An interesting article by Hiroaki Sato concerning Mishima and a lawsuit over a book which recounted stories about Mishima’s sexuality.
Suppressing more than free speech
By HIROAKI SATO
“Two years before he killed himself in an ultimate show of male bonding — the young man who beheaded him followed him in death — Mishima wrote an introduction to Tamotsu Yato’s collection of photographs celebrating Japan’s “naked festivals” (hadaka matsuri). Men taking part in them wear nothing but loincloths, most of the time.
In that essay, Mishima rued how culturally diffident the Japanese were when they opened their country to the West in the 19th century. They thought they were “backward” in comparison with Europeans and set out to suppress many of the things that were natural to their own culture. They were unaware that the seemingly “advanced” Westerners came with a lode of cultural hangups of their own.
Among the customs the Japanese tried to snuff out as “barbaric” amid the onslaught of Christian morality was the “naked festivals.” Another was the easy custom of men and women bathing together. One thing Mishima could have readily mentioned but didn’t, though he had made it palpably clear elsewhere, was male-male love.”
