Kinkaku-ji Arson

In the early hours of 2 July 1950, Hayashi Yōken, a young Buddhist acolyte at Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto, set fire to the Golden Pavilion. The blaze destroyed the celebrated wooden structure and its contents, turning an individual act of arson into a nationally discussed event during the Allied occupation of Japan.

Hayashi survived an attempted suicide, was convicted of arson and later died in 1956. Explanations of the crime have considered his mental health, isolation, stammer, religious circumstances and troubled relationship with the pavilion’s beauty and public status.

Yukio Mishima transformed the incident into The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. His narrator Mizoguchi is a fictional construction rather than a direct biography, but the novel retains the acolyte, the temple, postwar Kyoto and the destructive act as its historical foundation.