Takeshi Dylan Sadachi, Writer & Content Producer
In this third piece, I turn to Yukio Mishima. He was queer (or at least MSM- a man who had sex with men), a sad boy, a fascist, a modern samurai, and a critical thinker. His often contested legacy complicates how we understand the intersection of queerness, ultranationalism, and far-right politics in Japan..
I was in Shimoda, a seaside onsen town just a train ride from Tokyo. Walking down a rustic street, I came across an old confectionary shop with a faded façade. In the window was a handwritten sign: “Yukio Mishima’s favorite madeleine.” My partner and I passed by at first, but curiosity got the better of us. After pacing back and forth, we stepped inside. The shop displayed photographs of Mishima. According to the owner, Mishima was a frequent summer visitor to this resort town and once told them that their madeleine was the best in Japan. An interesting selling point, I thought… It's not as if Mishima was an authority on zesty French cakes. Yet that single, alleged comment has kept this tiny shop alive for more than a century.
For most Japanese people, Mishima is a name you absorb almost by osmosis. As a child, you know him vaguely as a writer. As you grow older, you might learn he was a great one. Later still, you hear about his dramatic death. At some point, perhaps in passing, you also pick up that he was very interested in men. By the time I was in middle school, I knew, as did most of my classmates. It was oddly “matter of fact,” rarely questioned, just one of those ambient facts that drifts into your awareness.
Mishima, the “Bad Gay”
Where do I start? Even outside of Japan, Yukio Mishima is perhaps one of the most talked-about figures in Japanese literature and, controversially, in queer history.
In my previous piece, Before LGBT: Post-war Queer Entertainment & Print Culture in Japan, I mentioned his name often in relation to (other) queer icons. Whether we can truly call him queer or a queer icon is debated; what is certain is that he himself remains a deeply contested figure.
Many historical figures did not “come out”, in today’s sense. Regardless of how he actually identified his sexuality, his fame is well deserved. The way he is remembered and imagined in public memory makes him relevant to discussions of queerness in Japan. His status as “queer icon” is not debated because we question his sexuality per se or because he was married to a woman, but because of his dramatic turn—a fascist political activism that culminated in no less than an attempted military coup d'état and a ritual suicide. The BBC, for example, has described him as “infamous”[1].
The popular podcast series Bad Gays, by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller (which I personally enjoyed a lot) explores the lives of “evil and complicated queers.” In their book version, Mishima is the sole figure chosen from Japan[2]. The premise is fascinating: we often assume queer people hold progressive or inclusive political views, and we tend to project a certain morality onto historical queer figures that resonate with us. Hence, when someone is queer but evil, it is “complicating” and even “contradictory” for some. So how should Mishima, his sexuality and his actions be remembered? Or, perhaps more importantly, what does he represent in the wider landscape of politics then and now?
In a country so often described as “conservative,” how do a celebrated writer’s “non-normative” desires and “scandalous” actions become part of collective memory? For those who pass the madeleine shop, what comes to mind when they see Mishima’s name, what associations lead them, in the end, to step inside and taste the cakes?
This article is not a biography. To cover Mishima’s entire life would be a Herculean task, and there are excellent biographies already. Instead, I want to sketch the trajectory from his homosexuality-inflected literary career to his turn to far-right politics, and to consider how this “contradiction” still shapes queer political discussions today.
Early Life and “Queer” Literature
Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925 to a relatively wealthy family. He showed an early interest in literature, reading Oscar Wilde, Raymond Radiguet, and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki by the age of twelve[3]. By his late teens, through diligent submissions to literary journals, he was already being noticed as a prodigy by a niche circle. Around this time, he adopted his pen name “Mishima Yukio,” leaving behind his birth name, Kimitake Hiraoka.
He clearly was a man of art and culture. His early life revolved around poems, novels, and philosophical treatises. As a young adult, he was fluent in English and German, he was also academically gifted, graduating as valedictorian. But his frailty, often bullied for being pale and skinny, made him self-conscious, especially in a wartime society that prized masculine strength. He did not pass the military conscription, which is a blessing (at least many men secretly thought so at the time) but it would later haunt him.
After 1945, under the U.S.-led Allied Occupation, Japan’s publishing world was subject to censorship; anything critical of the U.S. or its policies. It was in this environment that Mishima began to establish his career, rising steadily through the late 1940s and 1950s. He entered Japan’s elitist but vibrant literary scene of rival cliques, journals, and critics, where networking was crucial.
His early works quickly made an impact. The semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask (1949) explored a narrator’s awareness of his same-sex desire, attempts at heterosexual love, and painful self-consciousness, often described as Dionysian in the Nietzschean sense.
Forbidden Colors (published in two parts, 1951 and 1953) followed an embittered older writer and a beautiful gay youth who conspires with him to take revenge on women[4].
These works placed Mishima within artistic currents that embraced homoeroticism and gender ambiguity, as discussed in my last article. They also made him a reference point for queer cultural history in Japan.
“Mishima Incident”
None of this early career was especially controversial from today’s point of view.
The controversy came later. As the Bad Gays podcast notes, many ambiguously queer cultural figures (like Morrissey, also featured in the podcast) have shifted toward reactionary politics later in life. However, one big difference is that Mishima’s little radical view did result in an attempted military coup. This is commonly referred to as, “Mishima Incident” of 1970.
At age 45, Mishima entered a Self-Defense Forces (SDF) base in central Tokyo with members of his private militia. They took the commandant hostage, and Mishima gave a speech urging SDF members to overthrow Article 9 of the Constitution, which prohibits Japan from having an official military or waging war. He then committed samurai-inspired ritual suicide, seppuku. (Along with him, a 25-year-old Waseda University student and his partner in crime also killed himself. He was said to resemble a handsome boy who worked at Ginza’s Brunswick, the gay bar where Mishima had been a regular, as mentioned in the last article. Mishima had long harbored a crush on him, and he is even said to have inspired the protagonist of Forbidden Colors.[5])
This stunned the nation, many consider it to be the most shocking incident in Japan after the war. It is important to note that the act was not hailed as heroic, and despite his literary stature, Mishima’s views found little resonance. The media called it a waste of genius: a celebrated, Nobel-nominated author dying for an ideology few took seriously. So how did a successful writer, who as we know, was seen in the gay bars of Tokyo end up seizing a garrison?
In his 30s, as his literary fame grew, Mishima’s life became increasingly public. Around this time, he encountered the captain of Waseda University’s Barbell Club and took up weight training, transforming his body, which was skinny his entire life, into a muscular physique. This new physical discipline continued until his death and reflected his long-standing fascination with Hellenistic ideals of beauty and strength. He even posed for semi-nude photographs and became a hot topic.
By the early 1960s, as debates over the revision of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) gripped the nation, Mishima began weaving political concerns more openly into his writing. The original 1951 treaty, signed under U.S. occupation, allowed American troops in Japan to operate with near-total freedom, including the right to suppress domestic protests and strikes, while not obligating the U.S. to defend Japan if attacked. After years of the Japanese government’s effort to make this treaty more equal, its 1960 revision removed the clause permitting domestic intervention and added a formal mutual-defense agreement[6].
This revision, negotiated by Japan’s major conservative and nationalist party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), many agreed it was better than the original, at least the majority of the right-wing, who saw this as a better way to repel the Communist threat of Soviet, China, and North Korea.
However, this also caused one of the biggest series of protests in Japanese history. The treaty also guaranteed the continued presence of U.S. bases on Japanese soil, effectively making Japan complicit in American imperialism. The “mutual defense” clause meant that if U.S. bases in Japan were attacked, Japan would be obliged to respond, dragging the country into America’s Cold War conflicts. In effect, the bases themselves turned Japanese soil into potential targets by the Soviet and others. For a nation still reeling from the most devastating war in history, the public consensus was clear: no war or even the possibility of being drawn into one[7].
Mishima observed these closely but did not join the protest. Like the protestors, he was against Anpo and the main part, the US’s military involvement in Japan. While the left opposed Anpo from the view of pacifism and anti-imperialism, Mishima focused on sovereignty and autonomy. For him, the issue was less about peace and more about Japan’s subordination to the foreign power, the U.S. in this case .
He began to believe more strongly that Japan needed to regain military strength, often invoking the “glory” of the imperial era as his reference point. By the mid-1960s, Mishima’s attention turned increasingly toward the SDF, Japan’s postwar de facto military.
His interest was ambivalent. On one hand, he genuinely respected the SDF for their principles and many of its core members had served in the former Japanese military. At the same time, he viewed the organization as hollow, constrained by Article 9 and dependent on the U.S. for protection. (The creation of the SDF was a result of U.S. encouragement to lessen America’s burden under the security pact, but the SDF itself does not have the authority to initiate any military operation.) Lastly, this was also about himself: military training seemed the next step in his project of physical and mental transformation. On top of weightlifting, he had also taken up martial arts in recent years and has now joined a boot camp. For Mishima, his own metamorphosis, from a bullied, skinny “literature boy” into a muscular martial artist, mirrored how Japan itself should “man up.”
After some difficult negotiations using his network, in 1967 Mishima arranged to undergo a 46-day training program, and he returned for further training several times up until 1970. This experience shaped his idea of creating a private militia: first the Japan National Guard, later renamed the Shield Society. Composed mostly of students active in nationalist politics, the group eventually grew to about a hundred members. Mishima cultivated ties with sympathetic SDF officers as well. Within this context, he began to imagine direct action, a coup that would restore Japan’s sovereignty and return the emperor to a central role. His ultimate plan was to persuade the SDF itself to rise up alongside him, a plan that culminated in the dramatic event of 1970.
[Note: this is a very simplified account of a complex incident, and I encourage you to read more.]
Sad Boy, Fascist, Modern Samurai or Critical Thinker?
There is a lot to break down, in order to make sense of him and his actions. I think the way we view him can be broken down to four aspects: sad boy, fascist, modern samurai or critical thinker. The context of Japanese history and politics, as well as Japan’s positioning in a post-colonial sense becomes the key.
First let’s break down what we mean by his right-wing tendency. In many ways, Mishima’s views overlapped with the broader right-wing of its time: he was anti-communist and wanted a stronger sovereignty of Japan. The mainstream right wing is represented by the aforementioned LDP, Japan’s largest conservative party. As the ruling party for most of the postwar era, it promoted parliamentary democracy, liberalism, economic growth, nationalism, and staunch anti-communism. As seen in the Anpo saga, the party is firmly pro-U.S. and embraces a broadly pro-globalist stance. For the LDP, the main threat was always the Cold War East, the Soviet Union and China. In this sense, the mainstream right promoted peace as a national consensus, while rejecting both fascism and any return to an emperor-centered state[8]. This is where Mishima diverged.
He, too, was outspokenly anti-communist, casting the Soviet Union and China as Japan’s enemies. But unlike the LDP, he was often characterized as “anti-U.S.” (not in the sense of hate, but in opposition to American interference in Japan and to the Pax Americana order.) Interestingly, this stance echoed aspects of the left and more progressive politics, much like horseshoe theory suggests.
For him, U.S. dominance symbolized a Japan that had been “feminized,” stripped of sovereignty and martial pride. This fixation ultimately fed into more ethnonationalist views: an idealization of “purity,” where Japan should remain as “Japanese” as possible, defined, of course, on his own terms.
His view is often discussed in the framework of Japanese new-right, which is characterized by not only the cultural conservativeness but also a critical view of the US’s military involvement. While Mishima is not credited as the earliest case, he is often quoted as the central icon and possibly inspired some to diverge from the pro-US mainstream right-wing. But even the definition of new-right did not necessarily advocate for restoring imperial rule. Hence, to this day, Mishima does represent a very specific case of politics, a rare public figure who expressed a fascist view.
Today’s narrative around Mishima often frames him as “queer but fascist.” Yet the “but” feels almost misplaced: as his sexuality was probably not central to his political views or actions. In that period, queerness was rarely articulated as a political issue that divided the political spectrum. In other words, not only was activism around sexuality largely absent, but acceptance or tolerance of queerness was also rarely a decisive factor in aligning with either the left or the right. (This will be further elaborated in the next piece, which will take up the broader question of situating queerness within progressiveness and tradition in Japan.) In that sense, it is not so much a paradox that Mishima was a fascist: even if he had been involved in progressive politics, his same-sex desire likely would not have been explicitly entangled with them.
His obsession with the nation’s defeat was intertwined with insecurities from his own early life, during the very war. Having failed the wartime military conscription and surviving while many of his male peers died in battle or in kamikaze missions, he carried a guilt that fueled both his fantasy of self-sacrifice and his dream of an imperial rebirth[9]. Mishima was, in many ways, a “sad boy,” fascinated by the aesthetics of tragedy and death, from kamikaze pilots, the samurai’s seppuku, to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. In his semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask, the protagonist experiences his first ejaculation while masturbating to a painting of Saint Sebastian, naked, bound to a post, and pierced with arrows. Two years before his own death, Mishima himself posed as Saint Sebastian in a photoshoot by acclaimed photographer Kishin Shinoyama.
What stands out more is how his cultivation of masculinity and physical strength mirrored his radical view for Japan’s re-empowerment.
I would argue that it was primarily his masculinity, entangled with the wartime and postwar context, that shaped his political imagination. Like most others, his focus was on navigating Japan’s place in the Cold War order in the shadow of its devastating defeat in World War II. He was queer and fascist, and indeed a complicated one.
In his idealization of Japanese culture, Mishima was obsessed with the “samurai spirit” as an ethos of discipline and honor. He saw samurai as the embodiment of Japanese masculinity, and romanticized their modesty, straightforward pursuit of fulfillment, and indifference to death in the name of their honor, like a form of Epicureanism in a traditional sense.
Some Japanese queer people, predominantly cisgender MSM engaged in varying degrees and directions with far-right politics, regard Mishima not merely as a representation of being simultaneously queer and ultranationalist in a nation perceived as disapproving of their sexuality, but as a kind of discursive mechanism, channeling a further historical imaginary. In this, Mishima’s sexuality, though never explicitly acknowledged by him, is retrospectively legitimatized through exogenous attributions to historical precedents of samurai, imagined as quintessentially Japanese, and through this act of projection the non-normative sexuality of those who cite him is likewise rendered more legitimate, in their imagination of authentic Japaneseness. Mishima thus becomes both a proximate modern reinterpretation and a liaison between the present and a long-vanished past, filling the gap between historically recorded Japanese homosexuality, and the present existence of these queer individuals. Additionally, the association of queer sexuality with both the samurai, as representations of Japanese hypermasculinity, and with Mishima himself, whose visibly masculine presentation was the result of deliberate effort, works to frame both Mishima’s and the predominantly male ultranationalists’ desire for men, otherwise marked as gender-deviant, into a form that can be aligned with traditional masculinity.
Thus, Mishima, both in what he projected and in what is projected onto him, enables contemporary queer men involved in ultranationalist politics to situate their identities as consonant with, rather than disruptive of, their broader ideological commitments.
Moreover, Mishima’s prestige in these conservative milieus, including among those who are neither queer nor explicitly supportive of queerness, allows his alleged desire for men to be rendered either dismissible or, in certain registers, even symbiotic with the historical idealization of Japan. In this way, Mishima’s position is consolidated as a legible figure within these circles, providing them with a prestigious icon who embodies their political views, while simultaneously creating space for the aforementioned queer right-wingers. This dynamic will be central to understanding the intersection of Japanese queer sexuality and far-right politics, and the ways in which Mishima and his persona, often refracted through their own interpretations, become implicated.
Of course, outside of certain far-right circles, Mishima today is not even seen as a divisive figure—he is rarely discussed in a positive light, especially with regard to the final years of his life. His political turn is often dismissed as madness, with discussions focusing less on whether his actions were acceptable and more on how to separate his literary brilliance from the later political activism that most deem evidence of his decline. The portrayal of him or his political views as simply “crazy” is, of course, reductive. While his imperialist and fascist views are not something I, or many others, could ever endorse, his critique of U.S. interference and Japan’s lack of agency is somewhat valid and perspicacious, especially in its time. Only a few years after the Allied Occupation ended in 1952, such criticisms were rarely spoken aloud. In that sense, Mishima was a critical thinker. Yet his solution to this quasi-sovereign status was to call for a return to imperial Japan, a deeply problematic direction.
Postcolonial Ambivalence, and the Rejection of LGBTQ+ Activism
To situate Mishima more broadly, we need to consider Japan’s postcolonial positioning, a theme that becomes crucial in the next discussion of queer people in Japan’s far right.
Japan occupies an ambivalent position vis-à-vis postcolonialism. Like many Asian nations, it feared colonization as European empires expanded in the 16th century, leading the country to close itself off strategically. This isolationist policy held until the mid-19th century, when U.S. gunboat diplomacy forcibly opened its ports. Observing China’s exploitation by Britain, Japan recognized a profound shift in power and turned to modernization following the western model; this is seen as a desperate act of “self-colonialism”, which ultimately avoided Japan losing its sovereignty. At the same time, this rapid militarization and industrialization is a move that laid the foundation for its own brutal imperial ambitions.
Despite these efforts to become an equal power, Western nations imposed unequal treaties on Japan, and in 1919 its proposal for a racial equality clause, submitted as the only POC-led global power at the League of Nations, was rejected[10][11]. These moments are often remembered as an experience of humiliation, despite its dramatic change of nation to westernize. At the same time, Japan itself pursued violent colonial expansion across Asia and the Pacific, culminating in WWII. Postwar defeat thus repeated the cycle: Japan once again found itself in a colonized position, this time under U.S. dominance, what many perceived as another era of humiliation. Yet Japan has been a major global power, undoubtedly benefiting from the “past” imperialism.
Its aggression in one sense functioned as a subversion of the West–East hierarchy and a desperate resistance to subjugation. In another sense, it expressed an ethnocentric nationalism that enacted imperialist violence and subjugation across East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific[12]. In a discussion of colonialism, nationalist and patriotic views, even when exclusionary or violent, are often seen as more “justifiable” within a decolonial frame, where they historically functioned as crucial unifying forces for oppressed peoples seeking independence from colonial powers, more subversive than supremacist, as exemplified by scholars like Franz Fanon[13]. In Mishima’s account, the longing for Japan’s past imperial power became a way to reimagine sovereignty in a nation he regarded as reduced to an American colony. Yet the “powerful Japan” he envisioned was itself an imperialist oppressor, which renders such a vision ultimately unjustifiable. Japan’s modernization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is not unique in this paradox: exclusionary or supremacist politics can be logically analyzed as beneficial in certain historical contexts while also remaining morally troubling or materially harmful.
This ambivalent positioning of Japan vis-à-vis the West, and more specifically the United States, is crucial for understanding how Japanese queer ultranationalists often dismiss LGBTQ+ activism as unnecessary or “excessive,” framing it as a foreign imposition.
This differs from some other non-Western contexts where queerphobia is justified by claiming queerness itself is a Western invention, and, for example, homosexuality is rejected on religious grounds. In Japan, the historical record of limited and contextual homoerotic practices is instead weaponized to argue that activism is either unnecessary or excessive. LGBTQ+ movements are likewise cast as “foreign” and rejected through references to Western colonial threat and postwar American dominance, recasting imported activism as a danger to Japan’s autonomy.
This historical reference operates not only as a rationale for rejecting progress but, in some cases, as an assertion of cultural supremacy, positioning Japan as not needing such activism, unlike the Christian West. Ironically, this narrative invokes the very point that Japan’s adaptation to Western morality in Meiji contributed to the erasure of homoerotic samurai culture. In this sense, the citation of history simultaneously acknowledges that the (albeit limited) tolerance of homosexuality is relegated to the past and admits dissatisfaction with the present status quo, which they blame the West for.
While particular cases of contemporary queer right-wing politics will be discussed later, Mishima functions as a way to decode this multilayered referencing of history, positioning Japan within global power dynamics and articulating nationalist narratives on an emotional level. In many ways, this operates as a politics of emotion, where feelings of humiliation, pride, resentment and supremacy circulate.
Yukio Mishima’s Legacy
Mishima was surely a complicated man. Any attempt to pin down who he “really was” will always remain speculative.
For instance, Mishima is often characterized as “anti-U.S.” or as an austere “lone wolf.” Yet, fun fact: records show he visited the United States six times, and in 1960 he went to Disneyland in California—more than two decades before Tokyo Disneyland would open. In a letter to a literary friend, he wrote he could hardly believe such a fun place existed, and often spoke of wanting to return. Only months before the coup, he even proposed a family trip to Disneyland with his wife and children so they could experience the kingdom of dreams and magic[14].
Breaking down someone’s entire persona is just as complicated as my attempt to explain why queer people in a society often perceived as “conservative” sometimes support even more “conservative” politics. His life and death, as well as its influence, was complicated: between pacifism and militarism, victimhood and perpetration, queerness and reactionary politics. Some far-right groups that emerged after his death, such as Issuikai (founded in 1972), directly cited him as inspiration. Yet even Issuikai, despite its ultranationalist tone, has at times expressed tolerance toward same-sex marriage and opposed anti-LGBT remarks by conservative politicians and shintoist figures.
As Naomi Klein reminds us, “fascism is always an attempt by the right to resolve a crisis,” and such reactionary turns are globally relevant now more than ever[15]. Each iteration, however, brings its own context, or addition. And in an era that is marked by unprecedented visibility and rights globally, the discussion of queer people engaged in far-right politics in Japan becomes especially timely.
Mishima is less a “queer icon” in any celebratory sense than an entry point into more difficult questions: how do queerness and nationalism intersect, and how do queer people themselves sometimes embrace reactionary politics? That, to me, is Mishima’s enduring relevance.
Thomas Graham, "Yukio Mishima: The strange tale of Japan's infamous novelist," BBC, 2020.
(https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201124-yukio-mishima-the-strange-tale-of-japans-infamous-novelist)Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, Verso Books, 2022.
NHK Radio, "Hyakusai Ni Naru Mishima Yukio (100 Years of Yukio Mishima)", NHK, 2020. [Radio, Japanese]
(https://www.nhk.jp/p/rs/DK83KZ8848/episode/re/LXKYG47LRY/)Mishima Yukio Memorial Museum, "Mishima Yukio: Jinbutsu (Mishima Yukio: Person)”, [Japanese]
(https://www.mishimayukio.jp/person/)News Post Seven, "Densetsu No Gei Bā Mama: Mishima Yukio No Shōsetsu Moderu Ni Natta Kako (Legendary Gay Bar Mama: The Past as the Model for a Yukio Mishima Novel)”, 2019. [Japanese]
(https://www.news-postseven.com/archives/20190905_1444161.html?DETAIL)National Archives of Japan, "Nihonkoku To Amerika Gasshūkoku Tono Aida No Sōgo Kyōryoku Oyobi Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku Oyobi Kankei Bunsho: Goshomei Genpon, Shōwa 35-nen, Dai 10-kan, Jōyaku Dai 6-gō. Bōsatsu bangō: Go 39420 (Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States of America and Related Documents: Original Signed Text, 1960 (Shōwa 35), Volume 10, Treaty No. 6. Ledger Number: Go 39420)”, Kōbunsho ni miru Nihon no Ayumi (The Progress of Japan as Seen in Official Documents), 1960. [Japanese]
(https://www.archives.go.jp/ayumi/kobetsu/s35_1960_01.html)Hiroe Saruya, "The Knot: 60-nen Anpo Tōsō Kara Miru, Shakai Undō No Igi To Shakai Hendō No Mekanizumu" (Understanding the Significance of Social Movements and the Mechanisms of Social Change through the 1960 Anpo Protests), Sophia University:, 2021. [Japanese]
(https://www.sophia.ac.jp/jpn/article/feature/the-knot/the-knot-0131/)Riki Yoshii, "Mishima Yukio O Aikon-ka Suru Uha Giin No Taerarenai Karusa (The Unbearable Lightness of Right-Wing Politicians Who Iconize Yukio Mishima)", Mainichi Shimbun, 2022. [Japanese]
(https://mainichi.jp/articles/20221126/k00/00m/040/140000c)NHK, "50 Nengo No Wakamono E: Mishima Yukio No Seinenron (To the Youth 50 Years Later: Mishima Yukio’s Theory of Youth)”, 2020. [Japanese]
(https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/special/sci_cul/2020/11/story/story_201125/)Josh Axelrod, "A Century Later, The Treaty of Versailles and Its Rejection of Racial Equality," NPR, 2019.
(https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/08/11/742293305/a-century-later-the-treaty-of-versailles-and-its-rejection-of-racial-equality)Tarik Merida, “A Japanese Anomaly: Theodore Roosevelt and Japan’s Racial Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2020.
(https://apjjf.org/2020/20/merida)Xu Guoqi, "The Japanese Dream of Racial Equality," in Asia and the Great War: A Shared History, Oxford University Press, 2016.
(https://academic.oup.com/book/10172/chapter-abstract/157738215)Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961.
Sugiyama Kinya, "Mishima Yukio Ni Okeru Kokkyō Ninshiki: Amerika O Shiza To Shite (Mishima Yukio’s Sense of Borders: Viewing from the Perspective of America), Anais do Encontro Nacional de Professores Universitários de Língua, Literatura e Cultura Japonesa, 2016. [Japanese]
(https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1390572174914352256)
Democracy Now, “End Times Fascism: Naomi Klein on How Trump, Musk, Far Right Don’t Believe in the Future”, 2025.
(https://www.democracynow.org/2025/5/5/naomi_klein_trump_silicon_valley)
