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If you’ve got a philosophical bent and you like to lift weights, you\u2019ve probably heard of Yukio Mishima.<\/p>\n
Mishima was one of history\u2019s most interesting cats. He was a Japanese novelist and playwright, a martial artist and bodybuilder\u2026and an insurrectionist who attempted to overthrow his country\u2019s government.<\/p>\n
His life started out one-sided. Then he found a way to artfully combine dual energies. Then he came apart.<\/p>\n
Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka in Tokyo in 1925. When he was a baby, his grandmother Natsuko, a sickly aristocrat from a samurai family, took him away from his parents and raised him in her sickroom. She wouldn’t let him go out in the sun or play with other boys. He grew up surrounded by female cousins and classical literature. There was no outdoor, rough-and-tumble play. To compensate for the lack of physical stimulus, a scrawny and sickly Mishima crafted a rich imaginary world.<\/p>\n
When World War II came, Mishima fully expected to be drafted and die for the emperor. That\u2019s what he wanted to happen. He came from a samurai family, and it was his destiny to sacrifice all for the glory of Japan. But an army doctor misdiagnosed him with tuberculosis and sent him home to work in an aircraft factory while his classmates went off to die in the Pacific. He never forgave himself for that. “I lacked\u2026the muscles suitable for a dramatic death,” he wrote years later.<\/p>\n
After the war, he published his first novel, Confessions of a Mask<\/a>,<\/em> at 24 and became instantly famous. He wrote novels and plays at an astonishing clip and became one of the best modern fiction writers in Japan. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.<\/p>\n But despite the literary success, Mishima was discontent. He built his entire identity out of words and abstractions. He didn\u2019t feel fully alive. He described his younger self as a creature of the night, holed up in a “dusky room,” burning the midnight oil, with a body he not only ignored, but despised.<\/p>\n But a trip to Greece in his late 20s, where he stood in front of the classical statues and saw what the human body could look like, kickstarted Mishima\u2019s journey in the visceral world of physical culture. Seeing those white statues gave him what he called a “will to health in the Nietzschean sense.” In 1955, Mishima walked into a gym and started lifting weights. He kept at it three times a week, without a break, for the next (and last) 15 years of his life, and added boxing and kendo along the way. He took great satisfaction in his bodybuilding, treating it like a spiritual or religious practice.<\/p>\n For a while, it seemed like Mishima would be like a Japanese Ernest Hemingway or Jack London, relishing a life of both physicality and letters.<\/p>\n But Mishima became more and more politically radicalized. He felt that the soul of Japanese society, and particularly its samurai culture, had been eviscerated after WWII and wanted to resurrect it and restore the Emperor to the center of political and spiritual life. So he embraced an extreme form of nationalism and started his own private army, which he suited up in sharp military uniforms. Then, on November 25, 1970, he attempted to lead a coup to overturn Japan\u2019s postwar political order. The coup had no chance of succeeding, and Mishima had already planned what he would do when it failed. After the soldiers who had assembled below the balcony at the Self-Defense Forces\u2019 Ichigaya headquarters jeered him, he walked back into the commandant\u2019s office and committed ritual seppuku<\/em>.<\/p>\n He committed suicide by disemboweling himself with a dagger and then having one of his followers (in the end it took two of them) decapitate him with a samurai sword.<\/p>\n Dang.<\/p>\n Mishima was a complicated guy who left a mixed legacy, and you don’t need to look to his politics or radicalism for inspiration. But there is something you can glean from his philosophy.<\/p>\n Particularly the philosophy he forwarded in his book Sun and Steel<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Two years before he killed himself, Mishima published Sun and Steel<\/em> to explain what he learned from his religious (in both senses of the word) pursuit of weightlifting. The title is his shorthand for the two things that pulled him out of the sheltered mindset he had developed in his childhood.<\/p>\n The sun is objective reality. It’s \u201cthe world beyond your head,\u201d as Matthew Crawford put it<\/a>. When you\u2019re out in the sun, you\u2019re like the guys that escape Plato\u2019s cave of shadows, and you finally see things the way they really are. The sun doesn’t care about your theories of how you think the world is supposed to work. It\u2019s fitting that Mishima made the sun his symbol for hard reality. This was a guy who spent his childhood hidden from the sun in his grandmother’s sickroom and, consequently, from real life.<\/p>\n The steel is the barbell and plates. The steel was the tool he used to train his body and mind so that he could meet the reality of the sun on its own terms.<\/p>\n The sun, the steel: together these elements provide a counterbalance to a life lived too much in the abstract.<\/p>\n I first read Sun and Steel<\/em> a long time ago, and much of it really resonated with me. What I appreciate about Mishima is that he was a brainy, cerebral guy who understood there’s a danger in living inside your head too much. It can make you morbidly self-conscious. And the remedy to that is to train your body. Hard.<\/p>\n I know I’ve learned that lesson. I make my living sitting in a chair typing words or talking to people via the internet in my closet for the podcast. I spend most of my time in the world of ideas, and I\u2019ve seen how that can lead to a downward spiral of rumination. But I’ve also seriously trained with the iron for over a decade, and have found it\u2019s taught me things I couldn’t have learned any other way.<\/a><\/p>\n Mishima does an illuminating job articulating what those lessons have been, and below I offer seven of the insights from Sun and Steel<\/em> that have stuck with me:<\/p>\n Most people make friends with their body before they enter the abstract world of ideas. A child runs and climbs and scrapes his knee and gets back up without thinking much of it. Mishima experienced it backward: “My memory of words reaches back far farther than my memory of the flesh.” A person who only lives in the world of words, he says, becomes a man who can write a tragedy but “cannot participate in it.” In other words, when you exist in the world of the abstract, you live only half a life.<\/p>\n Living entirely inside your head can also breed anxiety and despair as thought loops back endlessly on itself. Mishima found an antidote in shifting his attention outward and pushing against something that wasn’t him: the barbell. Science has since confirmed the broader point that physical activity is one of the best ways to get out of your head and improve your mood.<\/p>\n My favorite idea from Sun and Steel <\/em>is that there is a “language of the flesh.” Mishima said he learned it “much as one might learn a foreign language.”<\/p>\n What does it mean that your body has a language? Nietzsche, whom Mishima read closely, gets at it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>: “You say ‘I,’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you would not believe it, is your body and its intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I.'” There\u2019s an embodied kind of intelligence you can\u2019t acquire simply by thinking about something. You have to actually move your body. You have to \u201cperform.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an example of that. Right now, I\u2019m teaching my son Gus how to drive stick shift. He read the article we wrote about it several years ago<\/a> and watched a YouTube tutorial, approaching the new skill as an abstract theory you can download into your brain. But when he gets in the car and starts actually trying to apply that theory into practice, it only sort of works. It doesn\u2019t translate completely. So he asks for advice on when to shift or how to take his foot off the clutch, and I give him some, and it works\u2026a little. But in the end, I simply tell him, \u201cYou just got to feel<\/em> it. I can\u2019t tell you exactly what to do. There\u2019s no three-step process. Your body just sort of learns what to do and when to do it.\u201d The physicality of driving stick requires him to learn the language of the flesh.<\/p>\n The same goes for any physical activity, be it throwing a football, climbing a rock face, or deadlifting a heavy barbell from the floor. The language of the flesh is a language of physical action, not abstraction. If you want to fully express yourself and communicate with the world, you have to learn it.<\/p>\n As a novelist, Mishima made his living manipulating words. He could do whatever he wanted with them. The barbell was different. He couldn’t manipulate it. He had to conform himself to the steel:<\/p>\n The steel gave me an utterly new kind of knowledge, a knowledge that neither books nor worldly experience can impart…For me, muscles had one of the most desirable qualities of all. Their function was precisely opposite of that of words.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In short, unlike words that can be arranged to tell yourself the story you want to hear, the steel won\u2019t let you do that.<\/p>\n Henry Rollins made the same point in his famous Details<\/em> essay “Iron and the Soul\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you\u2019re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver\u2026two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I make my living with words, so I’m as good as anyone at telling myself a story. I can’t do that with the barbell. I either lift the weight or I don’t. I can’t spin the results. The iron teaches you not to lie because it doesn’t lie.<\/p>\n “Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh.” As Mishima observed, pain is often the medium for the language of the body. Physical pain can tell you things about yourself that you didn\u2019t know, even your values.<\/p>\n Kate wrote a great Sunday Fireside called “You Are Your Relation to Pain”<\/a> about this idea. The pain of a hard workout can feel like an unwelcome stressor…or evidence that you’re becoming more fully alive. How you interpret pain reveals something about what you value. As Ernst J\u00fcnger put it: “Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are.”<\/p>\n The whole modern approach to self-knowledge, from therapy to journaling, is about digging. If you want to learn about yourself, you go deep inside your psyche. Self-reflection can be useful, but like any good thing, taken too far, it becomes a hindrance. Think about those nights when you lie in bed caught up in a whirlwind of thought about how your life isn’t going the way you wanted, rewinding every mistake you’ve made and conjuring up increasingly dire futures. That’s what happens when you live entirely in your head.<\/p>\n Mishima poses a contrarian question. What if, instead of only going down into your psyche, you went up into the world?<\/p>\n Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n By surface, Mishima means your skin: the boundary where you meet the world, the part of you that’s visible in the sun. His claim is that there’s as much truth up there as in your psychological basement. Once he started training, the anxieties and neurotic fantasies he’d lived with since childhood receded. He learned that things weren’t as bad as he thought. The sun puts things in perspective.<\/p>\n I’ve experienced this. Whenever I’m in a rut or a foul mood, my natural bent is to ruminate. I think that thinking about the problem over and over will solve it, but it rarely does. It usually just makes me feel worse. So I go down to the garage and train, and I usually feel better afterward. The iron gets me out of my head, because my only focus is getting the next rep. When I’m doing a heavy set of squats, the only thought in my head is “Don’t die.” That’s it. There’s no room under a 420-pound barbell for thoughts about why my recent article didn’t get as much traffic as I wanted. The weight doesn’t care. Most of life doesn’t care about most of your problems either.<\/p>\n At one point in the book, Mishima describes carrying a portable shrine through the streets during a festival with a crowd of other young men, all of them staggering under the weight of it. They were all miserable. But he noticed that misery made him feel closer to those other guys: “The pounding of the heart communicated itself to the group; we shared the same swift pulse\u2026only bodies, placed under the same circumstances, can experience a common suffering.”<\/p>\n I’ve never carried a shrine, but I know what Mishima’s talking about. Back when I played high school football, I absolutely hated pre-season two-a-days. So did my teammates. Just awful. The morning practice started when it was a \u201ccool\u201d (and very humid) 85 degrees. Then you’d get a few hours off and head back to the field when it was pushing 100 and even more humid. But that shared suffering brought the team together. During practice, we’d encourage each other when one of us was flagging; between practices we’d trade gallows humor. Shared pain made us one. I loved those guys.<\/p>\n If you want to bond a group of people, have them do something physically demanding together.<\/p>\n The samurai had an ideal called bunbu ryodo<\/em>, the dual way of the pen and the sword. A samurai was supposed to be a gentleman and a fighter, and a man who was only one or the other was either a brute or a coward. Mishima lived the ideal of the refined warrior. He\u2019d train hard in the gym and then come home to write or listen to flute music. He combined both brains and brawn<\/a>, and saw parallels between the gym and the classroom. Adding weight to the bar little by little, he wrote, “was remarkably similar to the process of education, which remodels the brain intellectually by feeding it with progressively more difficult matter.” Progressive overload, baby<\/a>. It works for your muscles and your mind.<\/p>\n Books and barbells. That’s mostly my life, and the combination has lent it richness. I think it’s important for guys to think, to be philosophically inclined, but to always stay grounded in the objective reality of the sun by way of the steel. Read Kierkegaard. Then go deadlift.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/yuk3.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe Sun, The Steel<\/span><\/h2>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n1. Living Entirely Inside Your Head Is Existentially Stunting<\/h3>\n
2. Your Body Speaks a Language<\/strong><\/h3>\n
3. The Iron Doesn’t Lie<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\n4. Pain Is Information<\/strong><\/h3>\n
5. The Body Brings You Up to the Surface<\/strong><\/h3>\n
6. Shared Suffering Brings People Together<\/strong><\/h3>\n
7. Be a Man of the Pen and the Sword<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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