The Importance of Being Mishima Yukio

Damian Flanagan

24 November 2017

On November 25, 1970, the celebrated author Mishima Yukio shocked Japan with his ritual suicide. Damian Flanagan argues that his death went beyond a nationalistic call to arms or the final act of a madman, carrying real literary significance and shedding light on Mishima’s final artistic aims.

The Shocking End of an Author

November 25 this year marks the forty-seventh anniversary of the so-called Mishima Incident—one of the most shocking happenings of postwar Japanese history. What happened in the space of 80 extraordinary minutes that bright morning in 1970 has been minutely chronicled, yet still resounds in controversy and enigma.

The events, at least, are clear: Mishima Yukio, Japan’s greatest postwar literary talent, led four young cadets of his private army, the Shield Society, into a pre-arranged meeting with a general at a Self-Defense Forces facility in Ichigaya, Tokyo. Expecting nothing more than some pleasantries, the general was stunned when Mishima’s men suddenly seized, gagged, and threatened to kill him unless all the personnel on the base were immediately summoned to hear the author speak. After repeated scuffles with officers attempting to break into the hostage room, Mishima eventually strutted out onto a large balcony outside the room and addressed up to 1,000 military staff on the parade ground below.

Mishima hectored them about the need for constitutional reform and fulminated that the “Peace Constitution” did not even recognize their existence. Intending to speak for a half-hour, he was immediately confronted with a barrage of abuse (“Madman!” “Idiot!” “Japan is at peace!”) and gave up after only seven minutes. He retired to the general’s room, where he began his meticulously prepared ritual suicide. He plunged a short sword deeply into his abdomen and excruciatingly pulled it across his stomach before his attendant and probable lover Morita Masakatsu attempted to perform kaishaku, beheading Mishima with a long sword to end his agony.

Unfortunately, Morita’s swordsmanship was hopeless, and he repeatedly missed Mishima’s head, striking him agonizingly on the shoulders instead. Another of the cadets—an experienced kendō practitioner—then stepped in and expertly performed the kaishaku. Morita himself then performed ritual suicide and was in turn decapitated. When the police entered the room shortly afterwards, the heads of Mishima and Morita were resting side by side on the carpet.

An Electrifying Tragedy

News of the incident spread like wildfire across the mass media in waves of miscomprehension and misreports. Some people, when they heard the name “Mishima” constantly repeated on the radio and television, assumed that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Instead, that evening’s edition of the Asahi Shimbun—the paper’s top-selling edition ever—carried a photograph of Mishima’s severed head.

An explosive outpouring of frantic analysis followed, offering diverse opinions: Mishima had died in the noblest of political protests. No, he had simply gone insane. The writer’s desire to die a heroic samurai death at the peak of his powers and to indulge his lifelong sadomasochistic impulses were also inevitably mentioned.

In his later years Mishima dove deeply into Japan’s military past and the samurai ethos underpinning it. (© Jiji)

The ostensible reasons for Mishima’s dramatic suicide—a demand for the legal recognition of the Japanese military and a reform of the American-imposed “Peace Constitution”—are today policy objectives of the conservative Abe Shinzō and his Liberal Democratic Party, which has just won an overwhelming electoral victory. Indeed, in a grim irony showing how things have come full circle, three years ago a protestor set himself on fire, objecting to just the constitutional reform Mishima was calling for.

Although he only became interested in the idea in the last years of his life, Mishima took constitutional reform seriously and set up a study group on Japan’s Constitution within the Shield Society. Yet many have seen his posturing on this issue as a charade to effect his own spectacular samurai-style death. Mishima had written in works like the 1969 Wakaki samurai no tame ni (For Young Samurai) of reviving samurai ideals in modern Japan and had died with a hachimaki band around his head proclaiming shichishō hōkoku, or “seven lives to give for the emperor.”

Whatever your perspective on the incident, the one thing that seemed clear was that it was a grim, terrifying moment of high tragedy. Mishima was known in life for his great sense of humor and his infectious laugh, but it seemed as if in this final event all humor deserted him. As the writer Yoshida Ken’ichi memorably said of Mishima, he might be laughing with his voice, but his eyes were always serious.

Looking for the Comedic Side

That is one way of understanding Mishima, but it is not the only one. In fact, it makes just as much sense to turn that equation around and see things the other way—whenever Mishima was staring at you in deadly seriousness, he was also laughing. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, a favorite author—Mishima’s mother left a copy of Nietzsche on her son’s altar so he could read him for all eternity—Mishima understood that the most profound ideas could not just be fused with comedy, but that comedy is intrinsic to the highest forms of philosophy, as it is to the human condition itself.

Where, then, was the comedy in the Mishima Incident? Actually, everywhere, if you knew where to look.

Mishima had a long-standing interest in ritual suicide, a subject he described in detail in his 1961 short story “Yūkoku” (Patriotism), which he turned into a film in 1965 with himself in the lead performing the suicide. In preparation for the Mishima Incident he read up on historical acts of seppuku. His editor at Shinchōsha, Kojima Chikako—for whom he was serializing his “life work,” the Sea of Fertility tetralogy—recalls how when she called to collect his monthly manuscript he would regale her with comic stories of seppuku that had gone bizarrely wrong.

There was the samurai who had started to insert a sword into his stomach, but had discovered it to be blunt and so decided to have it sharpened, putting off his death for another day. Or the samurai who had committed seppuku without kaishaku and had lain there for hours. When his body was discovered by junior samurai, they began talking about him, only for the seemingly dead corpse to bark out, “Don’t dare speak about me in that way!” This type of thing would send Mishima into hysterics.

Still, it’s hardly Oscar Wilde, is it? But in fact Wilde, along with the Japanese writer’s lifelong devotion to the Irish playwright who lived from 1854 to 1900, was a key part of the 1970 suicide. Mishima’s obsession with Wilde’s 1891 play Salomé—the story of the beheading of John the Baptist at the request of King Herod’s stepdaughter Salomé and its alluring depiction of sadomasochistic eroticism—positions the entire Mishima Incident in an entirely new light.

The Mishima-Wilde Connection

Mishima first encountered Oscar Wilde and his play Salomé, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley for its 1894 English translation, in his preteen years. He would later recall the enormous impact it made on his imagination.

“I was probably eleven or twelve and saw an Iwanami pocketbook edition of Wilde’s Salomé. Beardsley’s illustrations intensely attracted me. Taking it home and reading it, I felt as though I had been struck by lightning . . . Evil had been unleashed; sensuality and beauty had been liberated; moralizing was nowhere to be seen.”

Later, Mishima had the opportunity of going to see Richard Strauss’s Salomé at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York when he made his first overseas trip to America in 1952.

As well as being an outstanding novelist and short story writer, Mishima was also a prolific dramatist, writing more than 80 pieces for the stage, in a variety of genres including Western plays as well as nō and kabuki works. He also adapted and directed plays and occasionally appeared in them himself in bit parts. Yet when in 1960 he realized his lifelong dream of putting Wilde’s Salomé on stage in Tokyo, he declared:

“It has been my dream for the last twenty years to direct Salomé. I would only be slightly exaggerating to say that I joined the theater just so I could direct Salomé one day.”

Wilde himself selected the young artist Aubrey Beardsley to create the images for his play’s first English-language edition.

Immediately before the Mishima Incident, he was preparing another production of Salomé to open in Tokyo in the spring of 1971. When on stage, only a few months after Mishima’s death, the severed head of John the Baptist was lifted up and kissed by Salomé, the audience could not fail to link its significance to the incident that had just rocked Japan.

The eyes were deadly serious, but the voice rang out in high laughter. It was a pattern throughout Mishima’s life that he wished to act out in person the arresting visual stimuli—from the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian to samurai seppuku deaths—that had beguiled his imagination as a child. But perhaps no image mattered more to him that the severed head of John the Baptist in Wilde’s Salomé.

Rather than seeing that shocking image of Mishima’s severed head on the carpet as the appalling conclusion to his call for constitutional reform or his desire to die like a samurai, we can view it as Mishima’s longstanding ultimate objective, the moment when he himself was transformed by the stroke of a lover’s blade into a real-life John the Baptist.

It’s not funny, most would say; it’s deeply disturbed. But this was Mishima’s ultimate joke on life and the power of imagination itself, profoundly informed by his love of Oscar Wilde. It was a comedic representation of the importance of being Mishima Yukio.

(Originally written in English. Banner photo: Mishima Yukio gives a speech from the second-floor balcony of the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Eastern Corps Headquarters in Ichigaya, Tokyo, shortly before committing suicide on November 25, 1970. © Jiji.)

Damian Flanagan

Writer and literary critic. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in English literature, came to Japan and earned his MA and PhD in Japanese literature at Kobe University. An author of numerous books on Japanese literature, he also writes widely on Japanese politics and culture for Japanese and Western publications. His website is www.damianflanagan.com.

NIPPON

 

Shapers of Japanese History

Mishima Yukio: Historical Visionary

Inoue Takashi 

2 October 2020

Mishima Yukio’s literary creations, imbued with his individualistic aesthetic sense, have enthralled readers around the world. In the year that marks the fiftieth anniversary of his suicide, Mishima expert Inoue Takashi looks back on the writer’s life.

Fifty years ago, Mishima Yukio died dramatically, killing himself by seppuku after his calls to reform Japan’s postwar Constitution failed to inspire Self-Defense Forces to rise up at a base in Tokyo. The death of the renowned author, nominated five times for the Nobel prize in literature, caused shock in Japan and around the world, but his motives were hard to fathom. Half a century later the mysteries remain, and critics continue to investigate the meaning of his literature and suicide.

Mishima was born Hiraoka Kimitake in 1925. As the Shōwa era (1926–89) began the following year, the author’s age remained in step with the numbering of the era; he was 20 in 1945 (Shōwa 20) and 45 when he died in 1970 (Shōwa 45). Divide the period into three, and there are the first 20 years of Shōwa that were dominated by years of warfare culminating in unprecedented collapse, the next 25 of rapid economic growth that lifted the country up from its burnt-out ruins, and the 20 or so that followed. Mishima’s life overlapped with the first two of these parts, which could be seen as most representative of the period as a whole. Although the curtain finally came down on the Shōwa era in 1989, as the economic bubble burst, he could be said to have already followed its spirit to the grave.

Mishima believed that literary works represented their age, while at times expressing disagreement and offering new historical visions. This was particularly the case from his 1956 work Kinkakuji (trans. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) onward. The main genre of modern Japanese literature was the I-novel, in which authors sincerely recorded their own experiences and incidents around them; writers with the same sense of creativity as Mishima were extremely rare. On the international stage, however, authors celebrated for their contributions to the novel like Balzac, Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky all transcended their era, criticizing society and thrusting their artistic vision on the world. Mishima was a writer in this tradition.

Debut at 16

Mishima was born in Yotsuya, Tokyo. This was technically in the prestigious Yamanote district on the west side of the city center, but in fact it was a poor locality, left behind in the reconstruction that followed the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. His grandmother Natsuko, from a distinguished samurai family, was dissatisfied with the living environment there. Mishima’s grandfather was formerly the governor of the southern half of the island known as Karafuto in Japan (now wholly administered by Russia as Sakhalin). However, he was forced out of office after a bribery scandal, and Natsuko compensated for her lost dreams and shattered self-esteem through devotion to her grandson.

As Natsuko suffered from sciatica and Mishima had a weak constitution, they often spent their days together in the sickroom. Mishima, who loved fairy tales and picture books, later let his own imagination fly, drawing and writing stories. In “Sekai no kyōi” (The Wonder of the World), a story he wrote when he was 10, autumn comes to an island paradise and with the extinguishing of a candle, it is plunged into darkness.

Although Mishima was not himself from an aristocratic family, he attended Gakushūin, a school for children of the upper classes. His poor health played a part in his undistinguished performance in elementary school. From junior high school, however, his teachers helped lift him to become one of the institution’s outstanding students. At 16, he made his literary debut with his first story to be published outside school magazines. In “Hanazakari no mori” (The Forest in Full Flower; 1941), the narrator enters the flow of time before he was born, and rediscovers the origin of life. This was when Mishima adopted his pen name. It was also the year Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, initiating the Pacific War.

Mishima graduated from Gakushūin High School at the top of his class in 1944 and enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo). Although poor health exempted him from military service, Mishima’s first collection that year, bringing together “The Forest in Full Flower” with four other stories, had been intended as a posthumous publication. The end of the war the following year left him facing a dilemma. Older authors forced into silence during the war years and up-and-coming writers back from the battlefields let forth a flood of fiction, while Mishima, who despite his youth had been creatively active during this time, found he had lost his place in the literary world. Half deciding to abandon his idea of becoming a novelist, he joined the Ministry of Finance after graduating from university, and began on the bureaucratic career path.

Instead of giving up fiction, however, Mishima quit his job at the ministry after nine months to work on a new novel. Kamen no kokuhaku (trans. Confessions of a Mask), published in 1949, had a narrator based on the author himself, who looks back on the circumstances that led him to accept his homosexuality. In one notable scene, the narrator first becomes sexually excited on seeing a picture of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, who was bound to a tree and shot with arrows. The novel did not represent Mishima’s own coming out as gay, though. Rather, with an insistence that everyone is wearing masks, it poured cold water on the kind of sensibility that believes unquestioningly in the identity of the self. This irony resounded with the psychologically troubled young people who had to live through the chaos of wartime and the immediate postwar period, making Confessions of a Mask a bestseller.

Unpublished manuscripts by Mishima Yukio. In 2000, 183 works of fiction and criticism written by Mishima in his late teens and early twenties were discovered. These are at the Mishima Yukio Literary Museum in Yamanakako, Yamanashi Prefecture. (© Jiji)

Success and Miscalculation

Having returned to the literary scene, Mishima drew a lively picture of the gay community in occupied Japan in Kinjiki (trans. Forbidden Colors), published from 1951 to 1953, and presented an innocent story of first love in his 1954 Shiosai (trans. The Sound of Waves). He also ventured into drama with the 1956 collection Kindai nōgakushū (trans. Five Modern Nō Plays) and the 1954 kabuki play Iwashiuri koi no hikiami (trans. The Sardine Seller’s Net of Love). In 1956, at the age of 31 he published The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, based on the real-life arson of Kinkakuji, the titular Kyoto temple, by one of its acolytes in 1950. It became one of his best received works and was translated into many languages.

By the time it was published, Japan’s economic boom years had begun. What drew so many readers to this novel about the arson incident of six years before? Reborn after the tribulations of war, the country was rising toward prosperity. Even so, it was only a decade or so since the war ended, and the dark memories of that time were slow to fade. They remained deeply rooted in people’s minds as an inner threat to the bright dreams of postwar democracy, progress, and affluence. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion spoke for the internal unease many in the new society felt.

From the inner perspective, democracy and economic growth were nothing other than masks. Continuing to wear them meant losing sight of the roots of existence, and falling into nihilism. Mishima made nihilism the subject of his 1959 work Kyōko no ie (Kyōko’s House), which tells the story of four young people leading lonely lives in Tokyo and New York around 1955.

(From left to right) Authors Mishima Yukio, Abe Kōbō, Ishikawa Jun, and Kawabata Yasunari come together to read a joint statement in Tokyo on February 28, 1967, protesting against the Cultural Revolution in China. (© Jiji)

Here he made a great miscalculation. The generation of readers who embraced The Temple of the Golden Pavilion were lukewarm about Kyōko’s House. By 1959, the people bustling through a new and bigger economic boom were no longer interested in the question of nihilism. For Mishima, who had tried to depict some of the darker aspects of the age in his novel, this was a grave shock.

The Final Manuscript

Mishima went on to seek new ways of being outside the literary sphere, acting in the 1960 gangster movie Karakkaze yarō (Afraid to Die) and becoming the subject of the 1963 photography collection Barakei (Ordeal by Roses) by Hosoe Eikō. With their success, he became a media favorite. 

This meant, however, catering to the postwar society that made no attempt to understand Kyōko’s House. The greater the media reaction he stirred up, the greater his sense of self-denial. To counter this situation, he could only take on the challenge of creating a literary work that captured the age and offered a new vision of history on a greater scale than ever before. This was the tetralogy Hōjō no umi (trans. The Sea of Fertility).

Mishima Yukio practicing the martial art of iaidō on July 3, 1970. (© Jiji)

In the four books, its protagonist apparently reincarnates through the twentieth century. The opening depicts a memorial ceremony for those who died in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Its bleak atmosphere lingers in the background throughout The Sea of Fertility, demonstrating that the roots of postwar nihilism were already present in the Meiji era (1868–1912). As the successive reincarnations fight against this rejection of principles in their pursuit of life, a joyful enlightenment seems certain in the final part.

However, while this was the ending in the original concept, the fourth book actually finishes with the twist that the stories of reincarnation were no more than an illusion. After handing the final manuscript in to be edited on November 25, 1970, Mishima caused a sensation with his suicide. The truth behind the act is still unknown. One thing I can say is that Mishima vividly portrayed the nihilism the age was moving toward in his ending to The Sea of Fertility. I take his death by his own hand as having been an act aimed at encouraging each one of us to discover how to overcome that nihilism.

(Originally published in Japanese on August 26, 2020. Banner photo: Mishima Yukio in 1970. © Jiji.)

***

Inoue Takashi

Professor at Shirayuri University. Specializes in Mishima Yukio and other modern Japanese literature. Born in Yokohama in 1963. Graduated from Tokyo University, where he also conducted graduated work. Was a lecturer and associate professor at Shirayuri University before taking on his current position in 2008. Works include Mō hitotsu no Nihon o motomete: Mishima Yukio Hōjō no umi o yominaosu (Seeking Another Japan: A Reassessment of Mishima Yukio’s The Sea of Fertility) and Mishima Yukio Hōjo no umi vs. Noma Hiroshi Seinen no wa: Sengo bungaku to zentai shōsetsu (Mishima Yukio’s The Sea of Fertility vs. Noma Hiroshi’s Ring of Youth: Postwar Literature and the Total Novel).

NIPPON

Watching the Skies in Japan / Mishima Yukio and Other UFO Enthusiasts

Watching the Skies in Japan: Mishima Yukio and Other UFO Enthusiasts

24 JUNE 2020

Mishima Yukio was among the famous members of the Japan Flying Saucer Research Association, founded by Arai Kin’ichi in 1955 to research and discuss UFOs.

Mishima and the Flying Saucers

“Summer, the season of flying saucers, is almost here. Last summer, I took my binoculars to Atami Hotel and watched the skies every single night in the hope of seeing so-called UFOs coming in to land. Yet in the end, I was not fortunate enough to witness such an event.”

This is the opening of an essay that author Mishima Yukio wrote in 1957 for Uchūki (Spacecraft), the official publication of the Japan Flying Saucer Research Association (JFSA). Mishima, who yearned to see an alien spaceship, joined the organization the year after it was founded in 1955 by Arai Kin’ichi, a UFO trailblazer in Japan. The JFSA had more than 1,000 members at one point, and Mishima was not its only famous face. Others included the writers Hoshi Shin’ichi, Ishihara Shintarō, and Nitta Jirō; the rocketry pioneer Itokawa Hideo; and the composer Mayuzumi Toshirō. In June 1957, Mishima took part in an observation event in Hibiya, Tokyo, and later that summer he searched for UFOs during a trip to the United States. Arai wrote in an article that Mishima was an enthusiastic member of the association and always showed up to events with a huge telescope.

Mishima Yukio (left) at an observation event in Hibiya, Tokyo, in June 1957. (Courtesy UFO Fureaikan)

Mishima wrote an article for the magazine Fujin kurabu (Women’s Club) about a cigar-shaped UFO-like object he witnessed with his wife from the top of his home in Ōta, Tokyo, on May 23, 1960. In his novel Utsukushii hoshi (A Beautiful Star), published two years later, the members of a family of four who each witness a flying saucer discover that they are all from different planets: Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus. They strive to build up the peace movement to save humanity from annihilation and nuclear war, while facing an antagonistic group of aliens seeking to wipe people out. This uncharacteristic work reflects Mishima’s fascination with UFOs and aliens.

However, Mishima was never convinced he had actually seen a UFO. In a tribute in the Asahi Shimbun to the playwright and fellow flying saucer enthusiast Kitamura Komatsu after his death in 1964, Mishima wrote, “While I wasn’t able to see a flying saucer in the end, I enjoyed the more valuable experience of pure friendship.”

UFOs for Peace

Even so, Mishima believed that UFOs existed. Arai, the JFSA head, was similarly certain that they were real, despite not having seen them himself, and toiled steadily to gather information about them. Arai was born in Tokyo in 1923 and worked with airborne radar in the Army Air Service during World War II. He had a longstanding interest in weather and astronomical observation, as well as aircraft. After a postwar spell in the Ministry of Finance, he ran a bookshop in Shinagawa, Tokyo, and read widely in his fields of interest. He came across the Japanese translation of Flying Saucers Have Landed by George Adamski, which was published in 1954. Adamski claimed to have gone on board a flying saucer that came to land and talked with aliens from Venus. The UFO boom had begun some years earlier with media reports that US businessman Kenneth Arnold had seen nine shining objects flying through the sky while traveling in his plane on June 24, 1947. Arai was immediately interested, although skeptical whether Adamski’s claims could stand up to scientific scrutiny. As these kinds of personal stories and witness accounts steadily continued to emerge, Arai felt there should be a venue for serious discussions of UFOs, which led him to found the JFSA.

The inaugural edition of its official publication included the following passage. “As Japan still has no serious research body for UFOs, they are currently seen as the products of daydreams or hallucinations. Yet it cannot be called absurdly unscientific to investigate whether such objects exist in our vast universe. For even now we, the residents of Earth, are forming plans to journey through the cosmos in the distant future. Thus, our possession of all manner of materials relating to flying saucer reports around the world and debate on their veracity based on today’s superlative space science is, although we are an amateur organization, surely a significant first page in the history of space travel.”

Arai Kin’ichi’s 2000 autobiography UFO koso waga roman (My UFO Romance). (Courtesy UFO Fureaikan)

Arai’s ultimate goal was world peace and the protection of humanity’s future. He feared that the Cold War between the Western and Eastern Blocs would lead to another global conflict. In a 1978 interview with the magazine UFO to uchū (UFOs and Space), he commented, “If we knew for certain that there were UFOs watching Earth, like a third party, wouldn’t that bring war to an immediate end?” In 1957, the JFSA marked two years since its founding with a joint statement of “universal peace” with other research groups. It sounded a warning over how the nuclear arms race threatened the future of humanity, while calling for differences between states and races to be overcome in order to make preparations for the coming of flying saucers. The same year, a report in foreign dispatches came that the Soviet Union was planning to launch a rocket to the moon armed with a nuclear weapon. The JFSA handed a document urging the cancelation of its launch to the Soviet ambassador. Mishima’s novel Utsukushii hoshi depicts the writing of a letter calling on the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to stop nuclear testing, which was clearly influenced by the JFSA action. 

A UFO Center in Japan

Around 3,000 items from Arai Kin’ichi’s collection are kept in the UFO Fureaikan. (Courtesy UFO Fureaikan)

Arai established a UFO library in his company building in Shinagawa, where he displayed the materials he had assembled and made them available for reading. Shortly before his death in April 2002, he donated most of the materials to a museum, the UFO Fureaikan in Fukushima, Fukushima Prefecture. He knew and trusted Kinoshita Tsugio, then the museum director. Kinoshita recalled, “While he was still alive, Arai wanted the materials to be properly organized and looked after. He was a good-natured and serious man. He told me, ‘I’ve never seen a UFO. You’re so lucky to have witnessed them several times.'”

The UFO Fureaikan opened in 1992, funded by one of the ¥100 million grants paid out to municipalities throughout Japan in a government bid to revitalize the regions. It is located on a hill called Senganmori, known for the many sightings of luminous objects in the skies. Kinoshita, a local UFO researcher, was director of the museum from 1993 to 2010.

Senganmori (left) and the view from its 462.5-meter summit. (Courtesy UFO Fureaikan)

The pyramid-shaped Senganmori is said to have a strong magnetic field, and has rocks resembling a whale, an Easter Island moai, and other curious forms. These have led it to be seen as a “power spot.” Kinoshita says there are many witness reports of UFOs within a radius of 30 or 40 kilometers around Senganmori and the city of Fukushima. He says he first encountered one in the summer of 1972, when he was 25, while climbing Minowayama to the west of Senganmori with three friends. 

“We were 10 or 15 minutes from the summit. As I took a step forward, I suddenly looked up at the skies and saw a helmet-shaped object floating as if it had been stuck there. It was the oxidized silver color of a one-yen coin and looked around 30 centimeters long. The four of us were dumbfounded for 30 seconds or so. We hurriedly climbed to the summit to view it from a greater height, but when we looked up again it had vanished.”

Kinoshita soon became engrossed in UFO research. He says he has now seen UFOs at least six times. Since retiring from his post as museum director, he has established a place for study next to his home, a short car journey from the Fureaikan. Sometimes visitors come and talk about UFOs or share their own witness accounts. While there are many people who do not believe at all, Kinoshita says it is important to recognize UFOs as potential gateways to advancement. “We don’t know if people really saw UFOs or not. But simply deciding that they must have been mistaken doesn’t allow for them to broaden their interest. If they say they’ve witnessed a UFO, we have to listen carefully. A sighting might inspire someone’s future research in astronomy or energy systems. These are gateways for expanding our world. There are skeptics who ask why they’ve never seen a UFO, but people today rarely look at the sky. If you don’t look up at the sky, you’ll never spot a UFO!”

(Originally written by Kimie Itakura of Nippon.com and published in Japanese. Banner photo © KTSimage/Pixta. With thanks for the cooperation of UFO Fureaikan.)

NIPPON

 

Contemporary Culture Going Global

Tommy Lee Jones in Japan: Fifteen Years as “The Alien”

Doi Emi
5 October 2020

The Alien and His Many Jobs

Alien Jones is on a mission from his home planet, sent to observe conditions on Earth. Each episode sees him working in a different job. At the end of each “episode,” he gulps thirstily from a can of coffee and intones a variation on his catchphrase, summarizing what he has learned from his latest job about “The inhabitants of this planet . . .” The commercial, which has become a favorite for the gentle humor with which it highlights the foibles of daily life on this “lousy but somehow also wonderful” planet, has now entered its fifteenth year as a fixture on Japanese TV screens.

Playing the part of the alien is Tommy Lee Jones, better known to American audiences as the Hollywood veteran with credits that include an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in The Fugitive (1993) and a string of appearances as Agent K in the Men in Black series. Jones plays the part of an extraterrestrial sent to gather intelligence on the inhabitants of Earth (read, Japan). Over the past 15 years, he has been depicted working in more than 70 different jobs that have taken him all over the country. He’s played a doctor on a remote island and an apartment building caretaker, as well as distinctively Japanese roles including a sumō referee, a traditional gardener, and a samurai. And he speaks only Japanese—not a word of English. The series was the brainchild of Fukusato Shin’ichi, a commercial campaign planner who has been with the One Sky agency after an earlier career with Dentsū. Now in his early fifties, Fukusato has been responsible for bringing more than 1,500 commercials to Japanese television screens.

An Outsider’s Perspective

Fukusato joined advertising giant Dentsū after graduating from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. Despite this elite background, Fukusato says he has never had an optimistic personality. “I’ve always had a feeling that just about anything I do is bound to go wrong,” he says. “I still have it now. A constant nagging feeling like: How could anything ever go right for a guy like me? And for the first ten years or so after I started work, things really didn’t go well at all. So I started to feel: What did I tell you, I knew it wouldn’t work out . . .”

Fukusato says he has always had an unconventional, outsider’s way of looking at the world. He remembers his interview at Dentsū. “They asked me why I had applied for the job, so I said, well, I don’t really have any friends, so I never know what people around me are thinking. So that’s the work I’d like to do at your company: research on what people are really thinking.”

In his book Denshin-bashira no kage kara miteru taipu no kikaku-jutsu, (Creative Planning from the Guy Lurking Behind the Telephone Pole), Fukusato looked back on his own childhood as a detached observer. “I would stand apart at the park, looking on from behind a utility pole, watching the other kids as they galloped in circles around a wistaria trellis or screamed with excitement on the swings. I didn’t dislike being an outsider; I never felt lonely. In fact, it was a contented and comfortable time in my life.”

Fukusato has won numerous awards for his work, including the TCC Grand Prix, the TCC Award (22 times), and the ACC Grand Prix (3 times).

In 2006, Fukusato was approached to come up with a new commercial for Boss canned coffee. The client wanted to keep a strong emphasis on the brand’s image as a drink that was “an ally on the side of working people”—an energizing glug of caffeinated sweetness ever-ready to refresh and encourage people working hard on the front lines in their various jobs. The client wanted a series that could run for at least five years—something that would take people’s minds off the constant stream of bad news and make them feel more optimistic about their lives.

Fukusato had an idea. “I asked myself a question. What’s the most depressing thing you see on television? The answer was obvious: the news. I mean, it’s just bad news everywhere you look, right? Politics is hopeless, the environment’s in a mess and getting worse, wars are breaking out. They collect all these bleak and depressing items from around the world and broadcast it as a package of bad news. And it’s not just once a day. It’s become more like a constant stream, all through the day. If you spend too much time following it, you’re bound to wind up feeling depressed. So I asked myself, what’s the opposite of that? What would make people feel better about their lives?

Fukusato came up with the idea of a series of commercials in which an extraterrestrial researcher was sent to Earth to study the lives of the inhabitants, reporting on his findings from a detached perspective. He starts off unimpressed and sardonic about what he sees, but as he spends more time here he realizes there is more to the planet than he initially thought. He starts to feel sympathy and a sense of admiration for earthlings and the way they can work to achieve great things when they put their minds to it. “I thought if we showed an alien coming to appreciate the good aspects about this planet, it would help people feel a bit better about themselves and their lives. And if we had him do a different job every time, we could keep the series going almost indefinitely.”

Fukusato felt that casting a foreign actor in the role would help to underline the “alien” element of the character as an outsider and detached observer. Tommy Lee Jones is a successful and thoughtful actor, who once roomed with former United States Vice President Al Gore at Harvard. But 15 years ago, he was not yet a universally recognizable figure in Japan. Jones impressed with his ability to present a straight face and a convincingly “alien” expression of bemusement. He was hired almost immediately, and soon his face was familiar to millions of people in Japan.

Once the basic idea was decided, Fukusato says, the details came quickly. “Alien Jones is an outsider who does not enter into the normal social circles of the [Japanese] earthlings. He watches detached and apart, with an eye that’s ironic but never malicious, sometimes amused by what he sees, at other times admiring. In fact, come to think of it, he’s just like me,” he says with a smile. Fukusato’s withdrawn, detached personality, which he had used to observe his peers from a distance as a child, came to life again in the character of Jones. Alien Jones, it turns out, has a lot of his creator in him.

In one episode, set in a “factory, the earthling workers are boisterously shouting otsukare-sama to one another, the everyday workplace greeting that, roughly translated, is an appreciation of the other’s efforts meaning “you must be very tired.” Alien Jones mutters his findings at the end of the episode: “The inhabitants of this planet take happiness in their tiredness.” In another episode, Jones plays the part of a courier delivery worker. “On this planet,” he reports, “there is a constant demand for speed. Why things have to be so urgent is not clear.” He hurries back to the delivery van, only to find he has received a ticket: “They are also really strict about parking infringements.” Like a well-drawn cartoon, each installment of the commercial humorously and memorably encapsulates in a few effective strokes an aspect of daily life in contemporary Japan.

Tommy Lee Jones as an alien taxi driver.

Over the years, as the series has become successful, it has incorporated numerous popular actors and “idol” groups, bringing its message of gentle humor from settings as diverse as outer space, remote islands of the Japanese archipelago, and the famous “scramble” crossing in Tokyo’s Shibuya.

Fukusato describes his personality as “herbivorous,” passive and yielding, and says he hates fights and arguments.

A touch of the truth

The eighteenth episode in the series saw Jones working as a “construction worker building a tunnel. “When the inhabitants of this planet see a river, they build a bridge; when they see a mountain, they dig a tunnel. Where could they be in such a hurry to get to?”

Jones presses a detonator, blasting away the rock and successfully joining the two sides of the tunnel. “It must be admitted,” he says, “that the sense of accomplishment you get from work on this planet can be habit-forming.”

Alien Jones gets emotional as he joins fellow workers in a round of “banzai” cheers to celebrate the successful dynamiting of a new tunnel.

“That episode put into words what I was always feeling myself. Why are people always working so hard? Surely it would be all right to stop and just take it easy,” says Fukusato. “It’s not just for the money. People really throw themselves into their work, and they feel a sense of accomplishment when they complete something. That, surely, is at the heart of what work means to most people. That’s the thing about commercials—if you can include an element of the truth like that, and maybe spice it up with some humor, it can really resonate with audiences.”

A 2017 outing, “A breath of fresh air: where is everyone?” was set in the office of an IT company developing smartphone apps. It contained the following snatch of prescient dialogue.

Sakai Masato: “What’s going on? Has no one come in today?”

Sugisaki Hana: “The company president and team manager are working from the co-working space. Sugiyama-san and Kumi-chan are using up their paid leave allowance, and Tanaka-san is in a meeting on remote. So, yes: there’s no one actually in the office.”

Sakai (to Narita Ryō, via video teleconferencing screen): “Why didn’t you come into the office today?”

Narita (from his garden at home): “Why should I? What’s the need?”

Jones: “The inhabitants of this planet seem likely to have a decreasing need for the office in the years to come.”

Several years on, this dialogue seems to have accurately predicted the “workstyle reform” trend that has become a mantra in corporate Japan in recent years—and especially in recent months, spurred on by the coronavirus pandemic. Here again, Fukusato incorporated an “element of the truth” into his script: If you can do your work from anywhere, why go in to the office at all? Even the manager, played by Sakai, can’t argue with the logic of it: “Hmm, now you put it that way, maybe you’re right . . .”

“I think probably a series like this wouldn’t work in other countries,” Fukusato believes. “A lot of the time, I think, clients overseas want to emphasize how a product can offer solutions to problems. This series isn’t like that. The alien just describes some aspect of earthling behavior and then at the end gulps down a can of coffee. It’s the empathy and fellow-feeling he comes to feel for the people he is observing that gradually develops the image of the brand.”

In May this year—at the height of Japan’s state of emergency, amid stay-at-home requests and shuttered businesses around the country—a special digest edition of the commercial was released, featuring 90 seconds of “Advice from an Alien” culled from excerpts from previous episodes aired over the previous 14 years. “First of all, make sure to wash your hands really well,” the clip begins. Wear masks, maintain distance from others, stay at home, open windows to air out your rooms from time to time, the spot continues. And above all, “show appreciation for the efforts of people who are working to save lives and keep society running.” The success of this mini-masterpiece was made possible by the accumulated stock of clips showing “Alien Jones” in various settings alongside the hard-working people of Japan. The outer-space visitor’s words of encouragement offer solace for us all, wherever we may be living and working on this lousy but wonderful little planet.

“Advice from an Alien” (May 2020)

(Courtesy Suntory; © Jiji Press)

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: “Make sure to wash your hands really well,” says Tommy Lee Jones, as Alien Jones, at the height of the Covid-19 crisis in May 2020. With thanks to One Sky. Photos of Fukusato Shin’ichi © Nippon.com.)

Fukusato Shin’ichi

Born in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, in July 1968. Graduated from Hitotsubashi University and joined Dentsū in 1992. Since 2001 has worked as creative director at the One Sky agency. Has worked on more than 1,500 television commercials, including successful campaigns for Georgia Coffee, Toyota, and Eneos. His work has received numerous industry awards, including the prestigious Tokyo Copywriters Club Grand Prix.

NIPPON

 

The New Yorker’s Fact Crisis

Is Masha Gessen’s performative anti-Zionism an exception to the magazine’s commitment to factual accuracy and independent style, or a reflection of broader decay?

BY

DAVID MIKICS

AUGUST 05, 2024

It was a commonplace among right-minded people at the dawn of the 20th century that hatred and bigotry were the products of ignorance and would be eliminated through the sanitary means of education. Unfortunately, the horrors of the 20th century would prove this theory to have been radically false. Even the horrors of the Holocaust failed to immunize Western societies against the plague of antisemitism, which is clearly thriving in major Western culture centers to an extent that Victorian optimists and post-Holocaust pessimists alike would find incredible.

 

A protester uses a scope on top of a barricade to look for police approaching the Capitol Hill autonomous zone (CHAZ) in Seattle on June 11, 2020

JASON REDMOND/

What Nellie Saw

Good progressives are tossing the heady days of wine and wokeness down the memory hole. Lucky for us, there was a witness.

BY

DAVID MIKICS

MAY 22, 2024

Remember the heady days of 2020? Progressives trained by the richest universities in the land suddenly had the chance to remake America in their image, the way they had always dreamed of doing. The result was so obvious and crushing a failure that one is no longer supposed to talk about it.

Four years later, the power elite have discovered that their cosplay revolution is seen as merely ridiculous. Minority groups don’t want the new names that have been issued to them. Straight people prefer not to be called cisgender, and gay people don’t like being submerged in a tide of heterosexuals who style themselves queer. Even The New York Times, that high conclave of official euphemisms, has begun to soft-pedal chilling locutions like “gender-affirming care for minors,” instead referring honestly to puberty blockers and body-altering surgery.

Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution is a grand tour through the craziness that followed the killing of George Floyd and continues to this day, despite the majority of Americans shaking their heads in bewilderment. Bowles, a former Timesreporter, started out as a progressive seeker, curious and hopeful about the new thinking, and she is still seeking solutions to racism, income inequality, and attacks on women’s rights. But she also sees the absurdity of much of what passed for progressivism, yet was actually narcissistic, neo-racialist, and aggressively inhumane.

At the Times, Bowles was hounded by an anti-disinformation editor, who was there to remind writers that the lab leak hypothesis was a conspiracy theory and also that conservatives were very bad people. The real danger was Trump, she was told, and anything questionable that the left did had to be passed over in silence, lest the enemy gain succor. When she said she wanted to go to Seattle to check out the new anarchist collective that had abolished the police, she was asked, she says, “Why do you care? No, but seriously why do you care?”

Bowles wrote several significant stories for the Times, including one on antifa in 2020, before leaving the paper along with her wife, Bari Weiss, who founded the now-indispensable Free Press. (Bowles was told by a Times editor that her new romantic partner, Weiss, was “a Nazi,” as their colleagues nodded in agreement.) Bowles wrote a mordantly funny weekly column, TGIF, for the Free Press, where she has covered many stories not fit to print in the Times and The Washington Post.

Early-2020s wokeism exerts a dismal fascination in part because it was (is?) more a patchwork than a consistent ideology. In this way it resembles liberalism, conservatism, and a few other -isms, only more so. Wokeism began in the wake of the Floyd murder with a neo-Puritan practice of self-examination geared toward the spiritual regeneration of enlightened “white people.” This project merged with a patrolling of speech engineered by academic elites who were carting around a barrelful of new phraseology. When the pandemic hit, the protesters cast their lot with the surveillance state and the powers that be, since social change could only be dictated from above.

Wokeism immediately added a contrary aspect, though—heavily-armed liberated zones in West Coast cities run by violent male youths who, instead of being agonized by their skin color (mostly super-pale, this being the Pacific Northwest), ran rampant like bite-sized made men hoisting their AKs. Those anarchist spaces were short-lived—people got killed. So, wokeism pivoted to milder forms of self-expression, like queering yourself in inventive ways, even if you were purely vanilla. (Bowles describes the speech given by Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo’s daughter, when she came out as “demisexual,” meaning she only wants to have sex with people she’s emotionally attached to.) Somewhere in there came the genius inspiration of Tema Okun, a middle-aged white woman, who said that Black kids, and maybe white kids too, shouldn’t try to get the right answers in school, since objectivity was toxic whiteness. Oh, and there was also that business of ending prison sentences for theft, pulling down public monuments and paintings of “white men,” helping drug addicts get high, and other interesting stuff.

Puritanism and libertarianism, of the somewhat unhinged Murray Rothbard sort, were the strange bedfellows of the wokeist movement. In the 1960s Rothbard had urged getting rid of the police, since vigilantes would do a much better job in a free market. But the new woke libertarianism was clothed in utopian social welfare garb, which made it all the more confusing. Cops would be replaced not by armed gangs but by social service professionals who would eliminate all crime, since people are inherently good and do bad things only because of social oppression. Yet there was still room for healthy mayhem, as long as it was left-wing violence directed at the police and others deemed to be “fascists.”

Over time, the Puritan side of wokeism faded, and the urge to mortify white flesh gave way to a vogue for trans-humanist gender expression, coupled with an admiration of the noble “bodies of culture” that remained nonwhite. (Bowles quotes a professor on the radio claiming that “rape did not exist among Native nations” before contact with white people.) It has ended, at least for now, with the adulation of the decidedly nonwhite Hamas with the noble hang gliders, bravely resisting the white Jews whom they burn and rape.

And it all started with the tears of self-excoriation shed by white people. Bowles quotes a Pastor Marcia of the Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, North Carolina:

“What is it that makes whiteness so seductive?” Pastor Marcia says. “It internalizes itself in white bodies but also black, indigenous, and brown bodies. It gets into our cells. It changes the way our bodies work. What is it about this that is so seductive that we literally eat it and drink it and let it seep into our bones?”

Like an environmental poison, whiteness pollutes everything, and there is no way to wash yourself clean, no matter your skin color.

You can substitute “sin” for “whiteness” in Pastor Marcia’s sermon. Sin is the primal toxic substance, and only by unrelenting practices of self-abasement can you begin to see its lethal effects inscribed within your own body. In the summer of 2020, Bowles notes, white police and community activists in Cary, North Carolina, washed the feet of Black people and pleaded for forgiveness.

Second-guessing everything one says or does is a crucial part of Puritan practice, in the 2020s Ivy League America just as in 1640s New England. Bowles, who attended a Robin DiAngelo consciousness-raising session, quotes a participant who wonders how “perfectionism” and “linear thinking” are really white traits, since her husband and son, who are white, aren’t perfectionists. “Then she wonders why she is wondering this, whether the question itself is white supremacy.”

Thought itself can be sinful, a key point in Puritanism. Meanwhile, Patrisse Cullors’ Black Lives Matter Global Network raked in $100 million in donations that year, large chunks of which have never been accounted for. People started saying that BLM stood for “Build Lovely Mansions,” like Cullors’ $1.4 million house in Topanga Canyon. Asking to see her charity’s finances was racist, Cullors complained: “It is such a trip now to hear the term 990s. It’s like ugh, it’s like triggering.” After some rough spots, BLM Global Network is now back in business, and ready to accept your cash.

Bowles traveled to Seattle in summer 2020, where she visited the Capital Hill autonomous zone (CHAZ). A local café owner, Faizel Khan, described CHAZ as a “white occupation”: “They barricaded us all in here ... and they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.” The occupiers, dressed in black, shattered windows and looted and castigated any “cop caller” who dared to complain. A teenager bled to death, since no ambulances were allowed to enter CHAZ. Then two more kids died, and Mayor Jenny Durkan, who had earlier called CHAZ a “peaceful expression,” ordered it shut down. CHAZ lasted less than a month. So much for armed utopia.

Later, Bowles also went to Portland, where antifa gave handy tips on “how to burn a cop car” and acolytes were reminded that “the children of Police Officers must be killed.” Police, it was noted, “include[s] doctors, midwives and psychologists who violently police gender and sexuality at the point of birth.”

Bowles continues to like some aspects of the new progressive thinking. She is open to actual attempts to tackle social ills, as well as new freedoms and styles and modes of self-definition. Drag queen story hour at the daughter’s Tot Shabbat is a big hit, relished by both Mom and child. She likes the police reform advocates, who complain that “’abolish the police’ ruined us,” diverting attention from their real, needful strategies. She is impressed by unarmed violence intervention groups, who patrol neighborhoods and try to break up confrontations between gangs, reducing the need for police. Yet violence intervention, she adds, is risky for the brave men and women who engage in it—there is a not-insubstantial death toll.

Bowles has been slammed for her inconvenient desire to bear witness to a moment of acute upheaval in American manners and social practice by the usual boundary-policing progressive outlets like The New Yorker and The Washington Post. No one has hit her harder than Laura Kipnis in The New York Times Book Review. Kipnis accuses Bowles, a mild, even affectionate satirist, of “mocking” and “sneering,” all the while smearing Bowles viciously. Kipnis aggressively misrepresents Bowles’ reporting, charging her with being a bougie NIMBYist who didn’t want a homeless encampment next to her nice LA house. Bowles, Kipnis snipes, “wishes the unhoused could just have better manners—be less rowdy, perhaps more constipated. More like middle-class homeowners.” Bowles in fact describes poor people of color who could no longer take their children to the only neighborhood park because homeless addicts were exposing their genitals, doing drugs, and beating each other up. For all I know, Kipnis lives next to an anarchic homeless camp and is having a fine time. Maybe she should write about it.

The movement has never been about actual results, only the public display of righteous intentions.

I suspect that Kipnis’ real objection to Morning After the Revolution is that Bowles opposes biological males infiltrating women’s sports and women’s prisons, as well as puberty blockers that cause sterility and the inability to achieve orgasm, marketed to gay kids who are supposed to be “really” the other gender. Bowles also criticizes the habit of relabeling women “non-men” (men are always “men,” she astutely notices, rather than “non-women”). She’s against saying that sex is “assigned at birth” as if it were the product of vague guesswork, and the misogynistic fetishizing of women as “female holes” by demented trans polemicists like Andrea Long Chu. Having herself come under fire for daring to question what she termed “sexual paranoia” on campus, Kipnis is apparently bent on shoring up her progressive bona fides by proving that she can be a useful boundary-policing instrument herself, to be employed against those who go ‘too far’ by pointing out the radical and even absurd ideas of some trans advocates (who do not necessarily speak for most transpeople).

Bowles’ most poignant chapter deals with the drug addicts that San Francisco helps to die by providing an open-air shooting gallery in the Tenderloin, which now appears to be off limits for reporters. The movement’s Dickensian libertarianism has conspired with old-fashioned social welfare policies, revamped so that they serve death rather than life. J.S. Mill upheld the right to do self-harm in a free society, and he wasn’t fazed by hard drugs—he approved of the opium trade that destroyed China. But Mill didn’t advocate refashioning social services so that addicts would have an easier time ending their lives.

In time progressives would move on from the right to kill yourself in public to the right to murder other people, as long as they were the right people, i.e., white oppressors, specifically Jews—the final station stop on the progressive crazy train being open and enthusiastic support for Hamas. Morning After the Revolution ends ominously with one of the fervent pro-Islamist rallies that now seem to be the entire focus of America’s so-called progressive movement.

The latest litmus test goal for progressives, erasing Israel from the map, will prove to be no more achievable than eradicating whiteness. But the movement has never been about actual results, only the public display of righteous intentions. Lately the righteousness has been serving evil ends, but few leftists are willing to admit this. Instead, they say that students demanding justice is a noble thing, whether or not what they are demanding is actually just; or that there really aren’t many extremists; or that they oppose genocide in Gaza, whether or not a genocide is actually happening, and while ignoring the actual genocidal rhetoric and actions of Hamas; or mostly, that you should be denouncing Trump instead.

Michelle Goldberg, in her Times op-ed about Bowles’ new book, wistfully yearned for the return of the “progressive urgency that marked the Trump presidency.” Except, the urgency is still there—not this time smashing the windows of minority business owners, saying that math is racist, or championing the right to shoot up in public, but applauding the murder of Jews, past and future. Putting progressive urgency in the past tense is a way of closing the book on that past while at the same time erasing what progressives are saying and doing in the present, in order to avoid any moral or practical responsibility for a political program that has clearly gone off the rails.

Progressivism’s moral bankruptcy is hard to overlook. Unless, of course, you write for The New York Times, in which case your strategy is to pretend that the left extremism of the past few years either didn’t happen or doesn’t matter. Luckily, we have Nellie Bowles to show us otherwise.

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