... the coupling of art and terrorism is not pervers...

 

... the coupling of art and terrorism is not perverse. Acts of terrorism are calculated displays of violence that speak to us through their impact on our senses. Visually spectacular and highly dramatic, often they seem to blur or reject conventional distinctions between performance and reality. This, of course, is a feature they share with modern art. Modern artists challenged the boundary between art and reality because they realised that they were addressing an audience whose sensitivity to act had atrophied. The shock tactics of modern art have been an attempt to stall this process of atrophy, to resuscitate art's magical communicative power. What drives modern artists to utilize 'terroristic' tactics is the ambition to overcome what Mishima calls 'the hell of relativity': the loss of absolute values, the transfer of art into the realm of aesthetics, the disconnectedness of artists from their material, from tradition, and from modern audiences who seemed to have grown immune to art.

... from shock to terror is not great step, and the dream of making a work of art that will dangerously overwhelm both the audience who experiences it and the artist who makes it has a great appeal to a certain kind of visionary mind. Mishima, acutely aware of sickly, wilting Japanese writers imploding under the pressure of art, determines to break this stereotype by shockingly and triumphantly exploding into his art. To that end, the modern tradition of Japanese terrorism offers him an ideal template for his project. As he observes, 'The ideology of Japanese terrorism is charaterised by its intimate bond to the ideology of suicide'.

[...] while Mishima hyperbolizes the issue of the emperor's divinity, there is no question that the humanization of the emperor after the war was a momentous event in the spiritual history of modern japan. People ought to have been stricken with panic, yet superficially they carried on as if it were merely a minor readjustment. It is this evasiveness, this willful repression of collective memory, that Mishima wants to attack. His intention is not just to melodramatize the trauma of the loss of the emperor as a value-guaranteeing absolute, but to insist that Japan's experience of this loss has not been traumatic enough. 

As Japan approached what many were hailing as the completion of its astonishingly rapid process of modernization and democratization after the Wesern model. Mishima taunted Japan by lauding aspects of its history and traditions that seemed most at odds with that process: aggressive ultranationalism, military glory, samurai ethics, ritual suicide, the way of the sword, religious reverence of the emperor, the ancient myths of violence and insurrection, the kamikaze, and so on.

[...] 'I refuse to believe in the future', declared Mishima in one of his many media interviews, 'I prefer to think that I carry all of tradition on my shoulders, and that literature will end with me'. Mishima's chief inspiration for this attitude was Hagakure, which instructs samurai to deepen their experience of the present by giving no thought for the future. 'Only the weak put their hopes in the future', says Mishima, 'only people who think of themselves as processes'. Refusing to believe in the future does not, he insists, mean living only in the present moment: 'We must think of ourselves as the result of many generations of culture and tradition, in order to perform our present work fully'.

But even as he says this, Mishima repeatedly portrays Japan as a culture in decline. His final statements are full of gloomy prophesies:

I no longer have any great hopes for Japan. each day deepens my feeling that Japan is ceasing to be Japan. Soon Japan will vanish altogether. In its place, all that will remain is an inorganic, empty, neutral, drab, wealthy, scheming, economic giant in a corner of the Far East. I will not listen any longer to people who are content with that prospect.

[...] we are the last humans, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. 

Andrew Rankin, Mishima: Aesthetic Terrorist [At last - a book worthy of its subject.]