Tatenokai

The Tatenokai, or Shield Society, was a private militia in Japan dedicated to traditional Japanese values and veneration of the Emperor. The author Yukio Mishima founded and led it, and it was officially founded on 5 October 1968 to counter what he saw as indirect aggression by proponents of foreign ideology. It grew out of a predecessor, the Japan National Guard of 1967, whose members had enlisted in the Japan Self-Defense Forces with Mishima. Membership ultimately reached about 100 people, most of them students at Waseda University, who trained in kendo and long-distance running. The name comes from two classical waka poems about becoming a shield for the Emperor. On 25 November 1970 Mishima and four members briefly seized the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Force and tried to rally its soldiers to stage a coup; it failed, and Mishima and student leader Masakatsu Morita committed seppuku.