A clerk who longed for the wars of his great-grandfathers

On the 5th day of the 3rd month of the 7th year of the Hōei era (3 April 1710), when in a certain province in southern Japan snow still lay in the shadows of the mountains, and at their foot the first cherry buds were appearing, two men sat across from each other in a wooden hut. The elder was fifty-two, with a shaved head and a road behind him that he had never wanted: thirty years of service as a clerk to his lord, several diplomatic missions, no battles. The younger was thirty-three, had come from the clan capital, and had recently lost his post. They bowed to each other. They exchanged poems. They drank tea. In the evening they began to talk.

These conversations would last seven years. From them a book would emerge, of which everyone in Japan – and even more often in the West – knows a single sentence (to which we shall return, because although the popular translation is catchy, it misses one important nuance):

武士道といふは、死ぬ事と見つけたり。

(bushidō to ifu wa, shinu koto to mitsuketari)

"the way of the samurai lies in dying"

Some say they know what it means. Unfortunately, hardly anyone has read the rest. And the rest – the remaining one thousand three hundred and forty-one verses – says surprising things. It says that life is short and should be lived doing what one loves (yes – this is what the book says, the one the West has declared the bible of the samurai code). It says that imagining one's own death every day brings freedom, not fear (as if I were reading Marcus Aurelius). And it even says – seriously, in the preface – that after reading the book all eleven volumes should be burned.

"Hagakure". "A Spiritual Guide for the Warrior". "The Bible of the Samurai". This is what the English-language internet tells us when we want to find out what kind of work it is. The truth is that almost no samurai ever read it. For two centuries it lay in half-forgotten copies of one clan. Then it woke three times. Once as mental preparation for the fall of the shōgunate and the end of the samurai class. Once as a tool of modern military propaganda. And once as the private manifesto of a thinker and writer whom I hold in great respect – but facts are facts. Each of these awakenings took something different from it. Each saw something completely different in this text. And every time, what stayed in our memory was that famous first sentence. Without the context of what came after it. So let us check – what was actually written there next.

The hermit of Kurotsuchibaru

Yamamoto Tsunetomo was born on the 11th day of the 6th month of the 2nd year of the Manji era (30 July 1659) in the Katadae district of Saga on western Kyūshū. His father, Yamamoto Jin'emon, was then seventy-one. According to family tradition, he regarded the newborn as a "superfluous addition" and intended to give him to a salt merchant. The infant remained at home largely by accident. In childhood he was sickly – so much so that doctors, as Tsunetomo later writes in the sixth book, told his parents he would not live past twenty. Despite this, at the age of nine he entered service as an 御側小僧 (o-soba-kozō – "a small boy at the lord's side", what Europeans would call a page) to the second daimyō of Saga, Nabeshima Mitsushige.

What Tsunetomo never knew was war. He was born twenty-one years after the suppression of the Shimabara rebellion – the last great military upheaval in Japan. Throughout his entire life the Tokugawa shōgunate maintained systematic peace. Duels were restricted, private vendettas were legally regulated (see here: Katakiuchi – A License for Samurai Clan Revenge in the Era of the Edo Shogunate), the warrior class was undergoing a slow, bureaucratic metamorphosis from mounted spearmen into diligent clerks. Tsunetomo was an exemplary representative of this second generation. He wrote beautifully, knew classical poetry, copied documents. His most important life mission, achieved after years of effort, was bringing back from Kyoto the secret commentary on one of the oldest Japanese anthologies of poetry. It was called kokin denju (古今伝授, "the secret transmission of the Kokin wakashū") and was one of the most jealously guarded privileges of court culture. Tsunetomo delivered it to his dying lord in the year 1700. It was one of the last months of Mitsushige's life.

Mitsushige died on the 16th day of the 5th month of the 13th year of the Genroku era (2 July 1700), aged sixty-nine. Tsunetomo was forty-two. According to old tradition, a vassal who had lost his lord could commit junshi (殉死, "suicide following one's lord") – a ritual seppuku as an act of ultimate loyalty. The tradition was already formally prohibited at the time: the shōgunate had issued an edict in 1663, and Mitsushige himself had during his lifetime repeatedly stressed that he did not wish anyone to "follow him". Tsunetomo did not. Three days after his lord's death he went to Kōden-ji temple, where the Zen abbot Ryōi shaved his head and gave him the monastic name Jōchō. In July he built a hut of wood and bamboo in the Kurotsuchibaru district, at the foot of Mount Kinryū-zan, ten kilometres north of Saga Castle. He named it Chōyōken (朝陽軒, "Pavilion of the Morning Sun").

He lived in it for ten years. Alone.

Tashiro Tsuramoto arrived on the 5th day of the 3rd month of the 7th year of the Hōei era (3 April 1710). He was thirty-three. He also came from Saga, also worked as yūhitsu (祐筆, "court chronicler and secretary"), this time to the third daimyō of Saga, Nabeshima Tsunashige. A year before his visit, Tashiro had been dismissed from his post without explanation. After losing his office he wandered for a while around the clan capital, until at last he came to that strange old clerk in his hut beneath the mountain. Two men met whom the same court had pushed aside. The first greeting took the form of an exchange of poems. Tsunetomo wrote: "how many miles from the floating world does the mountain cherry bloom here". Tashiro replied: "o white cloud, only now have I met the flower I was seeking". They went inside and talked late into the evening.

These conversations would continue for the next seven years. Tashiro wrote them down. Tsunetomo himself, according to the instructions, was meant to believe that all of it would be burned. In the surviving copies of his talks a preface has been preserved, in which he says clearly:

此の始終十一巻、追って火中すべし

(kono shijū jūikkan, otte kachū subeshi)

"all these eleven books, let them then go into the fire"

Tashiro did not obey. He hid the copies. Tsunetomo died on the 10th day of the 10th month of the 4th year of the Kyōhō era (21 November 1719), three years after the conversations had ended. He never learned what happened next with his words. He probably did not even think there would be any "next" at all.

1342 verses

The title Tashiro gave to the whole work calls for comment, because it is ambiguous. "Hagakure" (葉隠) literally means "in the shade of leaves" or "hidden beneath leaves". The Nabeshima clan tradition traces it to a poem by the twelfth-century monk Saigyō, from the Sankashū anthology:

葉隠れに散りとどまれる花のみぞ忍びし人に逢ふ心地する

(hagakure ni chiri-todomareru hana nomi zo shinobishi hito ni au kokochi suru)

"Only the flower

that lingered,

hidden beneath the leaves,

gives me the feeling of meeting

the one for whom I secretly longed"

The eleven books that Tashiro completed by 1716 contain 1342 verses – the numbers vary depending on the copy, because the Yamamoto original has not in fact survived. We have only copies made secretly by the samurai of Saga: kōhaku-bon, koyama-bon, nakano-bon, gojō-bon, soejima-bon and several others. The first two books are the teachings and sayings of Tsunetomo himself. Books three, four and five – anecdotes about four successive lords of the Nabeshima clan, from the founder of the line Naoshige, born in 1538, who still fought in the Sengoku era, to the third daimyō Tsunashige. Books six, seven, eight and nine – stories about the vassals of Saga, their duels, promotions, troubles, drinking bouts, weddings, deaths. Book ten – anecdotes about samurai from other clans, mainly from neighbouring Hirado and from Kyoto. Book eleven – supplements, additions, reflections that Tashiro could not fit in elsewhere.

So this is, above all, a clan chronicle. The memoir of an older lord who knows hundreds of stories and wants to pass them on to a younger one. The advice is often technical and detailed: how to arrange one's hair, how to behave properly at a drinking party with a superior (briefly: not the first to raise the cup, never the last), how to speak to a person of higher rank, how to raise a son (block one's ears to flattery, severity before the age of eight, then a moderate increase of distance), how to conduct correspondence, how to wake up in the morning. Many verses are simply gossip about neighbours. Some, recorded by name, are so unpleasant that Tsunetomo adds an explicit ban on showing the notes to outsiders and, again, asks for them to be burned. Tashiro again will not obey.

The famous sentence stands at the very beginning, in the second verse of the first book. For the sake of order, it must be cited in the original and in its full form, because what follows it is what is most often omitted:

武士道といふは、死ぬ事と見つけたり。

二つ二つの場にて、早く死ぬかたに片付くばかりなり。

別に仔細なし。胸すわつて進むなり。

(bushidō to ifu wa, shinu koto to mitsuketari. futatsu-futatsu no ba nite, hayaku shinu kata ni katazuku bakari nari. betsu ni shisai nashi. mune suwatte susumu nari)

"The way of the warrior – I have discovered – lies in dying. When you stand before two choices, decide quickly, toward the side of death. There is nothing complicated in this. With composure – forward."

Good. But let us go further – what are the next lines?

毎朝毎夕、改めては死に改めては死に、

常住死身になりて居る時は、武道に自由を得、

一生越度なく、家職を仕果すべきなり。

(mai-asa mai-yū, aratamete wa shini, aratamete wa shini, jōjū shini-mi ni narite oru toki wa, budō ni jiyū wo e, isshō otsudo naku, kashoku wo shi-hatasu beki nari)

"Every morning, every evening, dying again and again in imagination, dying once more again and again – when one lives in the state of unceasing death, one gains freedom in the way of the warrior, lives a life without failure, and fulfils the duties of one's house."

These two fragments belong to the same way of thinking. The first sentence – terse, almost slogan-like – speaks of a decision technique in a critical situation: when one has two ways out, calculation is a trap, because every calculation leads toward life, and life is not always the better choice (or: the reflex of clinging to life makes us live in fear). The second sentence says what is born from this technique: calm, freedom, a life without failure.

This is Stoic philosophy. In fact very close to what Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations: imagine each day that it is your last, and you will live better. Tsunetomo of course did not know Marcus Aurelius, although he did know the Chinese classics of Confucianism and the writings of Zen Buddhism, from which he drew a similar idea. His version is direct and practical: death not as an abstract memento mori, but as a concrete, daily exercise of the imagination. I get up in the morning – I die. I lie down in the evening – I die. After a while, actually dying ceases to be a problem; it becomes the last of one's unavoidable duties, so the paralysis disappears, and the day gains freedom.

"Hagakure" says this many times, in different ways, in different verses. It also says it by counter-example: it criticises samurai who calculate too long before a fight. It writes – without mincing words – against the most famous event in the Japanese consciousness of warrior honour at the time: the revenge of the 47 rōnin of Akō in 1703. The case was fresh when Tsunetomo was dictating. For a year and a half the samurai pretended to be drunkards in order to lull Kira's vigilance, finally killing him in his residence in Edo, carrying his head to their lord's grave, surrendering to the machi-bugyō office, and receiving a sentence of seppuku. The whole of Japan spoke of them as the ideal of loyalty. Tsunetomo, from his hut beneath Mount Kinryū, said the opposite.

What would have happened, he asks in the first book, if Kira had died of illness during those eighteen months while they were waiting? The answer is obvious: nothing. They would have remained drunkards and cowards in the eyes of the world. Their entire calculation, so praised by the Confucian scholars, rested on the assumption that the enemy would wait. Tsunetomo sees in this a lack of resolve. The true way of the warrior, he writes, would have been to attack at once after the lord's death, regardless of the enemy's numbers, ending with the attacker's death on the spot. If one is to die anyway, let death settle the matter, not calculation.

The same logic "Hagakure" praises on the occasion of another, far less known event – the night brawl in Nagasaki in December 1700. Two samurai of Saga quarrelled about precedence in dancing (yes, dancing: kouta-mai, 小唄舞, or jiuta-mai, 地唄舞) during a meeting with samurai of the neighbouring Hirado clan. A fight broke out in a teahouse. The next night both sides came with weapons; a clash began in a narrow alley. All died – either in the fight, or soon after – from their wounds or by seppuku forced upon them by the startled lords of both clans. Tsunetomo considered this right. They did not calculate. They moved.

From the point of view of the Confucian scholars dominating Edo Japan, such an approach was a scandal. It stood in opposition to the entire philosophy of the peace era – the philosophy of the Yamaga-ryū school (山鹿流), built by Yamaga Sokō (1622-1685) and his pupils, who tried to remake the samurai from a warrior into a moralising clerk. Yamaga taught that the samurai should be a model of virtue, an expert in ritual and history, a good administrator, a rational guardian of order. "Hagakure" answers briefly: the samurai is not a clerk. The samurai is the one who walks straight into the jaws of death.

Here is born the paradox of "Hagakure" and the key to why it was later used in three such different ways. It is the work of a man who never fought, dictated in a period in which there were no battles at all, longing for a war which Tsunetomo did not know at all. His ideal samurai is not a figure from his own life. He is a figure from the grandfather's stories about his own grandfather. From the Sengoku jidai (the period of multi-generational civil war, more on it here: The Real Sengoku – What Was Life Like for the Swordless in the Shadow of Samurai Wars?), which had ended 60 years before his birth. This is the frustration of a man whose era had stripped him of a role, projected backwards – onto the image of a warrior he himself had never been. Forgive me, this is of course my personal conclusion from the reading, with which not everyone will agree.

"Hagakure" appears in essence a book of nostalgia. And like every nostalgia, it is hard on the present. Tsunetomo does not spare bitter remarks about the young samurai of Saga, who learn to play the biwa instead of training in arms, who walk through the streets on tiptoe like girls, who wash themselves too often, who on a rainy day try not to soak their kimonos, who flirt with women during work. "Hagakure" condemns everything that is decent, bourgeois, cautious. It praises everything that is direct, impulsive, definitive. It is the book of an old man who sees that the younger world does not need him, and does not pretend that this does not hurt.

That is why to understand "Hagakure" as the canon of bushidō, as the propaganda of the 1930s wanted, is a double misunderstanding. First, Tsunetomo himself criticises most of the schools of thought about the way of the warrior of his time – the neo-Confucian school of Yamaga Sokō, the showy bushidō of the Kamigata style, the rationalist approach of Itō Jinsai. He differs from each. Second, he was not writing a canon. He was writing a memoir of his own clan, for a narrow circle of vassals, with a sharp, private tone. The rest is myth. A myth that would have to wait for its authors for two centuries.

Two centuries in copies

"Hagakure" was never printed during the rule of the Tokugawa. Never. For the first hundred years it circulated only in manuscripts – made by hand by Saga vassals, sometimes for themselves, sometimes for trusted friends. Each copy differed from the previous one: fragments were left out, the order was changed, marginalia were added. Hence the differences between the surviving variants, hence the problems of philologists who only in the twentieth century began trying to reconstruct what Tsunetomo had actually said and what Tashiro had already added or reshaped.

The Saga clan did not approve of the circulation of "Hagakure". The Confucian scholar of this domain, Koga Kokudō (1777-1836), who directed the clan school Kōdōkan, founded in 1781, wrote frankly: the samurai of Saga believe that one volume of "Hagakure" is enough for them for their whole day. Koga regarded this as a false calm: the readers learn one assertive sentence instead of real erudition. In the clan school "Hagakure" was not used. Never. The children of Saga samurai studied the Chinese classics, Japanese history, calligraphy, court ethics. The text about the way of dying was not made available.

The first organised circulation of "Hagakure" begins only in the mid-nineteenth century and not in the main domain but in a peripheral garrison. In 1841 a group of Saga samurai on guard duty on the islet of Kōyaki in Nagasaki Bay – to defend against Western ships, which from the time of the First Opium War were beginning to come ever closer to the shores of Japan – began meeting three times a month, on the sixth, sixteenth, and twenty-sixth day, for a joint reading of "Hagakure". Away from the main garrison, away from the Confucian scholars. Seven years later similar circles began operating in the clan capital. Five years later still, in 1855, the daimyō of Saga, Naomasa, allowed a reading circle to meet in the "bamboo room" of the castle, with his personal participation.

This is the moment when "Hagakure" begins to return to official circulation. It returns, however, in a very particular context – the last decade before the Meiji restoration. The Saga clan, one of the most modern clans of the bakumatsu era, conducting its own research on cannon casting and steam engines, reads "Hagakure" as a hint on how to endure the pressure when the existing world is falling apart. The daimyō Naomasa wants his men to be capable of immediate decision, not of calculation. Perry's ships had been off Edo two years earlier. Reading "Hagakure" is in fact a mental exercise before catastrophe.

From this wave the first modern propagators also emerge. In 1906, already after the Russo-Japanese War, a descendant of a side branch of the Yamamoto family publishes the first printed version, in a limited run of two hundred copies, intended for internal circulation among the descendants of Saga vassals. In 1916 a local press in Saga publishes a fuller edition. Even these, however, are editions for several hundred people, known mainly in one province.

A signal of how "Hagakure" was then assessed in Saga itself is provided by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the most famous statesman from that province – twice prime minister of Japan, one of the founders of the Kenseihontō party and of Waseda University, son of a clan vassal. Ōkuma speaks of "Hagakure" with distance. He calls it a work of the "old world". He speaks of it kindly, as a heritage from which one does not renounce, but it is not a heritage according to which he himself advises governing a modern state. Even in Saga itself, even among people for whom "Hagakure" was part of family memory, it was treated as a voice of the past, not a programme for the future. The myth of "Hagakure" as the canon of bushidō was not born in Saga. It was born in Tokyo. Thirty years after Ōkuma's words.

Iwanami, 1940

In the last decade of the Taishō era and the first of the Shōwa era, Japan lived under the rising pressure of a state ideology in which military loyalty to the emperor became the central slogan. Bushidō, as supposedly an ancient national tradition, was needed. Already in 1900 Nitobe Inazō published in English Bushido. The Soul of Japan, a book which owed more to Victorian chivalry than to the samurai of the Sengoku era, but became the export manifesto of the Japanese soul. Note please – the ideas of bushidō were first presented in such a way in this book, 300 years after the end of the samurai wars. This book was originally published in English, there was no Japanese version of it until 1908. At the same time it forms the basis for how, over the last century (and in the twenty-first century as well), Europeans and Americans have understood what it meant to be a "Japanese samurai".

In the following decades subsequent authors built up a superstructure – a code of military honour, a manual of patriotism, a model to follow in new schools. In this context "Hagakure", almost unknown to the wider public, strange, "raw", local, turned out to be a treasure for propaganda.

In 1940 Iwanami Shoten, the most respected academic publisher in Japan, issued a three-volume, pocket-sized, cheaply available edition of "Hagakure" in its Iwanami Bunko series (岩波文庫). The volumes appeared gradually: the first in 1940, the other two in 1941. The edition was prepared by two scholars – Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎, 1889-1960) and his then young collaborator Furukawa Tesshi (古川哲史, 1912-1995).

Watsuji is a figure who cannot be passed over here. A philosopher with a European education – student of Köber in Tokyo, reader of Heidegger, author of the famous book Climate (風土, Fūdo) of 1935 – he was one of the greatest Japanese thinkers of the twentieth century. At the same time, in the 1930s, he was drifting more and more clearly toward a philosophical justification of the uniqueness of Japanese culture, toward harmonising modern philosophy with the state myth of the empire. He was not a simple propagandist. He was a meticulous philologist who, however, drew from Japanese tradition what was politically desirable at the time. It is not difficult to find similar figures in the then Nazi Germany and other countries of Europe. The publication of "Hagakure" in Iwanami Bunko, with a precise critical apparatus, comparison of copies, and good editorial work, gave the text scholarly legitimacy – and at the same time brought it into circulation of a kind it had never had before.

At the same time, on 8 January 1941, the Minister of War Tōjō Hideki signed and distributed to the military the code Senjinkun (戦陣訓, "field service code"). It was a pocket document, in three chapters, intended to strengthen morale after six years of war with China and before the coming conflict with the Western powers. The central phrase, repeated later in training and recalled by witnesses after the war, read:

生きて虜囚の辱を受けず

(ikite ryoshū no hazukashime wo ukezu)

"Do not, while still living, suffer the disgrace of captivity"

This sentence was turned into a cardinal point: a Japanese soldier should not fall into captivity alive. Death is better. Earlier, in the First World War, the Japanese army had treated prisoners according to the Hague Convention. In the Pacific war no longer. Senjinkun, according to many historians, is the direct cause of thousands of mass suicides of Japanese soldiers, including the civilian catastrophe on Okinawa, where mothers threw their children from cliffs, believing that American captivity would be worse than death.

Between the Iwanami edition and Senjinkun there is full complementarity. "Hagakure" provides the canonical text. Senjinkun – its operational extension. Together they form the moral axis of a war in which a soldier's life is worth less than his death. This is the philosophy of the twentieth century. Not of Sengoku.

Only the text of "Hagakure" delivered to the propaganda was mutilated. Not technically – Watsuji's edition was complete. The reception was mutilated. In military schools, in speeches, in pamphlets, in brochures prepared for the pilots of special attack units, what was always quoted was one sentence – the first. The way of the warrior, which lies in dying. What followed it was never quoted. The fragment about the freedom that Tsunetomo described as the goal of the daily exercise of death was never quoted. Nor was the verse from the same first book ever quoted, in which Tsunetomo wrote:

人間一生誠にわずかのことなり。

好いた事をして暮らすべきなり。

夢の間の世の中に、好かぬことばかりして

苦を見て暮らすは愚かなることなり。

(ningen isshō makoto ni wazuka no koto nari. suita koto wo shite kurasu beki nari. yume no ma no yo no naka ni, sukanu koto bakari shite ku wo mite kurasu wa oroka naru koto nari)

"A human life is truly short. One should live it doing what one loves. In this world as brief as a dream, to live doing only what one does not love, and seeing only suffering – that is folly."

This passage was unacceptable to the propaganda of the 1940s. It comes from the same book, sits next to the same context, speaks in the same voice. Tsunetomo wrote both things in one stream. But for the propaganda only one sentence existed, torn out of 1341 others. "The way of the warrior is dying."

Under this one sentence went the special attack units tokkō (特攻) – the so-called kamikaze, although the word "kamikaze" was then used mainly outside Japan (more about those poor kids I write here: The Real Kamikaze — Boys’ Letters to Their Families Before Death). From October 1944 to the end of the war some five thousand of these unit members died. Each of the young men who perished at the controls of adapted fighter aircraft had on his desk, the testimonies agree, one or several favourite sentences. Sometimes from "Hagakure". Sometimes from Senjinkun. Sometimes from the poetry of jisei no ku (辞世の句, "the farewell poem before death"). All these sentences said one thing – better this way, quickly, nothing complicated in it. For the emperor.

Only "Hagakure" had never said "because this is better". "Hagakure" had said: because this gives freedom. Freedom, however, is not an idea in the name of which we slaughtered each other on almost every continent in the middle of the twentieth century. The content had to be changed.

Mishima and the third fire

Here I must slow down. The third reading of "Hagakure" is the one that demands more focus and more humility. This is no longer the blunt propaganda of the military; we are entering quite different territory. I am not Japanese. What I write further on, I read, checked, compared with several Japanese and Western interpretations – but I know that certain nuances I still do not catch the way a reader raised in Japan catches them. I say this directly, because the figure to whom I now turn deserves it. Mishima Yukio was a writer and thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. He is also a man who with his own death by seppuku added an epilogue to "Hagakure" – unintended by Tsunetomo, but consistent with the text in a way the propaganda of the 1940s would never have understood. Although I myself disagree with most of Mishima's thought, I wanted to note that this is an entirely different level of reflection on life than the previous examples.

In August 1967, twenty-two years after the defeat, Mishima Yukio published the book Hagakure nyūmon (葉隠入門, "Introduction to Hagakure"). Mishima was then forty-two – the age at which Tsunetomo had retreated to his hut in Kurotsuchibaru. He was at the peak of his literary fame, a candidate for the Nobel Prize, and at the same time an increasingly clear contestant of post-war Japan: its Americanisation, its demilitarisation imposed by the constitution of 1947, its, in his eyes, spiritual shallowness. He himself had written many times about his experience of shame. In 1945, when he was called up to the army, he had a fever. The military doctor, not very attentive that morning, diagnosed tuberculosis. Mishima was sent home. His unit, in which he never served, mostly died on the Pacific.

Mishima Yukio, born Hiraoka Kimitake, carried this "unfinished seppuku" within him his whole life. Hagakure nyūmon is in essence an attempt to come to terms with this burden. Mishima quotes the famous first sentence, but then, sharply and concretely, brings up what the propagandists cut. From the depth of the text, he writes, behind the sentence about the way of dying there immediately emerges a second sentence: a human life is truly short, one should live doing what one loves. Mishima calls "Hagakure" "a living philosophy that has death and life on the two sides of the same shield". He writes that Tsunetomo does not praise death because he disdains life. He praises death because it is death that gives life the intensity that otherwise cannot be reached.

This is the third interpretation. Not the frustrated man from Saga. Not the canon of propaganda. Only the private manifesto of a lonely writer who longs for the intensity that the post-war world does not want to give him.

Mishima at the same time builds a paramilitary organisation Tatenokai (楯の会, "Shield Society"), with several dozen students. The uniforms, designed by Igarashi Tsukumo – the tailor who in his Paris period dressed de Gaulle – are tailored, neat, deliberately theatrical. Tatenokai trains with the Self-Defence Forces in camps near Mount Fuji, plans a future role of "shield of the emperor". Mishima writes and at the same time shapes his life so that death will not take him by surprise.

On 25 November 1970, on a Wednesday, around eleven in the morning, Mishima and four young members of Tatenokai – Morita Masakatsu, Ogawa Masahiro, Koga Masayoshi and Koga Hiroyasu – arrived on an apparently courteous visit to the Eastern Corps base of the Self-Defence Forces in the Ichigaya district of Tokyo. On the same morning Mishima had handed over to the publisher the last volume of the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility – his literary legacy. On the last page he left a note – a date, like a stamp under a finished life's work:

昭和四十五年十一月二十五日

(Shōwa yonjūgo-nen jūichi-gatsu nijūgo-nichi)

"25 November of the 45th year of the Shōwa era"

At the base they took the commander, General Mashita Kanetoshi, as a hostage, barricaded themselves in his office. On the wall they hung a traditional banner. Mishima demanded that a thousand soldiers be gathered before the building. The demand was met. At noon Mishima went out onto the balcony and began his prepared speech about the necessity of restoring the constitutional rank of the emperor, of breaking with American domination, of the spiritual renewal of Japan. He spoke for seven minutes. The soldiers, mostly young conscripts, burst into laughter, shouted him down, sometimes clapped ironically. Press helicopters drowned out the speech. Mishima cut the speech short, shouted three times:

天皇陛下万歳

(Tennō heika banzai)

"long live the emperor"

and went back inside.

In the office he took off his jacket. He sat down on the floor. He pushed a knife into the left side of his abdomen and drew it to the right, as deeply as he could. Morita, the twenty-five-year-old Waseda student, Mishima's closest pupil, was himself to commit seppuku next to him in a moment. He drew his sword to help his teacher by cutting off his head. The first cut missed. The second missed. The third. Then Koga Hiroyasu took the sword and finished the job. Then Morita sat down next to Mishima's body. He too made the cut. This time Koga at once cut off the head. The corpses of the two men leaned next to each other in postures that had once been studied for centuries, although for more than a hundred years no one had really done this anymore.

In the afternoon the news swept through Japan. A writer, a Nobel candidate, a famous aesthete, had died in a way no one had seen for decades. Television stations showed the balcony, the speech, the office. By evening Japanese bookshops were selling Hagakure nyūmon at an unimaginable pace. The book became an instant bestseller, both important versions – the Mishima interpretation and the "Hagakure" itself in the Iwanami edition – were being reprinted for the following weeks. A nation which a quarter of a century earlier had watched the collapse of its war ideology was now looking at someone who had chosen the same death. Only privately, aesthetically, without an army. The third interpretation of "Hagakure" became loud.

Mishima essentially left behind his own epilogue to the book. He wrote about it, used its quotations, arranged his life around it. His seppuku, defenceless against the reality of the 1970s, ridiculous to the young soldiers below the balcony, politically unfeasible, was nevertheless an execution of exactly what Tsunetomo described. One brief moment of decision, in which a quick death is chosen so as not to waste time on calculation. There is nothing complicated in it. "With composure – forward."

With the difference that Tsunetomo never made this move. He died hundreds of times in his imagination, every morning and every evening, but in reality he died in bed, at the age of sixty, in November 1719 – alone, in a hut at Daishōguma, eleven kilometres west of the one in which he had once begun his conversations with Tashiro. The next day his body was burned in a field before the hut. The ashes rested in the Yamamoto family temple, Ryōun-ji in Saga.

Return to the hut

We return to the hut in March 1710. An older man and a younger man are sitting on either side of the hearth. The first evening of seven years. Tashiro begins to take notes on sheets of washi paper, in fukurotoji notebooks prepared in advance. Tsunetomo speaks calmly, sometimes sharply, sometimes with humour. He does not know – for how could he know – that his book will survive all the fires he wishes for it. That two hundred and thirty years later it will be printed in thousands of pocket copies, packed into the backpacks of suicide pilots. That thirty years after that it will appear on the desk of a writer who will repeat the gesture Tsunetomo himself never performed.

And one more thing he does not know. That out of the one thousand three hundred and forty-two verses, stories, gossip, anecdotes, fragments of poems, instructions about shoes and cracks on a knife, what will be remembered will be a single sentence. The very one that will fall just after a brief breath and a brief glance toward the hearth. A sentence that seems to him obvious, almost banal, one of many observations of an old man who has spent ten years alone:

"The way of the warrior – I have discovered – lies in dying."

The rest he will say quietly. What falls after that sentence Tashiro will have to chase. Tsunetomo speaks on, almost to himself – about imagining one's death every day, about a practice that after years brings freedom. Tashiro will manage to write it all down. But it is precisely that continuation, the one that four generations later will turn out to be the most important in the whole book, that will strangely keep disappearing. Quoted only in part. Printed by halves.

What Tashiro wrote down that spring was then read three times. Every time, what came after the famous sentence stayed in the shade. "Hagakure" – "in the shade of leaves". Literally.

Sources

1. Wilson, William Scott (trans.), Hagakure. The Book of the Samurai, Kodansha International, Tokyo 1979 (revised 2014).

2. Ikegami, Eiko, The Taming of the Samurai. Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan, 1995.

3. Mishima, Yukio, Yukio Mishima on Hagakure. The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, trans. Kathryn Sparling, Basic Books, New York 1977.

4. Benesch, Oleg, Inventing the Way of the Samurai. Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan, Oxford 2014.

5. Nathan, John, Mishima. A Biography, Little Brown, Boston 1974 (revised 2000).

6. 山本常朝・田代陣基『葉隠』和辻哲郎・古川哲史校訂、岩波文庫（上中下）、東京、岩波書店、1940-1941年（再版多数）.

7. 山本常朝・田代陣基『定本 葉隠〔全訳注〕』佐藤正英・吉田真樹訳注、ちくま学芸文庫、東京、筑摩書房、2017年.

8. 三島由紀夫『葉隠入門』新潮文庫、東京、新潮社、1983年（初版 光文社、1967年）.

9. 古川哲史『武士道の思想とその周辺』東京、福村出版、1957年.

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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