[NullInvictus]

Maybe it's a vast over-simplification as the article notes, but you cannot get away from the fact that what Mishima did was carry out a right-wing reactionary attempt to incite a military coup against a democratically elected government over what was essentially a culture war.

The kind of person who looks romantically at that disgusts me. we need a Mishima? By all means, be the first to spill your guts and call for a violent military overthrow because radical violence is the answer to the culture-war not going your way. I'm sure the Nazis will be far less willing than the Paris Commune to hijack Zoom, Netflix, Uber Eats and future products of Big Data and AI to keep you singing the party's tune. The only kind of people who look romantically at that kind of violence are the ones who feel it will never touch them, who are so safe they can't imagine the suffering. I'm sure the author feels happy giving Nouveau-Mishima the thumbs up because he tacitly thinks he'll be on the last flight out to watch the fireworks from the safety of a Paris cafe.

Lets say the 'shock' against this 'Last Man' isn't a call from the author for violence and political revolution because the Culture War isn't breaking his way. What's the Nouveau-Mishima supposed to do here? Besides some old man grumbling about "them d*mn kids and their nebulous and scary AI" it's not really identified what exactly we're being complacent in. I'm afraid this feels like more angry impotent pot-stirring mixed with a bit of rehabilitation.

The conservative's "Last Man" seems to come and go every century unabated, and with it the reactionary conservative backlash that oddly only ever seems to seek to turn back the clock a decade or two. We're always so arrogant in thinking that the present is so different than the past.

The sentiment that the world will ever be devoid of struggle to me is naive. The fear of the "fall of struggle" is like fear of the "rise of productivity". We all thought that the rise in productivity would mean less work and thus laziness; instead productivity is sky-high and we're all working ourselves to death. More productivity just means more opportunity for work. Likewise, People are naturally tuned to find struggle and risk, and they will redefine their selves and situations until they have it. Free of our old burdens, we'll just find new vaster ones. If you need the Noble Savage stuff to create art, wisdom, or whatever other product your spoiled mind think society has to produce to have 'worth', it's gonna be there, I promise.

[ur-whale]

> against a democratically elected government

I believe calling the Japanese government of that era "democratically elected" is a bit of a stretch if you consider that the exact same party stayed in power from the mid-fifties to the mid-nineties [1]

For a long while after the war, Japanese politics were essentially controlled by the west, something Mishima and many like him - quite understandbly - resented deeply.

[1] https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gm0f2jf

[claudeganon]

Both you and the parent are correct however. The LDP was a wholesale construction by the US, including being proved massive financing and intelligence operations conducted against their opponents. But it was also comprised of former war criminals and members of the fascist regime that led the country into the war that Mishima glorified in the first place.

Having read most of his books and a few biographies, the animating factors behind his politics were a sadism derived from years of abuse at the hands of his family and a self-hatred driven by the homophobia of his time and his failure to be conscripted. There’s very little well-though out critique of any of Japan’s political circumstances in his work. Instead, it’s largely just an appeal to theatricism and violence that he thought would rid him of these feeling of shame.

[bsenftner]

As I scan the comments, you're one of the few talking sense.

I'm a serious literature head. Mishima lives in a world that creates itself and then tries to impose that desired world on reality, dressing the entire essay in narrative poetry, like a ninja assassin he seeds poisonous concepts disguised as flowers in his readers heads. But their mental soil has none of the fertility of his mind, so they die in his fans, but his fans have fallen in love with his narrative poetry and that is what they cling.