MISHIMA'S STATEMENT ON THE SHIELD SOCIETY

...discovered on 4chan...

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THE SHIELD SOCIETY/TATENOKAI

(Manifesto commemorating the first anniversary of the Shield Society, November 1969)

The Shield Society I have formed is composed of less than a hundred members, has no weapons, and is the smallest army in the world. Despite welcoming new members every year, I have decided not to exceed one hundred members, as I do not want to lead more than that.

They are not paid anything. They are only provided with a summer and winter uniform, caps, boots and a combat uniform. The latter is extraordinarily colorful, and was designed by Tsukumo Igarashi, the only Japanese stylist to create uniforms for De Gaulle.

The flag of our Society is simple: a red blazon on white silk. I personally designed our emblem, which consists of a circle that encloses two ancient Japanese helmets. This same pattern appears on the caps and buttons.

To be a member of the Shield Society it is convenient to be a university student. This for a fairly obvious reason: you are young and you have time. Someone who works cannot be arbitrarily granted long vacation periods. To be admitted into the Society, it is also required to complete a month of military exercises in an infantry regiment of the Self-Defense Forces and then pass an exam.

Once you become a member of the Society, you participate in a monthly assembly where you dedicate yourself to some activity entrusted to groups of ten; the following year there is a new period of training in the Self-Defense Forces. Currently, the members of the Society are exercising for the march that will take place on the terrace of the National Theater on November 3rd.

The Shield Society is an army ready to intervene at any moment. It is impossible to foresee when it will go into action. It might never happen, or might be tomorrow.

Until then, the Shield Society will not fulfill any other duties. They will not even participate in public demonstrations. They will not distribute leaflets. They will not throw molotov cocktails. They will not throw stones. They will not protest against anything or anyone. They will not organize elections. They will only participate in the decisive fight.

This is the smallest spiritual army in the world, made up of youths who do not possess weapons, but well-tempered muscles. Some people have tried to insult us by calling us “toy soldiers”. As commander of these hundred men, when I have to spend a month with the members of the Self-Defense Forces I get up, like everyone else, at at six in the morning, sometimes at three, when there is an emergency call, and I run five kilometers with them…and to think that I usually don't wake up before one in the afternoon.

Indeed, in civil life I dedicate myself to writing long novels, very long novels, novels that seem endless to me. At night I carefully select words, weighing them as a pharmacist would do with his drugs on an extremely sensitive scale to then put them together. I can only fall asleep when morning has come.

I know that I must maintain a constant balance between my activity in the Shield Society and the quality of my literary work. If this balance was broken, the Shield Society would degenerate into an artist's distraction, or I would end up becoming a politician. The more I understand the subtle functions of words, the more clearly I see that in the face of reality the artist is as irresponsible as a cat. As an artist, I wouldn't feel responsible even if the world melted like ice cream. Instead, I take full responsibility for the Shield Society. It is an obligation that I have freely imposed on myself. And it is impossible that I can outlive all its members.

After founding this small group, I understood that the ethics of a movement, whatever it may be, is conditioned by money. I have never accepted a single penny from anyone for our group. The funds available to us come entirely from my copyright. That’s the economic reason why I cannot allow more than one hundred members.

In May of this year I was invited to a students meeting of the most radical left, and I engaged with them in an exciting debate. When I transcribed such an encounter into a book, the edition became a bestseller. I decided, in agreement with the students, to distribute the copyright equally. With that money, they probably bought helmets and made molotov cocktails; I, for my part, bought the summer uniforms for the Shield Society. Everybody tells me it was a good deal.

The hypocrisy of postwar Japan makes me nauseous. I do not believe that pacifism is hypocrisy in itself, but I am convinced that because of the abuse made by both the left and right of our peaceful Constitution, used as a political pretext, there is no country in the world where pacifism has become as perfectly synonymous with hypocrisy as in Japan. In this country, the safest and most respected condition of life is that of the pacifist, who rejects violence and assumes positions similar to those of the left-wing parties. True, there should be nothing objectionable about that. But the more the conformity of the intellectuals grows, the more I wonder if an intellectual does not have the duty to criticize this conformity and to choose a more adventurous life. And, as if this wasn’t enough, today, among other things, the so-called “salon socialism” of the intellectual elite, whose social influence is notorious, is stupidly spreading. Mothers cry that it is not right to put toy guns in the hands of their children, and that the obligation to line up and be identified by a number at school are reminiscent of militarism, and that is why schoolchildren now gather in idle disorder, like parliamentarians.

Some might object: "But why don't you, as an intellectual, just carry out a verbal activity?" As a man of letters I know too well that in Japan all words have lost their meaning and have become false and insignificant elements, like that plastic that imitates marble. In addition, they are used in such a way that one concept hides another, thus, whoever writes them, provides an alibi to open up any possibility of escape. Falsehood, like vinegar in vegetables, has crept into every word. As a man of letters I believe nothing more than the perfectly false words of literary works; As I have already indicated, I am convinced that literature is a world completely removed from struggle and responsibility. And this is the reason that induces me to love with special zeal, in Japanese literature, the tradition of elegant beauty. If all words referred to action have been corrupted, it is necessary to resurrect the other tradition of Japan, that of warriors and samurai, to act silently, without the help of words and running the risk of confusion. I had long held the conviction in my mind that, as the samurai believed, to justify oneself is an act of baseness. Driven by an inner strength I began to dedicate myself to kendo. I've been doing it for thirteen years. This art, modeled on that of ancient warriors, consists of mastering a bamboo sword, and doesn’t require words. Through this, I have felt the ancient spirit of the samurai born in me.

Economic prosperity has transformed the Japanese into merchants, and the spirit of the samurai has been completely annihilated. It is now considered old-fashioned to risk one's life to defend an ideal. Ideals have become a kind of amulet suitable only to protect life from the dangers that lie in wait. Only when the students, mistakenly considered the quiet continuators of the work of their masters, confronted the intellectuals with terrifying violence, did they realize (although too late) that to defend one's ideas it is necessary to be willing to sacrifice life.

The current student riots are reminiscent of the period in which the sophists, the antagonists of Socrates, isolated the young men in the agora and they rebelled. But I believe that the lives of young men - and not only of them, but of all intellectuals - must be spent between the gym and the agora. Defending an opinion with opinions represents a contradiction of method: I am one of those who believe that a thought must be defended with the body and with martial arts.

Through this reasoning, I spontaneously came to understand the notion known in military strategy as "indirect invasion". Seen from the outside, this looks like a covert ideological struggle led by a foreign power, while essentially it is, at least in regards to Japan, a battle between those who try to destroy the national identity and those who try to defend it. Such a strategy assumes the most varied and complex forms, since at times it provokes a popular struggle that adopts the mask of nationalism, and at others it becomes a battle of irregular militias against a regular army.

However, it can be said that in Japan the modernization of the 19th century overthrew the concept of irregular militias, and in this way the regular army assumed exclusive importance. A similar tradition has extended even to today’s Self-Defense Forces. Starting in the 19th century, Japan stopped having a popular militia, to such an extent that during the World War, the Parliament passed a law to enlist volunteers only two months before the defeat. We Japanese consider that irregular armies, which are the most suitable forces for the new forms of warfare of this century, must employ the simple strategies of the conventional army. My idea of this popular militia has always been criticized by all those with whom I’ve spoken on the subject, who wanted to convince me that such a militia could not be put into practice in Japan. I responded by stating that I would create one, with my own means. This was the origin of the Shield Society.

In the spring of 1967, at the age of forty-two, I obtained a special permission to participate for two months in the exercises of the Self Defense Forces, being admitted to an infantry division as an officer student. My companions were all young people, mostly in their early twenties. I shared to the limit of my possibilities their training: I ran, marched and even participated in training for rangers. These were very hard experiences, but I managed to overcome them.

I realized that it was impossible for twenty-year-olds to fail to do what a forty-two-year-old man had been capable of doing. From my experiences I deduced that, with a month of practice, young men, ignorant of any military discipline, would be in a position to lead small platoons of men, and with the help of experts I studied and perfected, in six months, a rational plan of exercises.

During the spring of 1968 I carried out my first experiment: I went to the barracks on the hillside of Mount Fujiyama with about twenty students and began training. The soldiers greeted us with obvious skepticism. They thought that these young men, whose postwar education had taught them to avoid all physical strain and discipline, could not endure a month of harsh military life.

But, to their surprise, these young men passed the test by behaving like splendid platoon leaders during combat simulations in which, after a forty-five-kilometer march and a two-kilometer run, various offensive strategies had to be developed against an enemy position. After that month we parted with great sorrow from the instructor officers and the NCOs, shaking hands with tears in their eyes.

In the following years, I returned the military life with the new members of the Society, and I acquired the habit, unusual for me, of participating in their most difficult exercises. Then, in the fall of 1968, I named our group the Shield Society.

Such a phenomenon would be inconceivable in Europe. In Japan, as I have said, apart from the members of the Self-Defense Forces, there are no young civilians who have received military training, not even for a month, with the exception of those in the Shield Society. Therefore, despite being only one hundred, the military importance of our group is relatively great. In case of necessity, each of them could take the lead of fifty men and undertake auxiliary or surveillance services, or carry out raids, or work in intelligence.

But the main goal I had when I created this group was to reignite the warrior spirit, restore the noble tradition of the way of the samurai, that’s dying out in modern Japan.

Finally, I would like to narrate an episode that, to me, accurately reflects the character of our Society.

That summer I was a guest on the barracks at the hillside of Mount Fujiyama, accompanied by about thirty students. The first day we spent an arduous war training under a fiery sky. When we got back to the barracks we had dinner and bathed, and then some students gathered in my room. Violet lightning bolts reverberated over the plain, distant thunder was heard, and the crickets song came closer to us. After discussing the difficulty of driving a platoon, a Kyoto student pulled a transverse flute out of an elegant bag-shaped case. It was an ancient instrument of Gagaku, the music of the court; nowadays very few people know how to play it. The student confessed that he had started practicing about a year before, and that he often played it when he was the first one to arrive at the place where he used to meet his girlfriend, in an old temple in the vicinity of Kyoto, as it was the signal for her to know where he was. The first notes of the flute vibrated. It was an ancient melody, melancholic and charming, a music that echoed the image of an autumn field sprinkled with frost. It had been composed at the time of the Genji monogatari, in the 11th century, and had accompanied the Waves of the Blue Sea dance, in which the protagonist of the work, the Splendorous Prince, was exhibited. Listening, lost in the sound of that flute, I felt as if postwar Japan never existed, and that, albeit for a brief moment, in that music, the happy and perfect harmony between elegant beauty and the warrior tradition became a reality. And that was what my soul had sought for many years.