I'm rather confused by all that surrounds Yukio Mishima and the Tatenokai. I've gathered from the information I've found that he was a very successful writer and founder of the Tatenokai. However, I'm confused on his attempted coup d'etat and the following suicide. It's noted that his John Nathan, who wrote his biography, believed his coup d'etat was simply a pretext for his suicide, and the entire thing had to be planned. This fact is backed up by other members of the Tatenokai.
What I do not understand is what he was trying to prove. It almost feels random, as if the entirety of it was to be poetic. Can anyone shed light on this for me? Was he truly desiring to restore power to the emperor of Japan following the implementation of the "Post-war Constitution." Following this up to make it more confusing, a literary award was established to honor his life only 18 years after his suicide, and only 11 years after the Tatenokai held multiple people hostage.
The entirety of Nathan's book essentially tackles this question so it's not something that can be answered simply. Did he want to restore power to the emperor? Certainly. Did he think he was going to be effective in doing so by holding people hostage? Almost certainly not. Nathan essentially argues that his various philosophies about life, sex, beauty and politics all converged in a way that drove him to create the circumstances of his death. By dying in that way, he expressed his ideas about Japanese Nationalism, the ideal male, fragility of the human form and attempted to receive penance for avoiding service in WWII all at once.
Which is to say, his ultimate goal may very well have been to create a story that would live on, as writers do.
Source: John Nathan's biography, if it isn't clear.
Also if anyone would like to give detail as to what OP is referencing to begin with ; I'm very curious
Though I don't feel particularly qualified to answer the question, I have read Sun and Steel (Mishima's memoir) a couple of times and feel like it offers some personal insight into how he came to feel about the purpose of life and death, what it means to shape the body, and how we compare to the vastness of the world.
Source: Sun and Steel, Mishima, 1970, Kodansha