Ideologically, politically and aesthetically Mishima was clearly a dead end, but I’ve always found him of minor interest because his aesthetic was so clearly Westernized in a way that earlier strains of Japanese fascism weren’t. The campy, macho-hysterical aesthetic elements that have been present in western far-right movements from D’Annunzio to Trump weren’t really present in the prewar Japanese military government, but Mishima was really almost their apotheosis. It’s kind of ironic - rather than being a throwback to a pure strain of Japanese masculine identity, he was really a syncretist.