“…we, never seeking power and giving no thought to personal advancement, go forth to certain death to become the foundation stones for the Restoration.”
- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
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“Chusai Oshio realized in his own person the Wang Yang-ming concept of unity of thought and action, embodying the dictum : ‘To know and not to act is not to know.’”
- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
Tags: action, wang yang-ming
“The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.”
- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel
Tags: cynicism, insecurity
“It is true enough that when I lifted a certain weight of steel, I was able to believe in my own strength. I sweated and panted, struggling to obtain certain proof of my strength. At such times, strength was mine, and equally it was the steel’s. My sense of existence was feeding on itself.”
- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel
“Facile cynicism, invariably, is related to feeble muscles or obesity, while the cult of the hero and a mighty nihilism are always are always related to a mighty body and well-tempered muscles. For the cult of the hero is, ultimately, the basic principle of the body, and in the long run is intimately involved with the contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death.”
- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel
“As he saw it, there was only one choice–to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide. When a fellow from his own class killed himself, Jiro had approved of the act itself, yet had felt it a pity that it wasn’t the strong man’s suicide he had always envisaged, but that of someone frail in both mind and body.”
- Yukio Mishima, “Sword” Acts of Worship
“All around, vastly and untidily, stretched the country for which he grieved. He was to give his life for it. But would that great country, with which he was prepared to remonstrate to the extent of destroying himself, take the slightest heed of his death? He did not know; and it did not matter. His was a battlefield without glory, a battlefield where none could display deeds of valor: it was the front line of the spirit.”
- Yukio Mishima, Patriotism
“Although one may judge the purity of an action by the action itself, Jōchō realizes that the purity of righteousness must be measured differently.
- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure
“…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality.”
- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure
Comment: This is an especially frank portrayal of the traditional concept of honor.
