ideology, identity, and political violence in four … identity, and political violence in four...

Steinhoff Ideology, Identity, Political Violence in Four Linked Groups 1

Ideology, Identity, and Political Violence in Four Linked Japanese Groups

Patricia G. Steinhoff

University of Hawaii

Abstract This paper examines the relation of ideology, context, and identity to political violence in four linked groups that form a natural experiment. Three of the groups are offshoots of the Red Army Faction, an armed clandestine group with a distinctive ideology that emerged at the peak of the New Left protest cycle in Japan in 1969. Under severe repression, some members went overseas to become the Yodogō group in North Korea and the Japanese Red Army in the Middle East, while others remained in Japan and merged with another underground group to become the United Red Army. All three offshoots viewed themselves as the vanguard pursuing revolution in Japan through political violence. However, each group interacted with different organizations in different state contexts, which re-shaped their ideology, organizational structure, and opportunities for political violence. The study examines how these changes affected the groups’ ideology, identity claims, and choice of targets. Paper to be presented at European Consortium on Political Research 2015 General Conference session on “The Role of Ideology in Violent Politics: Mobilization, Strategy, and Targeting,” Political Violence Section, European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, Montreal, Canada, August 28, 2015. DRAFT: Please do not cite or quote without the author’s permission.


Introduction

The four linked groups in this study arose sequentially as the result of escalated policing and

repression at the peak of the Japanese New Left protest cycle. The first, the Red Army Faction, was

ejected from one of the major public insurgency groups active in the protest cycle for advocating armed

clandestine political violence. Their new tactics as an independent group attracted even more severe

repression, producing a transformational moment that led to a shift in framing. All three successor groups

stem directly or indirectly from this shift. Two different subsets of the original Red Army Faction went

into exile in North Korea and the Middle East, respectively. Each initially planned to pursue their existing

framing, but had to adapt in order to survive under the protection of host organizations with their own

ideologies and political aims. Those who remained in Japan under extreme repression merged with

another group whose ideology was substantially different. They retreated into the mountains, where their

efforts to forge a common way forward ended disastrously.

My aim is to examine these critical shifts, utilizing the dynamic approach to framing proposed by

Johnston and Alimi (2013), in order to analyze changes in the identity, activities, and targets of these four

related Japanese radical groups. The approach uses the semantic triplet first proposed by Franzosi

(Franzosi 1987; Franzosi 1999) for quantitative analysis of newspaper data, but uses it in a different way.

Johnston and Alimi use the subject and predicate (verb and object) set as a schematic, to analyze

documents that reflect how the framing of social movement groups develops over time, starting from a

primary framework and studying changes as a “keying process” by which groups adapt the primary

framework as conflict unfolds.

…it is useful to think of primary frameworks and their elaborations in terms of the

aggrieved <subject> challenging <verb> the offending <object>….The starting place for

collective action must be those framings that are widely shared and based on the

collective history, symbols, and cultural images. Subsequent analysis traces how

transformations of the primary framework occur as the movement develops—the keying

process….If frames are best thought of as tripartite structures, subsequent framings will

reflect battles over collective identity, the strategy of contention, and the definition of the

enemy (p.456)

I am adapting Johnston and Alimi’s general approach and procedure to the smaller scale of this

exploratory analysis of four related groups, and will explain the selection of key points and representative

documents as each group is discussed. I have been studying this cluster of Red Army groups for several

decades, primarily using Japanese language materials the groups have produced, plus prison interviews

with participants and observations of their trials (Steinhoff 1976; Steinhoff 1989; Steinhoff 1991;

Steinhoff 1992; Steinhoff 1996; Steinhoff 2003; Steinhoff 2004; Steinhoff 2013; Zwerman and Steinhoff


2005; Zwerman, Steinhoff, and della Porta 2000). I have taken the selected documents from published

compilations that are more widely available than the obscure originals, so the references indicate the re-

publication source and date, plus an indication of where the document was originally published. All of the

documents are in Japanese. Only the English translation for the titles appears in the text, but the original

Japanese and the English translation are given in the full reference.

The New Left Bund as the Primary Framework for the Red Army Faction

The starting point for the analysis is not general cultural ideas in Japanese society, but rather the

shared cultural and ideological context of the Japanese New Left during the time period in question. The

Red Army Faction emerged out of a faction fight within the mainstream New Left public insurgency

organization formally named the Communist League (Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei, often shortened to

Kyōsandō) and nicknamed Bund, so we begin with that predecessor organization’s basic beliefs and its

immediate cultural and organizational context. That organization in turn grew out of a factional dispute.

The Communist League, hereafter Bund, was one of the two original New Left organizations that arose in

late 1950s Japan. (The other original New Left organization of the late 1950s was the Revolutionary

Communist League (Kakumeiteki Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei or Kakkyōdō), which grew out of a Trotsky

study group and was affiliated with the Fourth International. While it had its own ideological leaders who

developed their own distinctive language, they shared the basic precepts of Bund but saw their own group

as the vanguard party leading the revolution.)

At that time the All-Japan National Student Association (Zengakuren) consisted of local chapters

of student self-government organizations at universities all over Japan, which were linked through elected

delegates to city and regional-level organizations. The Japan Communist Party had helped build the local

student government organizations and the services they provided in the immediate postwar period a

decade earlier, and had established the national organizational framework of Zengakuren. At the national

level, the Party viewed Zengakuren as part of its web of affiliated labor federations and other groups that

could be mobilized for political campaigns over various issues. It also invited promising young student

activists to become Party members.

As a consequence, the elected leadership of the national student organization and its major

regional affiliates in the Tokyo metropolitan area and urban western Japan were largely students affiliated

with the Japan Communist Party (JCP). As Zengakuren leaders they participated with the JCP and its

union federations by mobilizing students to participate in major protest movements, but as JCP members

from Party cells at the top universities in Japan, they were under Party authority. The relationship of these

national student leaders with the JCP was contentious, reflecting the long-standing internal divisions in

the Party, plus the students’ frustration with the shifting JCP political line and slow de-Stalinization after


1956. They also chafed at the student movement’s low status in the Party structure as a minor,

subordinate wing of the labor movement. The conflict came to a head in June, 1958, when a large

contingent of the national Zengakuren leadership rebelled openly with a vote of no-confidence in the JCP

leadership and left the Party. The JCP then formalized the breach by expelling even more of the student

leaders. This leadership group formed the nucleus of a new organization, the Communist League or Bund.

Like the JCP, the Communist League was conceived as a revolutionary party that accepted members by

invitation.

Bund already had a national network of affiliated student groups through its founders’ concurrent

position as the national elected leaders of Zengakuren and their leadership of the Socialist Student League

(which had no relation to the Socialist Party). Local chapters of this student organization won election to

campus student government, which in turn led to their leaders’ election to the regional and national levels

of Zengakuren. Whereas the JCP viewed students as a marginal appendage of the working class, Bund

saw students as a special segment of the proletariat destined to lead the revolution, with Bund as its

vanguard revolutionary party in place of the discredited JCP. Bund’s New Left ideology was Marxist and

strongly anti-Stalinist. It accepted Trotsky’s premise that revolution had to be worldwide in order to

succeed. The Bund leadership had extensive experience in mobilizing students for joint protest campaigns

with labor unions and local groups on a range of issues, and had developed distinctive tactics that

escalated confrontations with the police. These campaigns reinforced their self-image as leaders of the

proletariat who developed strategy and tactics through action, rather than armchair theorizing.

The founding document of the Communist League "In order to capture the world: the urgent task

of the proletariat." expresses this cultural context clearly (Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei 1959 (1984)). It begins

with a reference to the Communist Manifesto as having introduced the proletariat to the world as a unified

class transcending national boundaries. The name of the Communist League was taken directly from the

transnational workers’ organization for which the Communist Manifesto was written (Marx and Engels

1848 (1978)). Having just broken with the Japan Communist Party, the founders of Bund were explicitly

going back to the original ideological source to underline their rejection of what the Soviet-dominated

JCP had become. The original Communist League had also been an international organization of workers

based in Paris, underscoring Bund’s identification with a world proletariat preparing to fight to destroy

the world bourgeoisie and the imperialist nations that dominated it.

The document uses the image of a warning bell to express the urgency of the current situation,

referring to events in various countries as well as Japan in 1958 as evidence that the time was ripe now for

revolutionary action. For Japan, it points to the “strange victory” of late 1958 in which concerted protest

actions by a broad coalition of labor, students, and left parties had suddenly forced the government to

withdraw from legislative consideration a contentious bill to strengthen police powers. Quotes from Marx


and Lenin remind the reader that circumstances can change dramatically in just a few days, reinforcing

the notion that a vanguard group can set off a revolution during a moment of crisis, through bold action

that confronts the power of the state. In the style of the Manifesto, the document critiques an array of

other groups on the Left to justify why Bund (not the JCP, major labor federations, or its New Left rival)

is the only vanguard party that can lead the world proletariat to world revolution.

It concludes with a series of rallying cries: “Let’s form a revolutionary vanguard with the

capacity to lead the way to achieving the socialist revolution!” In a historical reference to Bund as

signifying those who split the JCP, “Let’s form a revolutionary left organization by shaking off timidity

and skepticism without succumbing to the intimidation and threats of being ‘splitters’!” “We aim to create

a new revolutionary class political party!” “The overall plan of the liberation of the proletariat is born

only in practical tests of fire, through the process of responding to the everyday class struggle.”

Thus the cultural foundation of the Japanese New Left, as seen in the founding document of the

Communist League at the beginning of 1959 may be schematized as follows.

One year later, Bund was leading the mainstream of Zengakuren through the massive 1960

protests against the U.S.-Japan Joint Security Treaty, mobilizing tens of thousands of students to

participate in huge street protests alongside union members and other ordinary citizens. The symbolic

target in those protests was the Diet building, the seat of the Japanese parliament (Diet) where the

Communist and Socialist Party Diet members fought unsuccessfully to prevent ratification of the security

treaty by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party government. In this capacity Bund developed a

reputation for dramatic surprise attacks. In addition to escalating a mass demonstration by crashing

through police lines to enter the protected Diet compound, on another occasion it foiled police efforts to

prevent protesters from demonstrating at Japan’s international airport (and primary link to the outside

world) by quietly going to the airport a day early and hiding there, before the security was in place.


Based on both their written documents and their style of political action, the culture of Bund can

be characterized as a combination of applied theorizing and carefully planned surprise attacks. Their

framing was elaborated in documents that combined their knowledge of Marxist texts with

knowledgeable references to contemporary events, which led to their personal identification with past and

current revolutionary leaders. As new Japanese leaders they would lead grand revolutionary movements

to transform the world, based on their interpretation of the significance of contemporary events. Although

their ultimate goals were extremely broad, their actions combined a Japanese style of participatory

planning and careful coordination of mass protests with symbolic surprise attacks whose outcome was

contingent and open-ended. In the original Bund, these surprise attacks involved a small group planning

and executing an unexpected deviation from a much larger organized joint protest event for which they

had mobilized and led the student contingent. The object was simply to demonstrate that they could

subvert the state’s defenses; once they had crashed through police lines or turned up unexpectedly where

they were not supposed to be, they simply ran around to celebrate their symbolic victory and then

dispersed or were arrested. Subsequent Bund documents exploited the propaganda value of these events,

even as they indirectly acknowledged that such actions had not advanced their broader political goals.

Despite the massive street protests and widespread public opposition, the security treaty was

rammed through the Diet by parliamentary maneuvers and the movement ended in failure. In the

aftermath of the 1960 protests, Bund gradually declined as various factions proposed different theoretical

explanations for why the protests had not succeeded in rejecting the security treaty and toppling the

conservative party from power. Within a few years, however, New Left leaders realized that the treaty

would come up for automatic renewal again in 1970, and began to mobilize a new generation of students

for that campaign. Some of the old Bund leaders and their younger student protégés from the 1960 anti-

security treaty protests rebuilt what came to be known as the Second Bund. It became one of the main

New Left organizations during the more complex protest cycle of the late 1960s, retaining Bund’s self-

identity as an independent vanguard party preparing to lead a Japanese revolution in which students

would lead the proletariat.

By then the collective New Left vision articulated by Bund was shared by several other national

student-based organizations with their own ideological variants, all of which participated in street protests

in shifting coalitions, along with labor organizations and citizens’ groups. (Most also styled themselves as

“parties” even though their following was primarily students.) In the interim, the state had built up its

security capacity substantially, leading to escalating confrontations between student protesters and police.

In addition to street protest campaigns over major domestic and international issues, Japanese students

also confronted university administrations and eventually riot police, in conflicts that shut down 162

campuses between 1968 and 1970. Japanese students we well aware that students in Europe and the


United States were reading the same books, promoting the same New Left ideas, and engaging in similar

protest movements, often over the same issues such as involvement in the Vietnam war.

Student groups from the United States and Europe were invited to an International Anti-War

Conference in Tokyo in August 1968. Three different Bund leaders prepared separate sections of a three-

part policy statement to present at the conference (Shiomi, Saragi, and Asahi 1968).

The controversial first section, written by Shiomi Takaya under his pen name Ikkō Ken and

entitled “The Contemporary World Transition and the Prospects for World Revolution,” advanced his

“transitional world” theory. Shiomi argued that since the 1917 Russian Revolution the world had been

moving toward imperialism and in that era labor’s opposition to the contradictions of uneven

development had resulted in fascism, but now the world was in a new transition from imperialism to

socialism. The imperialist powers, organized into NATO and the US-Japan Security Treaty under the

dominance of U.S. imperialism, faced increasing political and economic contradictions and were

weakening. The labor movements and general citizenry in these advanced imperialist countries were

losing trust in their national bourgeois leadership and moving toward the later developing socialist

countries as an alternative. This provided an opening for the mobilization of the proletariat in the

imperialist countries and their unification into a world proletariat along with the socialist (workers’)

countries. On the basis of this analysis, Shiomi concluded that the time was ripe to build a world party

and a Red Army in each country, in order to bring about a revolutionary war and to attack the divided and

shaken bourgeois anti-revolutionary alliance with a new world revolutionary front (Shiomi 1968 (1984)).

This view did not become a shift in framing for Bund, but instead split the organization.

The Red Army Faction’s Separation from Bund

Shiomi was the head of the secretariat of the Socialist Student League, Bund’s student

organization, and in that capacity had been bringing students from his home base in western Japan

(Kansai) to Tokyo to expand student protest activity. His argument reflected the more radical and action-

oriented views of the Kansai faction of Bund. One other faction left the second Bund immediately as a

result of its disagreement with this analysis, while Shiomi’s allies rallied around him and began

organizing an underground army for more aggressive battles with the police. Labeled by its opponents as

the Red Army Faction, the group accepted the label and began publishing fliers under that name as an

internal faction or “party within a party” of Bund. A year of violent internal factional struggle ensued

before Bund expelled the Red Army Faction in summer 1969. Thirteen months after the International

Anti-war Conference at which Shiomi had presented his transitional world thesis, the Communist League

Red Army Faction (Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei Sekigunha) under the leadership of Shiomi Takaya,


announced its independent existence with a “Declaration of War” (Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei Sekigunha

Gunji Kakumei Iinkai 1969 (1975)).

As befits a declaration of war, the tone of this document is direct and combative. Although it is

not a theoretical exegesis, it clearly follows the transitional world thesis and applies it to contemporary

world events. The main part formally addresses “Gentlemen of the Bourgeoisie” but then in subsequent

sentences uses the familiar second person form “kimitachi,” to express both familiarity and condescension

toward the bourgeoisie. It announces that the era of the imperialist bourgeoisie is over and they will be

completely wiped out by the world revolutionary war. A litany of the evil the bourgeoisie has done

around the world turns into a defiant claim that the united world proletariat demands for itself the right to

respond in kind. “If you killed our Black Panther comrades and have the right to oppress the ghetto with

police cars, we have the right to kill Nixon, Sato, Kissinger, and de Gaulle, and to blow up the Pentagon,

Japanese Defense headquarters, and your homes [the symbols of power in the imperialist nations].” “We

will point our guns at the self-defense forces, the riot police, and the American military [the three symbols

of armed power in Japan]. If you don’t want to be killed, turn your guns around to the bourgeoisie

standing behind you. We will kill whoever obstructs our operations to liberate the world proletariat.”

The declaration then addresses “Gentlemen of the Proletariat.” It points to signs that the world

and the Japanese class war have entered a new stage, with references to current conflicts all over the

world with which the proletariat can identify, adding that segments of student movements, including SDS

and the Black Panthers in the United States, and the Red Army Faction, are also beginning to arm

themselves. The Red Army Faction predicts that these actions will merge and produce the revolutionary

party, revolutionary army, and revolutionary front. It concludes: “Gentlemen of the Proletariat! Let’s win

the preliminary insurrection—the world revolutionary war!” Subsequent handbills called on groups to

form military units and arm themselves to prepare for the coming struggle.

Although the original Bund commitment to its own leadership role in the world revolution is

retained along with the orientation to action, this Red Army Faction document builds on Shiomi’s

analysis of the world transition to convey the urgent need to spark revolutionary action in Japan right

away. Shiomi and other Bund leaders had met the leaders of SDS and the Black Panthers at the

International Antiwar Conference in Tokyo a year earlier, but now he was theorizing the transformation

of antiwar movements into the long-awaited world revolutionary war. The “preliminary armed

insurrection” was the Red Army Faction’s term for the armed uprising they hoped to foment in Japan in

fall 1969, in explicit coordination with the SDS Weatherman group’s call for “Days of Rage” in Chicago

and with reference also to Lenin’s initial insurrectionary actions in Russia. In this and other documents

the preliminary armed insurrection in Japan is equated with the world revolutionary war, as its first step.


However, despite the belligerent talk of killing world leaders with their guns and blowing up

military headquarters in Japan and the United States, the Red Army Faction had no guns and was just

starting to experiment with making small hand grenades and pipe bombs in college chemistry labs where

striking students controlled buildings. Violence had definitely escalated in the clashes between police and

student demonstrators by 1969, but neither side was seriously armed. The students wore crash helmets,

pushed the police back with wooden poles, and threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. They confronted riot

police squads wearing medieval-looking helmets and wielding body shields and nightsticks, who tried to

control them with teargas and high pressure water cannons. Despite tantalizing brief victories whenever a

new student tactic caused the police to retreat temporarily, frustration with their inability to “win” in their

encounters with the police lay behind the Red Army Faction’s desire to escalate to the kinds of armed

confrontations they saw happening elsewhere. They had already begun to form their underground army,

housing volunteers together on occupied university campuses for “military training” with intensive study

of the Red Army’s theoretical materials and practice for future events. Bund had identified with world

revolution in a rather abstract way, but the Red Army Faction’s name embodied its identification with

armed guerrilla movements, anti-colonial liberation movements, and other armed conflicts in the

contemporary world. Their key symbol was no longer the bell heralding the approach of revolution, but

the guns needed to fight it. The schematic diagram for the Red Army Faction’s variant of Bund’s core

framing is shown in Figure II.

The Red Army Faction’s initial attempts to incite an insurrection were simple attacks on small

neighborhood police kiosks in futile attempts to obtain weapons. By early November they had developed

and stockpiled some simple pipe bombs, although police raids on some of their campus strongholds had

reduced their supply. The Red Army Faction leadership organized a guerrilla training exercise in a

mountain park area to teach people how to throw the devices without blowing themselves up. Although


they tried to exercise some secrecy, the inflammatory rhetoric in their publications and the visibility of

many of their members led police to the mountain inn where they were staying. Early the next morning

the police arrested the 53 members present and confiscated both the pipe bombs and the plans for using

them. Unbeknownst to many of the participants, the Red Army Faction leadership was planning a surprise

attack to preempt the scheduled mass public protests over the Prime Minister’s planned trip to the United

States to settle security treaty issues for the 1970 renewal. Their plan was to surround the Prime

Minister’s official residence before the day of his departure, armed with their pipe bombs, and hold him

hostage. The arrests at the guerrilla training had revealed and thwarted the daring plan, but led the police

to regard the Red Army Faction as a much greater threat to public safety. While the arrested members sat

in jail awaiting trial, the top leadership went underground and police surveillance of members still at large

increased to draconian levels. Teams of plain-clothes police surrounded known members night and day,

limiting their movement and looking for any excuse to arrest them for what came to be known as the

“Red Army crime.” Still, supporters came to public rallies called by the Red Army Faction and continued

to purchase their publications.

In December, the underground central committee and the support group for the arrested members

put out the first and only issue of a newsletter called Bastille, which carried their analysis of what had

gone wrong and adjusted their framing to the new situation (Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei Sekigunha CC and

Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei Sekigunha Kyūtaibu 1969). The document emphasized that their initial actions

and the response to them had revealed the political crisis and the transitional world they had predicted.

They were the only group that perceived the real situation and tried to respond to it with a bold plan, after

their initial call for a preliminary insurrection had not sparked wider revolutionary action. They explained

that they had intended to show the battleground for opposing Prime Minister Sato’s trip to the United

States was not the airport, but the seat of government in central Tokyo. Unfortunately, their plan was

thwarted by the arrests. They must now overcome their failure by working harder to achieve three aims:

continuing insurrection, building a stronger underground party and military movement, and establishing

international bases.

In its first months the Red Army Faction was still acting publicly while calling for an

underground army and trying to carry out guerrilla actions. Their failure had been costly. They quickly

appreciated the need for building an underground organization, but their capacity to operate inside Japan

was now severely compromised. While still trying to pursue their first two aims, their new solution was to

turn to the international aspect of their core framing and call for the establishment of international bases

from which they could continue their fight, with outside help from established groups in other countries

that were already engaged in revolutionary struggle. The argument for international bases was further

elaborated in issues 5, 6, and 7 of the Red Army Faction’s newspaper Sekigun [Red Army] published in


late November and December of 1969. They envisioned connecting with the groups in other countries

whose successes they had already been following with great interest, in order to obtain guerrilla training

and material resources so they could mobilize the Japanese proletariat and advance the world revolution.

This framing shift is diagrammed in Figure III.

This shift can be understood as a straightforward adaptation of the Red Army Faction’s framing

in the face of severe external pressure, by keying the international aspect of the core framing to the

contemporary international situation in conjunction with their direct action orientation. Two of the three

subsequent offshoots of the Red Army derive directly from efforts to implement this vision, driven by the

increasingly difficult situation for the group in Japan. We will look at these two offshoots and follow their

development, before returning to what happened to the group left behind in Japan. This follows the

chronological sequence in which the three offshoots began, but once launched, their activities were

roughly contemporaneous.

The Yodogō group in North Korea

Aside from occasional publications, support activities for those arrested in the guerrilla training

exercise, news reports of additional arrests, and a few public rallies, the beleaguered Red Army Faction

was relatively quiet over the winter of 1969-70. Then suddenly, on March 30, 1970, they burst back into

the public view with an unprecedented surprise attack: Japan’s first airline hijacking. Nine Red Army

Faction members, armed with pipe bombs and a motley assortment of toy guns and old swords, hijacked a

domestic flight from Haneda Airport in Tokyo to Fukuoka in southern Japan, and demanded to be taken

to North Korea. The hijacking came as a complete surprise to the Japanese authorities, despite their close

surveillance of the Red Army Faction and the arrest of Shiomi two weeks earlier with a notebook full of

references to “HJ.” They had no idea what a hijacking was. The event played out in the mass media over


four days with a ruse that got the plane to land at Seoul’s Kimpo airport in South Korea instead of

Pyongyang. After a Japanese Diet member who was the parliamentary Vice-Minister of Transportation

had been exchanged for the passengers, and the North Korean Red Cross had confirmed the North Korean

government’s agreement to accept the hostages and return the plane and official, the nine hijackers finally

landed in North Korea. They came to be known publicly as the Yodogō group because press coverage

referred repeatedly to the name (Yodogō) of the Japan Airlines plane they had hijacked, rather than its

flight number.

The leader of the group of hijackers was Tamiya Takamaro, a Kansai Bund student leader from

Osaka who became Shiomi’s chief lieutenant, head of the Red Army Faction’s underground army, and the

architect of its surprise attacks. He wrote a lengthy “Departure Manifesto” just before the hijacking,

which was published in a special issue of their newspaper and journal, both named Sekigun [Red Army]

(Tamiya 1970). I have used a somewhat abridged version of the lengthy document for this analysis

(Tamiya 1970 (1975)). Tamiya describes international hijackings as the symbol of the new era of

overcoming national boundaries to advance the world revolution, and points to a cluster of political

hijackings from the United States to Latin America in the latter part of 1969. Following the transitional

world theory, this is the first step in creating joint international leadership to build the world party to lead

the world revolution. He reported that the Red Army Faction had cooperated with the SDS Weatherman

group in their preliminary insurrection in fall 1969 and that “many comrades” had gone overseas to Asia,

America, Europe, the Middle East and South America to participate in revolutionaries activities.

Tamiya explained that establishing foreign bases was an intrinsic part of the Red Army Faction’s

plan, inseparable from building the underground army and party to lead the continuing insurrection that

would become the world revolution. “The actual achievement of Japan’s preliminary armed insurrection

will force the Japanese and American anti-revolutionary forces closer together, and bring out the US-

Japan security treaty’s military force. Then, mediated by the world party and world Red Army, the

continuing struggle will involve the whole world’s proletariat and peoples, and only then will the full

transformation of the workers’ states into revolutionary bases become possible.…For that reason, the

‘insurrection militia’ must be strong enough to call off the riot police and destroy the axis of power at one

blow.” (pp. 99-100). Hence they needed to go someplace where the authorities couldn’t see them in order

to organize, gain the skills, and get the weapons they needed for a strong militia. The hijackers would

make a base in North Korea to train, and then return to Japan to lead the fall insurrection, for which other

comrades were waiting in Japan. The arrest of their leader Shiomi and other members of the leadership

also weighed on them, and they vowed to rescue all those who had been arrested, when they returned.

The shift in framing articulated by Tamiya as they were about to hijack a plane to North Korea

contains familiar ideological arguments with a sharply narrowed focus. The subject “we” refers to the


nine hijackers acting on behalf of the larger organization; and the predicate focuses on the hijacking and

their return in the fall to carry out the insurrection, with the objects of their action the Japanese center of

power and the riot police, plus the comrades they would rescue from jail. The larger revolutionary aims

are still there, but in the background, as diagrammed in Figure IV.

Despite the absence of prior contact, the North Korean government accepted the

hijackers and let them stay; however, they did not return as planned for the fall insurrection. Although

there was no specific crime of hijacking at the time, arrest warrants were issued for all of the hijackers,

charging them with a variety of crimes including theft of the airplane and kidnapping of the crew and

passengers. Two years later, in May 1972, the hijackers were brought to a meeting in Pyongyang with

some visiting journalists from Japan, where they made clear that they had given up their Red Army

Faction ideology and embraced the North Korean ideology of Kim Il Sung. Little more was heard from

them until the late 1980s, when they began to re-establish contact through writings from North Korea, and

later invited some of their old friends to visit them. Tamiya’s writings in particular expressed his great

nostalgia and longing to return to his homeland, Japan. However, the group rejected all efforts to

negotiate such a return, insisting that they should not be arrested or punished for the hijacking.

What had happened to them in the intervening decades only became clear after one of those old

friends, chronicler of the New Left and investigative journalist Takazawa Kōji, published a prize-winning

non-fiction book about them (Takazawa 1998) that will soon be available in English translation

(Takazawa 2015 forthcoming). While treated royally as special guests of the state, the Yodogō hijackers

had undergone a very sophisticated form of intensive thought reform, guided by high-level North Korean

Workers Party specialists attached directly to Kim Jong Il (Kim Il Sung’s son and heir-apparent). They

did much of the ideological transformation themselves, with the combination of group criticism and self-


criticism that is routinely practiced in North Korea and among Communist cadres in China and elsewhere.

Only after they had converted to Kim Il Sung’s Juche ideology and demonstrated their complete loyalty

were they given the military training they had originally sought. The aim of the training, however, was to

make them North Korean special agents, whose task was to prepare to lead the Juche revolution in Japan.

The North Korean Workers Party arranged Japanese brides for them, some of whom were loyal

believers recruited from North Korean organizations in Japan. Others were lured to North Korea by

deception and also subjected to thought reform. After they had children growing up in their

“Revolutionary Village,” the hijackers and their wives became trusted North Korean operatives who

traveled in Asia, Europe, and even Japan. At the luxurious compound outside of Pyongyang where several

of the members still live, they were allowed to form their own party to lead the revolution in Japan, under

the watchful eye of their North Korean Workers Party handlers. As part of their mission in Europe they

abducted several other young Japanese to North Korea, in hopes of expanding their party with new

converts. Although they failed to add the people they had abducted to their revolutionary party, the

abductees never left North Korea. In 2002 Kim Il Song’s son and successor Kim Jong Il admitted that

North Korea had abducted thirteen Japanese citizens, three of whom were persons that Takazawa had

traced to the Yodogō group. North Korea claims all three subsequently died of accidents in North Korea,

while the Yodogō group denies any responsibility for them.

The Yodogō group’s own writings in Japanese tend to obscure their ideological aims, but their

shift in framing can be reconstructed from Takazawa’s analysis, as shown in Figure V below. They have

retained from Bund’s core framing the belief that they alone constitute the true vanguard party that will

lead the Japanese revolution. It is no longer the world revolution carried out by the world proletariat, but

an adaptation of Kim Il Sung’s Juche revolution in which North Korea absorbs both South Korea and

Japan within its orbit. This follows the Stalinist vision of revolution in one country, far removed from the

anti-Stalinist origins of Bund and the Japanese New Left. Ironically, the North Korean revolutionary

ideology espoused by Tamiya and the Yodogō group bears a strong resemblance to the ultra-nationalist

state ideology promulgated by Japan in the 1930s (when Korea was a Japanese colony) with Kim Il Sung

in place of the Japanese Emperor as the god-like focus of state worship. The Yodogō revolutionary

ideology often simply transposes the ethnic nationalist slogans of North Korea awkwardly to

contemporary Japan, where it sounds peculiarly right-wing rather than left-wing. They left Japan in a

dramatic hijacking intending to return to lead Japan’s part of a world proletarian revolution; instead they

were swallowed up in North Korea’s vision of a very different revolution and spent their lives in the

service of someone else’s dream. The obvious question is why they chose to go to North Korea when they


left Japan to establish an international base in order to get the training and weapons for an insurrection in

Japan. The answer is simple and sad: it was the only worker’s country within the flying range of the small

Japanese domestic airplane.

Arab Red Army to Japanese Red Army: Building a Base in the Middle East

After the Yodogō hijacking and associated arrests in Japan, the remaining central members tried

to regroup and keep the organization going under intense police pressure. The international committee

continued to look for potential international bases. Shigenobu Fusako, the only woman in the Red Army

Faction central committee, was a member of the committee seeking international bases. Researching

places in the Third World where there was already an active revolutionary movement with which they

could collaborate, she settled on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a faction of the

Palestine Liberation Organization. PFLP had been forced out of Jordan for its militant activities and had

moved to Lebanon in 1969. It was actively recruiting foreign volunteers and its militant approach and

framing seemed quite compatible with the Red Army Faction’s ideas. At about the same time, Shigenobu

met a young activist in Kyoto, Okudaira Tsuyoshi, a leader of some small, loosely-organized underground

cells called the Kyoto Partisans that had some weak ties to the Kansai Bund and the Red Army Faction.

He had also discovered PFLP and was learning Arabic in preparation for volunteering with its military

wing. Over the next several months they made plans to go to Beirut together, and Okudaira joined the Red

Army Faction to make their initiative an official Red Army Faction act of establishing a foreign base.

Shigenobu was known to the police and would have had trouble getting a passport, so her name was

entered in Okudaira’s family register as his wife and she was able to leave Japan as Mrs. Okudaira. They

traveled separately to Beirut in February, 1971, without having made prior arrangements with PFLP.

In Beirut, they went to the PFLP office and since PFLP was not yet ready to make an

organizational affiliation with a completely unknown Japanese organization, they volunteered as

individuals. Shigenobu volunteered with the public relations section, which published the newspaper Al

Hadaf, and began writing pieces about the Palestinian conflict for publication in Japan. She became


friendly with the Japanese consular staff and the Japanese press representatives in Beirut, as well as with

Palestinian activists. Within a few months she arranged for two Japanese filmmakers she knew to make a

film about the cooperation between the Red Army Faction and PFLP. They traveled with her around

Lebanon and the border areas for two weeks filming guerrilla fighters. When some of those they had

filmed were killed in an Israeli attack, they decided not to show fighters’ faces because of security

considerations, so to fill the gap they also filmed Shigenobu talking about revolution and collaboration

with PFLP in the Al Hadaf office. The filmmakers returned to Japan and quickly produced the film Red

Army-PFLP Declaration of World War (Adachi 1971), which was shown around college campuses in

Japan in fall 1971 and was also made available to Arab audiences. The film was a tangible expression of

the international cooperation between the two groups and was designed to encourage people in Japan to

volunteer with PFLP. Despite the lack of faces in the film, its many shots of Palestinian fighters’ hands

casually handling rifles resonated with the Red Army Faction’s desire to learn how to fight guerrilla war,

as did the scenes of Shigenobu talking about the collaboration between the two groups and articulating

their shared ideas about world revolution. At about the same time, a book describing the collaboration and

including Japanese translations of major PFLP documents was also published in Japan (Kyōsanshugisha

Dōmei Sekigunha and Paresuchina Kaihō Jinmin Sensen 1971).

Although there had been no departure manifesto, these two tangible products announced and

advertised the Red Army Faction’s achievement of an international base and its collaboration with PFLP.

These productions were explicitly understood and theorized as propaganda for the world revolutionary

war. The presented only a slight shift from the Red Army Faction’s 1969-1970 aim of establishing

international bases. The emphasis now was on working together with PFLP, which was already engaged

in guerrilla war as part of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s ongoing conflict with Israel. They

stressed the shared commitment of both organizations to the world revolution by the world proletariat,

rather than simply the liberation of Palestine and revolution in Japan as national goals. The two

organizations had created a new “Red Army” which, by fighting in the Middle East, was opening the way

to revolution in Japan and defeat of Japanese imperialism. The urgency to return to Japan to carry out a

preliminary armed insurrection the following fall had disappeared. The specific collaboration with PFLP

was keyed instead to the original aim of using international bases to further revolution in Japan as part of

the world revolution, as shown in Figure VI, below.

Meanwhile, Okudaira had volunteered for military duty and was sent to a PFLP base for guerrilla

training. He was then dispatched to a section of PFLP (called in Japanese by its English name “Outside

Work”) that carried out guerrilla attacks on various political targets, rather than to the military section that

was fighting Israeli forces along the southern border. Okudaira and the head of the unit began developing

a plan for a guerrilla action to be carried out by a small team of Japanese, so both Okudaira and


Shigenobu began trying to recruit more people to join them. Several people from Okudaira’s Kyoto

Partisans came, plus the younger brother of one of the Yodogō hijackers, Okamoto Kōzō. They completed

basic military training and trained secretly for the attack. Shigenobu was not directly involved in planning

the attack, but was troubled by its high risk nature. After the Outside Work staff assured her that despite

its risks the plan was not a suicide mission, she helped ensure that the young Japanese volunteers

individually decided whether to participate or not, and held a small farewell party for Okudaira and the

other two participants. In keeping with their actions as part of a world revolutionary army, the volunteers

planned to remove their photos from their altered passports to become unknown soldiers.

News media around the world reported a devastating terrorist attack at Israel's Lod Airport (now

Ben Gurion Airport) on May 30, 1972, by three attackers whose passports with false names had identified

them as Japanese. Arriving on a flight from Rome, the three men had claimed their luggage, removed

automatic rifles and hand grenades from their suitcases in the baggage claim area, and opened fire. In a

matter of minutes twenty-eight persons were dead, including two of the attackers. Nearly eighty others

were wounded. Discarding his empty rifle, the surviving third member of the attack team, Okamoto Kōzō,

ran outside and threw his two hand grenades at the plane parked on the tarmac. He ran across the airstrip

until he was tackled by police and arrested. As planned, PFLP immediately took responsibility for the

attack.

However, because the attackers had been identified as Japanese and the surviving participant had

confirmed it, PFLP pressed Shigenobu to announce publicly the involvement of the Red Army Faction.

She did so with a brief press conference announcement from Beirut in English, and then went into hiding,

her life changed irrevocably from a sociable young Japanese woman living in Beirut to a highly wanted

target for both the Israeli Mossad and the Japanese police. The following day a communique in Japanese

was issued from Paris in the name of the “Red Army” that justified the attack in light of Israel’s record

against the Palestinian people (Sekigun 1972). Despite the horror expressed throughout the western


world over the attack, it was widely acclaimed in the Arab world and celebrated in rallies by the Red

Army Faction and its sympathizers in Japan. The surviving attacker, Okamoto Kōzō and the small group

in Lebanon were treated as heroes of the Palestinian cause.

Two weeks later under the name “Arab Red Army” to distinguish it from the parent Red Army

Faction in Japan, Shigenobu’s group issued a document outlining the relationship between itself and the

main Red Army Faction (Arabu Sekigun 1972 (1975); Arabu Sekigun 1972 (1993)). This document

explains that its official name is the Arab branch of its parent organization in Japan, the Japan Red Army

Faction [Nihon Sekigunha]; reiterates the whole organization’s commitment to the world party, world

Red Army, and the world revolutionary war’s united front. It hints at the formation of other international

branches; and lays out how the international branches relate to the parent organization, which the

document acknowledges is currently in some disarray. This document reinforces the alignment of the

group in the Middle East with the framing presented in Figure VI above, but also celebrates the Lod

Airport attack as the first fruit of their military collaboration with PFLP. The consequence of that success

was the arrival of more Japanese volunteers to train and carry out guerrilla attacks with PFLP in the

service of the Palestinian cause, along with increased contact between the Middle East group and

Japanese living in Europe who shared their aims. From this point on, the group in the Middle East called

itself the Arab Red Army and identifies itself with the success of the Lod Airport attack, despite the pain

of having lost two of the three Japanese participants, who had carried it out as volunteers for PFLP.

However, English press reports called the group the Japanese Red Army or JRA, although there was no

formal organization with that name until two years later.

Over the next two years Shigenobu continued to write about Middle East issues for publications

in Japan, while an expanded group of Japanese volunteers with PFLP participated in a series of

international attacks with PFLP’s “Outside Work” section, including a Japan Airlines plane hijacked over

the Netherlands, flown to Libya and blown up in 1973, and a botched attack on an oil refinery in

Singapore, which led to an attack by other PFLP members on the Japanese Embassy in Kuwait to free the

original attack team from a ferryboat in Singapore harbor. The Japanese volunteers with PFLP were

highly regarded, but became increasingly frustrated with the organizational style of Outside Work’s

leader and the mistakes and miscommunications it produced. Accustomed to a more collaborative

Japanese planning style, they were also now seasoned participants in clandestine attacks. By 1974 the

group in the Middle East had decided it was time to form an independent Japanese organization.

Shigenobu undertook the delicate task of negotiating with PFLP to ensure continued cooperation and

support, but releasing the military volunteers from their direct relationship with the Outside Work section.

While they were planning a joint action in Europe to launch their new organization and secure a source of

funds to replace the PFLP payroll, a Japanese PFLP volunteer was arrested at the Paris airport carrying


messages about these plans. Once they discovered what had happened, a Japanese three-man team of

Outside Work volunteers, with approval and logistical support from PFLP, invaded the French Embassy

in the Hague and won their comrade’s release from a French jail.

Although this incident scrapped the preliminary plans for a joint European action, it was the pivot

point marking a shift in both policy and identity for the Japanese group in the Middle East. Despite the

fact that the three Japanese who carried out the attack were still volunteers working under PFLP’s Outside

Work section, the Japanese issued manifestos about this event under the name Japanese Red Army (Nihon

Sekigun) instead of Arab Red Army (Arab Sekigun), including several communiques during the standoff

at the French Embassy and a celebratory communique after it was over. The latter document reveals the

new organization’s framing shift in both identity and tactics (Nihon Sekigun 1972 (1993); Sekigun 1974

(1975)). It announced the new independent Japanese organization, and asserted the centrality of its

commitment to free any members who were arrested, anywhere in the world, both as a new revolutionary

tactic and as a matter of revolutionary morality. “The Japanese Red Army is not finished as an army. It is

advancing in Palestine, it is advancing in Europe, it is advancing in Asia, and it is advancing in Japan.”

Other documents confirm that the newly independent Japanese Red Army retained its core framing as a

vanguard group working toward the world revolutionary war on behalf of the world proletariat. Now they

vowed to utilize surprise attacks to free their comrades, as a bold new tactic through which they could

succeed throughout the world, by revealing the collaboration among the imperialist countries even as they

confronted and defeated them. This tactic was becoming popular with other New Left armed clandestine

groups at around the same time, and Donatella della Porta has given such groups the evocative name

“Free the Guerrilla Guerrillas” (della Porta 1995). A hallmark of the tactic as practiced by Outside Work

and the Japanese Red Army was international triangulation, in which a hostage-taking attack in a third

country was used as leverage to force the Japanese government to cooperate with other international

actors in order to achieve the group’s aim. This shift in framing is shown in Figure VII.


A side effect of the arrest of a Japanese courier in Paris and the Hague French embassy invasion

was the arrest and deportation of many members of the Japanese group in Europe, and the hasty departure

of others to the Middle East, where they became part of the new Japanese Red Army. Everyone who had

been identified as connected to the Japanese Red Army was now put on the Interpol wanted list by the

Japanese government, so those who had fled to the Middle East no longer could use their legal passports.

Since the group in the Middle East now had people with considerably less underground experience,

including several women, they needed time to work out new policies and develop new action plans. When

two members who had formerly been military volunteers with PFLP were arrested in Sweden and

deported to Japan, the Japanese Red Army activated its pledge to rescue arrested members with its new

tactics. They planned an embassy invasion in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1975, to free them. In addition

to their own members who had been deported to Japan, their list of people to be released included several

persons who had been jailed for their activities in the Red Army Faction in Japan and its offshoot the

United Red Army, plus one other person connected with a separate bombing group. The attack was

executed successfully, although some people on their list declined to be released to go to the Middle East

with the Japanese Red Army.

By this time the discussions in the Middle East had turned back toward revolution in Japan.

Observing that most New Left revolutionary activity in Japan had ended, they viewed themselves as the

only vanguard party that could lead the Japanese revolution. They conceived a plan to add representatives

of some other groups and people with desirable skills to the group, to strengthen and broaden their base.

The arrest and deportation of additional members in Jordan (and the death in custody of one of them)

prompted their second “free the guerrilla” guerrilla attack. This time they hijacked a plane and forced it to

land in Bangladesh in 1977, holding the passengers and crew hostage while they negotiated for the release

of another group of people from prisons in Japan. This time the list included their own members, more

members of the original Red Army Faction in Japan, members of other groups imprisoned in Japan, and

two non-political criminals. This was the last major international attack carried out by the Japanese Red

Army, although members were suspected of involvement in other attacks around the world over the next

decade in collaboration with other groups. The expanded and reconstituted Japanese Red Army continued

to live in the Middle East and adapt its framing for another two decades. When Shigenobu was arrested in

Japan in November 2000, she used her first public appearance at her arraignment to announce that the

Japanese Red Army had disbanded. She explained that they had wanted to do so for a long time, because

they had long renounced illegal activity, and the name had become a hindrance.

The Red Army Faction’s Disastrous Merger and the United Red Army Purge


What of the Red Army Faction members who remained in Japan after the two exile groups had

left to establish their international bases? After the Yodogō hijacking and the arrests that followed it, the

Red Army still had a large legal organization called Revolutionary Front that was invigorated by the

success of the hijacking, plus an underground army living collectively in small cells and carrying out

training and small operations. The leadership of the Red Army Faction was in flux because of arrests and

departures, and by fall 1970 Mori Tsuneo had emerged as the leader, more or less by default. His focus

was on the underground army and a robbery plan (Operation Mafia, or M) which began in February 1971

with successful robberies of branch post offices (which also serve as banking sites for the national postal

savings bank system), and later moved on to robbing payroll deliveries and regional branch banks. The M

operation continued through the summer of 1971 despite a growing number of arrests. In June at a big

public rally, a Red Army Faction pipe bomb was thrown directly at the police lines, causing another

temporary retreat by the police. There were arguments between the jailed senior leaders of the Red Army

Faction about the course Mori was following, but he insisted the framing remained the same and he was

simply adapting to contemporary exigencies to strengthen the basic aims.

Meanwhile, another underground splinter group, the Revolutionary Left Faction, began staging

attacks to obtain weapons. In December 1970 three Revolutionary Left members attacked a police kiosk

with knives. One was shot by police and killed, while the other two were seriously wounded and arrested.

The above-ground wing of the Red Army Faction joined the Revolutionary Left Faction for the first time

at a memorial event a week later. Then in February, the Revolutionary Left Faction succeeded in robbing

a gun shop in a town north of Tokyo, and acquired ten rifles, an air gun, and 2300 rounds of ammunition.

The perpetrators of the robbery and other leaders of the Revolutionary Left Faction fled to Hokkaido,

where they remained hidden for the next several months. The two groups grew closer, with the Red Army

Faction purchasing some guns from the Revolutionary Left Faction for some desperately needed cash,

and their above ground organizations cooperating in some public rallies. By summer 1971 they had

formed a unified Red Army as a military alliance, and were beginning to publish a newspaper called Jūka

(Gunfire). Although one of its founders had come from a faction of Bund, the Revolutionary Left Faction

had a different ideological lineage from the Red Army Faction. It stemmed from the Maoist faction that

had been pushed out of the JCP and had focused on opposing American military bases in Japan. Its slogan

“Oppose the US, Love Japan” had a somewhat right-wing flavor.

The initial announcement on July 15, 1971 in the first issue of Jūka reported the formation of a

joint central people’s revolutionary army by the two groups as a new level in the Japanese proletariat’s

participation in the international armed struggle through arms and hit and run attacks. It linked this

development both to the recent history of the two groups in Japan and to the usual array of international

revolutionary activity. The new unified army t identified itself as Japan’s part of the formation of Red


Army units all over the world, starting with Russia and China, as the path to world revolution. Its

responsibility is to help destroy the world imperialist bourgeoisie, starting with American, Japanese, and

West German imperialism. The rhetoric is classic Red Army Faction, with the addition of lessons from

Mao’s style of military formations and hit and run tactics. It ends “Organized under the unified Red Army,

we will fight to the bitter end with great hit and run attacks!” and “Organized under the unified Red Army,

we will achieve success in the world and Japanese revolutionary war!” The issue of Jūka also noted that

the two groups would continue to work out their theoretical differences in order to complete the formation

of a new party to be called the United Red Army. To analyze this framing shift, we have to go back to the

initial framing of the Red Army Faction, ignoring the later emphasis on establishing revolutionary bases.

The new United Red Army, while still keyed to the world revolution, reflects the Maoist orientation of the

Red Army Faction’s new partner and its ideological language, as shown in Figure VIII.

As merger talks continued during the fall of 1971, the combined group retreated to a series of

mountain cabins with their small stash of weapons. The group included seven of the top ten wanted

persons in Japan because of the Revolutionary Left Faction’s gun shop robbery and the Red Army

Faction’s Operation M robbery campaign, plus a number of additional participants with limited

underground experience. The leaders of the two organizations continued to try to reconcile their

ideological and stylistic differences while the rest of the participants managed the details of collective

living, including daily housekeeping tasks and building new cabins at more remote locations. They held

nightly meetings of the entire group of about 22 persons, which soon took on the Maoist style of self-

criticism and group criticism that the Revolutionary Left Faction had been using with their leader Nagata

Hiroko. Red Army Faction leader Mori Tsuneo was fascinated by this technique. As his dominance of the

group grew, these sessions devolved into physical violence that was intended to toughen up the weaker

members, a process Mori called “communization” (kyōsanshugika).


The last public statement from the newly created United Red Army (Rengō Sekigun) was

presented at a rally on December 18, 1971, commemorating the death and injuries that resulted from the

Revolutionary Left Faction’s attack on a police kiosk the previous year. Entitled “Annihilation with Guns,”

it was later published in the main collection of Red Army materials (Rengō Sekigun 1971 (1978)). This

document announces that the United Red Army has achieved firm agreement and will overcome the death

in the police kiosk attack with its new policy. “We are determined to achieve the war of annihilation with

guns.” The long, rambling account discusses the meaning of having and using guns and the

transformations involved. It notes that when Red Army Faction members with explosives were

surrounded by the police at the inn where they were holding their guerrilla training in 1969, no one threw

explosives at the authorities or killed them with a knife, and after the gun shop robbery in 1971, the

Revolutionary Left group fled and hid out, without using the guns against the authorities. Similarly the

Red Army Faction amassed a lot of money in its Operation M robbery campaign and the robberies

themselves were an attack on capitalist society, but they used up the money running from the clutches of

the police instead of funding the revolution. It asks why they needed to carry out the hijacking to North

Korea, implying that this was also running away rather than facing the enemy and fighting. It is not

enough to acquire guns; they need to be used to further the revolution.

In turn, that requires new resolve and spiritual preparation. Warfare with guns is not simply a

matter of “kill or be killed”, but requires taking up guns prepared both to kill and to be killed. The Red

Army uses other weapons as well, knives and explosives, and knows that it cannot win the revolution

without many more guns than it currently has. It must use all its weapons to acquire more guns in hit and

run attacks, while preparing its members for the war of annihilation. That also includes preparing them to

withstand what will happen when they are arrested and face the “terror” and “lynching” of police

interrogations. The United Red Army and central army must strengthen its resolve in order to use the

stolen guns to destroy the enemy. They will use the guns to give birth to the dictatorship of the proletariat

and through the process of comradely mutual criticism and self-criticism they will build the new party, as

a response to the sacrifices of the 1970 police kiosk attack. The final rallying cry was “All workers,

students, and brothers, with a revolutionary spirit, our central army and United Red Army intends to

achieve the war of annihilation with guns.” This framing keys on the early Red Army Faction concern

with developing the weaponry for guerrilla warfare, but elaborates it into a new theory of spiritual

preparation for battle with guns, that has now narrowed to destroying the Japanese authorities as the

enemy, as diagrammed in Figure IX, below.

This emphasis on spiritual preparation and the process of mutual criticism and self-criticism

reflected the internal discussions the United Red Army was having in the mountains, and provided

disturbing hints of what was to come. Over the winter of 1971-72 the group tortured and killed a dozen of


its own members, burying their bodies at remote mountain locations as the police began closing in on

them. Mori and his Revolutionary Left counterpart Nagata returned from a trip to Tokyo and were

arrested at a mountain cave the others had just left. The others crossed a high mountain pass in the

Japanese Alps at night in the dead of winter, with police helicopters buzzing overhead looking for them.

The following day they split into two groups outside the mountain resort town of Karuizawa. One group

was arrested at the Karuizawa train station, while the last five were chased by the police into a mountain

lodge, where they took the caretaker’s wife hostage and prepared for a siege. The lodge, a five story

building spilling down the steep mountainside from an entrance at the top road level, was well-situated

for defense. Over the next nine days the group held out against a force of 3,000 riot police, who sealed off

the mountain but did not move in despite several exchanges of gunfire, for fear of harming the hostage.

On the tenth day the police brought in a wrecking ball, demolished the building entrance and then shot

teargas-laced water into the building as riot police moved in and searched from room to room. The five

participants and the hostage, protected by mattresses, were found in a room on the bottom level. Two

policemen were killed in the final assault, but all five attackers and the hostage were brought out alive and

unhurt. The final day of the siege was watched live by an unprecedented 90 percent of the Japanese

television viewing audience.

The public had watched the spectacle as a slowly unfolding crime, but followers of the radical

group and a broader array of supporters held rallies and cheered on this unprecedented confrontation with

the riot police as the next step in the revolution. It was only in the ensuing interrogation of those arrested

that the details of the earlier deadly internal purge came out. As the police began digging up bodies and

the scale of the purge became known, the shocked Japanese New Left fractured, unable to come to terms

with what had happened.


Parallels and Divergences

Starting with the common cultural and ideological environment of the Japanese New Left and

Bund’s core framing, the Red Army Faction created its own frame shift based on a greater sense of

urgency to prepare an underground army to incite the start of the world revolution in Japan. Following

della Porta’s analysis of the mechanisms involved in initiation of clandestine political violence (Della

Porta 2013), this was clearly a response to escalating policing and competitive escalation, and represented

the first step in the activation of militant networks. As it transitioned from being part of a large public

insurgency organization to clandestine activity, the Red Army Faction’s early actions attracted too much

police attention before they were carried out and led to greater repression of the members. The group

responded to this with a framing shift keying to the larger international vision of both the Red Army

Faction and its predecessor Bund, by proposing to establish international bases.

Two groups from the Red Army Faction left Japan with the aim of establishing international

bases: the Yodogō group hijacked a plane to North Korea to launch its efforts, while Shigenobu Fusako

and Okudaira Tsuyoshi quietly went to Lebanon to volunteer with the Popular Front for the Liberation of

Palestine. Both of these international groups went armed with the Red Army Faction’s framing, but soon

adapted it in their new contexts to align with the expectations of their international hosts. For the Yodogō

group in North Korea, this happened through intensive indoctrination that led the group to renounce the

Red Army Faction’s ideas entirely and convert to the Kim Il Sung’s Juche ideology. Once their loyalty

had been assured, the North Korean government trained them as agents, sent them around the world on

secret missions, and made them the elite leaders of their own little revolutionary party whose task was to

create a North Korean Juche revolution in Japan. The Middle East group members worked for a few years

as paid volunteers for PFLP, carrying out its agenda for liberating Palestine, but then were able to

extricate themselves diplomatically and establish their own independent Japanese Red Army. Both

international groups operated clandestinely for a number of years with support from their hosts, during

which time their focus narrowed considerably. The identified strongly with their own previous

achievements of surprise clandestine actions, their actions served other people’s interests, and their targets

narrowed to focus on Japan but in different ways.

If we add to the comparison the group that stayed behind in Japan and later became the United

Red Army, the framing shifts followed a similar course: adapting the original Red Army Faction frame to

align with a new coalition partner under conditions of severe repression, and then narrowing their focus.

All three offshoots exhibited the mechanisms identified by della Porta as characterizing how groups

persist in clandestine activity: organizational compartmentalization, action militarization, ideological

encapsulation, and militant enclosure, and these processes were reflected in their framing shifts.


Like the international groups, the United Red Army identified strongly with its own previous

achievements of surprise clandestine actions, and its target narrowed to focus on Japan. Both the Japanese

Red Army and the United Red Army focused on the Japanese control apparatus. Their framing treated it

as the proximate face of their more abstract enemy, but in fact their actions reified the immediate target so

they no longer were really fighting for world revolution. The Japanese Red Army turned to “free the

Guerrilla” actions, while the United Red Army consumed itself like a scorpion, preparing for imagined

police tactics that never approached what they did to their own comrades. There was a partial parallel in

the Yodogō group in North Korea, despite the fact that they had completely abandoned the Red Army

Faction’s ideal and converted to the North Korean ideology. Kim Il Sung’s initial expressed reason for

accepting the hijackers was that he did not want to cooperate in any way with the Japanese police, who

had demanded their return so they could be prosecuted for the hijacking. Once they had converted, they

continued to reject all overtures to negotiate the terms of their return to Japan, not only because they

wanted to be free to pursue their political aims in Japan, but also because to submit to the Japanese police

and criminal justice system would violate Kim Il Sung’s wishes. Ultimately, members of all three

offshoot groups have spent much of their lives in Japanese prisons, while others remain exiled in North

Korea or the Middle East, with the Japanese police still actively pursuing them.

References

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Pp. 46-55 in Kaigo o totonoeyo! Nihon Sekigun Sengen [Assemble the Ranks! Manifestos from the Japanese Red Army], vol. 1, edited by Sekai Kakumei Sensen Joho Senta- and S. H. Iinkai. ?: Visa Palestine Books.

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