A Study On Cultural Nationalism In Yukio Mishima's Work

As a representative writer of post-war Japan,Yukio Mishima’s personal life and aesthetic creations are extremely complex and indistinguishable.With the massive influx of Western culture after the war,the continuous encroachment on traditional Japanese culture,and the disappearance of traditional spirits and values,Mishima began to search for ways to save postwar Japan in culture,a consciousness that eventually rose to a kind of cultural nationalism,and he focused the solution to all his problems on culture.It is therefore necessary to explore the causes of Mishima’s cultural nationalist tendencies,to clarify their connotations,and to critique them calmly and objectively from a broader international perspective.This paper will be discussed in the following three parts:In the first chapter,we analyze why he is defined as a cultural nationalist in the light of the current situation of Japanese postwar society and the perspective of the image of the other in postcolonial theory.Mishima is deeply anxious about the fact that Japan became a vassal of the United States after the war,that the United States carried out top-down reforms in Japan,and that Western polity and culture transformed Japan,and that traditional society fell apart.Chapter 2 analyzes the cultural nationalism in Mishima’s works.Mishima was greatly influenced by aristocratic education and Japanese Romanticism,and his works are full of aristocratic and samurai spirit and traditional Japanese aesthetics,and he wants to revive the traditional national spirit of "the two ways of literature and martial arts" and advocates more and more radicalism.The third chapter examines Mishima’s cultural nationalism.In the early stages of his work,Mishima was not interested in the situation of post-war Japan,and he was absorbed in his own aesthetic world.In the later stages of his work,Mishima turned his perspective to the real world and searched for a remedy to save the national spirit in the most traditional doctrine and spirit,but he did not explore how to transplant the ancient spirit to the rapidly changing modern Japan.His classical ideas were successful in literature,but when they came to the outside world,they were too rigid and lost the ground of reality.