Background
Mitsuyasu Maeno was born Shimoichiro Maeno in about 1947. He attended classes in acting at the University of California in 1967. Maeno was married twice, and both marriages ended in divorce. His troubled personal life also included a failed suicide attempt.
According to his father, Maeno came under the influence of the right-wing and ultra-nationalistic philosophies of the writer Yukio Mishima. In November 1970, Mishima had attempted to incite the Self-Defense Forces to overthrow the 1947 Constitution of Japan. When his efforts to restore Japan to a wartime samurai ethic failed, Mishima committed ritual suicide.
In contrast to the vocal right-wing, numbering approximately 120,000 in 1976, the "secret" or "romantic" rightists which Maeno joined harbored a hatred of Japan's 1947 "Peace Constitution", and adhered to the samurai beliefs of bushidÅ. According to contemporary estimates, this group numbered between 10,000 to 30,000 in the mid-1970s.
In 1971, Maeno attended a meeting of ultra-nationalists in Tokyo's Okura Hotel. Featured at the meeting was "Song of the Race", a composition by right-wing leader, Yoshio Kodama. The lyrics to the song, which the meeting promoted as the new national anthem, called for an overthrow of the government and a restoration of Japan's World War II Imperial policies. Kodama had been associated with gangsters and ultra-nationalism since the war years, and had served two years in prison as a Class A war criminal. One of the most powerful figures in post-war Japan, he was largely responsible for the yakuza's resurgence. Though Maeno had no real political connections, he came to admire Kodama as an ultra-nationalist leader.
Read more about this topic: Mitsuyasu Maeno
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)