The Man of Sun and Steel

The Early Life

Yukio Mishima was born on January 14, 1925, in Imperial Japan. He was born as Japan was undergoing a rapid and dramatic phase of industrialization and modern militarization, a transformation that stood in complete opposition to the traditional Japanese worldview of the shoguns and samurai. Mishima and his family felt this impact directly, as they were of the warrior aristocratic stock of the samurai.

His father was a government official who worked for several imperial ministries, and his mother was from a highly educated background. However, his paternal grandmother would become the dominant influence of his childhood. She was a traditional woman who held a deeply traditional Japanese worldview. She raised him in classical literature and Kabuki theatre, as well as epic stories of loyalty and death. There is little doubt that this would affect Mishima as he entered adulthood.

This style of rearing in his childhood home produced a fierce intellectual who, even by adolescence, was a literary prodigy. But this upbringing denied him what every man with aristocratic warrior blood thirsts for: sun and steel.

As a socially withdrawn and slightly built teenager, he attended Gakushūin, a school traditionally reserved for the Japanese nobility, where he proved to be a more than capable student. As Japan entered an era of sacrifice, concluding with the final act of nuclear devastation in the Second World War, Mishima was conscripted into the Japanese military but dismissed due to a mistaken diagnosis of tuberculosis. This left him with a sense of unearned survival and a feeling of dishonor that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Early in the postwar period, he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel titled Confessions of a Mask, which made him a notable cultural voice in postwar Japan. And while his voice was celebrated, he felt in his physical being a deep existential crisis. He was reaching the conclusion that while words are celebrated, action is what history demands.

Turning Toward the Body

Mishima felt that his skill with the written word had insulated him from risk, struggle, and consequence. Words may describe death, loyalty, and sacrifice, but they are never actually demanded. For Mishima, this realization was intolerable. He came to believe that the intellect, when unrestrained by the body, becomes evasive, capable of infinite interpretation yet incapable of commitment.

It was at this point that Mishima took up physical training. He first turned to weight training in order to strengthen his body. He believed that the body, because it responds only to pain, effort, and repetition, is incapable of telling a lie. This was the steel he wanted to embrace. And steel demands action.

For him, this was not about rejecting art or the mind, but about bringing them into the proper form of the body, beauty with danger, meaning with morality. He was correcting the imbalance of his youth while attempting to embody the very ideas that words could only describe.

Sun and Steel

For Mishima, the sun represented pain, clarity, and exposure, an unshielded reality of the world. He came to this realization during military training, where he described the sun burning on his skin, and in another experience while traveling on a ship, where he described being awash in photons.

Steel represented resistance, discipline, form, and danger. He saw in it the possibilities and limits imposed by the body, by tools, by weapons, and even by morality. Together, he believed these named the very thing that modernity had robbed humanity of a direct encounter with reality, free of abstraction.

This understanding of steel was not purely symbolic. Mishima sought it in practice through martial discipline, most notably kendo, the modern Japanese art of the sword. In kendo, he encountered a form of violence that was restrained yet real, governed by ritual, distance, timing, and the constant presence of simulated death. Each strike was bound by rules, each movement subject to correction, and each mistake immediately revealed. Unlike literature, kendo permitted no interpretive refuge. The body either stood in proper form, or it failed. Steel, even in its ritualized expression, demanded commitment and imposed limits that thought alone could not escape.

Mishima came to these realizations through dissatisfaction with his own success. Literature had given him recognition, but it had also revealed its limits. Words, he concluded, allow endless interpretation without consequence. They can circle death without touching it, describe courage without demanding it, and celebrate beauty without paying its price. Language, when unanchored from the body, becomes evasive. The body does not permit such escape. It answers only to effort, pain, repetition, and time. Where the intellect can rationalize weakness, the body exposes it.

For Mishima, strength was not an aesthetic preference but an ethical necessity. A man capable of nothing, he believed, could not meaningfully claim virtue. Modern morality, increasingly detached from physical consequence, allowed weakness to masquerade as goodness. Discipline corrected this imbalance. Through repetition, restraint, and submission to form, the trained body-imposed standards that language alone could not supply. Strength did not excuse cruelty; it prevented self-deception.

In the last years of his life, Yukio Mishima carried his philosophy beyond literature and the body into action through the formation of the Shield Society (Tatenokai), a small, disciplined group of young men committed to physical training, imperial loyalty, and the preservation of what Mishima believed to be Japan’s soul. The Shield Society was not a mass movement but a symbolic one, an attempt to embody form, hierarchy, and voluntary discipline in an age Mishima saw as hollow and false. On November 25, 1970, Mishima and several members of the group entered a Tokyo Self Defense Forces headquarters, where he delivered a brief, impassioned address calling for the restoration of imperial authority and a return to national honor. When the appeal was rejected, Mishima carried out ritual seppuku, completing what he believed to be a life brought into coherence. His death was not an impulsive act; it was the final assertion of his belief that words must ultimately submit to action, and that a man’s ideals, if they are to mean anything, must be lived without compromise.

What I Have Taken Away from Sun and Steel

For Mishima, beauty was never for display. It was severe, costly, and inseparable from limits. A thing became beautiful only when shaped by resistance, discipline, danger, and the certainty of death. Mortality, far from being an obscenity to be hidden or denied, was the boundary that gave life its form. Without limits, existence dissolved into excess and abstraction; with them, it acquired proportion, clarity, and meaning. Death, in Mishima’s view, was not a morbid fixation but the final measure against which all sincerity was tested, a mystical view shared by many ancient cultures.

This belief placed him in direct opposition to modernity. The modern world seeks comfort without cost, expression without consequence, and morality without capability. It celebrates survival while hollowing out significance. Mishima was intolerable precisely because he refused these substitutions. He insisted that ideals be embodied, that beauty be paid for, and that words submit to action. In an age that anesthetizes pain and indefinitely defers judgment, his insistence on form, hierarchy, and voluntary limits could not be absorbed or neutralized. He was not merely politically inconvenient; he was existentially disruptive.

Yet Sun and Steel does not ask for imitation, nor does it demand martyrdom. Mishima’s life should not be copied, and maybe his death should be aestheticized. What remains valuable and urgent is the question he posed: how does one live without evasion? The answer was integration, the reconciliation of intellect and body, the binding of words to actions, and the acceptance of limits freely chosen rather than imposed by decay or chance. Sun and steel, in this sense, are not relics of a vanished age but principles of orientation: exposure instead of concealment, discipline instead of indulgence, and action instead of endless explanation.

In this sense, Mishima’s death echoed an ancient teaching later articulated by Julius Evola: that death, when freely chosen and faced without evasion, is not defeat but victory over mere life, and the final act of liberation from its mortal compromises.

We should all live to be men of sun and steel.