Mitsuyasu Maeno Mitsuyasu Maeno 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 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
Seppuku surrender at the end of World War II. This behavior had been widely praised by propaganda, which made a soldier captured in the Shanghai Incident (1932) return to the site of his capture to perform seppuku. In 1970, author Yukio Mishima and one of his followers performed public seppuku at the Japan Self-Defense Forces headquarters after an unsuccessful attempt to incite the armed forces to stage a coup d'état. Mishima performed seppuku in the office of General Kanetoshi Mashita. His second, a 25-year-old man named Masakatsu Morita, tried three times to ritually behead Mishima but failed; his head was finally