was a Japanese nationalist, thinker, social activist, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force official, and member of a leading Japanese political family. He is best known for committing suicide through self-immolation as a nationalist protest in front of the Japanese Houses of Parliament.
Kosaburo Eto was born in Saga prefecture on 20 April 1946, the great-grandson of Eto Shinpei, a statesman during the Meiji restoration (remembered chiefly for his role in the unsuccessful Saga Rebellion), the grandson of Eto Shinsaku, a member of the House of Representatives of Japan and close adviser of Inukai Tsuyoshi and the third son of Eto Natsuo, a member of the House of Representatives of Japan.[1] He left Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Cadet School in Yokosuka without a diploma.[2]
On 11 February 1969 (the National Foundation Day of Japan) aged 22, he committed suicide through self-immolation next to the Memorial Hall of Constitutional Politics, located in front of the Houses of Parliament. He left a kakuseisho (覚醒書) (suicide letter) expressing alarm over the state of the Nation. In 1969 the leading Japanese literary figure and nationalist Yukio Mishima noted in his as I am one of the readers who read the most intense criticism against the politics as a dream or art for seriousness of Young Kosaburo Eto, who set himself on fire.[3]
On 11 February 1975, a memorial ceremony in honour of the life of Kosaburo Eto took place at Nogi Shrine, in Akasaka, Tokyo.
Eto's kakuseisho ended with the following jisei or death poem, a common element in Japanese ritual suicide.:
Under the silhouette of the big camphor tree swinging in the stiff wind against the sky, I think - who knows the Mikado's will, perhaps nobody knows it.
I know if I take risks, it makes no difference to me, but I dare to act with a Yamato Spirit.[4]
He wrote three kakuseisho and sent them to Shintaro Ishihara, Yukio Mishima, and Kiyoshi Oka.
