Afterword (For Young Samurai), by Yukio Mishima
"For proof of the existence of the spirit, action is needed, and for action the body is needed. For this reason, one must train the body."
Afterword (For Young Samurai)
Yukio Mishima
“Lectures on the Spirit for Young Samurai” is an essay that was serialized in the magazine Punch Oh!, and I tried to the best of my ability to speak of the problems of the spirit and morality in plain language1 so that it would be easy for contemporary young people to hear2. The spirit is a thing that is if you believe and is not if you do not, and there is no one who has seen the actual thing. Because the proof of its existence ultimately materializes through the visible (for example the body), the method of exalting the spirit by dismissing the visible is inadequate. Action is visible. It is the body that bears action. Consequently, for proof of the existence of the spirit, action is needed, and for action the body is needed. For this reason, one must train the body, this is my basic idea.
By letters and by speech, of course the spirit can be expressed. It can be expressed, but ultimately it is not proven. Consequently, for the spirit, written expression is insufficient. This is the conclusion that I myself, naturally, was led to, and influencing this conclusion is the experience that I confirmed with my own eyes of how unreliable the speech of wartime and postwar intellectuals was and how they did not take ultimate responsibility.
“Turn Tōkyō University into a Zoo” is the title that Bungei Shunjū3 gave to the transcript of my speech, but what I was trying to say with this indiscreet remark was also just that. My idea is that the Tōkyō University Problem is the event that was able to put an end to the vanity-filled loose and indolent spirit of the Japanese intellectuals of the twenty years of the postwar.
Both are “tracts for the times4” and have no relation to literature. However, it is a characteristic of eras of change and flux like now and also like the end of the Tokugawa period to compel writers to dare to write “tracts for the times.”
June 16 of the Forty-Fourth Year of the Shōwa Era (1969)
Afterword (First Appearance) For Young Samurai - Nihon Kyōbunsha - July of the Forty-Fourth Year of the Shōwa Era (1969)
砕けた表現で kudaketa hyōgen de. Lit. with broken expressions. Could also be translated as “informal language.”
耳に入りやすい mimi ni iriyasui. Lit. easy to enter the ears.
文藝春秋 Bungei Shunjū. Founded in 1923 by Kikuchi Kan, Bungei Shunjū is one of Japan’s two leading general magazines. It is slightly more conservative than Central Review, but is firmly within the mainstream.
時務の文 jimu no bun.