Yukio Mishima

Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡 公威, Hiraoka Kimitake; 14 January 1925 – 25 November 1970), known by his pen name Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫, Mishima Yukio), was a Japanese novelist, playwright, short story writer, actor, martial artist, model, and the leader of an attempted coup d'état that culminated in his seppuku.

He is considered one of the most important postwar stylists of the Japanese language.

Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s—including in 1968 when the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata. Mishima's works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism, and death," according to the author Andrew Rankin.

Mishima's political activities made him a controversial figure; he remains so in Japan to the present day. From his mid-30s onwards, Mishima's far-right ideology and reactionary beliefs became increasingly evident. He extolled the traditional culture and spirit of Japan, and opposed what he saw as Western-style materialism, along with Japan's postwar democracy, globalism, and communism, worrying that by embracing these ideas the Japanese people would lose their "national essence" (kokutai) and distinctive cultural heritage to become a "rootless" people.

In 1968, Mishima formed the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), a private militia, for the purpose of protecting the dignity of the emperor as a symbol of national identity. The Tatenokai are interpreted by scholars as attempting to reclaim Japan's prewar values of loyalty. Yukio Mishima believed the traditions that made Japan great had been weakened by postwar Japan. Although the Tatenokai were legally allowed in postwar Japan, their ideology directly opposed the newfound pacifism that was adopted. On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four members of his militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, took its commandant hostage, and unsuccessfully tried to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to rise up and overthrow Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution to restore autonomous national defense and the divinity of the emperor. The incident ended with Mishima's suicide by seppuku, which had been planned.