129 Facts About Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima, born Kimitake Hiraoka, was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai, an unarmed civilian militia.

Yukio Mishima was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, but the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata.

Yukio Mishima's works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel.

Yukio Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin.

Yukio Mishima was proud of the traditional culture and spirit of Japan, and opposed what he saw as western-style materialism, along with Japan's postwar democracy, globalism, and communism, worrying that by embracing these ideas the Japanese people would lose their "national essence" and their distinctive cultural heritage to become a "rootless" people.

Yukio Mishima formed the Tatenokai for the avowed purpose of restoring sacredness and dignity to the Emperor of Japan.

Kimitake Hiraoka, later known as Yukio Mishima, was born in Nagazumi-cho, Yotsuya-ku of Tokyo City.

Yukio Mishima's father was Azusa Hiraoka, a government official in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, and his mother, Shizue, was the daughter of the 5th principal of the Kaisei Academy.

Yukio Mishima received his birth name Kimitake in honor of Furuichi Koi who was a benefactor of Sadataro.

Yukio Mishima had a younger sister, Mitsuko, who died of typhus in 1945 at the age of 17, and a younger brother, Chiyuki.

Yukio Mishima's childhood home was a rented house, though a fairly large two-floor house that was the largest in the neighborhood.

Yukio Mishima lived with his parents, siblings and paternal grandparents, as well as six maids, a houseboy, and a manservant.

Yukio Mishima's grandfather was in debt, so there were no remarkable household items left on the first floor.

Yukio Mishima was the granddaughter of Matsudaira Yoritaka, the daimyo of Shishido, which was a branch domain of Mito Domain in Hitachi Province; therefore, Mishima was a descendant of the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu, through his grandmother.

Yukio Mishima did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, engage in any kind of sport, or play with other boys.

Yukio Mishima spent much of his time either alone or with female cousins and their dolls.

Yukio Mishima returned to his immediate family when he was 12.

When Yukio Mishima was an infant, Azusa employed parenting tactics such as holding Yukio Mishima up to the side of a speeding train.

Yukio Mishima raided his son's room for evidence of an "effeminate" interest in literature, and often ripped his son's manuscripts apart.

When Yukio Mishima was 13, Natsuko took him to see his first Kabuki play: Kanadehon Chushingura, an allegory of the story of the 47 Ronin.

Yukio Mishima was later taken to his first Noh play by his maternal grandmother Tomi Hashi.

Yukio Mishima began attending performances every month and grew deeply interested in these traditional Japanese dramatic art forms.

Yukio Mishima was enrolled at the age of six in the elite Gakushuin, the Peers' School in Tokyo, which had been established in the Meiji period to educate the Imperial family and the descendants of the old feudal nobility.

Yukio Mishima was attracted to the works of the Japanese poet Shizuo Ito, poet and novelist Haruo Sato, and poet Michizo Tachihara, who inspired Yukio Mishima's appreciation of classical Japanese waka poetry.

In 1941, at the age of 16, Yukio Mishima was invited to write a short story for the Hojinkai-zasshi, and he submitted Forest in Full Bloom, a story in which the narrator describes the feeling that his ancestors somehow still live within him.

Yukio Mishima mailed a copy of the manuscript to his Japanese teacher Fumio Shimizu for constructive criticism.

Yukio Mishima had it published as a keepsake to remember him by, as he assumed that he would die in the war.

The name "Yukio Mishima" came from yuki, the Japanese word for "snow", because of the snow they saw on Mount Fuji as the train passed.

Yukio Mishima is much younger than we are, but has arrived on the scene already quite mature.

Hasuda, who became something of a mentor to Yukio Mishima, was an ardent nationalist and a fan of Motoori Norinaga, a scholar of kokugaku from the Edo period who preached Japanese traditional values and devotion to the Emperor.

Later in 1941, Yukio Mishima wrote in his notebook an essay about his deep devotion to Shinto, titled The Way of the Gods.

On 9 September 1944, Yukio Mishima graduated Gakushuin High School at the top of the class, and became a graduate representative.

Emperor Hirohito was present at the graduation ceremony, and Yukio Mishima later received a silver watch from the Emperor at the Imperial Household Ministry.

On 27 April 1944, during the final years of World War II, Yukio Mishima received a draft notice for the Imperial Japanese Army and barely passed his conscription examination on 16 May 1944, with a less desirable rating of "second class" conscript.

Yukio Mishima had a cold during his medical check on convocation day, and the young army doctor misdiagnosed Mishima with tuberculosis, declared him unfit for service, and sent him home.

The troops of the unit that Yukio Mishima was supposed to have joined were sent to the Philippines, where most of them were killed.

Around that time, Yukio Mishima admired kamikaze pilots and other "special attack" units in letters to friends and private notes.

Yukio Mishima was deeply affected by Emperor Hirohito's radio broadcast announcing Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945, and vowed to protect Japanese cultural traditions and help rebuild Japanese culture after the destruction of the war.

Yukio Mishima learned of the incident a year later and contributed poetry in Hasuda's honor at a memorial service in November 1946.

On 23 October 1945, Yukio Mishima's beloved younger sister Mitsuko died suddenly at the age of 17 from typhoid fever by drinking untreated water.

Yukio Mishima was worried that his son could actually become a professional novelist, and hoped instead that his son would be a bureaucrat like himself and Mishima's grandfather Sadataro.

Yukio Mishima advised his son to enroll in the Faculty of Law instead of the literature department.

Yukio Mishima obtained a position in the Ministry of the Treasury and seemed set up for a promising career as a government bureaucrat.

However, after just one year of employment Yukio Mishima had exhausted himself so much that his father agreed to allow him to resign from his post and devote himself to writing full time.

In 1945, Yukio Mishima began the short story A Story at the Cape and continued to work on it through the end of World War II.

Some people denounced them and converted to left-wing politics, whom Yukio Mishima criticized as "opportunists" in his letters to friends.

Yukio Mishima had heard that famed writer Yasunari Kawabata had praised his work before the end of the war.

Uncertain of who else to turn to, Yukio Mishima took the manuscripts for The Middle Ages and The Cigarette with him, visited Kawabata in Kamakura, and asked for his advice and assistance in January 1946.

In 1946, Yukio Mishima began his first novel, Thieves, a story about two young members of the aristocracy drawn towards suicide.

Around 1949, Yukio Mishima published a literary essay about Kawabata, for whom he had always held a deep appreciation, in Kindai Bungaku.

Yukio Mishima visited Greece during his travels, a place which had fascinated him since childhood.

Yukio Mishima's visit to Greece became the basis for his 1954 novel The Sound of Waves, which drew inspiration from the Greek legend of Daphnis and Chloe.

Yukio Mishima made use of contemporary events in many of his works.

In 1959, Yukio Mishima published the artistically ambitious novel Kyoko no Ie.

In June 1960, at the climax of the protest movement, Yukio Mishima wrote a commentary in the Mainichi Shinbun newspaper, entitled "A Political Opinion".

Yukio Mishima warned against the dangers of the Japanese people following ideologues who told lies with honeyed words.

The next year, Yukio Mishima published The Frolic of the Beasts, a parody of the classical Noh play Motomezuka, written in the 14th-century playwright Kiyotsugu Kan'ami.

In 1962, Yukio Mishima produced his most artistically avant-garde work Beautiful Star, which at times comes close to science fiction.

In 1965, Yukio Mishima wrote the play Madame de Sade that explores the complex figure of the Marquis de Sade, traditionally upheld as an exemplar of vice, through a series of debates between six female characters, including the Marquis' wife, the Madame de Sade.

Yukio Mishima's play was inspired in part by his friend Tatsuhiko Shibusawa's 1960 Japanese translation of the Marquis de Sade's novel Juliette and a 1964 biography Shibusawa wrote of de Sade.

Yukio Mishima was considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963,1964, and 1965, and was a favorite of many foreign publications.

However, in 1968 his early mentor Kawabata won the Nobel Prize and Yukio Mishima realized that the chances of it being given to another Japanese author in the near future were slim.

Yukio Mishima was an actor, and starred in Yasuzo Masumura's 1960 film, Afraid to Die, for which he sang the theme song.

Yukio Mishima performed in films like Patriotism or the Rite of Love and Death, Black Lizard and Hitokiri.

Yukio Mishima was featured as the photo model in photographer Eikoh Hosoe's book Bara-kei, as well as in Tamotsu Yato's photobooks Young Samurai: Bodybuilders of Japan and Otoko: Photo Studies of the Young Japanese Male.

American author Donald Richie gave an eyewitness account of seeing Yukio Mishima, dressed in a loincloth and armed with a sword, posing in the snow for one of Tamotsu Yato's photoshoots.

At that time in the late 1960s, Yukio Mishima was the first celebrity to be described as a "superstar" by the Japanese media.

In 1955, Yukio Mishima took up weight training to overcome his weak constitution, and his strictly observed workout regimen of three sessions per week was not disrupted for the final 15 years of his life.

Yukio Mishima later became very skilled at kendo, and became 2nd Dan in battojutsu, and 1st Dan in karate.

Yukio Mishima hoped to marry her, but they broke up in 1957.

In February 1961, Yukio Mishima became embroiled in the aftermath of the Shimanaka incident.

Yukio Mishima argued that it was the custom of traditional Japanese patriots to immediately commit suicide after committing an assassination.

Yukio Mishima wrote a play titled The Harp of Joy, but star actress Haruko Sugimura and other Communist Party-affiliated actors refused to perform because the protagonist held anti-communist views and mentioned criticism about a conspiracy of world communism in his lines.

When Neo Litterature Theatre experienced a schism in 1968, Yukio Mishima formed another troupe, the Roman Theatre, and worked with Matsuura and Nakamura again.

Yukio Mishima had eagerly anticipated the long-awaited return of the Olympics to Japan after the 1940 Tokyo Olympics were cancelled due to Japan's war in China.

Yukio Mishima hated Ryokichi Minobe, who was a communist and the governor of Tokyo beginning in 1967.

Yukio Mishima was fond of manga and gekiga, especially the drawing style of Hiroshi Hirata, a mangaka best known for his samurai gekiga; the slapstick, absurdist comedy in Fujio Akatsuka's Moretsu Ataro, and the imaginativeness of Shigeru Mizuki's GeGeGe no Kitaro.

Yukio Mishima especially loved reading the boxing manga Ashita no Joe in Weekly Shonen Magazine every week.

Yukio Mishima was a fan of science fiction, contending that "science fiction will be the first literature to completely overcome modern humanism".

Yukio Mishima praised Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End in particular.

Yukio Mishima traveled to Shimoda on the Izu Peninsula with his wife and children every summer from 1964 onwards.

In Shimoda, Yukio Mishima often enjoyed eating local seafood with his friend Henry Scott-Stokes.

Yukio Mishima liked ordinary American people after the war, and he and his wife had even visited Disneyland as newlyweds.

Yukio Mishima said that His Imperial Majesty had become a human when he should be a God.

In February 1967, Yukio Mishima joined fellow authors Yasunari Kawabata, Kobo Abe, and Jun Ishikawa in issuing a statement condemning China's Cultural Revolution for suppressing academic and artistic freedom.

Yukio Mishima traveled widely and met with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Zakir Hussain.

Yukio Mishima left extremely impressed by Indian culture, and what he felt was the Indian people's determination to resist Westernization and protect traditional ways.

Yukio Mishima feared that his fellow Japanese were too enamored of modernization and western-style materialism to protect traditional Japanese culture.

Yukio Mishima later spoke of his sense of danger regarding what he perceived to be a lack of concern in Japan about the need to bolster Japan's national defense against the threat from Communist China.

On his way home from India, Yukio Mishima stopped in Thailand and Laos; his experiences in the three nations became the basis for portions of his novel The Temple of Dawn, the third in his tetralogy The Sea of Fertility.

In 1968, Yukio Mishima wrote a play titled My Friend Hitler, in which he depicted the historical figures of Adolf Hitler, Gustav Krupp, Gregor Strasser, and Ernst Rohm as mouthpieces to express his own views on fascism and beauty.

Yukio Mishima explained that after writing the all-female play Madame de Sade, he wanted to write a counterpart play with an all-male cast.

Yukio Mishima was hated by leftists who said Hirohito should have abdicated to take responsibility for the loss of life in the war.

Yukio Mishima regarded the postwar era of Japan, where no poetic culture and supreme artist was born, as an era of fake prosperity, and stated in The Defense of Culture:.

In other critical essays, Yukio Mishima argued that the national spirit which cultivated in Japan's long history is the key to national defense, and he had apprehensions about the insidious "indirect aggression" of the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea, and the Soviet Union.

In critical essays in 1969, Yukio Mishima explained Japan's difficult and delicate position and peculiarities between China, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

Yukio Mishima aimed for a very long novel with a completely different raison d'etre from Western chronicle novels of the 19th and 20th centuries; rather than telling the story of a single individual or family, Yukio Mishima boldly set his goal as interpreting the entire human world.

Yukio Mishima hoped to express in literary terms something akin to pantheism.

Yukio Mishima envisioned the reincarnation of Kiyoaki, the protagonist of the first novel Spring Snow, as a man named Isao who put his life on the line to bring about a restoration of direct rule by the Emperor against the backdrop of the League of Blood Incident in 1932.

From 12 April to 27 May 1967, Yukio Mishima underwent basic training with the Ground Self-Defense Force.

Yukio Mishima had originally lobbied to train with the GSDF for six months, but was met with resistance from the Defense Agency.

Accordingly, Yukio Mishima trained under his birth name, Kimitake Hiraoka, and most of his fellow soldiers did not recognize him.

From June 1967, Yukio Mishima became a leading figure in a plan to create a 10,000-man "Japan National Guard" as a civilian complement to Japan's Self Defense Forces.

Yukio Mishima began leading groups of right-wing college students to undergo basic training with the GDSF in the hope of training 100 officers to lead the National Guard.

Yukio Mishima showed his sincerity by signing his birth name, Kimitake Hiraoka, in his own blood.

When Yukio Mishima found that his plan for a large-scale Japan National Guard with broad public and private support failed to catch on, he formed the Tatenokai on 5 October 1968, a private militia composed primarily of right-wing college students who swore to protect the Emperor of Japan.

Yukio Mishima wore a white hachimaki headband with a red hinomaru circle in the center bearing the kanji for "To be reborn seven times to serve the country", which was a reference to the last words of Kusunoki Masasue, the younger brother of the 14th century imperial loyalist samurai Kusunoki Masashige, as the two brothers died fighting to defend the Emperor.

Yukio Mishima's speech was intended to inspire a coup d'etat to restore the power of the emperor.

Yukio Mishima succeeded only in irritating the soldiers, and was heckled, with jeers and the noise of helicopters drowning out some parts of his speech.

Yukio Mishima then retreated into the commandant's office and apologized to the commandant, saying,.

Yukio Mishima then committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment associated with the samurai.

Morita had been assigned to serve as Yukio Mishima's second, cutting off his head with a sword at the end of the ritual to spare him unnecessary pain.

However Yukio Mishima attempted to dissuade them and three of the members acquiesced to his wishes.

Yukio Mishima planned his suicide meticulously for at least a year and no one outside the group of hand-picked Tatenokai members knew what he was planning.

Yukio Mishima cautioned against the lack of reality in the basic political controversy in Japan and the particularity of Japan's democratic principles.

Between 1968 and 1970, Yukio Mishima said words about Japan's future.

Yukio Mishima's corpse was returned home the day after his death.

The day of the Yukio Mishima Incident was the date when Hirohito became regent and the Emperor Showa made the Humanity Declaration at the age of 45.

Researchers believe that Yukio Mishima chose that day to revive the "God" by dying as a scapegoat, at the same age as when the Emperor became a human.

On his birthday, Yukio Mishima's remains were buried in the grave of the Hiraoka Family at Tama Cemetery.

Writer Takashi Inoue believes he wrote Confessions of a Mask to live in postwar Japan, and to get away from his "Realm of Death"; by dying on the same date that he began to write Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima intended to dismantle all of his postwar creative activities and return to the "Realm of Death" where he used to live.

Yukio Mishima was recognized as one of the most important post-war stylists of the Japanese language.

Yukio Mishima wrote 34 novels, about 50 plays, about 25 books of short stories, at least 35 books of essays, one libretto, and one film.

Yukio Mishima's grave is located at the Tama Cemetery in Fuchu, Tokyo.

The Yukio Mishima Prize was established in 1988 to honor his life and works.

The Yukio Mishima Incident helped inspire the formation of New Right groups in Japan, such as the "Issuikai", founded by Tsutomu Abe, who was Yukio Mishima's follower.

The Mishima Yukio Shrine was built in the suburb of Fujinomiya, Shizuoka Prefecture, on 9 January 1983.

In 2014, Yukio Mishima was one of the inaugural honourees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighbourhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields".

Yukio Mishima wrote a detailed account of the whole process, in which the particulars regarding costume, shooting expenses and the film's reception are delved into.