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Yukio
Mishima
Yukio Mishima is one of the world’s most well-known Japanese authors. He is
famous not only for his work, which combines romantic and often startling
images of love, loss and death, but for his spectacular suicide in 1970, at
age 45. In addition to authoring over
40 novels Mishima wrote books and plays and screenplays. His three most
famous works are:
Confessions of a Mask
--- a semi-autobiographical novel about a young man’s sexual awakenings.
This was the book that brought Mishima wide international acclaim.
The Temple
of The Golden Pavilion
-- based on a true story of a monk who is so obsessed by the beauty of
Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion he burns it down.
The Sound of Waves -- a tragic love story set in a small Japanese
fishing village.
During the 1960s Mishima became interested in issues of Japanese nationalism
and espoused romantic ideas of Emperor worship and a rearmed Japan. This led
him to form a private army called the “Shield Society”. On November 25, 1970
Mishima and his followers took over an army barracks in central Tokyo.
Mishima tried in vain to enlist the army’s support for his coup, but the
soldiers would not listen. Mishima then committed ritual suicide. This act
shocked Japan which still does not understand his actions. Mishima is seen
as a hero and visionary by some and as by a fool, an embarrassment and a
symbol of a Japan that no longer exists by others. Whatever, the case, his
works and final act remains to show his genius.
For more
information please refer to the
Yukio Mishima Cyber Museum.
Henry
Scott Stokes
Henry (65) is a former Tokyo Bureau Chief of three great newspapers. The
Financial Times, whose Tokyo office he founded, The Times of London,
and The New York Times. He was born June 15, l938 in Glastonbury,
Somerset. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford
University where he obtained an MA honors degree in PPE (Philosophy,
Politics, Economics). He became Tokyo correspondent of The Financial Times
in 1964. In 1967 he was made Tokyo correspondent of The Times where he
became friends with Yukio Mishima. During the 1970`s he moved to Paris where
he wrote
The life and death of Yukio Mishima
(1974). He returned to Japan to be Tokyo Bureau Chief of The New York
Times from 1978-83. He has also written a number
of financial books on small Japanese companies.
Henry divides his time between Japan and the UK. His wife Akiko and his son
Harry live in Glastonbury, Somerset.
Mark Devlin
Mark (38) is from Glasgow, Scotland, where he studied Engineering at
Strathclyde University. Arriving in Japan in October 1989, he was an English
teacher, an Editor of financial reports and then a Network Administrator at
Jardine Fleming Securities before starting Tokyo Classified, Tokyo's
first classified ad magazine, with his wife Mary in 1994. The magazine, now
a 64-page city guide renamed
Metropolis, is the essential guide to Tokyo life and is the No.1
English magazine in Japan with 30,000 audited copies distributed each week.
In June 2000, Mark launched Japan
Today, a Japan news and information portal which is the world's
leading source of Japan news and currently ranked as the top 6000t
most popular websites in the world.
Mark lives
in Tokyo with his wife Mary and their two young children, Aran and Kara. |