Japanese right-wing activist shot himself outside parliament

[J-10]

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=45971&sectionid=351020406
Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:57:54

A man, protesting against the Japanese prime minister's government policies, has shot himself in the head in front of the parliament.

Local news outlets said Wednesday the man was holding two letters, one addressed to Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and the other to the media, which contained protests against the current government's foreign policy with China.

Both letters reportedly mentioned the Yasukuni shrine, which honors the country's war dead but is the cause of friction with Japan's neighbors.

Fukuda, 71, has vowed to improve ties with communist China, which warmed considerably during Ex-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's term.

Witnesses said the man, believed to be in his 60s and a member of a right-wing anti-China activist group, shot himself shortly after arriving at the south gate of parliament.

While critics call Yasukuni a symbol of Japan's past militarism, right-wing Japanese extremists support the shrine, which honors Japan's 2.5 million war dead, including wartime leaders executed for their World War II crimes.

Koizumi paid repeated visits to the shrine, a gesture Fukuda has said he will not repeat while in office.

[Satellite Weapon]

a modern method of 'hara kiri' ? history of hara kiri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku)

[yomex21]

a modern method of 'hara kiri' ? history of hara kiri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku)

No.
This is not "Hara kiri".
It is a suicide.

:-(

[Billy No Mates]

He really showed them.....if only all the other political extremists in the world would follow his example.

[9mmRifle]

Kudos to MacArthur et al for modernizing their society

This kind of mentality which would have been respected and worshiped has become very alien to the average Japanese

http://img103.imageshack.us/img103/585/cartoon4dl.jpg

[yomex21]

"Hara kiri" is how to take the responsibility.
When troubling you, "Hara kiri" is done.

"Die to protest".... This is not assumed to be virtue.

[Rudolph]

This is not entirely an isolated incident. Below, from Wikipedia, is the tale of Nobel Prize-nominee, Yukio Mishima, and his "heroic" death:

"In 1955, Mishima took up weight training, and his workout regimen of three sessions per week was not disrupted for the final 15 years of his life. In a later essay published in 1968, Taiyō to Tetsu (Sun and Steel), Mishima deplores the emphasis given by intellectuals to the mind over the body. Mishima later also became very skillful at kendō.

Although he visited gay bars in Japan, Mishima's ****** orientation remains a matter of debate. After briefly considering an alliance with Michiko Shōda – she later became the wife of Emperor Akihito – he married Yoko Sugiyama on June 11, 1958. The couple had two children, a daughter named Noriko (born June 2, 1959) and a son named Iichiro (born May 2, 1962).

In 1967, Mishima enlisted in the Ground Self Defense Force (GSDF) and underwent basic training. A year later, he formed the Tatenokai (Shield Society), a private army composed primarily of young students who studied martial principles and physical discipline, and swore to protect the emperor. Mishima trained them himself. However, under Mishima's ideology, the emperor was not necessarily the reigning emperor, but rather the abstract essence of Japan. In Eirei no Koe (Voices of the Heroic Dead) Mishima actually denounces Emperor Hirohito for renouncing his claim of divinity at the end of World War II.

In the last 10 years of his life, Mishima wrote several full length plays, acted in several movies and co-directed an adaptation of one of his stories, Patriotism, the Rite of Love and Death. He also continued work on his final tetralogy, Hōjō no Umi (Sea of Fertility), which appeared in monthly serialized format starting in September 1965.

On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai, under pretext, visited the commandant of the Ichigaya Camp - the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan's Self-Defense Forces. Inside, they barricaded the office and tied the commandant to his chair. With a prepared manifesto and banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below. His speech was intended to inspire a coup d'etat restoring the powers of the emperor. He succeeded only in irritating them, however, and was mocked and jeered. He finished his planned speech after a few minutes, returned in to the commandant's office and committed seppuku. The customary kaishakunin duty at the end of this ritual had been assigned to Tatenokai member Masakatsu Morita, but Morita was unable to properly perform the task: after several attempts, he allowed another Tatenokai member, Hiroyasu Koga, to behead him.

Another traditional element of the suicide ritual was the composition of jisei (death poems), before their entry into the headquarters.[4] Mishima prepared his suicide meticulously for at least a year and no one outside the group of hand-picked Tatenokai members had any indication of what he was planning. His biographer, translator, and former friend John Nathan suggests that the coup attempt was only a pretext for the ritual suicide of which Mishima had long dreamed.[citation needed] Mishima made sure his affairs were in order, and left money for the defense trial of the three surviving Tatenokai members.

Much speculation has surrounded Mishima's suicide. At the time of his death he had just completed the final book in his The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. He was recognized as one of the most important post-war stylists of the Japanese language.

Mishima wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, and at least 20 books of essays, as well as one libretto. A large portion of this oeuvre comprises books written quickly for profit, but even if these are disregarded, a substantial body of work remains."

---

I have only read one of his books, Confessions of a Mask - blew my mind! At times uncomfortable, but truly introspective and revealing of his, and our, psyche.

BTW. I can see some of you haven't watched Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa films...

[mas-36]

^^ Yep! My first thought after reading that article was Yukio Mishima. I'm also a fan of his writings. I have his collection of short stories published under "Acts of Worship". I found his writings on human nature in matters of personal relationships between lovers and friends to be very perceptive and very observant.

Interestingly, during my trip to Japan several years ago, I found few people who really knew Mishima's works very well, and my Japanese friends here in the US who are only somewhat familiar with him, usually state the same thing: Mishima was bizarre. I'm going to assume that most of Mishima's fans are from outside Japan?

[Thumpsquid]

Isn't this part of the "individual eleven" plot, as seen in Ghost In The Shell: Second Gig? Not seeking to denigrate Mishima, rather that it sparked a memory.

back on topic

What was the point of this suicide? He went to all the trouble to get hold of a gun, and then shot himself. Makes no sense, unless all he wanted was publicity for a cause that has little meaing to the majority of the Japanese.

[gaijinsamurai]

I first thought of Mishima as well.

[yomex21]

The TV station in Japan doesn't report this event....
The content of the letter that he had is not announced....


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Ishihara_Mishima.jpg
Yukio Mishima and the current governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shintaro_Ishihara) in 1956.

The work of Mishima is wonderful.
However, a lot of Japanese do not understand what he did.

Japan after the defeat.
Leftism-person is ruling the mass communication and the educator group(Japan Teachers Union (http://www.jtu-net.or.jp/english/index.html)).:-(

[Dragonscript]

Reminds me of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Man,_Nice_Shot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL9Hxb_pHOA

Great song.

[Bongopete]

He really showed them.....if only all the other political extremists in the world would follow his example.


I thought it was very nice of him not to take any innocent people with him. Maybe he will start a new trend.

[Rudolph]

I'm not saying I'm an expert on Japanese culture, but I've come to appreciate their internal way of handling problems. I believe the one joke was that in America when you're angry you take a gun and shoot everybody around you, in Japan you go to your room, close your window and shoot yourself...

In Mishima's case his desire to die ran very deep though. In his semi-biographical work he mentions faking disease to escape military duty during WW2 - while many of his former classmates and friends went. After hearing about their deaths he was racked with guilt, and ultimately he ended his life in the most honorouable way possible to make up for his mistake early in life. It was his true belief that he should have died during WW2.

[Steel21]

So what pistol did he use?

I thought firearms were illegal in Japan.

Kinda odd because the whole idea of ritual suicide was the leveraging the pain to make a point.

[Seiyuuki]

I'm not saying I'm an expert on Japanese culture, but I've come to appreciate their internal way of handling problems. I believe the one joke was that in America when you're angry you take a gun and shoot everybody around you, in Japan you go to your room, close your window and shoot yourself...

In Mishima's case his desire to die ran very deep though. In his semi-biographical work he mentions faking disease to escape military duty during WW2 - while many of his former classmates and friends went. After hearing about their deaths he was racked with guilt, and ultimately he ended his life in the most honorouable way possible to make up for his mistake early in life. It was his true belief that he should have died during WW2.Check out the 60's movie "切腹" (Harakiri / Seppuku) by Masaki Kobayashi, I think you'll enjoy that.

[9mmRifle]

current governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shintaro_Ishihara) in 1956.



Isn't that the racist Japanese mayor who called "America a weak people because blacks lower the IQ" ?

[yomex21]

Isn't that the racist Japanese mayor who called "America a weak people because blacks lower the IQ" ?

He doesn't say such a cruel thing though he is anti-American.

[junglejim]

Protestors should do what the man did, here in the Philippines. Doing this would really help our country. :)

[Satellite Weapon]

See this article on the current governor http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10361989
Ishihara's anti-American politics were formed during the war. He remembers being strafed "for fun" by US planes "with pictures of naked women and Mickey Mouse painted on the fuselage". "I couldn't believe my eyes. I was scared to death and angry but I was also thinking what a place America must be, what a culture, and how different from Japan. "Then I heard other planes, but no machineguns this time. They were Zeros in pursuit and their insignia was the Japanese flag. I felt like reaching up to embrace that rising sun." Sentiments like that are rare in Japan, but many Japanese are ambiguous about their post-war relationship with the US, which bombed most of the country's major cities to rubble before incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are memorials to Iwo Jima throughout the country, including one on Mt Takao in western Tokyo, officially inaugurated by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi when he was health minister. Under Ishihara and Koizumi, Japan has grown less inhibited about its wartime past and increasingly willing to commemorate its millions of dead soldiers. After six decades of negative portrayals of the Imperial Army, nationalists like Ishihara and Shindo want Eastwood to show that Japanese troops were no better or worse than their US counterparts.

[Photopunk]

So what pistol did he use?

I thought firearms were illegal in Japan.

Kinda odd because the whole idea of ritual suicide was the leveraging the pain to make a point.On topic: this was not ritual suicide - it was a protest.