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Also you don't find a lot of far right artists now, Mishima's works and his political stand is a really interesting combination. Just watched the Mishima film

Also you don't find a lot of far right artists now, Mishima's works and his political stand is a really interesting combination. Just watched the Mishima film a couple weeks ago, the Cinematography awed me the most, the director clearly studied a ton of Japanese cinema (I think he's going for that style), the theatre scenes are easily one of my top scenes of all time. The music on the other hand I think it's a little bit over-scored, like a lot of other Philip Glass' scores they sound amazing stand-alone but not always fit to the films, just personal taste..

claudeganon 6y ago
Mishima isn’t really that divergent from the prewar fascist aesthetic. More context on that in this book: https://www.ubcpress.ca/glorify-the-empire https://www.ubcpress.ca/glorify-the-empire The only thing different about him was that he came to his fascism in a kitsch fashion after it had otherwise been broadly repudiated for its destructive consequences (largely for psycho-sexual reasons, he was decapitated in his “coup” attempt by his young lover). But in prewar Japan, there were plenty of avant-garde artists who turned fascist as it subsumed the country. In the postwar period, they were rightfully turned on by their fellow citizens who had watched their country razed to the ground and families destroyed by proponents of an irrational nihilism. Their recuperation only began in earnest when US intelligence services began purging leftists from the cultural sector and funding proponents of “traditional” Japanese culture in literature and the arts in the 1950s-60s. I know that Kawabata Yasunari received CIA funding through cultural front organizations and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mishima did as well (they were close friends and shared work with each other). All of this was intended to combat the otherwise widely popular emergence of leftist culture in the post-occupation period.

claudeganon 6y ago

Mishima isn’t really that divergent from the prewar fascist aesthetic. More context on that in this book: https://www.ubcpress.ca/glorify-the-empire https://www.ubcpress.ca/glorify-the-empire The only thing different about him was that he came to his fascism in a kitsch fashion after it had otherwise been broadly repudiated for its destructive consequences (largely for psycho-sexual reasons, he was decapitated in his “coup” attempt by his young lover). But in prewar Japan, there were plenty of avant-garde artists who turned fascist as it subsumed the country. In the postwar period, they were rightfully turned on by their fellow citizens who had watched their country razed to the ground and families destroyed by proponents of an irrational nihilism. Their recuperation only began in earnest when US intelligence services began purging leftists from the cultural sector and funding proponents of “traditional” Japanese culture in literature and the arts in the 1950s-60s. I know that Kawabata Yasunari received CIA funding through cultural front organizations and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mishima did as well (they were close friends and shared work with each other). All of this was intended to combat the otherwise widely popular emergence of leftist culture in the post-occupation period.