Wakamatsu Kōji’s latest film 『実録・連合赤軍：浅間山荘への道程』 (The True Story of the United Red Army: the Road to Asama-Sansō) is probably the final and definitive cinematic retelling of the United Red Army (URA) story. In early 1972, the URA terrorist cell achieved infamy for killing off twelve of its own members during ideological training and then battling police from the inside of a mountain lodge near Nagano’s Mt. Asama. Over the course of three hours, Wakamatsu covers the group’s entire history from their formation and eventual arrest, moving the viewer through a brief history of the student movement, the internecine fighting accompanying the foundation of the Red Army Faction (赤軍派), the brutal lynching of fellow members in its secret mountain training lodge, and the final standoff at Asama-Sansō.

Telling the “full” story of such a fractured and complex set of events forces Wakamatsu to use a no-frills “docudrama” approach, including plenty of on-screen text and voice-over narration. The story could not fit neatly into the conventional three-act film. Almost none of the Red Army members survive or stay free of police custody long enough to act as an emotional anchor or arch-villain for the entire three hours. Some characters are little more than historical bookmarks; for example, future Japanese Red Army leader Shigenobu Fusako shows up in the forward to bond with future URA victim Tōyama Mieko, but soon leaves for Lebanon to found the “international wing” of the Red Army. Likewise, Red Army founder and philosopher Shiomi Takaya is arrested in the first hour and taken completely out of the central story. But so goes the actual history.

Wakamatsu and fellow soft-porn filmmaker Adachi Masao were both Red Army sympathizers and chronicled the early proto-Japanese Red Army / Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Lebanon training camps in their 1971 documentary 『赤軍PFLP世界戦争宣言』Red Army-PFLP Declaration of War. In the last few years, both have apparently felt the need to create new films reflecting on the ’70s Japanese leftist terrorism. Adachi’s lackluster 『幽閉者テロリスト』Prisoner / Terrorist told the story of Lod Airport Massacre attacker Okamoto Kozo losing his mind in Israeli jail. With multiple Japanese fictional films about the United Red Army’s self-destruction already in circulation, however, it may seem odd that Wakamatsu went to such lengths to make yet another film on the topic. He has specifically stated a need to correct falsehoods in the 2002 film 『突入せよ！浅間山荘事件』(Choice of Hercules), which tells the story of the Asama-Sansō hostage crisis from the perspective of law enforcement. Wakamatsu protege Takahashi Banmei’s 2001 film 『光の雨』(Rain of Light) , on the other hand, very skillfully visualizes the horrific URA training deaths, but somewhat tempers it with a distancing meta-approach where the actors are shown “adapting” the novel that lends the film’s name. Although there are slight discrepancies between Takahashi and Wakamatsu’s versions, both generally work from the same historical chronicles and hit the same notes. Wakamatsu’s only real addition is combining the lynchings with the Asama-Sansō tale in a single epic-length film.

The other notable film to pick up the United Red Army narrative is 『鬼畜大宴会』 (Banquet of the Beasts) — Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s ultra-gory mondo-horror retelling of the early ’70s student movement disintegration — where post-gunshot head-wounds spew blood, men are castrated with knives, and limbs are frequently severed. Beyond twisting this important historical event into purely prurient content, Kumakiri does the URA story great disservice by recasting the event’s true horror — the legitimatization of comrade purging through Marxist utopian ideology — into the result of the evil female leader’s growing “insanity.” When the stand-in for female URA leader Nagata Hiroko is killed late in the movie (by brutal means which I never want to think about again), Kumakiri gives viewers the karmic revenge they ultimately desire. (The historical URA denouement is not so rewarding: sadistic leaders Nagata and Mori were unceremoniously arrested before the Asama-Sansō siege even starts. Mori’s later suicide is always reduced to an afterword.)

Ultimately, Wakamatsu’s defiantly detached approach strongly suits the material. He makes no attempt to create sympathy with any of the characters — other than, perhaps, the 16 year-old Kato Motohisa who must strike his own brother in ideological training and later watch him die as a result. (When Kato starts shooting at the cops at Asama-Sansō, however, he no longer looks so adorable.) Despite the fact that most other Red Army-sympathizers tend to blame police oppression for the sect’s eventual violence, Wakamatsu never really casts the Japanese authorities in any sort of negative light. Yes, the cops arrested more and more protesters through the late 1960s, but the director refuses to create heavy-handed portrayals of overbearing cops and G-men preying on “innocent” and peace-loving students. Throughout the film, the police are mostly an invisible threat, and when shown, serious adults serving warrants.

Wakamatsu’s docudrama approach has the effect of reducing everyone to their historical personage. Instead of being everyday, relatable humans thrown into a difficult situation, we see them only as the participants taken straight from black-and-white newsreels. This emotional detachment generally harms most films: the Star Wars prequels mostly failed because the main characters were reduced to august, humorless historical personalities rather than the sympathetic “ragtag” characters in the original triology. But Wakamatsu may be onto something by using this character framing in United Red Army: the sect viewed themselves first and foremost within the prism of “history.” They willfully abandoned their humanity and legitimized brutality for larger abstract goals of revolution. Leninist hierarchy overrode any sort of natural human relationships within the URA circles. The group members constantly speak in an argot based in theoretical Marxist terminology, almost to the point where the movie feels scripted solely in idiosyncratic Chinese loan words. Common sense was in short supply. Projecting benevolence on any of the characters would betray the true story.

Most of the URA member deaths centered around the concept of sōkatsu (総括) — a word normally meaning “summarization” or “generalization.” In ’60s Leftism, however, the term means “to judge and reflect upon past actions”: essentially, “self-criticism” in order to grow stronger as a revolutionary. URA leaders Mori and Nagata charge their followers with insufficient sōkatsu, and when the members cross the threshold, they ask the other members to punish their lack of self-criticism through physical violence. Sect members are beaten to a pulp and then tied up to poles in the cold outside. Female Tōyama Mieko’s punishment forced her to literally punch herself to death. These sōkatsu training sessions provide the film’s most harrowing sequences, and Wakamatsu barely projects any sort of remorse or regret onto the faces of the aggressor comrades. While dying women are urinating themselves and mumbling nonsense within the icy cabin, the other members eat dinner and study their maps and Marx with only the slightest discomfort.

Although Wakamatsu never fully explains the specific arcane theories that propel this Marxist-Leninist revolutionary guard, we see “ideology” in a broad sense slowly separate the young pioneers from any semblance of reality. After the fratricides, Nagata and Mori leave the scene to have sex at a hotel. When Nagata’s boyfriend Sakaguchi shows up to check in, she calmly explains that the revolution needs her to pair off with Mori for the time being. Later inside of the Asama-Sansō cabin, Sakaguchi tells the young female hostage that their rag-tag group of six young motley terrorists is “the revolution.” When an Asama-Sansō team member is caught eating cookies, a serious discussion on sōkatsu breaks out. Despite the grave circumstances, these scenes elicit a chuckle. In the first case, Nagata quickly hides behind ideology to absolves her love life betrayal. Sakaguchi in the cabin, on the other hand, is so far detached from his actual hopeless situation that he can only see the group’s actions like sympathetic narrators in a future post-revolution history textbook.

Wakamatsu spends the last hour of his film faithfully recreating the conditions inside of the cabin during the Asama-Sansō siege, but in comparison to the tragic second-act lynchings, this hour feels less essential. His detailed attention, however, stems from his need to “finish” the historical retelling at group’s eventual arrest. The Japanese collective memory of the URA mostly centers around Asama-Sansō, a product of how the URA story was mediated to the public. The mountain lodge siege was televised in real-time, whereas news of the lynchings could only transmit through textual and verbal recollections after the fact. Wakamatsu’s film, therefore, has a value in restoring the proper balance in the tale’s emotional weight, by creating a powerful visualization of the comrade murders. On paper, killing twelve people seems somewhat pedestrian compared to the millions purged in the USSR, China, or Cambodia. But seeing an enthusiastic, highly-educated group of students in their early 20s needlessly murder their peers one-by-one is usefully traumatic. This is petit-Stalinism on a human scale. And Wakamatsu never milks these murders for shock’s sake: seeing an eight-month pregnant woman’s bleeding corpse is crucial for understanding the abject brutality of what happened.

The URA also made the master mistake for winning sympathy in post-war Japan: in an attempt to free the nation from its feudal-capitalist structure, they ended up re-staging the morality play of WWII — as the villains. Communism came out of the war as the only legitimate voice of anti-imperialist dissent, but the extremes of the student movement transformed the Marxist praxis into something as dangerous and ideologically-rigid as the wartime imperialist dogma. Just like the Japanese government’s decision to continue the war in the spring of 1945, the URA is holed up, surrounded on all sides by hostile forces with no exit, yet refuses to surrender. The obvious and glorious solution is a greater death toll — inflicted on both allies or enemies — in order to secure a fairer settlement. Army leaders believed that the 1945 surrender would shame those who had died for that meaningless war, and in an eerie echo, Wakamatsu stated in a Japan Times article that Asama-Sansō participant Bando believed that, “Everyone had pledged to fight to the end. They had committed the sin of purge killings and to make amends, (they) felt they had to fight against authority, even if they had to die.” The URA showed in vivid colors that it wasn’t the actual content of ideology that led to the most nightmarish forms of Japanese organizational behavior, but the Japanese approach to ideology itself that was at the heart of the matter.

Unfortunately, however, the Leftist baby went out with the terrorist bath water, and any sort of left-leaning socioeconomic liberalism died an almost permanent death with the arrest of the URA terrorists. At that time, the main opposition party to the hegemonic conservative Liberal Democratic Party were the “Socialists” rather than a moderate social democratic party, and judging by Asama-Sansō, handing power to anyone on the entire semi-Marxist left wing may have suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. But this is exactly why the URA story is so attractive to novelists, journalists, filmmakers, and manga artists. This is the ultimate tragedy and final episode of progressive post-war politics — a micro-social event at the scale of human relationship that caused the macro-social collapse of Japan’s long flirtation with Marxism. For those who wish that progressive democratic politics played more of a role in the Japanese government and mass culture, the URA’s self-destruction is a total heartbreaker. Wakamatsu’s cinematic portrayal, however, hints at the most obvious observation: perhaps the mutation of Marxist ideology in Japan was best off dying on the vine. As punishment for a failure to meta-sōkatsu, the United Red Army murdered the entire Left.

Related Articles:
• Interview with Dr. Patricia Steinhoff (Parts 1,2,3,4,5)
• Documentary Footage of Japanese Student Protests and Leftist Terrorism
• Aru Hi, Totsuzen (New Left Sect Reactions
if the Revolution Suddenly Erupted One Morning)

FILM FOOTAGE

PAPERS AVAILABLE ONLINE

Muto, Ichiyo and Reiko Inoue. “Beyond the New Left Part 2 – In Search of a Radical Base in Japan.” AMPO Japan-Asian Quarterly Review 17(4).

SELECTED PAPERS FROM DR. STEINHOFF

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Student Conflict.” Conflict in Japan. Eds. Krauss, Rohlen and Steinhoff. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984.

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Hijackers, Bombers and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army.” Journal of Asian Studies 48(4) Nov 1989.

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables: the Social Dynamics of the Rengō Sekigun Purge.” Japanese Social Organization. Ed. Takie Lebra. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992.

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Three Women Who Loved the Left: Radical Women Leaders in the Japanese Red Army Movement.” Re-Imaging Japanese Women. Ed. Anne Imamura. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Zwerman, Gilda, Patricia G. Steinhoff and Donatella della Porta. “Disappearing Social Movements: Clandestinity in the Cycle of New Left Social Movements in the United States, Japan, Germany, and Italy.” Mobilization (5) 1. Spring 2000.

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Notes from the Underground: Doing Fieldwork without a Site.” Doing Fieldwork in Japan. Eds. Theodore Bestor, Patricia G. Steinhoff, and Victoria Lyon-Bestor. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003.

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Kidnapped Japanese in North Korea: The New Left Connection.” Journal of Japanese Studies Winter 2004.

WEB RESOURCES

The Takazawa Collection at University of Hawaii (Manoa) – Official homepage for the extensive collection of resource materials on postwar Japanese social movements that Takazawa Kōji donated to the University of Hawaii in 1993. The collection contains 1,800 books, over 9,000 issues of magazines, 1,200 serial titles, the majority of which are not available in any other library. This page on the Takazawa Collection page offers a comprehensive list of Japanese web resources on Japanese activism.

Dr. Patricia Steinhoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This is the fifth and final installment of our interview with Dr. Steinhoff about the Japanese New Left in the 1960s and 1970s.

PART 5 – WHAT DID IT MEAN?

If we look at where the Weathermen and Red Armies developed from their respective student movements, there are some very clear differences. The Weathermen made a point not to kill anyone after they ended up blowing themselves up, but the Red Army in Japan continued with bombings and other violent actions, no?

Actually, after the Lod incident, Shigenobu said, we aren’t going to kill anybody, and they did not kill anybody else in all their subsequent attacks. She was also deeply distressed because her best friend had already been killed in the United Red Army purge, before the Lod Airport attack. That was the only time the Red Army in Japan killed anybody.

I did a paper with Gilda Zwerman, an American sociologist who studies the “post-New Left” in the U.S. The U.S. also had groups that went underground and were involved throughout the 1970s. Part of it is that it’s not as visible in the United States, because it wasn’t centralized and it wasn’t national. It’s very easy to say, somebody did something stupid over in one place, but not to see it as a part of the same larger movement. We did a paper with Donatella della Porta who has studied the same types of movements in the same time period in Italy and Germany. And we first put all our cases, which included all the radical groups, including the Weathermen, including the Black Panthers, and the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), Puerto Rican Nationalists from the U.S., the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Red Army Faction in Germany and a couple of other Italian factions. We put all our cases together and we tried to figure out what the processes were. The three of us wrote one paper about going underground and the process of who went and that sort of thing.

Zwerman and I did another one where we talked about other types of things that happened in the ’70s and the ’80s, so there are interesting parallels and when you put a lot of groups together, you can see a lot of common patterns, but there are differences because of the structural differences in the countries and the way the groups were organized. I wouldn’t want to say across the board that the U.S. was milder, but some things were different.

One of the reasons that the Japanese groups did what they did is because guns are so hard to find in Japan, whereas in the U.S., that’s not an issue. Going underground and having a guerilla army with guns — you weren’t about to overthrow the U.S. government that way. There are differences in thinking about what you can do and why. The Black Panthers were walking around the streets with guns quite deliberately in the 1960s.

Is there a palpable legacy of the student movement and the Japanese Red Army in particular? Did they accomplish any of their goals or was it just a total wash?

First of all, the movement marked a generation. And because of that, those people have gone on to do different things. It isn’t that they got certain things out of the movement and carried them directly, but rather that they had these experiences. The movement failed, and they had to figure out what went wrong. And in that process, which is a very built-in, very Japanese thing, you always have to analyze what happened and figure out what went wrong. Basically they tried to change course in an organized way. And I think it’s out of that, that this very different style of contemporary social movements in Japan has come about. I am writing about this now, as Japan’s “invisible civil society,” which came out of the New Left but reflects their thoughtful analysis of what went wrong with it.

Part of it is that they see that these big organizations, this top-down stuff doesn’t work. As students, they had a loose lefty kind of approach. They were not traditional uptight Japanese. But they were still Japanese, and they were in this structure that had a lot of the vertical stuff. So there’s a mix. When they decided that part of the problem is this big top-down organization, then they were freer to go in different directions and avoid large organizations by using networking to link together lots of small groups. And culturally, they were doing all these interesting things at the same time that people were protesting in the streets in the 1960s, there was music, literature, drama, all kind of art coming out of it in a kind of cultural renaissance. So it was a creative period that had its impact in many ways.

In terms of the Red Army itself… well, they helped immensely in making the Japanese justice system more severe than it was before, which certainly wasn’t what they intended. To a certain extent, the fact that these people in the early 1970s went to North Korea and went to work with the Palestinians, and that 35 years later they are still connected to those issues, and those issues are still on the front pages, in a sense you can say that their going there and staying there — at least as far as Japan was concerned — kept an awareness of what was going on in those two places that might have not been there otherwise. It would not have been as salient within Japan if they didn’t have a bunch of people in the Middle East who did stuff once in a while.

Or a bunch of people in North Korea that you could forget about until all of a sudden, it turns out that they had done all this other wild stuff. So in that sense, there’s an indirect awareness factor that they have something to do with.

I don’t think it was a wash. But clearly, a lot of lives were wrecked. I don’t just mean people who were killed or injured by their actions. But their own lives were deflected and pretty much wrecked. The guys that went to North Korea: half of them are dead, the remaining ones… Good God! That’s not what should have happened with their lives.

The Middle East people are pretty much going to spend the rest of their lives in jail. They did have a freedom of movement, because they were there in the Middle East and they were elusive, but still, there was a lot of stuff they couldn’t do because they were on wanted lists. And you know, their lives to a certain extent have been wrecked by it. So, it’s not a happy story.

PART 4 – THE JAPANESE RED ARMY

How in the world did the Red Army end up in Palestine and supporting the struggle against the Jewish state? At least in the U.S., Israel was not a big target of the student movement in the 1960s.

There is a strain of anti-Jewish sentiment in Japan that is fed by the Far Right, that David Goodman has written about (in the book Jews in the Japanese Mind). He sees the students as being part of that. I don’t really, because theirs was much more political. They make it very clear that they are not anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic, but anti-Zionist. They are opposed to the things that Israel has done against the Palestinian population — invading and taking over Palestinian lands and occupying them very brutally for a long period of time.

Shigenobu Fusako, pre-JRA

Was Shigenobu’s exodus to Lebanon tied into the Yodo hijackers’ travel to North Korea?

Yes, in a sense. I am reading something that Shigenobu Fusako has been writing since she came back. [She was arrested in Osaka in November 2000.] She says quite clearly, the Yodo-go hijacking didn’t work. The hijackers ended up being locked up in a Stalinist country. That didn’t do us much good at all.

The Red Army was starting to lose central direction after the hijacking, so there’s a lot of leadership turnover and internal turmoil because the original leaders were all either in North Korea or in jail. She was delegated to be looking for more international bases. The word is that she or somebody else was sent to the U.S., and they had this wild plan that they were going work with the Americans and surround the Pentagon. And they went there and started talking about this, and people said, you must be nuts. So nothing happened with that.

She thought that rather than going to a country, what they needed to go to do was go to a place where people were actually fighting and somehow get involved and get their training through that. So it wasn’t necessarily a country she was looking for, but it was a movement that was ideologically similar and active.

The PFLP wasn’t that old — it started about the same time [as the Red Army] and they had been thrown out of Jordan. They had just moved to Lebanon, and they had bases in Lebanon and were actively trying to get foreigners to come and volunteer with them.

It wasn’t actually the “Red Army” that went. She’s the only Red Army person that went. But when she was looking around for what to do, there was a group in Kyoto that was composed of little cells. They called themselves the Kyoto Partisans but they operated as loosely-connected, small independent cells. That was in part a response to the way in which the Red Army so over-organized and was such a clear target because they were trying to do guerrilla stuff when they were visible. But it was also a response to the conditions of the time in Japan, when the situation was so repressive that lots of groups decided they could only keep going if they went underground. That small cell structure is a classic organizational pattern for underground groups.

So the Kyoto Partisans had little groups around and they were doing little stuff. Okudaira [Takeshi/Tsuyoshi] — it’s not clear how much there was leadership in these things — but he was a fairly high-level person, and he had established some connection to the PFLP. He had already started learning Arabic. So he was interested in going to Lebanon, and there was some interest in other groups. There were people from Japan who were going to work in the Palestinian refugee camps as volunteers, like doctors and nurses and people with skills — going to volunteer in the camps. It was in the air. People knew about it — that you could go and that you would be making a revolutionary contribution. In that context, Shigenobu hooked up with Okudaira.

They married just for convenience? Were they a couple?

It’s unclear, but it’s clear that it was a way for her to get a passport. They flew there separately.

Was it hard to get there? Did you just fly to Lebanon?

You just flew to Beirut, Lebanon. You went any way you could, and Shigenobu has recently said that they usually went from Europe to Damascus, Syria, which is quite close to Beirut. But after the first people were there, then when other people came, once the conduit was set up, they would be told, take these flights and case the plane and the airports, because the PFLP was doing other airline hijackings at that time with other groups of people. Getting there for those other people was part of what you would do as contributing. But for the first couple of people that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Was Shigenobu on a wanted list when she left Japan?

She had been arrested once. She was very visible. She wasn’t wanted, but she was known, so she couldn’t have gotten a passport. That’s why she went using Okudaira’s name and was legally married to him. Even now, the Japanese authorities call her Okudaira in official documents. When she went to Beirut, she went to volunteer to do PR and publicity for people back in Japan — to tell people in Japan about what had happened or what the movement was about. So she went to work in their newspaper office, and then arranged for the people to come from Wakamatsu Productions and make the film.

So the film crew came, including Adachi Masao, and filmed the training. Then they came back to Japan, and there was an office in Japan that was helping them publicize things. I just heard a few weeks ago from Adachi that initially they were going to show the film in theaters, and there was some reason that they couldn’t. So they then arranged to show the film around campuses. So they had this tour in a red bus.

They were the “Japanese Red Army” at this point?

There was no “Japanese Red Army” until 1974. So, Shigenobu went, Okudaira went, and they went as volunteers to help the PFLP. Then they brought in other people who basically came from the Kyoto Partisans. They were not Red Army people in Japan before they went. But the film advertises the connection between the Red Army and PFLP, meaning the Red Army in Japan, to which Shigenobu belonged. It talks about joint activities by PFLP and the Red Army (Sekigun), and the name of the film is Sekigun-PFLP World Revolutionary Manifesto (『赤軍ーPFLP・世界革命宣言』).

This includes Okamoto Kozo, whose brother was a hijacker of the Yodo-go?

His brother was a hijacker.

And his reason for joining Shigenobu was that he wanted to meet his brother again?

He said that he wanted to see his brother, but that’s in his testimony in Israel, so who knows if it is true or not. He was aware of the Red Army because of his brother, but originally wasn’t all that interested in belonging to it. But he had been a rōnin (studying for entrance to university after graduating from high school) in Kyoto for a couple of years, and then he had gotten into school in Kagoshima. So he knew some of the people who were going to Lebanon, but his route to the group in the Middle East was apparently directly through Shigenobu. He was the local contact at Kagoshima University when they showed the film there. He said that a PLO person was traveling with the film and he met him, but he may have meant a person who had direct contacts with the PLO, because of the filming, rather than an actual PLO representative in Japan. So there was some sort of direct contact.

You told me before that the film Sekigun-PFLP World Revolutionary Manifesto is very “strange”?

Yes, I have a copy of it. And I saw it again a couple of weeks ago, and it was not quite as weird as I remembered it, but it is strange.

What do you mean by “strange”?

(sigh) You’d have to see it.

I feel like it should be on YouTube at this point…

No, it’s definitely not a YouTube kind of thing.

When I saw it again in Kyoto just a couple of weeks ago, my recollection of it had been that it was this very spare kind of filming. There were a lot of shadowy buildings and bare desert scenes, but not people. Adachi testified in his trial after he came back to Japan that after they filmed in the camp, the week after he came back to Beirut, the camp was bombed by the Israelis, and a lot of the people had died. In addition, the people who didn’t die were in grave danger, so that he couldn’t put their faces in the film… So they edited the film to cut out a lot of faces, which adds to the strangeness.

But when I saw it this last time, it seemed to have more faces in it than I remembered, but the other thing that I could feel and see this time was all kinds of shots of people being trained in the use of weapons, casually putting rifles together and taking them apart. And a lot of close-ups of people handling weapons like it was an everyday thing. And 1971-72 in Japan, those kids… Wow… You didn’t have to say anything, you just had to show people handling guns and getting trained on how to use them. It would have been highly attractive to kids who wanted to become guerrilla fighters. The film says very clearly that guerrilla activity is propaganda. It’s got an ideological message which resonated with where they were at the time. I mean, if you just watch it, what a strange film, but in the context of radical students in Japan at the time, it had a lot of resonance.

At this point, before Lod, how many people had collected with Shigenobu in Lebanon? Is it a dozen?

I don’t think it’s that many, but it’s a little unclear.

It’s not many.

No, she called it ipponzuri (一本釣り), fishing with one pole, because it was like… you get one, then another one. So there were probably half a dozen. There are more than I thought there were, more than the three. Maruoka Osamu was there. There’s the three who ended up doing the Lod attack. There’s the guy who came with them and drowned in an accident, and there’s Maruoka and there’s Himori Koyu. Whether there was anybody else, I don’t know. We don’t know. But there were at least six.

Okay, so you have these six. And the PFLP says, go do this attack on Lod airport?

That has been unclear. It’s becoming much clearer now, but it’s now tilting so far on the other side that you can’t tell how much of it is trial strategy.

It’s pretty clear that what happened was that people went, and they became volunteers directly for PFLP. Shigenobu was a kind of PR volunteer working at the newspaper office, but the men were all put into this international guerrilla training system that PFLP had. Ultimately, their instructions were from a guy named Abu Hani, whose real name is Wadie Haddad, but all the trial testimony is about Abu Hani. Anyway, he was a strange guy. I think he may have been a professor, but he was living in Baghdad at the time — not in Beirut at all. But he was running all these guerrilla operations that PFLP was doing. They were called “external work” and were separate from what the regular PFLP people were doing to fight on the border with Israel.

So the people got training, and then they were housed in apartments. Abu Hani would plan something, and then they would have people trained for them. His general style was to give people only very limited information about a small part of the plan in which they were directly involved. The reason I’ve been given for it is that he was usually working with uneducated Palestinian kids. His style was, he would plan an operation, and then he would pull in people: OK, you’re going to do this part, and he would train that person, individually, for his part. That person had no idea what the rest of it was. And then he would train another person for another piece. So he was operating this system in which the people who were participating only knew their part of what was supposed to happen. Well, that’s very nice for security, but if something goes awry it means that nobody knows what the hell is going on, and they don’t have any instructions beyond their piece, so they can’t recover from it. So other groups that he sent out on attacks had lots of failures, but that was his style.

So, for the Lod attack, apparently the plan was a PFLP plan. Okudaira had some input into the planning, and he was the most senior of the Japanese group. Apparently, the plan as a whole was known to some people, but it was risky enough that the Japanese were given the option of participating or not participating. There were people who chose not to.

The version of it that was publicized afterwards is wrong on lots of counts: it was not a suicide mission. It had a different structure.

They were supposed to escape?

I’m trying to get Shigenobu’s approval to tell that part of it now, but I can’t until I have it. But what happened is not what was supposed to happen. All the information after the attack was coming from the Israeli government and then through to the Japanese government and the mass media. And so that’s all we knew about it until other people were able to tell a different story.

But the plan was still to go into the airport and kill as many people as possible?

No. That was not the plan at all. That is part of the mistaken image of what it was, perpetrated by the mass media and everybody who was relying on that as a source, including me in my earlier writings. The other part of the situation, which has been public for some time, as soon as people closer to the participants could get into the debate, concerns the issue of crossfire. I was in that airport right after the trial ended. It was still all shot up, but there was a tremendous lot of security in that airport, and there is a kind of narrow balcony along one side of the baggage claim area that had armed security standing up there. So when they went in there, they pulled out weapons and started doing whatever they were doing with them, but the Israelis were shooting back at them. That never came out in the public accounts. It appears as if three guys killed all those people and injured all those people, and everyone else was peacefully sitting there saying, oh my goodness, when in fact, a lot of people were probably killed in crossfire. We don’t know, and I’m sure nobody ever looked to see whose gun did what because only the Israelis had control of the scene after it happened, and it certainly was not in their interest to indicate that anybody might have been shot by Israeli security.

What we have is an account that is a public account that makes it look as if the Israelis did nothing to create those deaths and injury, and that’s simply not the case.

So you are saying it got out of hand, but is it incorrect that one of the attackers decided to take his own life? One was apparently killed, but myth is that Okamoto also wanted to kill himself but failed.

No, you have that scrambled. He ran outside. When I interviewed him in 1972, he said that he had one grenade left and wanted to get the plane. Getting planes and doing other things to the airport seems to have been more what the attack was actually about. He was running to the edge of the airfield when he was caught. He may have thrown the grenade at the plane and nothing happened, but in any case, he was running away towards the edge. There may have been people there who would have picked him up, but he didn’t make it. He got arrested.

I am confused, because this new narrative paints this as a total failure. But if you look at this event in the JRA’s messaging in the years after Lod, the attack is their pivotal heroic moment.

That in itself is very, very interesting.

Basically, they regarded the attack at the time as a disaster. It had gone awry. They had lost all these people. It was an unmitigated disaster. But, they wake up the next morning, and they are surrounded by all these people in Lebanon who are cheering: this was a great success! Okamoto is a hero!

Then they hear that in Japan, the movement is cheering because they finally did something and were holding victory rallies for it.

The PFLP put out the first statement about it, and they took responsibility for it. They said, this was ours, because they weren’t identifying the people as Japanese. They said, three of our soldiers did this. Originally, the three attackers were supposed to be anonymous PFLP volunteers and not people who came from any particular country.

Then when it came out that they were Japanese, the PFLP asked Shigenobu to write a statement emphasizing the Japanese connection. So she did, but once she did that and these two constituencies in the Middle East and in Japan were seeing it as this great success, even though she’s lost her people and it wasn’t what was supposed to happen and the results were appalling, she had to sort of step forward to take the public credit for it and say, we are the people who did this. And they did construct their image around it from then on.

Once that happens, she can’t undo it. So it’s a very interesting dynamic, and that part of it in a sense fits in with a lot of Japanese psychological and social dynamics in that you suppress what you are really feeling because the tatemae is that you have to do this because it is a public expectation.

And after Lod, they still weren’t using the name Japanese Red Army?

No, they called themselves the Arabu Sekigun (アラブ赤軍, Arab Red Army).

This is the term that the media used?

Yes. Actually in Okamoto’s confession, he called it the Red Star Army.

Is that related to Okamoto’s line about how the attackers would become the “stars in Orion” when they died?

No, it apparently came from some organizational publication in Japan at the time called Red Star, but the Orion image did exist at some level at some point — that the participants would be the Orion belt stars and they would be up in the heavens. But where that enters, I am not sure anymore, although I believe he did say it in his statement to the court in Israel. At some point, that became part of the symbolism.

The participants really weren’t from the Red Army, but since the person who had the Red Army identity was publicly taking responsibility… She had gone there saying, I as a Red Army person want to cooperate with the PFLP. Her identity as Red Army got identified with the Red Army, but they weren’t actually members. They had come from this Kyoto Partisans group.

Then when more people came, there are women who are doing PR and language stuff. And there are people who are connected to them but living in Europe. There’s stuff going in ’72 and ’73 and a couple of incidents carried out under PFLP plans and orders. The ties are getting bigger. And there are more people coming who are coming as PFLP volunteers and get the guerrilla training. But there are also people who are exchange students and they have connections, but it’s unclear how many of those people actually got guerrilla training.

So then more people are doing stuff later in ’72 and ’73 as volunteers under Abu Hani. What happened during this time period is that one after another of these things is botched.

There was the thing in Singapore, where they were got on a ferryboat and were in the harbor and they were supposed to blow up a Shell Oil facility, but it was botched and they were stuck in the middle of the harbor until PFLP staged another attack in Dubai to get them out.

Tomorrow: Part 5 – What Did It Mean?

PART 3 – THE MOVEMENT GOES UNDERGROUND

In 1969, the SDS in the U.S. breaks down and the super-radical Weathermen are formed. Same thing happens with the Red Army Faction coming out of Bund. These transformations from student groups to underground terrorist cells seem very parallel. Did the Red Army look at the Weathermen and say, hey, we need to make the same shift?

Actually, the Japanese movement was ahead of the American movement, so the Red Army Faction was certainly not “copying” the Weathermen. But there was a certain amount of mutual awareness and interaction. There were conferences in Japan in 1968 and 1969, and they invited a lot of people from the U.S. — the Black Panthers and SDS, etc. They were very aware of the American movement. Shiomi Takaya (the intellectual leader of the Red Army Faction) himself was meeting with these people, and one of their early actions was timed to coincide with the Chicago Days of Rage. So they saw themselves as part of an international student movement. They also identified with the student movements in Europe at the same time and with revolutionary movements all over the world — the Cuban revolution, etc.

Who was Shiomi Takaya and where did he come from?

The original Sekigun-ha (Red Army Faction) was a faction of Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei or Bund. Shiomi Takaya went to Kyōdai (Kyoto University) and was a little bit older, but he was working in the Bund office in Tokyo as a full-time activist during the late ’60s. The movement was hitting a stone wall, the state began cracking down on violent protest in the streets, and the Kansai Bund people wanted to move into an underground army and more violence. So he became the central figure of that group, and he was the wordsmith. He was the guy who would come up with these incomprehensible but charismatic phrases for what they wanted to do. Tamiya was the person who would organize their activities, but Shiomi was the intellectual leader. In the summer of 1969 Bund threw out the Red Army Faction, which had operated as an internal faction for at least half a year before that, and the Red Army became independent at that point.

Shiomi was arrested two weeks before the hijacking of the Yodo-go in March 1970 on an arrest warrant for having planned some earlier actions. By that time, the Red Army was under tremendous pressure and many people were already in hiding. Shiomi had the record for a while for being held incommunicado after his arrest for a year and a half — now that’s nothing, everyone is held incommunicado for a year and a half. But at the time, it was the record. He had a long trial and all these appeals and served his sentence until about 1990.

How many people did the Red Army Faction have at first?

The Red Army had a lot of people until they started doing violent actions and the police started cracking down. In the Fall of ’69, they announced themselves publicly — “We are going to have an underground army, and we are looking for weapons.” They were making “Peace can bombs.” I don’t know if they still have them, but Peace cigarettes used to come in these little blue cans, so you could take the can and load it with pachinko balls and an explosive. They also experimented with pipe bombs. They were making homemade explosives.

Tamiya had devised an elaborate plan. Prime Minister Sato was supposed to travel to the U.S. to discuss Japan’s cooperation in the Vietnam War. This was to be a big, high-profile protest event with street demonstrations. But Sekigun had this elaborate plot that they were going to surround the Prime Minister’s residence the day before and lock him up so he couldn’t go. They couldn’t stop him forever, but they could obstruct his trip. That was going to be their sensational thing.

To prepare for it, they had gone to a mountain area fairly near Tokyo called Daibosatsu Tōge (大菩薩峠). They had rented rooms in an inn, and they were doing training on how to throw pipe bombs so they wouldn’t blow up in your face. So they were doing that, but they were so semi-open about everything they were doing and a lot of the people were already being followed on a 24-hour basis. So the police knew they were there. They sneaked up on them, and early in the morning when they were all still asleep, they surrounded the place and arrested 53 people. That was a big chunk of the membership.

What was the total membership at that point?

It’s hard to say. Much more than that, because you have to remember at that time because of the Zenkyōtō (全共闘, All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee) movement, whole universities were shut down. They inherited a lot of Bund units on campuses that were connected to the Kansai side. Whole student organizations on campuses went with the Red Army. And they also had a lot of campuses that were closed, so they could basically have people living on these campuses — all these guerrilla units scattered around, at Doshisha University, etc. So there were a lot of people.

It’s hard to get any kind of real number. It was certainly more than 53. That was just the people in the gun (軍, army) who were sent to get that training. Some of the top leaders were there, but others were not, so they didn’t get arrested. When those people at Daibosatsu Tōge got arrested, the police realized that it was a plan involving the prime minister’s residence, so that kicked up the stakes and there were big trials. After that, the leaders had to go underground. There was tremendous police pressure and lots of people were being followed constantly by plainclothes police. That was the beginning of what came to be known as sekigun-zai (赤軍罪) — Red Army Crime — if you belonged to the Red Army, they would find some way to prosecute you.

Why did they decide to go to North Korea?

What had happened was that Shiomi had invented this ideology of a Red Army, meaning a guerrilla army that would fight with weapons, but the pressure was so severe within Japan that they were saying, okay, we can’t do guerrilla training in Japan. We need to go outside the country, create some bases, get some training and then come back. That was the notion. And then they went to North Korea because they couldn’t hijack a plane that could go any farther. They wanted the North Koreans to send them on to Cuba, but of course, the North Koreans had their own ideas, so quickly these people were stuck in that country.

Was there any communication from them back to Japan?

Not initially. Later there was some communication when there were people in the Middle East and they could go through the same kind of Eastern European route to get to North Korea.

The Yodo-go group in North Korea was subjected to “re-education” and brainwashing, so nobody heard anything for a while. A couple of years later, they announced publicly that they had coverted to the North Korean Juche ideology, which is an odd blend of prewar Imperial Japanese ideas and Stalinism with its own flavor.

And they were helping the North Koreans kidnap Japanese people from Europe and Japan?

Yes. And some other stuff, but they were basically operatives of the North Korean government. The NK line was, sure, we’ll help you make your revolution, and the way to make your revolution is to first help us make ours. First we get South Korea, and then we’ll get around to Japan, because we’re going to do it.

Back in Japan, no one heard anything from them for a very long time. Sometimes journalists went and were able to bring back reports, but not much was heard from them until the 1980s.

Can you explain why the United Red Army imploded into lynchings as it did?

I have published a book chapter about this, and it also figures heavily in my Japanese book. First of all, you have to realize that they were pretty much cornered. They had gone off to the mountains, and they were in this little hotbed. That kind of thing didn’t happen in the U.S. First of all, we have the F.B.I., and they were following a lot of people and trying to infiltrate but it wasn’t the same kind of thing where they were closing in on a group that was then closing in on itself. That dynamic isn’t quite the same. There were lots of groups in the U.S. that did go underground and those processes are very similar.

[In a paper I wrote with Gilda Zwerman] we said that going underground is mostly a second generation phenomenon. College generations are short. But you get the first generation that is elite and takes the broader view, and they lead a movement which has certain public support. Then things get nastier. And those leaders start getting arrested, and they’re either going underground or getting arrested. Younger people who grew up seeing the wildness of it come in and say, wow, we’re ready to go. They didn’t have the same kind of slow movement to that point. They’re in there, ready to go and they often come from different places and they don’t have the same kind of intellectual perspective on it. And they get much more radical and do crazy stuff. That’s part of what was happening.

The URA killed twelve of its own members. Nobody really seemed to have stopped the leaders while their comrades were dying to say, hey, wait a minute here.

The not being able to stop it was partly Japaneseness, and that is part of my analysis of what happened. There aren’t good ways to say, wait a minute, in a Japanese group — at least at that time. That’s part of it. Americans would have said, no way, I’m getting out of here. So that is a difference. There were people who were coming in and out of the URA, being sent out on errands, but they came back! They felt obligated to complete whatever they were supposed to do, but they couldn’t oppose what was going on. In part it was because there was a leader who was out of control — Mori Tsuneo. Nagata Hiroko was there as a sub-leader, but it was really Mori’s show and nobody could stand up to him. Interestingly, at a symbolic level, the whole time they were there, he was sitting in front of their pile of guns — they never used the guns on their own members, whom they hit and stabbed and tied up and tortured in a crazy attempt to get them to become stronger revolutionaries.

There is a later image that Nagata was this evil, demonic woman…

She’s not. She was an enthusiastic cheerleader, but initially, her style was a bit more supportive, trying to get people to rethink things. Mori was doing all this stuff — really pushing it, incorporating violence to speed things up and forcing people to participate in the violence so they would not be thought of as weak themselves and become victims. He was constructing ideology to rationalize what they were doing and not realizing what the consequences were of what he was doing. He created a massive structure of blaming the victims for their weakness and used ideology to screen the members from what they were actually doing. Nearly a year later he finally realized what he had done, and he hung himself in prison.

How did the cops catch on to them?

Both groups had people who were already on the wanted list. So the police were looking for them but they couldn’t find them. They didn’t know where to look, and then they started getting clues. The police knew there had been this merger (between the Red Army Faction and the Keihin-Ampo Kyōtō). They thought that only one of the groups was there. They didn’t realize that both groups were in the same place and that they were all mixed up together. But they were closing in more and more as things went on. They finally caught up with them, arresting Mori and Nagata when they had just returned from Tokyo to a site the others had already left, and then they caught up with the others in Karuizawa, where the final group of five took over a mountain lodge called Asama Sansō and held out for nine days against a huge riot police force because they had a hostage.

When did the cops realize members had died from lynching?

They arrested several people in Karuizawa at the train station and some of them started to talk. The first person to talk was this poor old 16-year old boy who had been taken out there with his older brother. He started talking about how they had killed his eldest brother and the brother’s wife, and the police thought, oh, he’s hallucinating. It didn’t really happen. You’ve been disturbed by this event. Then they started finding where the group had been and started digging up bodies.

Tomorrow: Part 4 – The Japanese Red Army

(Text found in the Mainichi publication『連合赤軍・”狼”たちの時代―1969-1975』.)

Minsei (民青): Horrified, they’d rush to call Yoyogi (Japanese Communist Party headquarters), but since they have no idea what is going on, they’d push together all their furniture into a barricade, lock the door, and hide in the closet.

Bund (ブント): They wouldn’t believe the news, exclaiming, “We haven’t finished off the riot police, so there’s no way the revolution has begun!”

Kakumaru (革マル): They’d play it all cool, looking up at the sky and muttering, “Any revolution that we didn’t start could not possibly be real, so we aren’t going to liberate no one from alienation.”

Chūkaku (中核): They’d demand, “Let us join in,” and when denied, would cry, “They are Stalinist agents!” to deaf ears.

(United Socialist) Front (フロント): They’d be busy calling to arrange for teachers to hold a teach-in about the revolution.

Kaihō (解放): They’d keep repeating their one idiot slogan “We’re against the rationalization of revolutionary power!” until everyone finally realized how dumb they are.

ML (マルクス・レーニン主義派): Flustered, they’d call Beijing. But not being able to connect, they’d be completely perplexed: “How could a revolution start without a people’s war?” Then they’d retreat back to the farms with dour faces.

Proletariat Army (プロ軍): They’d say, “What? This is shitty!” and start pouring sulfuric acid into bottles to get ready for the counterrevolution.

Tokyo University Law Department Students (東大法学部学生): A call to the National Personnel Authority (人事院) would not convince them, so they’d go there to directly confirm it themselves. But they’d be terrorized to learn that the Civil Service Exam (国家公務員試験) had been abolished. After pulling themselves together, they’d throw out their statute books (六法全書) and start leafing through works by Stalin, Guevara, and Lenin. But not being able to understand the sentiments, they start preparations to make a placard that reads “Anti-Violence, Anti-Blockade.”

1. Minsei (民青) is the nickname for the Democratic Youth League of Japan (日本民主青年同盟) — a junior organization of the Japanese Communist Party. They were non-New Left student activists.
2. Kakumaru and Chūkaku are two factions of the Revolutionary Communist League that have been at war with each other for decades.
3. Front were the “Socialist League” and believed in “structural reform.”
4. Kaihō — meaning “liberation” — were an extremist offshoot of the Japan Socialist Party-affiliated Japan Socialist Youth League (日本社会主義青年同盟) nicknamed Shaseidō (社青同).
5. ML were an offshoot of Bund who took up Maoist ideology.
6. Pro-gun were Fourth Internationalist Trotskyites.
7. The Japanese bureaucracy has traditionally come from the Law Department of Tokyo University.

Dr. Patricia Steinhoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This is the second installment of our interview with Dr. Steinhoff about the Japanese New Left in the 1960s and 1970s.

PART 2 – THE BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT

Let’s begin with the 1960 demonstrations against the revision of the Ampo (Japanese shorthand for Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan). Did these protests enjoy broad public support?

Yes, the 1960 Ampo protests had very wide support. A lot of it was mobilized by the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. Those parties also had the main labor federations, which could mobilize huge numbers of people. There were also citizens groups created at the time. The student movement had initially been pretty much organized by the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) right after the war, but then expanded. But in the late ’50s, a lot of the student leaders were unhappy with what was happening with party policy, and they didn’t like being dictated to and treated like a subordinate part of the working class instead of being something on their own. A big group of those leaders broke with the Communist Party in 1958. Others were thrown out when they went with the leaders who left the party. They were the beginning of Japan’s New Left.

So the New Left, in Japan, means quite explicitly, “not affiliated with the Communist Party.” Marxist, but not JCP.

And the people who founded it had been key top leaders of Zengakuren (全学連, All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations), particularly around Tōdai (Tokyo University).

At that time, was Zengakuren controlled by the Japanese Communist Party?

Not exactly, and to characterize it that way to an English-speaking audience invites misconceptions. Zengakuren was a national federation of student government organizations all over Japan. There were local student government organizations or jichikai (自治会) on every campus, and students were elected to leadership positions in student government for each university faculty or gakubu (学部). These student organizations ran the co-op, and they got money from student fees. And they would control the student government because they were elected to do so.

Zengakuren had a democratic centralist kind of structure, where they had campus units that were just students, but technically everyone at some level is a member. Then there is an organizational structure for the city-wide federation and then for the regional federation, and then the national one. Each level would elect the next level up — that is what democratic centralism means. The Communist Party controlled the top — the organization leadership — but not necessarily the individual students. It’s not to say that every student in Japan was a Communist, but the movement itself at the national level was under clear control. So Zengakuren could mobilize people for different things. That was the case through the 1950s.

Then in the late ’50s, that’s when these people — who were national leaders of Zengakuren, but most of them also were from the Tōdai cell that controlled the Tōdai student government organization — broke with the party. They walked out and formed their own organization — Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei (共産主義者同盟, Communist League). They kept the word kyōsanshugi (共産主義, communism) but not the kyōsanto (共産党) of the Communist Party. They organized themselves as another party. They were nicknamed Bund (ブント).

Were they aligned with the left-wing of the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) instead of the JCP?

No. It is a mistake to think of this in terms of national political parties, as these were groups of students operating independently. They were close to the Socialist Party in their ideas, but at that point, the Socialist Party was not that much involved in the student movement. Later in the mid-to-late ’60s, they had a student branch — one part of which became part of the New Left.

Then there was another organization, which was minimal in the late ’50s — the Trotskyite League (日本トロツキスト連盟). It had been just a little study group, but right at that point, it also began to grow. It became another part of the New Left, and because it’s Trotskyite, it was not connected to the Communist Party. That became Kakumeiteki Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei (革命的共産主義者同盟, Revolutionary Marxist League), and then that split in Kakumaru-ha (革マル派) and Chūkaku-ha (中核派). And also, Daiyon-Intā (Fourth International), which is affiliated with the Trotskyite Fourth International organization.

Ideologically-speaking, what were these parties’ relative positions?

These people are all left of the Communist Party.

From ’59 to ’61, there was a fair amount of movement between Chūkaku and Bund, so if you trace individual histories, they are entangled. They’re all much more militant than the JCP, but they’re basically student organizations and they’re seeing students as the vanguard of the proletariat. But a lot of it follows the Trotskyite idea of simultaneous world revolution. They’re all anti-Stalinist. The individual differences between the groups are too arcane to be described here.

When the protests failed to stop the revision of the Ampo treaty, what happened to the movement?

All of these groups in the early ’60s are grappling with the question of, why did it fail? What should we have done? For them, it became a kind of organizational policy issue. And it took a while for them to recover from that, and they recovered in different ways. Basically, by about ’63 and ’64, they realize that the treaty would come up for revision again in ’70. We have to be better prepared for ’70. So they started early in trying to organize and mobilize in order to be ready. And of course, during that same period, the Vietnam War heats up, so there are different issues. They first used the treaty with South Korea as one mobilizing point at the end of ’65. From then on, they’re looking towards ’70, but they are also organizing all of these groups on campuses.

Is there something about either the ideology of these groups or the fact that they are Japanese that led to the amount of factionalism? (Examples of rival group helmets can be seen here.) There seems to be many more divisions than what you saw in the SDS, for example.

When Bund split from the JCP, they kept the same kind of organizational structure. So they had this image of being a national party. They had this vertical structure, and they had these groups at the local level that are part of it. There is a kind of Leninist organization to it all.

SDS never had that. SDS had a central committee, but it was when Al Haber and Tom Hayden and a couple of people might meet over lunch. They didn’t have this kind of structure. Later they did attempt to have a national structure to coordinate the local groups, but it was nothing like the centralized national organization that each of the Japanese New Left sects had, which derived from Leninist organizational principles.

The structure is part of it, but they were also reading Marx when you couldn’t read it in the United States. They were studying it in school. Marxist economics was taught in the economics departments of Japanese universities. In that sense, they were much more sophisticated Marxists, and even in the pre-war period, there was a pretty sophisticated group of Japanese intellectuals who were doing Marxist analysis and argumentation about issues in intellectual history.

The Japanese New Left was a lot more ideological than the U.S. movement, and there was a kind of privileging of people who could do ideology. So the people who gravitated to certain types of leadership positions were those who could do Marxist style argumentation. If groups want to split, whatever the reason for the split — whether it’s personality or something about the policy — it only happens when it’s articulated as an ideological position.

So when they were under the JCP, you’d have these kinds of splits. These splits are common in the Left anywhere, because of that ideological system. But when they are under the JCP, if the local group can’t resolve it, Moscow steps in and says, this faction got it right, that faction didn’t, and so the losing group must make a jiko-hihan (自己批判) or self-criticism of where their thinking went wrong and fall in line with the group that was declared to have the correct view. So when they left the JCP, there was no longer anyone to arbitrate these disputes. Whenever there’s a dispute, they just split.

Yes, it’s Japanese, but it’s not culturally Japanese. There’s a little bit of it that’s culturally Japanese in the sense of vertical structures. They were very comfortable with that — at the time. But it has to do with the institutional structures they were working with. We never had that in the U.S.

The distances are significant too. It’s a big deal to have a national meeting in the U.S.: you can’t get people together. There were 56 colleges in Tokyo alone in the 1960s. Meeting and having all these kinds of gatherings — that could happen very easily in Japan, even with differences in transportation speed.

A common criticism against the student movement I have heard in Japan is that the students only protested “petty” and trivial matters like internal university politics rather than rallying the masses around serious issues.

That is simply not the case. Anybody who knows what was happening in the 1960s in Japan knows that students were not protesting trivial matters. In 1960, they weren’t wearing helmets, but they were having mass protests in the streets about the major issue of international politics in Japan, which was also the major domestic issue in terms of whether Japan was going to preserve a constitutional democratic structure. The “zig-zag” [snake dance] was invented for that. They were having conflicts with the police at that time, and the government was worried about controlling it. That all became part of the tradition, but the more militant stuff starts in ’67.

The key point was a big protest on October 8, 1967 (pictures available here). They were protesting against Prime Minister Sato going to Vietnam, where there would be a meeting to discuss the Japanese role in the war. They could see that because of the Ampo treaty and other relationships, they were getting dragged into the Vietnam War.

The Socialist Party and other people were upset about it. The Asahi had a position against it, and they were doing mild forms of political protest, but these students went to the airport and by that time there were several different groups of New Left students. At that time, there was a kind of tradition in the New Left about protesting trips of government leaders who did things they opposed. They would try to keep the person from leaving the country by protesting at the airport, since he is representing them. So there was a big brouhaha there — at the time Haneda was the international airport — and the riot police were there and had their water cannon trucks. The students had previously used the poles and helmets for internal clashes, but they brought them and used them for the first time against the police.

I did some very intensive research on that event — it’s very complicated, but there are all sorts of neat symbolic things happening. At the height of this protest, they are throwing stones at the police who have this big net to deflect the stones, but they crawled up on top of the police vans and were waving their flags. So you can imagine how the police felt!

They were on several bridges that used to go to Haneda. On one bridge, the police had pushed them back, and they were jumping off the bridge into the water. During the melee, on another bridge, they had commandeered a police truck and someone was driving it, and one of their own people fell under the wheels and was killed.

On the bridge to Haneda Airport

So that became this big mobilizing thing that a student had been killed. It was the first death of a student since the death of a woman student [Kamba Michiko] in the 1960 Ampo protest on June 15, 1960. Of course at the time the students claimed that the police had killed the student, but the real story became clear later on. And if you read any of the accounts of people of that generation — whether they were there or not — that was a key thing in motivating them to participate. They all write about it. The emotion of it is, he died, so I have to take his place. It wasn’t, uh-oh, I can get killed doing this, I better not go. But rather: they killed one of ours, so now I have to go enlist and fight the good fight. After that, you not only get more violence in the interactions but greater mobilization. And a sense that, yes, this can be dangerous but we have to do it.

So that’s what was happening. But at that point in 1967, there were a couple of on-campus conflicts, and they tended to be at private universities about raising school fees, which is a fairly real issue for students and not trivial. But by late ’68 and ’69, you have all these international issues flaring up at the same time at the national level. You have the anti-Vietnam War protests and Beheiren (Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam) involved in that. You have the students in the streets about international issues and trying to change the government and unable to do it. The Okinawa Reversion is part of that because it was the main issue in the 1970 Ampo revisions. There were also more general protests against U.S. military bases in Japan, which were there because of the Joint Security Treaty, but also aroused a lot of concern among the communities surrounding them.

So you have all these big international issues, but you also have issues flaring up at the individual campuses. And the Japanese university administrations at that time were pretty conservative and traditional. And not very student-friendly. These kinds of things were happening in the U.S. and Europe at the same time. And a lot of it in those places was not just the international affairs stuff — it was about students and how universities treated them. They may seem trivial today, but in the lives of students at the time, they were seen as major issues. And they mobilized ordinary students who were not in these very highly-politicized sects protesting national and international issues in the streets at the same time. Of course, once you get such a movement going on a campus, the sects come in, and it’s all mixed up together. The national level protests on the streets and the campus protests were running on parallel tracks, but it meant that the whole place was blowing up. And a high proportion of students was involved to some extent in either the on-campus protests or in the off-campus stuff or both. You can’t separate them. Because if your campus is closed, that means you have all those resources. Students can camp out in campus buildings to prepare for a street demonstration, and you can make bombs in the chemistry labs.

Tomorrow: Part 3 – The Movement Goes Underground

In this five-part interview, we ask Dr. Steinhoff to explain the formation of the student movement in Japan, its radical re-organization into the infamous “Red Armies,” and the general social impact of the New Left upon contemporary Japanese society.

PART 1 – FINDING THE TOPIC

How did you end up researching Japanese student leftism and the Red Army saga?

I was a Japanese specialist before I was a sociologist. I have an undergraduate degree in Japanese language and literature. I was at the University of Michigan, with the Michigan Daily, when it was a center of student protest. My closest associates were very much in the center of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and activism in the early ’60s. So I was very close to that kind of activism, but I was not an activist myself.

When I went to Harvard and wanted to do a dissertation, Robert Lifton had just written a piece about Japanese student radicals — the ’60 Ampo [Japan-U.S. Joint Security Treaty] generation. I had read that, and in it he talked about the students making a tenkō (転向) which he meant as, they went from one organization to another, one ideological position to another. I’m not sure how accurate that description is for the students of that period. In any case, the word tenkō came up.

I was working at that time under Robert Bellah. He asked me what I wanted to do for my dissertation, and I said two things. One was Japanese politeness levels, which I had done some work on and had found sociologically interesting. The other was tenkō. And he knew Lifton and knew the Lifton piece, and he immediately said, “Tenkō! That’s a great topic. But don’t do the post-war, you need to do the real tenkō of the 1920s and 1930s.”

That’s what I did my dissertation on. My initial research in Japan was pre-war, but it was on the most radical elements in pre-war Japan — the members of the Japan Communist Party and the support organizations around them. And it ended up being a dissertation about how they confronted the state and how they were suppressed in their prison situation. The existing Japanese work at that time was all being done as intellectual history (思想史). I’m a sociologist and have a pretty low tolerance for intellectual history (laughs), so my approach was to look at the social context in which this was happening. I looked at the documents — in that period in the ’60s, a lot of classified material from pre-war Japan had come out and it was on the used book market and people were collecting it. There were pre-war, government documents about tenkō and how it had been managed.

When you say “tenkō” in this context, do you mean renunciation of Marxist beliefs?

The pre-war situation was that they arrested a lot of people under the Peace Preservation Law, that it’s against the law to carry out actions that have the purpose of changing the kokutai (國體, national polity) or the economic structure. So the logic is that it’s an action, but the crime really depends on what your beliefs are. What happened in this situation was, the criminal justice system was not content with prosecuting people for actions: they wanted them to give up the beliefs. Otherwise the crime is continuing, right? So tenkō became about pressure to give up your ideas.

A whole system was developed for getting people to make a tenkō and then using the confession/tenkō statements made by leaders to get other people to do it. It became a kind of mass movement. In the ’30s, it spread out to many other groups that had been caught under the Peace Preservation Law, well beyond the Communist Party. And also, it put pressure on many people long before they were ever arrested. When the Konoe government created the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (大政翼賛会) in 1940, they put pressure on all the mass organizations to become part of it, under state control. In that process, they pressured organizations to make an organizational statement that was basically a loyalty oath or a tenkō

I was interested in the whole process of tenkō, the logic of it, how the prosecutors tried to make it happen, and how people responded to it. So I tried to understand how people dealt with that pressure.

The research was actually being done in Tokyo in 1966 up to the beginning of 1968. Things were heating up in the student movement but I had my nose in the books and was not paying attention to what was going on around me.

So after the dissertation I turned to what I originally wanted to do which was look at post-war tenkō. I wanted to find a post-war situation that had some of the same elements, and my idea was the post-war constitution gave people a lot more protection in the legal system, and the post-war education system was trying to produce stronger individuals. So a lot of the thrust of the occupation should have created different social conditions in which people could resist that type of pressure if it fell on them again. I was looking around for a similar post-war situation in which people because of ideological commitment got themselves in a direct confrontation with the state and were under pressure to stop doing what they were doing.

So I was looking around, and I was aware that another social movement was going on, but I didn’t know what was happening in much detail.

Then in 1972, the Red Army people who were in the Middle East carried out the airport attack in Israel.

Before that, were Americans aware that there were major leftist protests in Japan?

I was not aware of the Red Army. I was aware that there were big protests. Certainly other Japan specialists who were in Japan during the late 1960s were aware of the protests, but I don’t think they were too well publicized in American mass media except possibly as protests against the Vietnam War, which were just one part of the movement in Japan. And these were not just leftist protests, because a lot of citizens groups were also involved in them. I was aware that there had been a huge blowup at Tōdai (Tokyo University), and in fact, I had come back in the summer of ’71 and things were pretty rocky and tense for foreigners. I had a friend who had lived around the Komaba campus and had been beaten up by Tōdai students. If I had wanted to get in and start studying it at that time, it would have been very difficult.

When the Lod airport event happened, we were watching it on television, the aftermath of it, and my husband said, isn’t that what you study? It’s the wrong country, but it’s Japanese, and [surviving attacker] Okamoto Kozo is in a prison situation. And he’s going to be under some kind of pressure. So I then made some strange arrangements that got me to Israel in August of 1972.

My very creative husband said, write a letter to Golda Meir. “She used to be a Milwaukee school teacher. You can write to her.” So I wrote her a letter and explained who I was and what I was doing, and I didn’t hear and I didn’t hear. But I had put in some names of people I knew as references. And I started hearing, “Hey, the Israeli embassy called.” I didn’t think anything of it. Then all of a sudden I got this air letter from the Attorney General of Israel saying that Okamoto has finished his trial, and we’ll let you interview him, but we can’t promise he will talk to you, because he hasn’t talked to anybody else.

So I went and I interviewed him. It was very exciting and interesting. I collected some other materials. I had a transcript of his trial testimony, but it was in Hebrew, so I had to find somebody who could translate it for me.

The immediate problem was, I am a sociologist. I don’t study individuals. I talk to people and try to understand what their context is, but a single person is not a topic for me. The obvious thing was to go back and find out where this guy came from.

Then I started looking at the background, looking at the Red Army. For several years, I was just collecting stuff because I was doing some non-Japan research in Hawaii. And then finally I decided it was time to get back to business, and in 1982 to 1983 I had a sabbatical in Japan, and I wanted to put the context back in. It seems like by then that the movement activity is all over, you can’t study it anymore. But in fact, in ’82 when I came, the trials were still going on and there were still lots of people. But the movement inside the country had died down enough that if I could find the people and get the access, it was not as difficult to study as one might think. There were more materials available then. In that year, the URA (United Red Army) defendants were available. The first trial had just finished but you could visit them in prison. I was shown how to do that and began interviewing them. I was interested in the early origins of the Sekigun [Japanese name for the Red Army]. So I interviewed a lot of people and I was asking about how they got into it and how the movement got started

From then, I started coming to Japan quite regularly. By the late 1980s, I was coming every summer for a period of time. And I could pick up the research where I had left off the year before. And somewhere along the way, I had met Takazawa Koji who became first a source of a lot of the documentation and then a source for interview with other people. We ended up collaborating on a lot of projects, and then he ended up donating his entire collection to the University of Hawaii, which had all of the materials in it. It’s mushroomed from there.

I never dreamed that 30 years later I would still be studying it, but by total fluke I picked a group that is not active in Japan anymore but has people still in hot spots around the world that they went to at that time.

How did you end up releasing a book on the Red Army in Japan but not in the U.S.?

By the late 1980s, I was ready to start writing what I thought was going to be my book about the Japanese Red Army. I suddenly realized that there was this huge rock in the middle of the road called the United Red Army. I couldn’t deal with the rest of it unless I tackled that first and understood it. I started writing about that. At some nijikai (after meeting drinks), Takazawa said, if you write a book and publish it in Japanese that will be enough money to come back again to Japan.

So I had an English draft that wasn’t ready to go to an American academic publisher. It was just a start. But I gave it to Takazawa, and he negotiated the publication through a good publisher Kawade Shobo Shinsha. Kawade had a very good staff translator do the translation, so next time I came back for a sabbatical in 1989-1990, I worked with the translator chapter by chapter to make sure that it said what I wanted to say. So that book came out in Japanese as 『日本赤軍派―その社会学的物語』. It had two printings at Kawade, and then a decade later Iwanami Shoten reissued it in their Modern Japanese Classics series (『死へのイデオロギー―日本赤軍派―』). It has still not been published in English, because so much happened in the 1990s with the exiles in North Korea and people returning from the Middle East that the story kept developing. It has been an enormous benefit to me, because it opened a lot of doors in Japan. After that of course, I would pick up some internal thing from the movement, and it would say, “Steinhoff says this…” (laughs) Contaminating my subjects!

Tomorrow: Part 2 – The Birth of a Movement