Spiritual Alienation and Existential Crisis in Postwar Japan: Modernisation, Aesthetics, and Destruction in Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Abstract

The present study examines the cultural, ontological, and aesthetic consequences of rapid post-World War II modernisation and Westernisation in Japan through the lens of Yukio Mishima's oeuvre, with particular focus on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The postwar adoption of Western political and economic models as a normative form of development led to the secularisation of traditional value systems, the museumification of sacred structures, and a profound crisis of collective identity in Japanese society. The study approaches modernisation not as a neutral historical process but as a Western-centred epistemological mechanism of cultural "othering."

The research demonstrates that this normative conception of modernity in Japan produced not only institutional and technological transformations but also spiritual alienation, existential void, and ontological fragmentation at the level of individual consciousness. This study analyses Mishima's aesthetic and philosophical stance as a literary articulation of this crisis. The protagonist of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Mizoguchi, is interpreted as an allegorical figure representing the subject who has lost the sacred foundations of modern Japan, yet cannot integrate into modernity. Within the novel, the Kinkaku-ji temple is depicted not as a living religious space but as a symbol of tradition preserved by modern society only as a display object, emptied of its original meaning.

The study concludes that in Mishima's work, acts of destruction should not be read as expressions of freedom or ethical rebellion; instead, they represent an inescapable response to the ontological pressures produced by modernity and the culmination of spiritual decline. In this regard, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion stands as one of the most vivid literary exemplars of fundamental critique directed at the aesthetic and metaphysical foundations of modernity.