October 6, 2022 • 50 mins
In his heyday, Japanese author Yukio Mishima was one of the most well-known writers in the world. But where did he come from -- and what on Earth led to his strange demise? In part two of this two-part episode, Ben, Noel and Max welcome research associate Zach Williams in his first on-air appearance.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Quick disclaimer before we enter part two of our exploration
of the bizarre final years of Mishima. This episode contains,
at times, uh no, how would we say it, pretty
graphic depictions of some some adult mature things. Yeah, I
(00:21):
would say that, and also discussions of suicide of the
ritualistic variety. And so if you were to ask me,
if you were to say, Ben, is this appropriate for
all listeners, then I would say it's something to have
a headsop about. But we hope you enjoyed part one
of this series as much as we did, so we
(00:43):
wanted to give you a quick disclaimer. Uh, this may
not be one for everybody, but it is certainly a
story worth being told, and we want to thank again
our excellent research associate Zach Williams. It is first ever
on air appearance. Technically is second. I would say, that's right.
(01:04):
Let's get right to it. Ridiculous History is a production
of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians.
(01:36):
Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Well,
let's give it up for our own iconic last super producer,
Mr Max Williams. Here's an iconic class. They called me,
Ben Null. This is part two of a two part
series that we've both been uh incredibly excited about. I
(02:00):
guess we should tell people before you listen to part two,
check out our episode that came out this previous Tuesday.
There's gonna be a lot of context you'll need. And
uh and I think it's a it's a deep diving,
wide ranging conversation, thanks in no small part to our
returning special guests, Research Associate doctor Zach. One night over
(02:22):
sleep down, a doctor appeared. But this was no normal doctor.
Who's there? It's Zach Zach who the doctor named Zach
and he's here to fill your scraps justic knowledge. Pett
(02:42):
is cat me teaching history books a stop. Uh, let's
go with other things. Yeah, that'll work, Zack. That's right.
The nickname stuck. What can you do surgery? He refused
(03:06):
my title. Yeah, I mean not actual brain surgery, but
you know, brain adjacent surgery. Guess what conversation really is,
isn't it diminishing returns? Well, you know, I find that
the returns to be absolutely sufficient. Uh if if if
part one of this series is any indication, And just
just to give people a little bit of a backtrack,
you know, even if it's been a couple of days.
(03:26):
As you've listened, we're talking about the bizarre life and
times and final years of Yukio Mishima, icon of clastic writer, poet, musician, bodybuilder, uh,
Samurai enthusiasts who also kind of you know, came honestly
by that in his upbringing, which was in more of
the kind of not feudal Japan, but sort of the
(03:47):
tradition of that kind of world and that archetype. Right. Yeah,
I mean, like like we said, he's his face, he's
descended from vassals like samurai families and things like that.
Definitely has historical so stations, cultural cultural associations, and certainly
was associated with those things after his life by much
of the Western publishing world. But a very modern figure
(04:09):
for Japan, like very post war kind of like this
new futuristic Japan, and he sort of was simultaneously embraced
by Western audiences and sort of like like the brass
in Japan didn't quite know what to make of him,
you know. Um, And he really was this sort of
like writer as celebrity kind of figure, which is not
(04:30):
something we see nearly as much today. Um, maybe the
artist as celebrity like uh, Damien Hurst for example, or
Andy Warhol. But you don't really think of like these
big celebrity writers that have that same kind of you know,
cult of personality. But this guy was that thing well J. K. Rowley, Uh,
(04:50):
Stephen King arguably, but not I I see what you're saying. Well,
not perhaps to that degree. Still, Uh in the rallying case,
especially lots of controversy, right and uh when a political
direction that maybe she had no business or expertise to
go down. Yeah, So this is this is the thing
where where last we left Mishima world famous right in
(05:16):
a always the bridesmaid sort of situation, with the Nobel
Prize for literature intensely considered uh throughout uh the sixties,
I believe, and he has no compunction about airing his
opinions past the world of fiction, past the world of literature.
(05:37):
He starts talking a lot about nationalism, and the man
very much has a microphone. He is very much in
the zeitgeist, right, and so people are hearing his opinions,
his perspective. And one thing that surprised me about this
was at this time, while outsiders may associate him increasingly
(05:58):
with what we would call right wing political ideology. I
was not aware that the people who are actually the
movers and shakers of right wing Japanese politics, we're talking
very far right. I did not know that they didn't
all dig him. Uh. And it's the primary sticking point
I believe, is that he says Emperor Hirohito, who we
(06:23):
mentioned in Part one, should have admitted fault at the
very least for the atrocities committed by the Japanese imperial
forces in World War two? Was that really such a
sticking point for them's act? It wasn't just that he
was also sort of he was also very critical of
the emperor simultaneously sort of like in favor of the
(06:47):
emperor's cultural purpose and station in society, very critical of
the fact that the emperor abdicated the throne at the
end of the war and renounced his status as a
sort of like spiritual being. And then, in addition to that,
as you pointed out, the sort of denial of wartime atrocities,
which are numerous in Japan um as they they were
(07:08):
everywhere else in the Access Powers. And you know, to
a certain degree as well, I don't want to say lesser,
but you know, we weren't necessarily doing the things that
some of these regiments were doing, but we had, um,
you know, we had camps for Japanese citizens and amrits
things of that nature. But in the case of Japan,
these are things that the right wing still refuses to
kind of countenance, like even sort of acknowledging sort of
(07:30):
like experimentation, and then of course comfort women and things
like that. UM. Most recently, former Prime Minister Shenzhabe was
assassinated in one of his because of his involvement in
the Nationalists right wing, and also because of his relatives
involvement in the Japanese military during the war and their
direct kind of responsibility and implication in those things. UM
still maintained that Japan did nothing wrong, which was something
(07:52):
that really did stick in Mishama's craw. He was very
nihilistic individual, but I think he also had a sense
of conscience and for his own sort of political aims
and ideas. He didn't think that the sort of noble character,
the essence of what he thought was the Japanese character,
could be retained unless those accounts were settled in some
way quite publicly. Even UM, you do not get to
(08:13):
have the sort of moral kind of high road if
you've committed acts like this seems to be the kind
of way he he saw things. The nationalism is what
like a backlash against like overly um kind of globalist
thinking like after World War two and and and you know,
the idea of kind of like let's play nice with
the rest of the world. Like where where does this
(08:35):
nationalist It's interesting cause it's tempered nationalism right because it
is saying, admit fault. But then let's go back in
our bubble. Is that am i? Am I getting that right?
That is, that is basically it. And the thing that's
worth noting is that UM Japan had experienced something akin
to the Martial plan in Europe, right wherein like after
the war, we're rebuilding Europe in our own image. We
(08:56):
basically did the same thing, I would say, to an
even more intense degree. In Japan. There is no standing army.
For instance, there's only the Special Defense Forces, and that's
by chartered constitution of the occupation government. We held and
still hold a great deal of property, including military bases
in Okinawa for instance. That's that Special Defense Force still
(09:16):
holds to this day. And of course, like the globalism,
the materialism, the kind of transacting this culture into capitalism,
which of course resulted in rapid growth and cultural change
over the course of the twentieth century, resulting eventually in
a crash that decimated Japan's economy throughout the nineties. All
of these things, Misha massaw is a kind of a
(09:38):
tempering of like the Japanese essence, the Japanese character, a
loss of who they were as people in the sort
of traditional sense. And one of the things that's interesting
about his views on these sorts of things is that
he was always very very clear that like, these are
not political sort of sentiments or feelings, which is a
thing that is very common among the right wing to
(09:59):
do politics and to say this isn't political. We're returning
to a natural order, which is that reactionary nostalgia that
I've sort of maybe made reference to last episode, which
seems to me to be the substance of where Mishima
was coming from at this point of his life. And
we can talk a bit more about reactionary nostalgia as
a kind of right wing concern and phenomenon, but I'm
sure we have other more pressing matters to get to
(10:21):
with regards to where our man is at in the
late sixties on into nineteen seventy there's something really really
fascinating here too. We established pretty well in Part one
that Mishma is looking for recognition and fame, maybe even
a little notoriety beyond the confines of Japanese culture. But
(10:43):
Japan has historically been somewhat closed society to outsiders. Even today,
the population is quite homogeneous and comparison to many other
countries its size, so it's an interesting wrinkle to me
that while wanting to be a public figure on the
global stage, Mishima also increasingly did not want the global
(11:08):
stage visiting and perhaps, in his opinion, diluting the cultural
framework and fabric of Japan. And this is when he
starts getting really involved with military forces. You mentioned the
self Defense Force, which is still, as you said, a
thing in Japan, although sometimes, depending on China's activities in
(11:31):
the region, you will hear politicians, domestic politicians arguing for
more militarization. Tell us a little bit about how Mishima
came up with the idea of making his own army
or militia. We could say, well, I think part of
it comes from an early effort in Um and it's
(11:53):
sort of like early years of kind of becoming a
political figure at the very least an object of political curiosity.
He drafted a sort of proposal to have ten thousand
civilians conscripted into the self defense special Defense Forces, and
basically the idea was to sort of not only shore
up defense but also bring back that kind of militaristic,
(12:15):
non imperialistic but sort of like in defense of the
nation's style of thinking. The defense forces not enough. We
need to foster a feeling of nationalism and defending the
character of this place within our citizen red thing that
has fallen by the wayside as we become more capitalist,
more materialistic, more global in our perspectives and in our
(12:38):
spending habits and things like that, allowing other people to
come in with their corporations and their militaries and things
of that nature. So naturally this was not necessarily that
popular a sentiment, And this is a kind of recurring
motif in Mishama's political activity. The sort of referendum that
he was trying to write up failed and then in
(12:58):
the absence of success in that regard, decided, I'll start
my own militia instead for the defense of the nation
and sort of like the resumption of what we we
are as people. It's that kind of first step towards
getting back to that glorious past that he became so
obsessed with. I mean, this is this thing, this uh
(13:24):
idea of a code, right, the honorable behavior that clearly
comes from this idea of Samurai lineage that clearly is
part of his logic and sane one must admit the
sentence of the past. Uh. And this this concept of
ethical traditions as we see in the Shield society is um.
(13:49):
He's he's started, I would say even more than a militia.
It's aiming for this movement, right, because he also, you know,
he does a little bit of a Tyler Perry thing
and does all the stuff he may the uniforms. I
believe he writes a song for the for this society,
which I have not heard, but I hope it slaps uh.
And and he uh, he is still writing the entire
(14:14):
time that he's doing this, right, He's like an every
night kind of night owl character. Is this the period
of his life that produces the sea of fertility? It
absolutely is, And it's sort of like the The Indicator,
I think most it's one of those things that so
(14:36):
very obviously aligns with his political ideas and what he
thought how he thought Japan was in crisis at the time.
It's a it's a series of four novels, all of
them are interlocking. It follows the same narrative protagonist as
he lives through from nineteen twelve through nineteen seventy five,
and naturally, that's a very very very meticulously select did
(15:00):
period because this is the period of modernization, Postmaji restoration,
this is the period of the war and imperial expansion
and things of that nature. And ultimately what he ends
up finding is that what the book ends up rehearsing
is this constant, kind of again backward looking, kind of
like reverent nostalgia for this path that is dying, and
(15:23):
this figure from the narrator's life who dies as a
very young man, and then subsequently throughout the rest of
the books is reincarnated in new forms as a kind
of place holder for this old this old life, this
old time that cannot by any means survive as Japan
modernizes and continues to modernize. The figure that is reincarnated
(15:44):
in these novels is always ostensibly doomed to die young,
which is also very thematically tied to where this all
goes at the end um this obsession with aging, this
obsession with losing things, whether that's the body or even consciousness.
Even for as much of a nihilist as Mishima was,
(16:04):
he seemed to be absolutely concerned with sort of being
around in some way of a sort of that kind
of reproduction of life that goes on into perpetuity, that
preserves the way things were, so people have something to
sort of put a hand on and and and know
where we came from. It's one of those things that's
utterly understandable. I think, like we think of things in
(16:26):
terms of legacy and stuff like that, and and sort
of making sure that we remember things. And one of
the things I think that Mishima does get correct. And
I'm coming at this from a left wing perspective, to
be fully to full disclosure, to be fully transparent. Um.
As the market and globalism is sort of like expanded
over the course of the last fifty years, especially, time
(16:47):
seems to have gone through changes that reflect that UH,
and people are increasingly remembering less and less and less
so for instance. You know, it's interesting when he says
we need to acknowledge the atrocities we committed during World
War Two because it's absolutely important to our ethics and
our character that we have a conscience and that we
take account of these things. The same could be said
(17:09):
of America's past and present. The same could be said
of England, Germany, especially Italy, all of this thing. Anybody
who has had any nation that has an idea or
concept of national characters um seems to be in like
lockstep with this constant movement forward. At the expense of,
you know, accounting for where this all comes from, I'll
(17:30):
sell you Germany seems to do quite a good job
at it. I mean they even have. Like I've mentioned
this before because I'm a big fan of overly long
the descriptive single German words. But there's a there's a
word describing collective guilts over the atrocities of the Holocausts,
Bavanian Heights, Bivalti gum And I was in berlin Um
for for a trip um last earlier this year, and
(17:51):
a lot of the museums that are named after Nazi
you know, officials or or sympathizers at the very least
like the Bodha Museum, they had a whole wing devoted
to reconciling that legacy and sort of course correcting, um,
you know, the legacy of of what the museum stood
for now and all of that pertains kind of to
(18:12):
that collective national kind of identity. So that really is
it's difficult to do. It requires buy in on a
very large scale to do it correctly. Um, And I think,
you know, I think that's something that they're very much
fascinates me as well. Yeah, it's still a struggle. You know.
You look at the sort of debate surrounding CRT and
things of that nature in the past two years that
(18:33):
have been very public and vocal, and there really does
seem to be and again it's that reactionary nostalgia, right,
that feeling that the natural order of things was this
and there was nothing wrong about it actually, and what
you do to sort of prop that up is to
deny that things happen, or to sort of like make
them less of a sort of anvil in the public consciousness,
(18:55):
you know, right, And for anybody listening along at home,
CRT is shorthand for critical race theory, which is not
really what it's being advertised as in oppositional media. The
folks who are against it are playing kind of fast
and loose with the reality of that that kind of study.
But what it's meant to be is just acknowledging reality,
(19:16):
and it's just being now used instead of a weapon
to say, oh no, no, no, you're trying to shove
all this you know, left wing ideology down the thirds
of our children. And what it really kind of means is,
let's just be a little more even handed with our
description of of of history. It's also college levels, it's
not anyway, that's that's the primary um. That's the primary cynical,
(19:37):
misleading statement that I'm talking about. But to to your
you guys, excellent points about the idea of moving on
or acknowledging the past. Folks, wherever you live, whatever your
quarner or neck of the global woods, maybe you'll see
the individual mileage may vary on a state actor level.
When I've been in Belgium before, by the way, like
(20:00):
not too far away from Germany, of course, there's not
a lot of talk about the atrocities in the Congo.
I've spent some time in Japan. There's you know, super
not a lot of talk about stuff that went down
in mainland China in World War Two or in Korea.
And so we see that again when I say we
are the stories are we tell ourselves, I'm not just
(20:21):
talking about the micro cosmic individual level. I'm talking about
the macro cosmic state level or nation level. And this
is something that Mishima is tapping into. One of the
strangest things that happens with the Shield Society is Mishima
does this one a d the U tease so beautifully Zach.
(20:43):
In part one of our series, he says, you know,
I gotta keep my I gotta you know, like offspring,
I gotta keep them separated, right, my literary life and identity,
my nationalistic military stuff, at least when applied to the
Shield Society. I was interested to find that he did
not think literary youth who would have been just like
(21:06):
him when he was younger, right, very similar. He didn't
think they were suited for the Shield Society. So there's
one exception, and it's him. I found that very interesting. Well, again,
it's that that contradiction that that insecurity, that tension between
being a man of action and being a man of letters,
There's a quote from his book Kyoko's House, which is
(21:28):
featured prominently in the film Mishima Life and Four Chapters,
this notion there's an actor there who who It's almost
like a refrain in the story. You know, stage blood
is no longer enough, letters are no longer enough, thought
is no longer enough. You have to act. And these
were things that he wrote very openly about, this kind
of sense that what we do sort of like engaging
(21:51):
in philosophy letters. Even his contempt for what he termed ideology,
which is I'm sorry, sort of interchangeable with politics. He
can't escape it. Um. It is always kind of in
service of this thing where it's like we can talk
until the cows come home, but when things really come
to a head, there has to be a man of
action or a woman of action, a person of action,
(22:13):
someone there to actually move the needle in some meaningful way.
And he took a he took great pains near the
end of his life to at least appear to be
that person, surrounding himself with people that he deemed of
that character, and his participation in debates within the academic
circles of the time. We're strangely very fraught, but also
at the same time begrudgingly respectful. Uh. The New Left
(22:37):
was arising during this period, as was the New Right,
in the wake of his work within his militia and
things like that, and one of the things that each
of them found was like this sort of simpatico kind
of set of ideologies, this idea that Japan had been
kind of set on a path by America specifically to
sort of denounce itself, to denounce its history, and to
(22:58):
become sort of like a pet project, for lack of
a better phrase. And he really resented that, and the
New Left also resented that. A great deal. Anti Americanism
was a major component of both the far right and
the far left of the period, and Mishama seemed to
be this sort of intermediary figure. Like in the last
(23:18):
years of his life, he openly debated people at universities,
and you know, there's always like this sort of because
this is a very violent time. Their students occupying Nehon
University and University of Tokyo eight thousand riot cops, their
struggle sessions within these New Left movements that resulted one
to four people dying between the years of nineteen seventy one,
two thousand three, Like, it's such a politically fraught time
(23:41):
that we don't hear much about because our entire understanding
of this place, and I think many places that we
don't have a close relationship to are just unfortunately as
it's kind of far away exotic colony wherein like they
are all of these political affiliations, these political conflicts that
are unfolding people you young people being killed by occupation
(24:02):
forces secretly. Like, it's so fascinating to see how, especially
around sixty eight, where all the other labor and leftist
movements are arising worldwide and protest of like the emerging
new neoliberal order. You see all of these things happening,
and it is happening everywhere, and to have that so
diminished in our discussion of history is just fascinating to
me and dangerously convenient people. Yeah, and that's why I
(24:27):
think that's a danger. You know, we have to remember
history is a conversation, right, and it's uh, Faulkner was
right when he said the past isn't past, you know,
it affects us today. So let's dive into this period
we're talking about, let's say nineteen sixty nine through the seventies.
We know that per your research, you site a wonderful
(24:50):
article in the Paris Review. We know that around nineteen
sixty nine is when Mishima starts seriously plau to take
his own life, starts really thinking about this. Uh. This
is also the time he has a big show for
the first anniversary of the Shield Society. I thought there
(25:10):
was a very neat, almost Capote esque note to this.
He invites a hundred guests, some from all over the world,
many from Japan, and if he didn't make it, he
never talks to you again. That's it. You have this,
This disrespect shall not stand. Uh where when we talk
(25:32):
about him sort of planning to take his own life,
becoming increasingly militaristic, and when he's uh he resigns from
the Symposium on Culture and stuff, he's really doubling down
on this more militaristic aspect. How connected is the Japanese
public with this? If if you ballparked it, like, if
(25:53):
you're a person in Japan here in the late nineties,
sixties or at least seventies, is there a common opinion
about Mishima or is it more again just sort of
you see what you want to see in a public figure.
I mean a lot of that comes down to again,
that cult of personality, that ostentatiousness. I mean it, he
(26:15):
remains a kind of not necessarily marginal culturally, but certainly
somebody who's increasing kind of participation of these things is
is seen as kind of ridiculous, absurd um. And one
of the things that's important to remember again is that
like the right wing did not like him, the left
wing had a grudging respect for him, but found him
(26:36):
to be quote an anachronistic guerrilla and um, I'm serious.
And it was often met with threats of violence on
both sides. And it seems to me like it's it's
it's so difficult to pen these things down because we
don't know the man. We can't know the man. There
seems to be something of like the death drive at
the center of all of this stuff, which is a
(26:57):
point that I think we can get to later on.
I don't think necessarily cared at the end of his
life how he was received so much so that like
as much as he wanted to be seen at nothing
if nothing else, is a man of action and all
that entails. And you get to the point where he's
doing these controversial things as an openly gay man who
(27:17):
surrounds himself with with college age men, and because of
his status as a literary figure, there's things were sort
of controversial and met with like a very skeptical eye.
Although it is plausible that he saw that as a
modern continuation of samurai tradition. Absolutely, and that's sort of
something we've lost in this discussion and their themes in
(27:38):
the book, In many of the books where you know,
the sort of love between an older boy and a
younger boy is is kind of a recurring motif and
in fact, like um, one of the things that comes
out at the conversation surrounding his death is how like
common a phenomenon this was, even even in this sort
of ty shoe or not even in the post Meji restoration,
that's not something they would have embraced publicly. It was
(28:00):
like absolutely, you know, an open secret maybe, but definitely
not you know, something that would be you know touted
or like you know, even like emphasized in historical accounts. Right, absolutely, yeah,
I know that's spot on. So he does not become
this this kind of like firebrand, this very public figure
in the way that he probably wants. And you know
(28:22):
that's indicative of the reception of the parade. It's indicative
in the reception for his referendum for conscripting ten thousand
civilians into the SDF, And it's also in the quizzical
response given to this militia um, which is truly like
a very absurd thing for a writer of novels to
be doing in any historical context, much less than nineteen
(28:44):
sixties and seventies. Right, it maybe makes more sense if
you are a if if you flip the evolution, right,
if you are a military individual of note, and then
later you write novels that for some reason, is it
transition that I think more people find understandable, Zach, I
(29:06):
want us to go to I want us to go
to November nineteen seventy. This is where Mishima gets heckled.
They heckle the heck out of him. Uh, And can
this speech that he gives that is I think it's
supposed to be ten minutes. It's not about literary literary matters.
(29:29):
It's not a it's not a performance of poetry or
a meditation on the nature of the soul. He is
at a balcony where he is giving a ten minute
I think he means it as a persuasive argument about
his political theories, and in terms of being well received
(29:52):
on a scale of one to ten, this is like
a negative two, negative three. So one of the things
that that we kind of have in uh tiptoeing around
here is that this was a this was a hostage
situation and attempted Kudata on the morning of November he
(30:16):
and several members of the Tatokai, the Shield Society. UM.
What they end up doing is they storm, but they
have an official meeting with the general, their general kanne
Toshi Mashita. There's, of course, no expectation that anything is
going to go wrong. This seems to be an utterly
cordial event. And in fact, that morning Mishima had dropped
(30:39):
off the final pages of the final novel of the
Sea of Fertility, the Decay of the Angel that morning,
which is in and of itself, is this highly symbolic
performative gesture. UM. He was then taken hostage by the
members of the Shield Society General Machida, that is, and
then Mishima ascended the balcony and then gave this speech
(31:00):
that basically was designed to incite all of the the
sort of servicemen in the garrison to um denounce the
occupation government, to denounce the charters that had sort of
conscripted the Japanese military to this kind of defense exclusive status,
um the sort of re elevation of the emperor to
(31:21):
his status within society, because again, he didn't feel the
emperor should have abdicated in the way that he did,
felt that they should acknowledge war crimes, did not feel
that the emperor should have walked away from his traditional
place within Japanese society. And then after finishing this address,
which he intended to make for half an hour, within minutes,
(31:43):
this group of young servicemen, uh, seven minutes are just
berating him with insults, madman, idiot Japan? Is it peace?
Do you think he was? Was he expecting that or
was this shocking to him to do a degree or
was he just sort of like a little bit he
losing it. This is up for contention and something that
I think we'll get into it at the end of
(32:04):
the episode. I personally don't believe that anybody who's serious
about a project like this knows that this is doomed
to fail. Right that taking six or so of your
best chaps to the to the military base with swords
and thinking that you're going to overthrow the government seems
(32:24):
like an absolutely hubristic kind of thing, like total performative,
absolutely performative. And so what ends up happening is that
he's being jeered by all of these people. He then, yeah,
it's it's really intense um and probably no doubt humiliating
if he is capable of feeling humiliation on that level.
(32:45):
We'll get to that stuff in a moment. But he
immediately withdraws from the balcony, and this is a trigger
warding for violence, takes the serum the ceremonial cross legged
seat on the ground, jam's a dagger into his abdomen
and then draws it across it. And then after that,
the attendant that's selected for the final act of seppuku,
(33:06):
which is kaishaku, which is the ritual beheading which puts
the committer out of their misery. This young man named
Marita Massa Katsu, somebody who has in the intervening years
been speculated to have been Mishima's last lover, draws the katana,
makes the swing and then fails to cleanly behead him.
(33:28):
So this is already itself a tragedy that is very
quickly becoming farce in a way that I don't think
even Mishima would have appreciated as morbid as his sort
of sense of humor and since of the world was.
So what ended up happening was that somebody else stepped
in a practice kindo expert, not an expert, but a
(33:49):
kindo practitioner. Why didn't they let him do it in
the first place, man, it seems like that with a
prerequisite would at least be that you've like, trained with
a sword to some degree. This kid seems to have
just botched it. Well, that status of being Mishima's favorite
probably has a lot to do with that makes sense.
But he steps in, finishes the job, and then Morita
(34:10):
himself commits seppuku on the grounds of having disgraced himself
by not being able to commit the final act of
the riches. That's meta right there. So basically what you
have is this incredibly bloody, awful scene, something that is
in fact stripped straight from the fiction of Mishima himself,
(34:31):
This ritual suicide in the name of kind of restoring
national character. The two heads of these men side by
side on the carpet, just absolute carnage and then um
obviously scandal, just something that had never happened in modern
Japanese public life. And mind you, up to this point
there had been political assassinations, especially within right wing circles.
(34:55):
There were a number of incidents where right wingers would
would come upon leftist authors or academics and openly murdered
them in public. Um at some point they were like
a sort of right wing elements that were flying planes
into buildings and things of that nature. Like again, this
is incredibly conflicted fraud politically time and it reaches this
punctuation mark the death of the most popular Japanese author
(35:17):
in the world in the most curious and absurd of circumstances.
This anachronistic act that can't help but resemble pageantry more
than anything that would be like a kind of expression
of a real politic. And I think ultimately that's where
we kind of end up going with all of this stuff,
is like the sort of open questions, the ambiguity whether
(35:37):
or not Mischimo is absolutely serious about this plot working,
or whether if not this was all just a pretense
for something else. Yeah, it's a good question, Zac, because
also you know, to the point about pageantry, the suicide
is planned or at lea see times it seems to
(35:57):
coincide with the opening of the Appendese Diet, which is
the Japanese legislature. He also has very specific wishes about
how his Buddhist name is rendered postmortem. Uh. He needs
to be dressed in his Shield Society uniform. He bluntly says,
(36:18):
I die not as a literary man, but entirely as
a military man. And when we when we get to
these these questions, and you phrase it so beautifully, man,
the puzzling ambiguous questions. I think this is one of
the most fascinating parts of the story for you and
(36:40):
for me as well. Honestly, do you think this is
in Mishima's mind which we can't totally read. Do you
think he sees this, as you say, a punctuation mark.
Do you think this is meant to impart some sort
of lesson or statement to the people of Japan at large?
(37:00):
I think, and again, this is all just speculation and interpretation,
which is about as valuable as um probably a pocket
full of lint in many cases. But The thing about
this is is that I've already brought up this sort
of doomed to failedness of this enterprise, the kind of
absurd um hubris that goes into committing attempting to commit
(37:20):
kudata with a group of like several student aged men
armed exclusively with bladed weapons. To me, I think what
this is trying to impart, which is something that even
in his sort of like the notes that he left
to his wife surrounding this plot, which is very strongly
suggested this was the plan, so he told his wife
and this is a quote. Even if I'm not immediately understood,
(37:43):
it's okay because I'll be understood by the Japan of
fifty or a hundred years time. Which is such a
tragic kind of um thing to say, because I don't
think that's the case at all. I think it's happened,
it's not going to happen. The ambiguity of the thing,
the sort of performative absurdity of the thing, it kind
of preclude any real interpretation of understanding of what all
(38:03):
of this actually was. And the thing that the film
seems to try to sort of impart on all of this,
and the film mishim in Life of Four Chapters. And
you know the photographs that he had taken of himself
in the throes of many different suicides in the final
days of his life. Photographs that he himself meticulously composed
but had shot by somebody else. His his sort of
(38:24):
ideas about James Dean and like sort of dying beautifully
at in the young age. Like it very much seems
that Mishima could not be a man of action and
understood this inherently. M hm. His body at that point
was already in decline. He he was conscripted into the
military during the war in the final years of it.
(38:45):
He did not make it into service. And the film
Mishima in Life of Four Chapters implies that he in
fact played up his his his asthma symptoms so as
to avoid service. And the thing is too that that's
where all of the body billing comes from, this trying
to sort of like make himself this like stone cut figure,
(39:05):
this man of action. There's another lovely scene in the
film where he's at a dance hall where young men
are dancing with one another and he has a partner
and the partner places his hand on his shoulders and
mind you, this is Mishima in top physical form and says,
your shoulders are kind of flabby, and Mishima is absolutely
inconsolable about this, and just like leaves without saying anything,
(39:27):
and like in tears, like invisible tears, leaves the dance hall,
and then later in the night goes to a pay
phone outside of this young man's apartment and calls him
and essentially says, you're young and beautiful and I am
old and dying, so please be tender in the future
with anybody you meet. And it's this incredibly lovely scene
that I think also gives away a lot of this
(39:49):
guy's personality and sort of the anxieties surrounding the simple
fact that, you know, his literary career, while still fruitful,
was sort of on the wye. He wasn't taken seriously
as an actor. Um, he wasn't taken seriously as a
political ideal logue somebody whose influence and body were declining,
(40:09):
at least to him at a rate that was just
he couldn't abide it. Well, it's a hard thing to
wrap your head around in general. I mean, you know,
just the idea of you know, being replaced or you know,
getting older and feeling you know, if you're if you're
someone who seeks fame, and the way that this guy
obviously did to kind of base your whole personality around
(40:30):
you know, this character you've created yourself, and no longer
does it kind of fly anymore, And then who are
you at that point? Especially since you know, he was
kind of considered soft and weak and the whole Grandmother's situation,
and now he styled himself as this like macho kind
of you know, warrior kind of figure, and then that's
starting to waite too, So it really does seem like
(40:51):
he was kind of on this doomsday course the whole time. Zach.
You mentioned from the start that even in his writing
he sort of fancied himself of this sort of tragic
martyr type figure. Absolutely again that notion of stage blood
not being enough, that noted, that notion of that tension
between action and inaction, um, the life of the mind
(41:12):
versus the body, and quite frankly, and this is sort
of like the point that I've been kind of gesturing
towards throughout the whole thing. This is a type of
neurosis that reactionary nostalgia tends to engender the crisis of
the crisis of masculinity and modern times for instance, right,
the men's right stuff, you know, these figures that style
themselves is like these sort of these you know these men, right, uh,
(41:37):
these moral compasses exactly, and you know, obviously like here
it's a the inflection point is like Western philosophy, antiquity, etcetera.
There's so many similarities between me that and Mishuma's attitude
surrounding the aesthetics and the sort of ethics of Japan
and how those two are tied. And I think one
of the things that these people usually run into, and
I think should run into, is that aesthetic can be
(42:01):
politically inflected. It is not politics. Culture will generally tend
conservative regardless, because that's the nature of consensus, for better
or worse. And what we end up with is a
situation where you have a group of dispossessed people who,
rather than locating where their dispossession comes from, they reached
back into a past that in many cases they did
not even live. They have no relationship to an aesthetics
(42:23):
and philosophy political systems, and they think, well, that was
obviously something that is upheld as brilliant something that is
upheld as good and just you know, like we can
talk as much about the ancient Greeks as we want,
but the number of things that we would find a
morally pernicious about those systems really do leave a bad
taste in the mouth if you take any of this
(42:43):
stuff seriously beyond the aesthetic component. And Mishima seems to
me was a philosophically inclined person. If you read his writings,
he's not a slouch in this regard. He may have
had open contempt for the life of the mind and
intellectuals and things of that nature, but that's because he
was one of them. Yeah, And that double standard that
he imposed on himself, like I said, it cleaves you
(43:04):
in half and you don't really have much of a
place to go. Yeah, because I think that's I think
that's tremendously a stupe zack. And when we look at
Mishima's legacy today, you know, um, I actually first learned
of Mishama not in college, but on my first trip
(43:25):
to the Agoya because some writer friends they're wanted to
talk about Mishima with me. And it after you hear
this story, folks, if you've never heard of this author.
It may sound surprising that this person is still so
highly lauded in the literary world and so widely read
in Japan and abroad, but he really is that talented.
(43:50):
You can be a talented person and still have torturous
things in your psychology, in your being with which you
wrestle throughout your life. UM. I feel that it is
incredibly important anytime we discussed the topic that touches on
the nature of self harm, it is incredibly important for
(44:10):
us to say that if you are a loved one
are dealing with challenging issues, do not hesitate to reach out.
There are tons of worthwhile free resources available to you.
Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week here
in the US. You can reach out to self harm
(44:31):
suicide crisis lifelines. UH. There is the old ten digit
one one eight zero zero to seven three talk. That's
one eight zero zero two seven three eight to five
five and thank goodness, as of this summer, you can
also simply dial nine eight eight UH speak with someone.
(44:53):
Your health and well being is more than worth it.
And that's just that's our disclaimer. We want to bookend
this series with but UH, honestly, you know this makes
you want to go back and reread more. Mishima Zach,
I don't know about the everybody else. Also the friend
that the mutual friend of ours, Zack and Ben. You
you've met him as well. Peyton Fisher, friend of the podcast,
(45:14):
loaned me this DVD when we were in high school
together and I totally slept on it. I never watched it,
and I returned it to him and I I copped
to that recently and he was just kind of a gas.
So I really do need to get this film, which is,
by the way, directed by Paul Strader, who wrote UH
Taxi Driver was a very important UM collaborator with UH.
(45:35):
Francis Ford Coppola as well UM scored by the incredible
Philip Glass. I believe George Lucas and Coppola had or
was it Scorsese had production credits in this. I think
all three had production credits. There was a there was
a concerted effort on both Lucas and Coppola specifically as
well throughout the eighties to bring Japanese or Japanese sort
(45:55):
of deemed films to the United States. Kagemusha was executive
produced by Lucas and co Blue as well, and with this,
I believe we we have to say thank you again,
doctor Zach. One night over sick down, a doctor appeared.
But this was no normal doctor. Who's there? It's Zack
(46:17):
Zach who the doctor named Zach and he's here to
bill your scraps just for Colledge pett is cat teaching
history books at stop. Let's go with other things. Yeah,
(46:40):
that'll work, Zack. We're trying that nickname on. We're gonna
take it around the street, take it, drive it down
the block, and see how it feels. Thank you again
so much. And as we said in part one, I
think you mentioned the snool. Uh. Very excited to have
you on the team. Uh. You bring such a fresh perspective.
(47:04):
Love the stories that you are finding. And I hope
you had a good time. We pulled you in for
your first We pulled you into deep water for your
first odd air appearance. Doc Zach. Are are you how
you feeling about coming back on in the future. No, absolutely,
probably for some lighter subject matter, I hope, but UH
(47:24):
do for sure. But I mean, it really is like
it's hard to just explain why this guy was so
important And just a couple of sentences which I think
maybe why I did sleep on that film because I
couldn't easily wrap my head around it. And I think
my younger stelf was maybe a little, uh, a little
less willing to take the plunge, you know, but it
really is. You know, you've got so much stuff out there.
This guy's work is available, the film that we're talking about,
(47:47):
But just what a guy that kind of controlled the
narrative of his life. It's such an interesting way because
I am still kind of the mind that this ending
was orchestrated, you know, to a degree, like he walked
in there and no going full well what was going
to happen? And to his credit, you know, it's still
the object of speculation. We're still reading him. We're still
(48:08):
watching Schrader's film, which I can't stress enough is is
gorgeous both formally narratively thematically um My in my mind,
Schrader's best film. Um certainly worth a watch on the
Criterion channel if you have that um and read the
sound or read the sound the waves if you want
something a bit more traditional and less queasy, But if
you really want to dive deep with Mishima, highly suggest
(48:29):
the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which is one of
the most stark depictions of mental disturbance, um neurosis and
sort of spiritual awakening that I have ever read. Well
written books are not always happy books, folks, So let
the let the reader be aware. But do do also
(48:50):
check out Maschuma's work if you haven't yet. In the meantime,
we'd also love to hear from you, fellow Ridiculous Historians,
who were some other authors that you feel have a
body of, you know, canonical literature as well as a
personal life outside of literature that many people may not
(49:11):
be aware of. We'd love to hear your suggestions. You
can find us on Facebook where we're Ridiculous Historians. We're
still working on the vision board from our very first episodes.
I don't think we got the passwords in the MySpace yet.
No no, no, no, it's okay, it's okay, we were
working on it. We'll get right back to you on that.
Huge thanks to Zach Williams of course, Alex Williams, uh,
(49:32):
Max Williams, all the Williams, the Williams Is, the Williams Williams.
Yeah sure, um, thanks Chris for us. Jodis here in Spirit, Eves,
Jeff co Jonathan Strickland, all the hits. Thanks to you, Ben,
This is a great, great conversation. Thanks to you knowl.
We'll see you next time. Books. For more podcasts, form
(49:58):
my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Quick disclaimer before we enter part two of our exploration
of the bizarre final years of Mishima. This episode contains,
at times, uh no, how would we say it, pretty
graphic depictions of some some adult mature things. Yeah, I
(00:21):
would say that, and also discussions of suicide of the
ritualistic variety. And so if you were to ask me,
if you were to say, Ben, is this appropriate for
all listeners, then I would say it's something to have
a headsop about. But we hope you enjoyed part one
of this series as much as we did, so we
(00:43):
wanted to give you a quick disclaimer. Uh, this may
not be one for everybody, but it is certainly a
story worth being told, and we want to thank again
our excellent research associate Zach Williams. It is first ever
on air appearance. Technically is second. I would say, that's right.
(01:04):
Let's get right to it. Ridiculous History is a production
of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians.
(01:36):
Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Well,
let's give it up for our own iconic last super producer,
Mr Max Williams. Here's an iconic class. They called me,
Ben Null. This is part two of a two part
series that we've both been uh incredibly excited about. I
(02:00):
guess we should tell people before you listen to part two,
check out our episode that came out this previous Tuesday.
There's gonna be a lot of context you'll need. And
uh and I think it's a it's a deep diving,
wide ranging conversation, thanks in no small part to our
returning special guests, Research Associate doctor Zach. One night over
(02:22):
sleep down, a doctor appeared. But this was no normal doctor.
Who's there? It's Zach Zach who the doctor named Zach
and he's here to fill your scraps justic knowledge. Pett
(02:42):
is cat me teaching history books a stop. Uh, let's
go with other things. Yeah, that'll work, Zack. That's right.
The nickname stuck. What can you do surgery? He refused
(03:06):
my title. Yeah, I mean not actual brain surgery, but
you know, brain adjacent surgery. Guess what conversation really is,
isn't it diminishing returns? Well, you know, I find that
the returns to be absolutely sufficient. Uh if if if
part one of this series is any indication, And just
just to give people a little bit of a backtrack,
you know, even if it's been a couple of days.
(03:26):
As you've listened, we're talking about the bizarre life and
times and final years of Yukio Mishima, icon of clastic writer, poet, musician, bodybuilder, uh,
Samurai enthusiasts who also kind of you know, came honestly
by that in his upbringing, which was in more of
the kind of not feudal Japan, but sort of the
(03:47):
tradition of that kind of world and that archetype. Right. Yeah,
I mean, like like we said, he's his face, he's
descended from vassals like samurai families and things like that.
Definitely has historical so stations, cultural cultural associations, and certainly
was associated with those things after his life by much
of the Western publishing world. But a very modern figure
(04:09):
for Japan, like very post war kind of like this
new futuristic Japan, and he sort of was simultaneously embraced
by Western audiences and sort of like like the brass
in Japan didn't quite know what to make of him,
you know. Um, And he really was this sort of
like writer as celebrity kind of figure, which is not
(04:30):
something we see nearly as much today. Um, maybe the
artist as celebrity like uh, Damien Hurst for example, or
Andy Warhol. But you don't really think of like these
big celebrity writers that have that same kind of you know,
cult of personality. But this guy was that thing well J. K. Rowley, Uh,
(04:50):
Stephen King arguably, but not I I see what you're saying. Well,
not perhaps to that degree. Still, Uh in the rallying case,
especially lots of controversy, right and uh when a political
direction that maybe she had no business or expertise to
go down. Yeah, So this is this is the thing
where where last we left Mishima world famous right in
(05:16):
a always the bridesmaid sort of situation, with the Nobel
Prize for literature intensely considered uh throughout uh the sixties,
I believe, and he has no compunction about airing his
opinions past the world of fiction, past the world of literature.
(05:37):
He starts talking a lot about nationalism, and the man
very much has a microphone. He is very much in
the zeitgeist, right, and so people are hearing his opinions,
his perspective. And one thing that surprised me about this
was at this time, while outsiders may associate him increasingly
(05:58):
with what we would call right wing political ideology. I
was not aware that the people who are actually the
movers and shakers of right wing Japanese politics, we're talking
very far right. I did not know that they didn't
all dig him. Uh. And it's the primary sticking point
I believe, is that he says Emperor Hirohito, who we
(06:23):
mentioned in Part one, should have admitted fault at the
very least for the atrocities committed by the Japanese imperial
forces in World War two? Was that really such a
sticking point for them's act? It wasn't just that he
was also sort of he was also very critical of
the emperor simultaneously sort of like in favor of the
(06:47):
emperor's cultural purpose and station in society, very critical of
the fact that the emperor abdicated the throne at the
end of the war and renounced his status as a
sort of like spiritual being. And then, in addition to that,
as you pointed out, the sort of denial of wartime atrocities,
which are numerous in Japan um as they they were
(07:08):
everywhere else in the Access Powers. And you know, to
a certain degree as well, I don't want to say lesser,
but you know, we weren't necessarily doing the things that
some of these regiments were doing, but we had, um,
you know, we had camps for Japanese citizens and amrits
things of that nature. But in the case of Japan,
these are things that the right wing still refuses to
kind of countenance, like even sort of acknowledging sort of
(07:30):
like experimentation, and then of course comfort women and things
like that. UM. Most recently, former Prime Minister Shenzhabe was
assassinated in one of his because of his involvement in
the Nationalists right wing, and also because of his relatives
involvement in the Japanese military during the war and their
direct kind of responsibility and implication in those things. UM
still maintained that Japan did nothing wrong, which was something
(07:52):
that really did stick in Mishama's craw. He was very
nihilistic individual, but I think he also had a sense
of conscience and for his own sort of political aims
and ideas. He didn't think that the sort of noble character,
the essence of what he thought was the Japanese character,
could be retained unless those accounts were settled in some
way quite publicly. Even UM, you do not get to
(08:13):
have the sort of moral kind of high road if
you've committed acts like this seems to be the kind
of way he he saw things. The nationalism is what
like a backlash against like overly um kind of globalist
thinking like after World War two and and and you know,
the idea of kind of like let's play nice with
the rest of the world. Like where where does this
(08:35):
nationalist It's interesting cause it's tempered nationalism right because it
is saying, admit fault. But then let's go back in
our bubble. Is that am i? Am I getting that right?
That is, that is basically it. And the thing that's
worth noting is that UM Japan had experienced something akin
to the Martial plan in Europe, right wherein like after
the war, we're rebuilding Europe in our own image. We
(08:56):
basically did the same thing, I would say, to an
even more intense degree. In Japan. There is no standing army.
For instance, there's only the Special Defense Forces, and that's
by chartered constitution of the occupation government. We held and
still hold a great deal of property, including military bases
in Okinawa for instance. That's that Special Defense Force still
(09:16):
holds to this day. And of course, like the globalism,
the materialism, the kind of transacting this culture into capitalism,
which of course resulted in rapid growth and cultural change
over the course of the twentieth century, resulting eventually in
a crash that decimated Japan's economy throughout the nineties. All
of these things, Misha massaw is a kind of a
(09:38):
tempering of like the Japanese essence, the Japanese character, a
loss of who they were as people in the sort
of traditional sense. And one of the things that's interesting
about his views on these sorts of things is that
he was always very very clear that like, these are
not political sort of sentiments or feelings, which is a
thing that is very common among the right wing to
(09:59):
do politics and to say this isn't political. We're returning
to a natural order, which is that reactionary nostalgia that
I've sort of maybe made reference to last episode, which
seems to me to be the substance of where Mishima
was coming from at this point of his life. And
we can talk a bit more about reactionary nostalgia as
a kind of right wing concern and phenomenon, but I'm
sure we have other more pressing matters to get to
(10:21):
with regards to where our man is at in the
late sixties on into nineteen seventy there's something really really
fascinating here too. We established pretty well in Part one
that Mishma is looking for recognition and fame, maybe even
a little notoriety beyond the confines of Japanese culture. But
(10:43):
Japan has historically been somewhat closed society to outsiders. Even today,
the population is quite homogeneous and comparison to many other
countries its size, so it's an interesting wrinkle to me
that while wanting to be a public figure on the
global stage, Mishima also increasingly did not want the global
(11:08):
stage visiting and perhaps, in his opinion, diluting the cultural
framework and fabric of Japan. And this is when he
starts getting really involved with military forces. You mentioned the
self Defense Force, which is still, as you said, a
thing in Japan, although sometimes, depending on China's activities in
(11:31):
the region, you will hear politicians, domestic politicians arguing for
more militarization. Tell us a little bit about how Mishima
came up with the idea of making his own army
or militia. We could say, well, I think part of
it comes from an early effort in Um and it's
(11:53):
sort of like early years of kind of becoming a
political figure at the very least an object of political curiosity.
He drafted a sort of proposal to have ten thousand
civilians conscripted into the self defense special Defense Forces, and
basically the idea was to sort of not only shore
up defense but also bring back that kind of militaristic,
(12:15):
non imperialistic but sort of like in defense of the
nation's style of thinking. The defense forces not enough. We
need to foster a feeling of nationalism and defending the
character of this place within our citizen red thing that
has fallen by the wayside as we become more capitalist,
more materialistic, more global in our perspectives and in our
(12:38):
spending habits and things like that, allowing other people to
come in with their corporations and their militaries and things
of that nature. So naturally this was not necessarily that
popular a sentiment, And this is a kind of recurring
motif in Mishama's political activity. The sort of referendum that
he was trying to write up failed and then in
(12:58):
the absence of success in that regard, decided, I'll start
my own militia instead for the defense of the nation
and sort of like the resumption of what we we
are as people. It's that kind of first step towards
getting back to that glorious past that he became so
obsessed with. I mean, this is this thing, this uh
(13:24):
idea of a code, right, the honorable behavior that clearly
comes from this idea of Samurai lineage that clearly is
part of his logic and sane one must admit the
sentence of the past. Uh. And this this concept of
ethical traditions as we see in the Shield society is um.
(13:49):
He's he's started, I would say even more than a militia.
It's aiming for this movement, right, because he also, you know,
he does a little bit of a Tyler Perry thing
and does all the stuff he may the uniforms. I
believe he writes a song for the for this society,
which I have not heard, but I hope it slaps uh.
And and he uh, he is still writing the entire
(14:14):
time that he's doing this, right, He's like an every
night kind of night owl character. Is this the period
of his life that produces the sea of fertility? It
absolutely is, And it's sort of like the The Indicator,
I think most it's one of those things that so
(14:36):
very obviously aligns with his political ideas and what he
thought how he thought Japan was in crisis at the time.
It's a it's a series of four novels, all of
them are interlocking. It follows the same narrative protagonist as
he lives through from nineteen twelve through nineteen seventy five,
and naturally, that's a very very very meticulously select did
(15:00):
period because this is the period of modernization, Postmaji restoration,
this is the period of the war and imperial expansion
and things of that nature. And ultimately what he ends
up finding is that what the book ends up rehearsing
is this constant, kind of again backward looking, kind of
like reverent nostalgia for this path that is dying, and
(15:23):
this figure from the narrator's life who dies as a
very young man, and then subsequently throughout the rest of
the books is reincarnated in new forms as a kind
of place holder for this old this old life, this
old time that cannot by any means survive as Japan
modernizes and continues to modernize. The figure that is reincarnated
(15:44):
in these novels is always ostensibly doomed to die young,
which is also very thematically tied to where this all
goes at the end um this obsession with aging, this
obsession with losing things, whether that's the body or even consciousness.
Even for as much of a nihilist as Mishima was,
(16:04):
he seemed to be absolutely concerned with sort of being
around in some way of a sort of that kind
of reproduction of life that goes on into perpetuity, that
preserves the way things were, so people have something to
sort of put a hand on and and and know
where we came from. It's one of those things that's
utterly understandable. I think, like we think of things in
(16:26):
terms of legacy and stuff like that, and and sort
of making sure that we remember things. And one of
the things I think that Mishima does get correct. And
I'm coming at this from a left wing perspective, to
be fully to full disclosure, to be fully transparent. Um.
As the market and globalism is sort of like expanded
over the course of the last fifty years, especially, time
(16:47):
seems to have gone through changes that reflect that UH,
and people are increasingly remembering less and less and less
so for instance. You know, it's interesting when he says
we need to acknowledge the atrocities we committed during World
War Two because it's absolutely important to our ethics and
our character that we have a conscience and that we
take account of these things. The same could be said
(17:09):
of America's past and present. The same could be said
of England, Germany, especially Italy, all of this thing. Anybody
who has had any nation that has an idea or
concept of national characters um seems to be in like
lockstep with this constant movement forward. At the expense of,
you know, accounting for where this all comes from, I'll
(17:30):
sell you Germany seems to do quite a good job
at it. I mean they even have. Like I've mentioned
this before because I'm a big fan of overly long
the descriptive single German words. But there's a there's a
word describing collective guilts over the atrocities of the Holocausts,
Bavanian Heights, Bivalti gum And I was in berlin Um
for for a trip um last earlier this year, and
(17:51):
a lot of the museums that are named after Nazi
you know, officials or or sympathizers at the very least
like the Bodha Museum, they had a whole wing devoted
to reconciling that legacy and sort of course correcting, um,
you know, the legacy of of what the museum stood
for now and all of that pertains kind of to
(18:12):
that collective national kind of identity. So that really is
it's difficult to do. It requires buy in on a
very large scale to do it correctly. Um, And I think,
you know, I think that's something that they're very much
fascinates me as well. Yeah, it's still a struggle. You know.
You look at the sort of debate surrounding CRT and
things of that nature in the past two years that
(18:33):
have been very public and vocal, and there really does
seem to be and again it's that reactionary nostalgia, right,
that feeling that the natural order of things was this
and there was nothing wrong about it actually, and what
you do to sort of prop that up is to
deny that things happen, or to sort of like make
them less of a sort of anvil in the public consciousness,
(18:55):
you know, right, And for anybody listening along at home,
CRT is shorthand for critical race theory, which is not
really what it's being advertised as in oppositional media. The
folks who are against it are playing kind of fast
and loose with the reality of that that kind of study.
But what it's meant to be is just acknowledging reality,
(19:16):
and it's just being now used instead of a weapon
to say, oh no, no, no, you're trying to shove
all this you know, left wing ideology down the thirds
of our children. And what it really kind of means is,
let's just be a little more even handed with our
description of of of history. It's also college levels, it's
not anyway, that's that's the primary um. That's the primary cynical,
(19:37):
misleading statement that I'm talking about. But to to your
you guys, excellent points about the idea of moving on
or acknowledging the past. Folks, wherever you live, whatever your
quarner or neck of the global woods, maybe you'll see
the individual mileage may vary on a state actor level.
When I've been in Belgium before, by the way, like
(20:00):
not too far away from Germany, of course, there's not
a lot of talk about the atrocities in the Congo.
I've spent some time in Japan. There's you know, super
not a lot of talk about stuff that went down
in mainland China in World War Two or in Korea.
And so we see that again when I say we
are the stories are we tell ourselves, I'm not just
(20:21):
talking about the micro cosmic individual level. I'm talking about
the macro cosmic state level or nation level. And this
is something that Mishima is tapping into. One of the
strangest things that happens with the Shield Society is Mishima
does this one a d the U tease so beautifully Zach.
(20:43):
In part one of our series, he says, you know,
I gotta keep my I gotta you know, like offspring,
I gotta keep them separated, right, my literary life and identity,
my nationalistic military stuff, at least when applied to the
Shield Society. I was interested to find that he did
not think literary youth who would have been just like
(21:06):
him when he was younger, right, very similar. He didn't
think they were suited for the Shield Society. So there's
one exception, and it's him. I found that very interesting. Well, again,
it's that that contradiction that that insecurity, that tension between
being a man of action and being a man of letters,
There's a quote from his book Kyoko's House, which is
(21:28):
featured prominently in the film Mishima Life and Four Chapters,
this notion there's an actor there who who It's almost
like a refrain in the story. You know, stage blood
is no longer enough, letters are no longer enough, thought
is no longer enough. You have to act. And these
were things that he wrote very openly about, this kind
of sense that what we do sort of like engaging
(21:51):
in philosophy letters. Even his contempt for what he termed ideology,
which is I'm sorry, sort of interchangeable with politics. He
can't escape it. Um. It is always kind of in
service of this thing where it's like we can talk
until the cows come home, but when things really come
to a head, there has to be a man of
action or a woman of action, a person of action,
(22:13):
someone there to actually move the needle in some meaningful way.
And he took a he took great pains near the
end of his life to at least appear to be
that person, surrounding himself with people that he deemed of
that character, and his participation in debates within the academic
circles of the time. We're strangely very fraught, but also
at the same time begrudgingly respectful. Uh. The New Left
(22:37):
was arising during this period, as was the New Right,
in the wake of his work within his militia and
things like that, and one of the things that each
of them found was like this sort of simpatico kind
of set of ideologies, this idea that Japan had been
kind of set on a path by America specifically to
sort of denounce itself, to denounce its history, and to
(22:58):
become sort of like a pet project, for lack of
a better phrase. And he really resented that, and the
New Left also resented that. A great deal. Anti Americanism
was a major component of both the far right and
the far left of the period, and Mishama seemed to
be this sort of intermediary figure. Like in the last
(23:18):
years of his life, he openly debated people at universities,
and you know, there's always like this sort of because
this is a very violent time. Their students occupying Nehon
University and University of Tokyo eight thousand riot cops, their
struggle sessions within these New Left movements that resulted one
to four people dying between the years of nineteen seventy one,
two thousand three, Like, it's such a politically fraught time
(23:41):
that we don't hear much about because our entire understanding
of this place, and I think many places that we
don't have a close relationship to are just unfortunately as
it's kind of far away exotic colony wherein like they
are all of these political affiliations, these political conflicts that
are unfolding people you young people being killed by occupation
(24:02):
forces secretly. Like, it's so fascinating to see how, especially
around sixty eight, where all the other labor and leftist
movements are arising worldwide and protest of like the emerging
new neoliberal order. You see all of these things happening,
and it is happening everywhere, and to have that so
diminished in our discussion of history is just fascinating to
me and dangerously convenient people. Yeah, and that's why I
(24:27):
think that's a danger. You know, we have to remember
history is a conversation, right, and it's uh, Faulkner was
right when he said the past isn't past, you know,
it affects us today. So let's dive into this period
we're talking about, let's say nineteen sixty nine through the seventies.
We know that per your research, you site a wonderful
(24:50):
article in the Paris Review. We know that around nineteen
sixty nine is when Mishima starts seriously plau to take
his own life, starts really thinking about this. Uh. This
is also the time he has a big show for
the first anniversary of the Shield Society. I thought there
(25:10):
was a very neat, almost Capote esque note to this.
He invites a hundred guests, some from all over the world,
many from Japan, and if he didn't make it, he
never talks to you again. That's it. You have this,
This disrespect shall not stand. Uh where when we talk
(25:32):
about him sort of planning to take his own life,
becoming increasingly militaristic, and when he's uh he resigns from
the Symposium on Culture and stuff, he's really doubling down
on this more militaristic aspect. How connected is the Japanese
public with this? If if you ballparked it, like, if
(25:53):
you're a person in Japan here in the late nineties,
sixties or at least seventies, is there a common opinion
about Mishima or is it more again just sort of
you see what you want to see in a public figure.
I mean a lot of that comes down to again,
that cult of personality, that ostentatiousness. I mean it, he
(26:15):
remains a kind of not necessarily marginal culturally, but certainly
somebody who's increasing kind of participation of these things is
is seen as kind of ridiculous, absurd um. And one
of the things that's important to remember again is that
like the right wing did not like him, the left
wing had a grudging respect for him, but found him
(26:36):
to be quote an anachronistic guerrilla and um, I'm serious.
And it was often met with threats of violence on
both sides. And it seems to me like it's it's
it's so difficult to pen these things down because we
don't know the man. We can't know the man. There
seems to be something of like the death drive at
the center of all of this stuff, which is a
(26:57):
point that I think we can get to later on.
I don't think necessarily cared at the end of his
life how he was received so much so that like
as much as he wanted to be seen at nothing
if nothing else, is a man of action and all
that entails. And you get to the point where he's
doing these controversial things as an openly gay man who
(27:17):
surrounds himself with with college age men, and because of
his status as a literary figure, there's things were sort
of controversial and met with like a very skeptical eye.
Although it is plausible that he saw that as a
modern continuation of samurai tradition. Absolutely, and that's sort of
something we've lost in this discussion and their themes in
(27:38):
the book, In many of the books where you know,
the sort of love between an older boy and a
younger boy is is kind of a recurring motif and
in fact, like um, one of the things that comes
out at the conversation surrounding his death is how like
common a phenomenon this was, even even in this sort
of ty shoe or not even in the post Meji restoration,
that's not something they would have embraced publicly. It was
(28:00):
like absolutely, you know, an open secret maybe, but definitely
not you know, something that would be you know touted
or like you know, even like emphasized in historical accounts. Right, absolutely, yeah,
I know that's spot on. So he does not become
this this kind of like firebrand, this very public figure
in the way that he probably wants. And you know
(28:22):
that's indicative of the reception of the parade. It's indicative
in the reception for his referendum for conscripting ten thousand
civilians into the SDF, And it's also in the quizzical
response given to this militia um, which is truly like
a very absurd thing for a writer of novels to
be doing in any historical context, much less than nineteen
(28:44):
sixties and seventies. Right, it maybe makes more sense if
you are a if if you flip the evolution, right,
if you are a military individual of note, and then
later you write novels that for some reason, is it
transition that I think more people find understandable, Zach, I
(29:06):
want us to go to I want us to go
to November nineteen seventy. This is where Mishima gets heckled.
They heckle the heck out of him. Uh, And can
this speech that he gives that is I think it's
supposed to be ten minutes. It's not about literary literary matters.
(29:29):
It's not a it's not a performance of poetry or
a meditation on the nature of the soul. He is
at a balcony where he is giving a ten minute
I think he means it as a persuasive argument about
his political theories, and in terms of being well received
(29:52):
on a scale of one to ten, this is like
a negative two, negative three. So one of the things
that that we kind of have in uh tiptoeing around
here is that this was a this was a hostage
situation and attempted Kudata on the morning of November he
(30:16):
and several members of the Tatokai, the Shield Society. UM.
What they end up doing is they storm, but they
have an official meeting with the general, their general kanne
Toshi Mashita. There's, of course, no expectation that anything is
going to go wrong. This seems to be an utterly
cordial event. And in fact, that morning Mishima had dropped
(30:39):
off the final pages of the final novel of the
Sea of Fertility, the Decay of the Angel that morning,
which is in and of itself, is this highly symbolic
performative gesture. UM. He was then taken hostage by the
members of the Shield Society General Machida, that is, and
then Mishima ascended the balcony and then gave this speech
(31:00):
that basically was designed to incite all of the the
sort of servicemen in the garrison to um denounce the
occupation government, to denounce the charters that had sort of
conscripted the Japanese military to this kind of defense exclusive status,
um the sort of re elevation of the emperor to
(31:21):
his status within society, because again, he didn't feel the
emperor should have abdicated in the way that he did,
felt that they should acknowledge war crimes, did not feel
that the emperor should have walked away from his traditional
place within Japanese society. And then after finishing this address,
which he intended to make for half an hour, within minutes,
(31:43):
this group of young servicemen, uh, seven minutes are just
berating him with insults, madman, idiot Japan? Is it peace?
Do you think he was? Was he expecting that or
was this shocking to him to do a degree or
was he just sort of like a little bit he
losing it. This is up for contention and something that
I think we'll get into it at the end of
(32:04):
the episode. I personally don't believe that anybody who's serious
about a project like this knows that this is doomed
to fail. Right that taking six or so of your
best chaps to the to the military base with swords
and thinking that you're going to overthrow the government seems
(32:24):
like an absolutely hubristic kind of thing, like total performative,
absolutely performative. And so what ends up happening is that
he's being jeered by all of these people. He then, yeah,
it's it's really intense um and probably no doubt humiliating
if he is capable of feeling humiliation on that level.
(32:45):
We'll get to that stuff in a moment. But he
immediately withdraws from the balcony, and this is a trigger
warding for violence, takes the serum the ceremonial cross legged
seat on the ground, jam's a dagger into his abdomen
and then draws it across it. And then after that,
the attendant that's selected for the final act of seppuku,
(33:06):
which is kaishaku, which is the ritual beheading which puts
the committer out of their misery. This young man named
Marita Massa Katsu, somebody who has in the intervening years
been speculated to have been Mishima's last lover, draws the katana,
makes the swing and then fails to cleanly behead him.
(33:28):
So this is already itself a tragedy that is very
quickly becoming farce in a way that I don't think
even Mishima would have appreciated as morbid as his sort
of sense of humor and since of the world was.
So what ended up happening was that somebody else stepped
in a practice kindo expert, not an expert, but a
(33:49):
kindo practitioner. Why didn't they let him do it in
the first place, man, it seems like that with a
prerequisite would at least be that you've like, trained with
a sword to some degree. This kid seems to have
just botched it. Well, that status of being Mishima's favorite
probably has a lot to do with that makes sense.
But he steps in, finishes the job, and then Morita
(34:10):
himself commits seppuku on the grounds of having disgraced himself
by not being able to commit the final act of
the riches. That's meta right there. So basically what you
have is this incredibly bloody, awful scene, something that is
in fact stripped straight from the fiction of Mishima himself,
(34:31):
This ritual suicide in the name of kind of restoring
national character. The two heads of these men side by
side on the carpet, just absolute carnage and then um
obviously scandal, just something that had never happened in modern
Japanese public life. And mind you, up to this point
there had been political assassinations, especially within right wing circles.
(34:55):
There were a number of incidents where right wingers would
would come upon leftist authors or academics and openly murdered
them in public. Um at some point they were like
a sort of right wing elements that were flying planes
into buildings and things of that nature. Like again, this
is incredibly conflicted fraud politically time and it reaches this
punctuation mark the death of the most popular Japanese author
(35:17):
in the world in the most curious and absurd of circumstances.
This anachronistic act that can't help but resemble pageantry more
than anything that would be like a kind of expression
of a real politic. And I think ultimately that's where
we kind of end up going with all of this stuff,
is like the sort of open questions, the ambiguity whether
(35:37):
or not Mischimo is absolutely serious about this plot working,
or whether if not this was all just a pretense
for something else. Yeah, it's a good question, Zac, because
also you know, to the point about pageantry, the suicide
is planned or at lea see times it seems to
(35:57):
coincide with the opening of the Appendese Diet, which is
the Japanese legislature. He also has very specific wishes about
how his Buddhist name is rendered postmortem. Uh. He needs
to be dressed in his Shield Society uniform. He bluntly says,
(36:18):
I die not as a literary man, but entirely as
a military man. And when we when we get to
these these questions, and you phrase it so beautifully, man,
the puzzling ambiguous questions. I think this is one of
the most fascinating parts of the story for you and
(36:40):
for me as well. Honestly, do you think this is
in Mishima's mind which we can't totally read. Do you
think he sees this, as you say, a punctuation mark.
Do you think this is meant to impart some sort
of lesson or statement to the people of Japan at large?
(37:00):
I think, and again, this is all just speculation and interpretation,
which is about as valuable as um probably a pocket
full of lint in many cases. But The thing about
this is is that I've already brought up this sort
of doomed to failedness of this enterprise, the kind of
absurd um hubris that goes into committing attempting to commit
(37:20):
kudata with a group of like several student aged men
armed exclusively with bladed weapons. To me, I think what
this is trying to impart, which is something that even
in his sort of like the notes that he left
to his wife surrounding this plot, which is very strongly
suggested this was the plan, so he told his wife
and this is a quote. Even if I'm not immediately understood,
(37:43):
it's okay because I'll be understood by the Japan of
fifty or a hundred years time. Which is such a
tragic kind of um thing to say, because I don't
think that's the case at all. I think it's happened,
it's not going to happen. The ambiguity of the thing,
the sort of performative absurdity of the thing, it kind
of preclude any real interpretation of understanding of what all
(38:03):
of this actually was. And the thing that the film
seems to try to sort of impart on all of this,
and the film mishim in Life of Four Chapters. And
you know the photographs that he had taken of himself
in the throes of many different suicides in the final
days of his life. Photographs that he himself meticulously composed
but had shot by somebody else. His his sort of
(38:24):
ideas about James Dean and like sort of dying beautifully
at in the young age. Like it very much seems
that Mishima could not be a man of action and
understood this inherently. M hm. His body at that point
was already in decline. He he was conscripted into the
military during the war in the final years of it.
(38:45):
He did not make it into service. And the film
Mishima in Life of Four Chapters implies that he in
fact played up his his his asthma symptoms so as
to avoid service. And the thing is too that that's
where all of the body billing comes from, this trying
to sort of like make himself this like stone cut figure,
(39:05):
this man of action. There's another lovely scene in the
film where he's at a dance hall where young men
are dancing with one another and he has a partner
and the partner places his hand on his shoulders and
mind you, this is Mishima in top physical form and says,
your shoulders are kind of flabby, and Mishima is absolutely
inconsolable about this, and just like leaves without saying anything,
(39:27):
and like in tears, like invisible tears, leaves the dance hall,
and then later in the night goes to a pay
phone outside of this young man's apartment and calls him
and essentially says, you're young and beautiful and I am
old and dying, so please be tender in the future
with anybody you meet. And it's this incredibly lovely scene
that I think also gives away a lot of this
(39:49):
guy's personality and sort of the anxieties surrounding the simple
fact that, you know, his literary career, while still fruitful,
was sort of on the wye. He wasn't taken seriously
as an actor. Um, he wasn't taken seriously as a
political ideal logue somebody whose influence and body were declining,
(40:09):
at least to him at a rate that was just
he couldn't abide it. Well, it's a hard thing to
wrap your head around in general. I mean, you know,
just the idea of you know, being replaced or you know,
getting older and feeling you know, if you're if you're
someone who seeks fame, and the way that this guy
obviously did to kind of base your whole personality around
(40:30):
you know, this character you've created yourself, and no longer
does it kind of fly anymore, And then who are
you at that point? Especially since you know, he was
kind of considered soft and weak and the whole Grandmother's situation,
and now he styled himself as this like macho kind
of you know, warrior kind of figure, and then that's
starting to waite too, So it really does seem like
(40:51):
he was kind of on this doomsday course the whole time. Zach.
You mentioned from the start that even in his writing
he sort of fancied himself of this sort of tragic
martyr type figure. Absolutely again that notion of stage blood
not being enough, that noted, that notion of that tension
between action and inaction, um, the life of the mind
(41:12):
versus the body, and quite frankly, and this is sort
of like the point that I've been kind of gesturing
towards throughout the whole thing. This is a type of
neurosis that reactionary nostalgia tends to engender the crisis of
the crisis of masculinity and modern times for instance, right,
the men's right stuff, you know, these figures that style
themselves is like these sort of these you know these men, right, uh,
(41:37):
these moral compasses exactly, and you know, obviously like here
it's a the inflection point is like Western philosophy, antiquity, etcetera.
There's so many similarities between me that and Mishuma's attitude
surrounding the aesthetics and the sort of ethics of Japan
and how those two are tied. And I think one
of the things that these people usually run into, and
I think should run into, is that aesthetic can be
(42:01):
politically inflected. It is not politics. Culture will generally tend
conservative regardless, because that's the nature of consensus, for better
or worse. And what we end up with is a
situation where you have a group of dispossessed people who,
rather than locating where their dispossession comes from, they reached
back into a past that in many cases they did
not even live. They have no relationship to an aesthetics
(42:23):
and philosophy political systems, and they think, well, that was
obviously something that is upheld as brilliant something that is
upheld as good and just you know, like we can
talk as much about the ancient Greeks as we want,
but the number of things that we would find a
morally pernicious about those systems really do leave a bad
taste in the mouth if you take any of this
(42:43):
stuff seriously beyond the aesthetic component. And Mishima seems to
me was a philosophically inclined person. If you read his writings,
he's not a slouch in this regard. He may have
had open contempt for the life of the mind and
intellectuals and things of that nature, but that's because he
was one of them. Yeah, And that double standard that
he imposed on himself, like I said, it cleaves you
(43:04):
in half and you don't really have much of a
place to go. Yeah, because I think that's I think
that's tremendously a stupe zack. And when we look at
Mishima's legacy today, you know, um, I actually first learned
of Mishama not in college, but on my first trip
(43:25):
to the Agoya because some writer friends they're wanted to
talk about Mishima with me. And it after you hear
this story, folks, if you've never heard of this author.
It may sound surprising that this person is still so
highly lauded in the literary world and so widely read
in Japan and abroad, but he really is that talented.
(43:50):
You can be a talented person and still have torturous
things in your psychology, in your being with which you
wrestle throughout your life. UM. I feel that it is
incredibly important anytime we discussed the topic that touches on
the nature of self harm, it is incredibly important for
(44:10):
us to say that if you are a loved one
are dealing with challenging issues, do not hesitate to reach out.
There are tons of worthwhile free resources available to you.
Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week here
in the US. You can reach out to self harm
(44:31):
suicide crisis lifelines. UH. There is the old ten digit
one one eight zero zero to seven three talk. That's
one eight zero zero two seven three eight to five
five and thank goodness, as of this summer, you can
also simply dial nine eight eight UH speak with someone.
(44:53):
Your health and well being is more than worth it.
And that's just that's our disclaimer. We want to bookend
this series with but UH, honestly, you know this makes
you want to go back and reread more. Mishima Zach,
I don't know about the everybody else. Also the friend
that the mutual friend of ours, Zack and Ben. You
you've met him as well. Peyton Fisher, friend of the podcast,
(45:14):
loaned me this DVD when we were in high school
together and I totally slept on it. I never watched it,
and I returned it to him and I I copped
to that recently and he was just kind of a gas.
So I really do need to get this film, which is,
by the way, directed by Paul Strader, who wrote UH
Taxi Driver was a very important UM collaborator with UH.
(45:35):
Francis Ford Coppola as well UM scored by the incredible
Philip Glass. I believe George Lucas and Coppola had or
was it Scorsese had production credits in this. I think
all three had production credits. There was a there was
a concerted effort on both Lucas and Coppola specifically as
well throughout the eighties to bring Japanese or Japanese sort
(45:55):
of deemed films to the United States. Kagemusha was executive
produced by Lucas and co Blue as well, and with this,
I believe we we have to say thank you again,
doctor Zach. One night over sick down, a doctor appeared.
But this was no normal doctor. Who's there? It's Zack
(46:17):
Zach who the doctor named Zach and he's here to
bill your scraps just for Colledge pett is cat teaching
history books at stop. Let's go with other things. Yeah,
(46:40):
that'll work, Zack. We're trying that nickname on. We're gonna
take it around the street, take it, drive it down
the block, and see how it feels. Thank you again
so much. And as we said in part one, I
think you mentioned the snool. Uh. Very excited to have
you on the team. Uh. You bring such a fresh perspective.
(47:04):
Love the stories that you are finding. And I hope
you had a good time. We pulled you in for
your first We pulled you into deep water for your
first odd air appearance. Doc Zach. Are are you how
you feeling about coming back on in the future. No, absolutely,
probably for some lighter subject matter, I hope, but UH
(47:24):
do for sure. But I mean, it really is like
it's hard to just explain why this guy was so
important And just a couple of sentences which I think
maybe why I did sleep on that film because I
couldn't easily wrap my head around it. And I think
my younger stelf was maybe a little, uh, a little
less willing to take the plunge, you know, but it
really is. You know, you've got so much stuff out there.
This guy's work is available, the film that we're talking about,
(47:47):
But just what a guy that kind of controlled the
narrative of his life. It's such an interesting way because
I am still kind of the mind that this ending
was orchestrated, you know, to a degree, like he walked
in there and no going full well what was going
to happen? And to his credit, you know, it's still
the object of speculation. We're still reading him. We're still
(48:08):
watching Schrader's film, which I can't stress enough is is
gorgeous both formally narratively thematically um My in my mind,
Schrader's best film. Um certainly worth a watch on the
Criterion channel if you have that um and read the
sound or read the sound the waves if you want
something a bit more traditional and less queasy, But if
you really want to dive deep with Mishima, highly suggest
(48:29):
the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which is one of
the most stark depictions of mental disturbance, um neurosis and
sort of spiritual awakening that I have ever read. Well
written books are not always happy books, folks, So let
the let the reader be aware. But do do also
(48:50):
check out Maschuma's work if you haven't yet. In the meantime,
we'd also love to hear from you, fellow Ridiculous Historians,
who were some other authors that you feel have a
body of, you know, canonical literature as well as a
personal life outside of literature that many people may not
(49:11):
be aware of. We'd love to hear your suggestions. You
can find us on Facebook where we're Ridiculous Historians. We're
still working on the vision board from our very first episodes.
I don't think we got the passwords in the MySpace yet.
No no, no, no, it's okay, it's okay, we were
working on it. We'll get right back to you on that.
Huge thanks to Zach Williams of course, Alex Williams, uh,
(49:32):
Max Williams, all the Williams, the Williams Is, the Williams Williams.
Yeah sure, um, thanks Chris for us. Jodis here in Spirit, Eves,
Jeff co Jonathan Strickland, all the hits. Thanks to you, Ben,
This is a great, great conversation. Thanks to you knowl.
We'll see you next time. Books. For more podcasts, form
(49:58):
my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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