Chapter 2’s four sections (the overview article) look, at a glance, like separate topics. Read carefully, though, in two places far apart, Mishima Yukio repeats one and the same claim, in different guises. In this article we set the two passages side by side and check the substance of the claim. (Page numbers below follow the edition described in the overview article. English renderings of the quotations are ToL translations.)
The first passage — “Men’s Script and Women’s Script”
In the section “Men’s Script and Women’s Script,” after saying that Japan’s masculine culture — the culture of logic and intellect — was almost entirely foreign, Mishima continues:
この影響は明治維新以後にもあいかわらず払拭されませんでした。ドイツ観念論哲学の用語が嵐のごとく日本の知識階級の用語になって流入し、あらゆる抽象概念はドイツ観念論の用語で代用されました。（p.18）
(This influence was not shaken off even after the Meiji Restoration. The terms of German idealist philosophy flowed in like a storm to become the vocabulary of Japan’s intellectual class, and every abstract concept was substituted by German-idealist terms.)
And, Mishima says, whatever corresponds to a peculiarly Japanese abstract concept was always wrapped in a mist of emotion, soaked in the humidity of feeling, and could never gain autonomy, independence, or clarity.
The second passage — near “The Habit of Savoring Prose”
The other passage lies, as a section, elsewhere — near the end of “Prose and Verse.” Mishima touches on the technique Itō Sei invented in Twelve Chapters on Women, writing kanji terms frequently in katakana, and says:
たとえば伊藤整氏が『女性に関する十二章』のなかで、頻繁に漢語を片カナで書く手法を創始しました。（p.28–29, including summary）
(For instance, Mr. Itō Sei, in Twelve Chapters on Women, originated the technique of frequently writing Sino-Japanese words in katakana.)
Writing kanji terms in katakana, Mishima says, produces a strange parody effect that strips abstract concepts of their pomposity. The kanji that had stood in stern rows are suddenly exposed, naked, as plain katakana — an effect like discovering that “what we believed was a king was, in fact, a naked king.”
What appears when the two passages are joined
Set side by side, Mishima’s line of thought comes into view.
- Japanese abstract concepts were never born from within Japanese itself; they were substituted by foreign words — Sino-Japanese, Buddhist, Confucian terms, and, after the Meiji era, German-idealist terms.
- Those abstract concepts, written in katakana, at once look comic. Because katakana strips away the “sternness” of kanji — the visual weight that conceals the fact of being a foreign word.
That is: for Mishima, the “weight” of a Japanese abstract concept comes not from the content of the word itself, but from the visual effect of the kanji character. If it looks comic the moment it is put into katakana, then that weight was never, to begin with, especially firm.
What can be confirmed in this claim
Part of this claim is a matter that can be confirmed as fact. It is a widely known fact that much of Japan’s abstract vocabulary consists of Sino-Japanese words (largely derived from Chinese classics or Buddhist scripture) or of new Sino-Japanese coinages made in the Meiji period to translate Western terms — philosophy, society, rights, freedom, and so on. The very word tetsugaku (“philosophy”) is a translation coined by Nishi Amane, part of a historical process in which Western, especially German, concepts were recast into two-character kanji compounds and took root. To this extent, Mishima’s view is not badly off the mark.
What cannot be confirmed in this claim
On the other hand, the conclusion Mishima draws from this — that Japan’s own abstract concepts, wrapped in an emotional mist, can never gain autonomy, independence, or clarity — is not a proven claim of linguistics.
First, whether a word originates as a loanword and whether that word can achieve “clarity” are separate questions. Much of English’s abstract vocabulary, too, has origins in Latin or Greek — is, in a sense, “foreign” — but that is not generally said to make English abstract concepts unclear. Mishima’s argument binds together the origin of a word and its function, without distinguishing them very much.
Second, the phenomenon that “writing it in katakana makes it look comic” is more likely a visual effect coming from Japanese orthographic habit (the convention of using kanji and kana differently) than a weakness of the abstract concept itself. It makes more sense to read this less as a claim about the content of abstract concepts, and more as an interesting observation about the Japanese writing system.
What to keep in mind when reading
First, this article has connected two separate passages on ToL’s own initiative. Mishima himself does not explicitly tie these two passages together as one argument. The reading of “one thread” offered here should be understood as ToL’s own way of reading.
Second, this argument also connects to the claim we read in Chapter 5 of the first feature — that Japanese is “thin in logic.” For Mishima, this seems to have been not a one-off thought but a consistent view running across several chapters.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Passage 1 | Abstract concepts were substituted by foreign terms such as German idealism (p.18) |
| Passage 2 | Writing kanji terms in katakana strips abstract concepts of their pomposity (p.28–29) |
| The connection | The view that an abstract concept’s weight comes from the visual effect of kanji, not its content |
| What’s confirmable | That much Japanese abstract vocabulary is Sino-Japanese or translated is a historical fact |
| What isn’t confirmable | The conclusion that foreign origin means the concepts cannot be clear is not a proven claim of linguistics |
In a nutshell — In two separate places, Mishima repeated that Japanese abstract concepts are foreign in origin; his observation about etymology holds up, but the further judgment — “and so they cannot be clear” — remains Mishima’s own essayistic view.