Came across this article from the Japan Times, written by Hiroaki Sato, who is working on a biography of Mishima.

Apparently, Japan’s new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is getting criticism for saying things about Japan’s military being in the pocket of the US.  This concerned another Yukio many years ago…

“…after all these years, there persists the nagging suspicion, articulated most clearly toward the end of the 1960s by Yukio Mishima, that the ultimate commander of the Japanese military, the SDF, is not the Japanese prime minister but the U.S. president.

Not just the Persian Gulf War in 1991 but also the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 has demonstrated the validity of this suspicion.

It was at least this murky status of the SDF that Mishima, originally a law student, wanted to clear away. He proposed to split the forces into two separate entities: one a Japanese contingent for “U.N. peacekeeping operations,” and the other an entity dedicated to homeland defense. Hatoyama’s outline for constitutional revision on his homepage comes remarkably close to Mishima’s idea four decades ago, though without the part about splitting the forces.”