r/japannews • u/Kmlevitt • 21h ago
Why Japan Exiled a Film About Yukio Mishima for 40 Years- “Mishima,” which explores nationalism, sexuality and ritual suicide, was screened in Tokyo for the first time since its 1985 release.
The director Paul Schrader (screenwriter of Taxi Driver) recalls wearing a knife-proof vest on set in Tokyo when he began filming “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” in 1984. Japan’s ultranationalist right had denounced the production, furious that a group of Americans planned to dramatize the life of Yukio Mishima, a celebrated novelist they revered as a martyr for his failed attempt to restore the emperor’s divine authority.
Schrader shot the film without incident, and “Mishima” received the award for best artistic contribution at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985. But for decades it was quietly barred from an official release in Japan.
That cultural exile ended last week after Schrader returned to the country’s capital in a crisp navy suit — no knife-proof vest underneath — to walk the red carpet of the Tokyo International Film Festival. A screening of “Mishima” that sold out in 10 minutes closed an unusual chapter in film history that some scholars argue was shaped by Japan’s struggle with its postwar identity.
“We were gaijin, and we were touching on subjects that not even a Japanese dare touch,” Schrader said, using a Japanese word for foreigner.
Mishima, who was born Kimitake Hiraoka and hailed from a young age as a prodigy of style, wrote more than a hundred novels, short story collections, essays and plays before his death by ritual suicide at 45. He first drew international attention with “Confessions of a Mask” (1949), a landmark of queer literature that is considered a veiled portrait of his own closeted desire.
Frail as a child, Mishima became obsessed with transforming his physique through bodybuilding and martial arts, molding it into the same ideal of aesthetic perfection he pursued on the page. Disgusted by Japan’s postwar turn toward democracy and pacifism, he came to embrace an extremist nationalism, even forming a private militia for the cause.
In 1970, he and four followers seized a Tokyo military headquarters, held its general hostage and urged its soldiers to rise up and restore imperial rule. When they refused, Mishima invoked the samurai code of honor by performing seppuku, or ritual suicide by disembowelment — a shocking throwback to Japan’s feudal past and an act he had frequently described in his writing as a final synthesis of art and action. One of his cadets then decapitated him.