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.

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

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.

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