Mishima's Final Act: Suicide After Failed Coup
Yukio Mishima, Japan's most celebrated postwar novelist and a three-time Nobel Prize nominee, led four members of his private militia into the Tokyo headquarters of Japan's Self-Defense Forces on November 25, 1970. They took the commandant hostage and Mishima addressed 1,000 assembled soldiers from a balcony, urging them to rise up and restore the Emperor's direct rule. The soldiers jeered. After an eight-minute speech, Mishima returned inside and committed seppuku, ritual suicide by disembowelment. His follower Masakatsu Morita attempted to behead him but failed; another man completed the decapitation. Mishima had planned the coup and his death meticulously, delivering the final manuscript of his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, to his publisher that morning. He was 45 years old.
November 25, 1970
56 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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