3 ms·
Ideologically, politically and aesthetically Mishima was clearly a dead end, but I’ve always found him of minor interest because his aesthetic was so clearly We
by kthxbye123 6y ago
Ideologically, politically and aesthetically Mishima was clearly a dead end, but I’ve always found him of minor interest because his aesthetic was so clearly Westernized in a way that earlier strains of Japanese fascism weren’t. The campy, macho-hysterical aesthetic elements that have been present in western far-right movements from D’Annunzio to Trump weren’t really present in the prewar Japanese military government, but Mishima was really almost their apotheosis. It’s kind of ironic - rather than being a throwback to a pure strain of Japanese masculine identity, he was really a syncretist.
- morelisp 6y agoUpvoting because although I disagree strongly with "dead end" (something more like "closed world", maybe), this is a critical aspect of Mishima. His policy was thoroughly anti-Western but his ideology was heavily influenced by German philosophy and he had many personal and professional contacts with westerners. Mishima is among the first to embody his conception of Yamato-damashii in the same way Ta-Nehisi Coates labeled Donald Trump the US's "first white president" - not literally the first, but the first who needed to frame it explicitly in antithesis.