldiers began to boo and jeer him. They began to throw things up at the balcony and mock his hand gestures because like he was i mean imagine like the the stage presence of freddie mercury all the fist pumping and shit he was i mean mishima was kind of doing that and uh all the soldiers were just like laughing at him and fucking doing like fake ones below him are you implying that they

would laugh at freddie mercury yeah probably no absolutely not well i mean it depends if freddie mercury gonna climb the balcony and like you guys should totally take over the government darling i hope so uh eventually the booing got so loud mishima couldn't even hear himself speak uh he cut his uh and now he originally had a incredibly long speech written uh but he memorized the whole thing so he didn't bring any paperwork with him. And I'll post the whole thing, but I'm not going to read the whole thing. It is probably 10 pages long.

But he cut his speech short, saying, quote, Japanese people think today of only money, just money. Where is our national spirit today? The Jittai must be the soul of Japan. And the Jittai is like the imperial throne. Quote, the nation has no spiritual foundation this is why you don't agree with me you will just be american

mercenaries all of you in a tiny world you do nothing for japan i i salute the emperor long live the emperor uh mishima has been retreated back into the building defeated uh he complained that he wasn't even sure if anybody could hear him. Yeah, buddy, they couldn't hear you. That's why they didn't want you to fall you into fucking re-enthroning the emperor. I'm sure that's what his followers told him. Probably.

That is when Mishima ripped open his jacket and I'll take the rest from the Japan Times article titled The Lost Samurai. Quote, he positioned himself in a traditional japanese manner on the floor of the office which they had seized mishima proceeded ritually disembowel himself with a tanto which is a short sword exclaiming long live the emperor uh now there's a problem with committing seppuku which is um ritual suicide now there's a lot of

people think uh harikiri is ritual suicide and seppuku is ritual suicide they're both technically correct uh seppuku is the actual act of ritual suicide which includes the entire um ceremony and everything before that harikiri is pretty much just gutting yourself um it's pretty fucking painful you don't die quickly whatsoever which was the whole point the whole point of seppuku was to voluntarily inflict a ton of pain and suffering on yourself to retain your honor um because unhonorable death apparently can't be quick if you're a samurai has to just really suck uh that is why samurai came up with like a loophole and that is the idea to

have a kaiya shikunin or a dude waiting behind you with a sword to slice your fucking head off just as soon as you stab yourself. Like you have to commit to the act of seppuku, gut yourself, and he immediately cuts your head off. So you'd feel almost nothing. That is if the guy cutting your head off knew what he was doing. Because Morita did not. cutting your head off knew what he was doing because marita did not um because mishima loved marita and they were very very close he picked marita to be his uh kaiya shakunin which is a uh real is a super honorable position to have to be in charge of beheading a fellow samurai unfortunately marita was the worst swordsman in the entire shield society and he just like

embedded the sword in the back of fucking mishima's head it did not kill him he should have trained him better they did kendo all the time i don't know how he was this bad with the sword wait so he didn't actually kill anyone mishima never killed anybody oh he just really fucked himself up marita actually well marita didn't kill him marita fucked him up even worse and i'm'm 100% on his team, on his side. So he chopped into the back of his skull like he was trying to cut fucking firewood. And then Morita began to freak out and gave the sword to a different guy, Hiryaso Koga, who was a significantly better samurai. He still had the wherewithal to hand the sword over to somebody else?

Morita had to. Oh, I thought you meant Mishima. No, at this point, Mishima's probably unconscious because he has a sword embedded in the back of his head. I hope so. Ouch. Koga pulled the sword out of his head and successfully beheaded him on the second attempt.

Then Morita gutted himself and Koga beheaded him too. It was around now that the... So, like, the whole time this is happening the officers of the eastern army are trying to retake the office um the shield society guys had barricaded them in uh barricade themselves into the office and nobody really could get in so that at this point they finally busted down the doors and when they found the two surviving men praying over the severed heads of their comrades. A journalist for the Asai Shimbun newspaper who I think it's like the second largest

newspaper in Japan who had been with the rescue party pushed everybody past and snapped a single picture of Mishima's head. It ran on the front page of the newspaper the next day and has been the best selling issue of the paper ever since. So yeah, tasteful journalism. You can actually see that i'm not gonna post a twitter because i don't feel like getting our account banned but you can google search and find

it if you really like uh i did and uh you actually can hardly tell he got a sword in bed in the back of his head at some point that's nice uh so the survivors as you can imagine were arrested and put on trial for illegal possession of swords bodily injury and assisting a suicide uh if you noticed uh none of those charges were treason or you know subversion nothing like that the government did not take this seriously at all uh i mean they didn't get very far. No, but I mean, they did fucking slice the dude's back open and then kill themselves in the middle of an army base. No, but I mean, as far as actually like taking over anything, they didn't get very far. They like that was all that was all a part of their plan. Right.

I mean, they they definitely like the government. Now, the government had they knew Mishima. They definitely like the government. Now, the government had they knew Mishima. There were several members of the parliament who were close friends with him and actually were pretty sympathetic to his beliefs. And he actually timed this whole thing during the opening session of the Japanese parliament is kind of like, I think they do the same thing in England, where on the opening day, the monarch shows up to kind of like, I authorize this. It's a ceremony. So, the emperor was present in parliament as news began to spread that a guy was attempting to take over the government in his name.

Obviously, the emperor had nothing to say about the whole thing. Pretty much everybody called Mishima stupid on the parliament floor uh nobody really thought this was a threat to japanese democracy you mean him and the four guys that walked onto a military base yeah uh they were so they were all put on trial and sentenced to four years but got out in only a few months um now this is where we have to ask the real question was mishima really trying to take over the government like did he really think this whole thing was going to work um i mean was the legendary writer really so stupid to think that army would rally at his back and restore the throne in short no. That's pretty obvious. Now you can look at the logical aspect of this,

or you can look at what Mishima himself said in his writing before he gutted himself. First-hand organization around 90 people, and only brought four with him. There's a very good chance he could have gotten all 90 people into the base because of his connections, or because of the fact he was fucking training with them. But he didn't.

In the weeks after they came up with a plan to take over the government, literally the only thing they rehearsed or planned was the act of ritual suicide that they would commit. So you think this whole thing was just an elaborate way to commit? Kind of. Mishima even went so far as to only allow two of them to die

uh him and marita the other uh and the other guys that were going were pretty pissed off about that they all wanted to die um also mishima had written pretty much for years about doing exactly what he did uh only in so many words uh he even said as much in an interview saying, quote, spiritually, I wanted to revive some samurai spirit. I did not want to revive Harakiri itself, but through the vision of a very strong vision of Harakiri, I want to inspire and stimulate younger people. So he went further saying, quote, dying for a great cause was considered the most glorious, heroic and brilliant ways of dying. for a great cause was considered the most glorious heroic and brilliant ways of dying so

instead of actually taking over a country he wanted to draw as much attention to himself as possible so he could fucking butcher himself in the worst way possible to inspire the youth it's also meant as a giant fuck you to post-war Japan Japan Times said quote

thus Mishima's longing for a samurai style ritual suicide would somehow Japan Times said, his actions on that day the failed coup provided mishima with such an opportunity his dramatic death has been seen as a final yet futile stand against the direction of post-war japan uh so you can kind of i don't know it's it's hard to put that in context like it's hard to think of somebody who i don't know maybe like, so one of the most prolific or famous photographs ever taken was a Buddhist monk burning himself alive in Vietnam. And it's very obvious that that Buddhist monk, I mean, he was protesting the treatment of government oppression against Buddhists because the government of south vietnam was catholic thanks to the french but um he knew burning himself was not going to end that oppression but he knew that killing himself in the most fantastic way possible in front of the most amount of eyes possible would bring the most amount of attention to his cause. As a statement. Yeah. That's what I see this as.

Obviously, Mishima and his friends weren't being oppressed, but it was a giant spectacle. Well, no, but you don't have to be oppressed to have a certain belief system. Right. I mean, now this is known as the Mishima incident in Japan. It was kind of like if your shitty boomer uncle set himself on fire to protest millennials. He was really, really upset with the newest generation of Japan.

It was the first generation being raised by people who were not his generation. There's that huge disconnect between what he thought was real traditional japan and the real traditional belief system like he was trying to stop the process of time somehow it doesn't seem at like i i see where it should seem really outlandish that this is all that this is his reaction to it but it doesn't it doesn't seem that outlandish that he would have this reaction to it yeah i he's definitely the most extreme product of his time i think it was a really strange artistic political protest i think like i still think it was a cult though oh yeah i i agree i think that it was a cult and i think that it's kind of the perfect storm of puzzle pieces to go together because I think there's probably other people who have the same beliefs that he does. I mean.

Oh, they certainly didn't die with him. No, but just like in America, there are people who think that this younger generation is warped and that this political system is bullshit and all of that stuff. Well, it is. No, yeah, but none of them are going to kill themselves or make a spectacle over their beliefs. But sometimes you have this perfect storm scenario where you had this type of upbringing, you had this type of affliction,

and you have this type of, let's say, sexuality that's not necessarily accepted by people, and you have this type of affliction and you have this type of uh let's say sexuality that's not necessarily accepted by people and you have this type of psychology that where all of those things perfectly come together into something where it turns into a spectacle and that's that's your reaction that's what happens yeah i mean it was definitely a perfect storm of a really fucked up childhood. And then like being born in a really strange time that he, you know, I feel like if he was born or if world war two never would have happened, um,

or if it did happen and Japan wasn't so thoroughly destroyed, this just wouldn't have happened. Yeah. Like he was a very unique byproduct of a really weird time. Yeah, that's kind of what I get from this story. I don't feel like he's more a victim than anything in this whole scenario. Like, yeah, he probably overreacted a little bit. Well, he also got a whole bunch of college kids to get on it. And one of them killed themselves.

Yeah. So that's an issue. Yeah, it is. It is. Now, not a lot is known about Morita. Morita didn't write a ton. He didn't leave a diary behind. Mishima himself didn't write a lot about Morita, which is kind of heartbreaking.

But, you know, we don't really know his motivation because that wasn't why Morita was killing himself. Morita absolutely killed himself for Mishima. Yeah. He was devoted to him 100%. So Mishima is still kind of a fucking asshole for dragging that kid into it. True.

But it's not as bad as it could have been, I guess, if he had a many death cults and so many mass deaths where if only one person plus his lover were the sacrifice here, that's not really. Yeah, I don't know. I think, I mean, those four people went with him because they were the ones that he knew would go along with it.

I think he knew that there was a lot of people that were following him that totally weren't into it i just feel like it's kind of tragic though oh yeah more more than more than anything else more than malicious or anything i i just feel like it's kind of tragic yeah and you know he leaves behind a problematic legacy for like the literary circles of japan because like they want to remember him as being like this amazing artist but he has been canonized as a weird right-wing hero ever since so like his funeral was held in january 24th 1971 and was attended by over 10 000 people most of those people were writers um the entire surviving tententenokai attended in full uniform. The same month, right-wing groups in Japan began to mysteriously bankroll multiple statues of him and Morita all around the country.

There's even reports of several copycat suicides in high schools and colleges. in high schools and colleges. It's almost 100% certain that those copycat suicides were because of the death of an artist, not the death of a militant. Yeah, not the political reasons. That happens a lot. That happens in America. Oh, yeah.

There was, I think, over a dozen copycat suicides when Kurt Cobain killed himself in this area. I think it's pretty widely known that artists are tortured. The majority of artists, writers, singers, songwriters, like all of those, they're, they're a pretty tortured group. And a lot of the people who identify with those artists are equally tortured. That's why they identify so strongly with them. So, I mean, if you, I completely 100% idolize somebody for everything that they're saying and everything that they're doing and, and identify like with them on that level, then yeah, it's pretty, I don't want to say reasonable. Reasonable is not the right word, but it's pretty. It's understandable.

Understandable that you would take that route especially when he was something of an icon for an incredibly marginalized group which is homosexuals in japan yeah i mean in that time period it's i mean even today it's only recently acceptable to be gay in japan or in asia in general there i mean i talked to mike about that a little bit in our episode and it's not a bright spot i mean not even just in Asia in general. I mean, I talked to Mike about that a little bit in our episode, and it's not a bright spot. I mean, not even just in those places. That's kind of what I was saying about watching Bohemian Rhapsody earlier is Freddie Mercury was a, I mean, even in his time, I mean, now he's like, I mean, almost God status.

No, he's definitely a minor deity in my pantheon of yeah absolutely and rightfully so but in his time he was highly revered artist right for being a homosexual and being a complete outcast in the in the in the aids outbreak and all of that stuff but he was completely 100 ashamed to be who he was because in that time period, that was not an acceptable thing to be. And that's in Europe. That's in England. Well, England isn't exactly the bastion

of progressive thought either. No, but that was everywhere. That was America. That was, I mean, during that time period, that was just not an acceptable thing to be. And this was even before then. Yeah, I mean, at the same time, Freddie Mercury is dealing with his problems in England. The president of the United States of America was laughing about gay people dying.

So, I mean, it's not a good time. It's really, really tragic. Yeah. And, you know, there's a very good reason to believe that was part of the copycat suicides. I mean, there is a very well-known voice died and that i mean that happens all the time um the one thing good did come from this as the tent no guy fell apart without him um they splintered off into multiple different groups uh most of them still worshiped him secondly to the emperor uh one of those groups took 12 people hostage

at the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations in 1977. It was led by a gang named Yoshio Ito and Tsuchichi Yushio, who are both members of Mishima's group. They were two people who Mishima did not think were cool enough to

ritually murder themselves. The hostage situation was only ended thanks to the intervention of Mishima's widow, who told him to stop and go home. So in closing, we have one last giant fuck you to Mishima, thanks to one of his friends, poet Mitsuo Takahashi. Takahashi was the guy who won the Pulitzer Prize instead of Mishima, and he actually admits ever since he's felt super guilty about it because he feels Mishima is a better writer than him

or was a better writer than him. Again, the tortured artist. Yeah. Mishima actually... So Takahashi was interviewed very recently about this because Mishima is still very famous, at least his writing is in Japan, but he,

he started coming back recently as a right wing figure and like being lionized for dying for what he believed in shit like that. Takashi said, quote, Mishima actually exemplifies a common tradition and condition of Japanese youth today. Disaffected, desperately looking for a sense of identity and inclination towards fantasy,

Mishima anticipated the weak sense of identity in today's youth. You could say he laid his life down for them. Meaning the same people that he wanted to fucking destroy, he's now championing him for them. You have to admit he didn't want that no but i i i just i feel like it's so relatable like everything that he stood for and and like honestly like like you said before like i didn't i had no idea where this was going i thought that that's how i like it like i i i was thinking like death cult, like like American death cult, where you've got hundreds of people dying for this psychotic belief system.

But honestly, like everything sounds kind of reasonable for everything that he went through. OK, reasonable death cult. Yeah, I actually reason I recently joked on Twitter. There was this huge chain tweet going around. What cult would you have fallen for? I'm like, tent no kai for sure. All it was was lifting weights and running around the woods in military clothes. They're very healthy.

I totally would have fallen for that. A little emperor worship. I mean, you love reading you love literature you love lifting like this is your jam yeah i'm not so down with the gay sex well i mean that that wasn't a requirement though was it i don't know i i know it's very prevalent and it was something that he preached uh yeah maybe i could be like I don't know they're straight wing man well that is our episode you know and it was it was a lot different I know we've been doing we've been stuck in the Middle East for a while since our series and from Iran Iraq war and everything else so it was nice to go to a country i've never been to before on the show also like i learned i first learned about the whole mishima incident uh forever ago probably

a couple decades ago and i've always been really interested and confused by it and i never actually got to look into it until this time like i always just assumed he was some fucking crazed militant. I didn't realize he was like a virtuoso who kind of lost his mind. But thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. It was really, really interesting, something that I enjoyed learning about. Hey, you have a niche I always try to bring you on for.

I'm not sure how many cults and serial killers I got in military history but i'll figure it out hey whenever you have one you know who to call yeah uh so rich is smart and doesn't have anything to plug because she stays her stupid ass off fucking social media unlike myself uh but if you want to follow the show you can follow the lions underscore by you can follow me at jcast99. We have a TeePublic store now. You can buy some stickers or a coffee cup. I'm going to get some shirts made soon, but the art is slow in coming. Thank you for everybody donating to our Patreon. If you want to keep donating to it or if you haven't yet, you can go to patreon.com backslash lionsledbydonkeys.

And a dollar gets you access to all of our bonus shit to include an episode that we did together about harry potter which is great and also nick should be home soon um i don't know if this episode is coming out before or after christmas but we're hoping to have him home before christmas so let's all uh cross our fingers i don't know maybe we'll get a nick for christmas i hope it has a good return policy. But thank you everybody so much. Just go to audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs. Download his title for free and start listening. Once again, that's www.audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys to get started.