Thanks, Guest. Mishima was an interesting character allright.

Regarding the football stadiums: The immense footprint of Roman civilization is still all over western society, and one of the things we have inherited from them is huge sports arenas...our version of the collosseums that were located in all larger Roman cities, and which were a mark of a city's entry into "the big leagues". Another thing we inherited is the huge oval racetrack where betting is done on horse races. Any such large facility is handy for an authoritarian state, since a lot of people can be held prisoner inside it by guarding just a few entrances. I doubt that they designed the big stadiums with that conscious purpose in mind, but they are always there when a rogue government needs them. People were corralled in such a stadium and tortured and killed by Pinochet's military government in Chile when Allende was overthrown by a CIA-supported coup. Interestingly enough, that happened on Sep 11...1973.   (seems to be a very unlucky date)

Here's a brief summary:

"On September 11, 1973, a military coup d'état removed Allende. The intervention was extremely violent from the very beginning. The rebels surrounded the La Moneda Palace with tanks and infantry troops and bombed it with Hawker Hunter fighter jets. The president and some of his aides were besieged in the palace. Allende refused to surrender, and addressed the nation for a last time in a potent farewell speech.

The worst violence occurred in the first few months after the coup, with the number of suspected leftists killed or "disappeared" soon reaching into the thousands. In the days immediately following the coup, the National Stadium was used as a concentration camp holding 40,000 prisoners. Some of the most famous cases of "desaparecidos" are Charles Horman, a U.S. citizen who was tortured and killed during the coup itself; Chilean songwriter Víctor Jara, murdered while held prisoner at the Chile Stadium immediately after the coup, and the October 1973 Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte) where at least 70 persons were killed. Approximately 130,000 individuals were arrested in a three-year period, with the number of dead and "disappeared" reaching into the thousands within the first few months. Most of the people targeted had been supporters of Allende."