THE SAILORS WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA
Yukio Mishima and the sinking of the Ehime Maru

ROOTS OF RESENTMENT

It was, of course, not the incident itself that sparked the anger of the Japanese public, but its disgraceful aftermath. In Japan, the most civilized nation on earth – the country with the lowest crime rate, the highest technology, and an aesthetic sense far older and more evolved than Western culture at its peak – form reigns supreme. This is the aesthetic and moral basis for the widespread revulsion among ordinary Japanese at how the Ehime Maru tragedy was handled by US government and military officials. A formal apology from the US came swiftly – but getting truthful information out of them was like yanking teeth.

THE LIES BEGIN

At first, Pentagon officials purported to be "puzzled by the collision," according to CNN, "saying that U.S. submarines regularly surface in the area – and information about such surfacings are given out to commercial vessels." Then we were informed by Adm. Tom Fargo, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, that the submarine was on the way back into port, after a long hard day patrolling the Empire's Pacific frontier, when – for some as-yet-to-be explained reason – it was suddenly necessary to carry out what the Admiral referred to as an "emergency main ballast tank blow." Say what? "This is an operation that we do on a regular basis," he explained. The procedure is performed "for demonstration and to check the proper operations of these systems." Is that clear?

A CAPTAIN'S TEARS

Well, not quite: Hisao Onishi, the captain of the Ehime Maru, began to ask a few questions: why did the submarine suddenly surface, without warning? What's up with that? An official of the Japanese Maritime Defense said that such a thing was "unthinkable." Onishi added fuel to the smoldering embers of Japanese resentment when he told a Feb. 11 press conference that the Greeneville crew just watched him and his crew as they scrambled to locate and rescue survivors. "I could see several people on the [submarine] tower," said Onishi, fighting back tears. "They lowered a rope ladder from the conning tower, but none of our crew members were rescued by the submarine. … They were just looking until the Coast Guard arrived." Admiral Fargo retorted that three-to-four-foot waves precluded the possibility of opening hatches and jumping into the rescue effort. Onishi, however, disagreed, insisting that conditions may not have been perfectly tranquil, but they were calm enough for life rafts. Then, slowly but surely, the official story began to unravel. . .

DAMN THOSE GAIJIN!

As hopes faded that the missing Japanese fishing students and their two teachers would ever be found, the families of the lost ones and the Japanese government appealed to the US to raise the Ehime Maru and recover the bodies, but US officials refused to even consider it: National Transportation Safety Board investigator John Hammerschmidt declared that he saw no reason at present to raise the ship. Reuters reported that "he did not believe it was necessary to bring the ship up to discover accident details, but he added he might change that view as the probe progressed." Once again the barbarous gaijin had demonstrated their unreconstructed barbarity for all the world to see! Savages – – at least, the modern kind – do not take death very seriously, because for them human life is cheap – especially the lives of those they consider enemies, or, in this case, former enemies. And what, after all, are nine Japanese in the face of nearly 5,000 children a month who die in Iraq as a direct result of the US-imposed sanctions? What with the perpetual bombing, we knock off more than nine Iraqis in a few hours!

THE BARBARIANS

One hallmark of savagery is its unconsciousness, and this invincible ignorance was on full display in Hammerschmidt's remarks: failing to understand or appreciate the distinctively Japanese sense of profound awe at the phenomenon of death, he failed to grasp the cultural imperative of recovering the bodies. But what can one expect from barbarians, whose ancestors were still living in mud huts – and, in some cases, trees – when the Japanese tea ceremony was already a high art and a living god sat upon the Chrysanthemum Throne?

SUCH A MESS

As if this shocking arrogance and disregard for the spirits of the dead were not enough, the US government was still suspiciously tightlipped about the details, days after the accident, and already going into full obfuscation mode. On Feb.12, ABC News reported, as the furor picked up, that "there is no evidence that the crew of a US Navy submarine did anything wrong as they practiced an emergency surfacing maneuver that resulted in a collision with a Japanese fishing vessel, but there will be 'an absolutely clear and transparent investigation,' National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice said today." But something wasn't right, and the Japanese knew it: "It is so troublesome that the navy of our military ally is in such a mess," quipped Shizuka Kamei, the influential Liberal Democratic Party leader, and the sting in this remark was in its subtlety. But of course the navy of the mighty United States of America could hardly be in that much of a mess – so much so that one of its submarines, equipped with the most sophisticated equipment imaginable, could have failed to detect the Ehime Maru. Was such a thing possible? This was the question that Japanese were asking – but it was taking forever for the US government to answer.

THE DAMAGE DONE

Meanwhile, the emotional tremors sweeping over Japan put Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori in a seismically dangerous position. The report that, on hearing the news, he had simply continued his golf game, seemed emblematic of the dithering impotency of Japanese officialdom in the face of the Supreme Superpower's depredations. Disarmed after the war, disintegrating economically after the burst of the 1980's inflationary bubble, and disoriented culturally in the face of globalization, for Japan the pain and humiliation of the Ehime Maru disaster seems emblematic of the social and political malaise that permeates Japanese society. They may have lost their empire, a good deal of their wealth, and their sense of cultural rootedness, but why, they wondered, has Japan also lost its dignity?

A TANGLED WEB

As the clamor in Japan rose, President Bush finally called Mori personally, instead of just issuing a press release, and the US relented, somewhat, and decided that it would "consider" raising the sunken fishing vessel and possibly recovering the bodies, a typically graceless gesture that only piled injury on insult. Then came the ultimate insult: the news, leaked by an anonymous Pentagon official, that a civilian – among 16 aboard – had been at the helm of the sub when it surfaced and crushed the Ehime Maru. But don't worry, said the official, "the civilian was under careful supervision at the time" and "the move was not highly unusual and apparently had no influence on the collision." Now the whole structure of lies and "spin" began to crack apart at its foundations, and come crashing to the ground, as the news hit the wires that no less than two civilians had been at two out of three control boards! Oh, what a tangled web we weave – as they say in the West – when first we practice to deceive!

JOYRIDES FOR "OPINION LEADERS"

Forced to finally admit the truth, US military authorities stubbornly maintained that there was "no evidence" that having 2 civilians at two of the steering wheels had anything to do with the tragedy, and refused to say whether or not the civilians aboard might have been a distraction; although, they averred, it was possible. But the esteemed editors of Time magazine told us, definitively, that "Civilians at Sub's Controls Had No Significance in Killer Crash," as the headline on their story put it. We also learned, from Time's Pentagon correspondent, Mark Thompson, that these civilian joyrides, far from being unusual, are a regular feature of our naval operations: "Like the other services, the Navy routinely takes batches of so-called 'opinion leaders' on tours of their operations, to show off their various platforms," he said. "And an emergency blow is a neat time to be aboard a sub." Like children showing off their "neat" and highly expensive toys, the US military was engaged in courting political support among "opinion leaders" – which it refuses to name – in order to buy more. The Navy has a whole program, called "Operation Tiger," which amounts to an open invitation to "friends of sailors" and "VIPs" to "Come play with us!" And that is why nine Japanese, including six teenagers, had to die.

LIFE IMITATING ART

In spite of growing questions, authorities continued to deny that the presence of civilians was a contributing factor in the accident, insisting that the commander of the vessel had control of the sub at all times. When it turned out that the joyride had been arranged by retired Admiral Richard C. Macke, however, the irony and serendipity of this coincidence was almost too much for the Japanese to bear. Admiral Macke, once the commander of US forces in the Pacific, had been forced to retire after declaring that the US soldiers who raped a young Japanese girl in Okinawa in 1995 should have gone to see a Japanese prostitute instead. Such a development seems almost too poetic for reality: one might expect to see it in a work of fiction, perhaps in a novel by Yukio Mishima, but to see it enacted in reality is to witness that rare and delightful event: when life imitates art.

YUKIO MISHIMA: THE POET AS PROPHET

I cannot help but think that the restive spirit of the tumultuous Mishima must be rolling over in his grave. Here in the ritual humiliation of Japanese pride is his worst nightmare and dire warning come true. Mishima was a prodigiously talented novelist, whose books were bestsellers both in Japan and in the West: he is the author of Forbidden Colors, Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, among others. He was also a poet, dramatist, essayist, and man of action, a Japanese nationalist whose critique of Japan's "smiling full-bellied peace" was succinctly summarized in one of his long poems:

"Strength is decried, the body disdained
Pleasure has lost its substance
Joy and grief alike vanish in an instant
Purity is marketed, dissipation enfeebled
Feeling is dulled, sharpness blunted
Virulent and manly spirits have fled the earth. . . ."

CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY

Japanese modernity, he declared, would kill them all (slowly) with its "tediousness" and "insipidness": what was missing was a "sense of peril." Mishima traced the fatal decadence of his nation to that fateful day, in the ashen aftermath of World War II, when the Emperor declared that he was, after all, just another mortal, and not a god at all. In his famous unclassifiable work – is it a story, an essay, a polemical vision? – "Voices of the Heroic Dead," the departed spirits of the kamikazee pilots come back to haunt the Japanese, complaining that their sacrifice was in vain and plaintively asking, in a constant refrain, "Nadote Sumerogi wa hito to naritamaishi?" ("Why did the Emperor have to become a human being?") In the person of the divinized Emperor, held Mishima, was the union of the sword and the chrysanthemum, the nation and the culture of Japan: with the passing of this national myth, and its replacement by the Western institution of constitutional monarchy, the spirit and culture of Nippon was betrayed and abandoned in favor of all-out Westernization. Mishima's political stance was dramatized in many novels, as well as argued in essays: read today, his stories can be put in the category of prophetic fiction.

THE PROPHETIC FICTION OF YUKIO MISHIMA

The novel Runaway Horses depicts the young Isao, who is inspired to join an officer's rebellion by a pamphlet written issued by the "League of the Divine Wind": the pamphlet, which takes up a full fifty pages of the novel, tells the story of the 1876 Shinpuren Incident, the romantic revolt of the old samurai against Westernization. It was the era of the Meiji Restoration, and the last partisans of traditional Japanese culture – the last "virulent and manly spirits" – were in despair. They implored the Shinto gods for guidance. Should they rise up and fight for the Old Japan?

VERDICT OF THE GODS

Twice the answer was no, but finally, when all samurai were commanded to turn in their swords and trim off their traditional top-knots, came the last straw: this time, the gods reported back favorably. The samurai band prepared for battle – by praying. They disdained Western weapons, and armed themselves with swords and spears. When, on their way into battle, they had to pass under Western telegraph wires, they shielded their heads with white fans, lest they become contaminated by Western emanations. (A nice touch!) While the samurai are not totally ineffectual – a general and a couple of politicians are killed – against the guns of the local garrison their spears and swords are ineffectual. Faced with this failure, they all – but one – commit seppuku, ritual suicide, with a whole group of them ascending a mountain and performing this ancient rite as perfectly, solemnly, and bloodily as it was meant to be carried out. Mishima loved the purity of these men and their doomed, heroic action: it was, to him, a shining example of how action can embody and give meaning to life, even as that life snuffs itself out of existence.

NI NI ROKU – THE TURNING POINT

Isao, too, is inspired by this vision of purity, and joins a conspiracy to overthrow the government, and restore the authority of the emperor: but he is betrayed in the end by the corruption and baseness that is already infiltrating Japanese culture. At his trial he and his comrades are matter-of-factly unrepentant: this was their Shinpuren Incident, an act of purity in an impure, corrupting world. Runaway Horses, and also Mishima's famous short story "Patriotism" – a long, involved and very bloody depiction of ritual seppuku – are Mishima's homage to an actual historical event, the Ni Ni Roku Incident of 1936 – a key turning point in the history of modern Japan. It was the occasion of the final struggle between the two principal factions of the Japanese armed forces: the Kodo-ha, or Imperial Way faction, which favored going to war with the Soviet Union; and the Tosei-ha or "Control" faction, which wanted to strike south against the British, French, and other European colonialist powers. The conflict came when a large number of Kodo-ha soldiers were ordered shipped out to Manchuria – leaving Tokyo in the hands of the "Controllers." In a preemptive strike, Kodo-ha officers seized the center of Tokyo after killing three prominent members of the government. In spite of their proclamation that they were doing it for the Emperor, who had been led astray by evil, traitorous advisers, Hirohito denounced them and demanded they surrender. The Kodo-ha rebellion was crushed in four days, its leaders imprisoned, and executed. Japan's fate was sealed.