User:Shigekuni Honda/sandbox

On Hagakure, The way of the samurai (葉隠入門), is an essay published by Yukio Mishima in 1967, three years before his death. The essay is based on the modern Japanese translation from Hagakure (葉隠), the dictation of the lectures delivered from 1710 to 1716 by Jôchô Yamamoto (山本常朝, 1659-1719), a samurai in the Edo period. The translation itself was not done by Mishima but Nobuo Kasahara, and Mishima attached a plenty of his own interpretation to the text. Among the most well-known phrases in Hagakure are “I have found Bushido, the way of the samurai, to be the decision of death,” and “If you face two choices, you should choose the one that will lead you to death earlier.”

Yamamoto and Hagakure

The period from 1688 to 1704, the Genroku (元禄) period, was the time of decadence. In a long peaceful time following the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603, the Japanese economy had been prospering, which caused the various cultural flourishments. On the other hand, however, samurais were forgetting the spirit of a brave warrior; they had come to be obsessed with their cloths, competing with each other to make himself look fashionable; as a result, their swords changed into a mere ornamental item, not arms of dignity.

Grieving such a decline of samurai’s spirit, Jôchô Yamamoto secluded himself from the flippant world, and dictated Hagakure so as to remind samurais of their traditional spirit and morality again.

Mishima and Hagakure

Mishima himself stated that he had read Hagakure repeatedly throughout his life. He first read the book in the time of WWⅡ, when he was in his late teens; he never failed to carry it about himself even in the middle of air raids. In the prologue of On Hagakure, he stated: “I began to read Hagakure in the war time, and since that time I have always kept it in hand. It is the only book for the following twenty years that has deeply affected me every time I read it.” There are some radical phrases in Hagakure which advocate the superiority of dignity, such as self-sacrifice, over human life. So, in the war time, the military authorities recommended (or forced) the people to read Hagakure, aiming at raising the national’s morale. (For instance, Hagaure says, “It is certain that the outcome of a battle may sometimes be beyond our control however much effort we make. But, what really matters is not the victory but the honor. So, if you are about to be put to shame, you should choose to kill yourself.”) As the authorities intended, Hagakure became very popular at that time. And Mishima might have been one of such readers at first.

After the defeat of WWⅡ, however, the attitude of Japanese people toward Hagakure changed 180 degrees, and the book was regarded as a taboo in the public. But, in Mishima, it was after the war that the importance of the book came to rise. He stated in the prologue: “During the war time, everyone was forced to read Hagakure. But, to me, the book became significant rather after the war was over. Hagakure might be intrinsically such a paradoxical book. The Hagakure during the war was like an illuminant in the light, but it is in the darkness that Hagakure really emits light.”

Throughout his life, Mishima had consistently read Hagakure as the best philosophy of life. But, the book itself contains not a few inconsistencies. In Hagakure, for example, Stoicism and Epicureanism coexist without any problem; Yamamoto recommended even the makeup of samurais.

The philosophy of Hagakure, however, is strictly based on death. Yamamoto preached that every samurai must be always conscious of his own death, and that there must be death on the extension of his every action. Therefore, it is certain that Yamamoto allowed samurais to do makeup, but it must be done just with the intension to die beautifully.

This philosophy on appearance must have had a great influence on Mishima, for when he was asked late in his life why he had been doing bodybuilding, he cheerfully answered, “I’m going to suicide by hara-kiri in the future, and if I was big-bellied at that moment, wouldn’t it be shameful?”