In the fall of 1970, the week before and the week after I turned twenty-six years old, two things happened that helped inform my life.
I had finished with the Peace Corps in Korea and was living in Japan. I’d been there since April, working as an English teacher in a language school in the City of Hitachi, a couple of hours north of Tokyo and right on the Pacific Ocean.
Most of the time I taught at the school itself, but twice a week I drove up to Japan’s Atomic Research Institute in Tokaimura, to help nuclear scientists prepare to deliver their research papers in English, a thing they often had to do at international conferences. Everyone in my class had a PhD in physics while I had only a BA. But I was the sensei and they were the gakusei, and that pleased me a lot.
The week before my birthday, as I drove back home from the Atomic Research Institute I passed a small port. A Russian freighter was docked there so I stopped, got out of my car, and walked over to take a look.
It was a rusty old freighter and seemed to be waiting to load up and sail off again, probably over to Vladivostok, since that was the nearest Russian port.
A couple of crewman leaned against a railing, smoking and talking, and when they saw me they smiled and waved me onboard. Those were some strange old days, when something like that could happen. But I waved back and walked the plank, as it were, up into Russian territory.
When they discovered I was American they spread the word, and in a Moscow-minute (that’s a New York minute, Russian style) I was sitting in a cabin with the ship’s officers, those crewmen standing against a wall.
Smiles came out and vodka came out, as well as soggy crackers and a thimbleful of caviar.
“Drink!” said the captain.
“Eat!” the second mate said.
But the first mate, who spoke the best English, said, “Drink, yes, but we just came from Hanoi. Legless old men in the port! My Lai massacre! Lieutenant William Calley! How could you do such a thing!”
‘Whoa! What? Me! I didn’t do it! That was Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, and Nixon!’ said a voice inside my head, while the one in my throat said, somewhat venomously, “Look who’s talking? What about you in 1968? What about your murderous Prague Spring?”
Since I’d been wildly against the Vietnam War, crazily against it since 1966, it was a strange reaction. I’d protested that war, even helped write a letter to The New York Times from a number of us in the Peace Corps condemning it… a letter that was never sent.
So what happened to me on that ship? Was I defending the indefensible? However wrongheaded, was some latent and unexpected patriotism bursting out?
The evening ended when the captain ordered the first mate out of the room, I finished my vodka, and got off the ship. I wish I could find that first mate now, however, to rail at him about Ukraine.
____
November 25, 1970, was a Wednesday. I’d been twenty-six for a six days and in Japan for eight months. During that time I studied Japanese rigorously and, because I’d learned a modicum of Korean - the two languages are syntactically similar - I got to a fairly decent level quickly.
I was in my car again, heading to a bar I liked called Kado, where I often went to practice whatever bits of Japanese grammar and vocabulary I had learned that morning. It’s a good way to learn a language, drinking with strangers, I’ll say that much.
On my way to the bar I had the news on the radio, which I tried to parse while driving, usually only getting about twenty percent. That night, though, the name Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫 1925-1970) kept coming up, with the fast-talking broadcaster using words like seppuku (ritual suicide) and Jieitai (Self Defense Force). I parked and listened with a lot more concentration than I’d used when getting lectured by the Russians. Was this the Yukio Mishima I knew and loved? The author of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and the incomparable short story Patriotism?
First I thought, “surely not,” but then I knew it was.
I gleaned from the radio that Mishima and four of his cohorts had invaded the Defense Force commander’s office, taken the commander hostage, then Mishima, in a rambling speech from the commander’s balcony, demanded that the assembled soldiers return to the Imperial way of Japan’s super-military past.
When his speech didn’t go well - he was jeered - he went back inside, stripped to his waist, stuck a knife in his abdomen, and disembowel himself. His number one cohort then cut his head off with a samurai sword.
I got all this, mind you, in a radio broadcast, but when I went into the bar everything I’d inferred was confirmed by the bar’s regular customers as well as by its TV.
“He’s an idiot! Good riddance to him!” said Sachiko, the woman who ran the place.
“No he isn’t! He did it for patriotism!” said Hana, her helper.
The word for patriotism in Japanese is yūkoku (憂国). I learned it that night.
In Mishima’s story of that name, a Japanese army soldier comes home to inform his wife that his closest friends have joined an anti-imperial mutiny. So he and his wife decide to cut their bellies open out of a sense of dishonor and shame.
I left the bar after only one drink.
Decades later, when I taught Patriotism to my graduate students, it was hard for them to grasp its utter lack of irony. Some of them said “What dishonor and shame? The lieutenant and his wife didn’t do anything wrong.”
I said that they were simply loyal to the Emperor and had to find a way to show it, but it didn’t make much sense to my students. Patriotism was published in 1960, ten years before Mishima acted out his story, while his own wife and children waited for him at home.
What I felt on that ship was not, of course, patriotism. It was anger at having some Russian lecture me about America, even if he was telling me what I already knew.
And two weeks later I felt a similar anger in that bar. This time because I believed I’d been betrayed by a literary hero of mine.
Quite recently Russia has fallen into the same disrepair as that freighter, the same disrepair that our country fell into during the Vietnam War.
Mishima’s disrepair was different, for it was based on his belief in the right-of-birth godliness of a bespectacled little man who outlived him by eighteen years.
CODA: Two days ago, as I was writing this essay, Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister, Shinzō Abe (安倍晋三, 1954–2022) was assassinated in the city of Nara by an unemployed man using a homemade gun. Mr. Abe was sixty-seven years old.
Is there anyplace in the world where things are going in the right direction?
But Richard, when I leave the room I carry with me the brain I live in and imagine with. I never leave THAT room.
There is one place, Richard, in this cruel, tragic world where some things are going right. In the imaginations of writers. You have a reserved seat there. Breathe ... and imagine.