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The final part of Unseen Japan's series on the Japanese Red Army.

Part 1 – Homegrown Terror: The Birth of the Japanese Red Army

Part 2 – Blood on the Snow: The Horrifying Implosion of Japan's United Red Army

Part 3 – Last Stand: The Hostage Crisis That Ended Japan's Red Army

Part 4 – Mercenaries of Global Terror: Shigenobu Fusako and the Japanese Red Army

Japan Air Lines Flight 404 from Amsterdam was en route to Anchorage and Tokyo on July 20, 1973. It had only been in the air for a short time.

Suddenly, the concussive sounds of an explosion tore through the cabin's monotonous drone.

Of the 120 passengers on board, only six had not been Japanese. Two of them were a young couple who claimed to be husband and wife. The “wife,” traveling on a Peruvian passport, had gone to the lounge for a drink. She had been chatting with the head steward when a hand grenade fell out of her jacket. It exploded, instantly killing the woman.

In reality, she was an Iraqi operative from the Marxist Palestinian revolutionary group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Her name was Katie Thomas, and she had boarded the plane to hijack it.

The head steward lay on the cabin floor, stunned, covered in blood – both his own and Katie’s. Beyond the smoldering corpse, he saw a Japanese man and four Palestinians get up from their seats. Each was brandishing automatic weapons, and more grenades. Within moments, the airplane was under the surviving hijackers’ control.

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The Japanese Red Army, International Terrorist Group

The Japanese hijacker who now found himself taking over leadership of the operation was Maruoka Osamu. Maruoka had been a young university-aged student who'd come under the influence of a leftist teacher who had ties with the now-infamous Marxist terrorists, Okudaira Tsuyoshi and Okamoto Kozo. Both had been members of the international arm of the Japanese Red Army, a violent political organization that was devoted to sparking a global revolution. Both had participated in the bloody 1972 attack on Lod Airport in Israel, where they had murdered 24 travelers. Okudaira had died in the attack; Okamoto was now rotting in an Israeli jail. But their former teacher had encouraged the young Maruoka to head to the Levant to take their place.

Once in Lebanon, Maruoka had met up with the leader of the JRA: the notorious Fusako Shigenobu. After training him with the JRA-associated PFLP, Fusako sent Maruoka to represent her organization in this, its first major operation in two years. But now the death of his female companion had left Maruoka in a state of crisis, for the ringleaders had given Katie the most details on their hijacking plans. With her dead, Maruoka was unsure where his cohort should ground the plane. He made the pilot radio the hijacker’s first choice, Beirut. But the government that housed the JRA surprised Maruoka by denying them landing permissions in their capital. Finally, the government of Dubai announced that they would allow the hijacked plane to temporarily land on their airfields.

In Dubai, the Boeing 747 lay sweltering under the hot desert sun for three long days as negotiations stalled. The hijackers allowed authorities to remove Katie’s body and place it in a casket. They also allowed the badly wounded head steward and a sickly elderly couple to leave and receive medical care. The other 141 people on board had no choice but to remain in the hot and horribly cramped fuselage.

Maruoka announced the reason for the hijacking to his captive audience. he Japanese government had incensed the JRA and the PFLP by daring to pay reparations to the victims of the Lod Massacre while doing nothing for the Palestinians, whose suffering had motivated the attack. The hijackers demanded that the Japanese government pay a ransom of $4 million in recompense. They further demanded that the Israeli government release the sole surviving hero of Lod, the incarcerated Okamoto Kozo.

But Maruoka soon learned that Israel point-blank refused to allow a villain like Okamoto to again go free. This seemed to cause his resolve to falter. Maruoka agreed to allow the plane to leave Dubai as soon as authorities returned Katie’s body to the plane.

With the casket on board, the hijackers then ordered the plane to take off into the skies, where they would remain for some time. Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi refused requests to land, with Beirut refusing twice. Damascus allowed the plane to briefly land for refueling, but the exhausted hostages and hijackers had to take off once again. They flew aimlessly in long arcs until the Libyan government under Muammar Gadhafi granted the plane permission to land.

Once on the ground, the hijackers ordered their exhausted hostages to flee from the plane as quickly as possible. As they fled across the Benghazi tarmac, the hostages saw the plane behind them erupt in a fiery explosion. The terrorists had used grenades to turn the scene of their bungled hijacking into a pyre for their deceased comrade.

Decade of Terror

JRA terrorist Maruoka Osamu.

The JRA had lain dormant for the year preceding the hijacking of Japan Air Lines Flight 404, as Shigenobu called forth recruits both old and new to her organization’s bases amongst the ever-shifting PFLP camps in Lebanon and Syria. Shigenobu, only years earlier a mere idealistic student, was now the leader of an internationally-wanted criminal organization.

Her JRA had originated in the dying years of the Japanese leftist student movement. Initially, the public supported mass student protests against laws aimed at limiting political freedoms during the Cold War, but this support had crumbled in the face of increased radicalism and political violence.

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Shigenobu’s intellectual mentor, Shiomi Takaya, had founded the Red Army Faction in 1969. His personal Trotskyite beliefs led him to champion a violent international revolution. Shigenobu had soon found herself deeply involved in the new organization. The Red Army Faction gained the ire of the police after engaging in a series of robberies and attacks on kōban (交番, police boxes), and they rocketed to infamy after committing Japan’s first hijacking of a commercial airliner, which they diverted to North Korea. Shigenobu’s own boyfriend had led the hijacking; he would never return from North Korea.

Japanese police, through a series of arrests that took dozens of RAF members out of commission, pushed the group underground. It soon fell under the command of the unprepared and ideologically confused Mori Tsuneo, whom Shigenobu abhorred. Feeling the need to escape his shoddy leadership, Shigenobu made contact with Palestinian revolutionaries based out of Lebanon. She then pressured Mori until he let her leave Japan. Once abroad, she formed a more ideologically pure version of the Red Army organization, which could operate free of the watchful eye of the Japanese state. She'd left just in time. Only months later Mori would combine the former RAF with another violent radical group. This new United Red Army would then hold a training camp deep in the Gunma mountains, where twelve of their own radicals would be brutally murdered in a purge of the ideologically weak. Shigenobu’s best friend was among those murdered.

The Red Army had a final, deadly showdown with the police during a ten-day-long hostage situation in a remote lodge in snowy Nagano Prefecture. It was the death knell of the group in Japan. But Shiomi Takaya’s ideology survived in Shigenobu’s new, Lebanon-based Japanese Red Army. In 1972, the group exploded onto the international terror scene with the shocking Lod Airport Massacre. Shigenobu and the JRA were suddenly globally infamous terrorists. More dangerously for them, they had also become targets for the vengeful intelligence arm of the State of Israel, Mossad.

The Hijacking of Flight 404

One year later, echoing the tactics that had made a name for their antecedent group, the JRA executed its second major attack against a commercial airliner. What resulted was the near-farcical hijacking of Japan Air Lines Flight 404.

From that point onwards, the JRA would make headlines the world over on a fairly regular basis. Six months later, in January of 1974, a joint group made up of JRA and PFLP members attacked a Shell Oil refinery in Singapore. They subsequently hijacked a ferry, taking five crewmen hostage. A chase with Singaporean Navy gunboats ensued, leading to a maritime standoff in Singapore’s famed Marina Bay.

As talks stalled, PFLP members based in Kuwait carried out an equally shocking operation, invading the Japanese Embassy in Kuwait City and taking the ambassadorial staff hostage in support of the JRA/PFLP hijackers in Singapore. Finally, arrangements were made to allow both groups of hostage-takers safe passage to South Yemen in exchange for the various hostages. The attacks, the first of which represented Singapore’s initial brush with modern terrorism, had been made in protest against the supply of oil to embattled, democratic South Vietnam by the Singaporean government.

The next operation came only a month later, in February 1974. A European network that included such infamous figures as Carlos the Jackal and the West German Baader-Meinhof Gang supplied three members of the JRA with munitions. The three stormed the French Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands. As the elevator to the main floor opened and the terrorists emerged, the three encountered two Dutch police officers, whom they immediately incapacitated with a barrage of bullets. They then took the eleven people present hostage, including the French ambassador. Next, the terrorists dropped a note from the window demanding that the French government immediately release a recently arrested JRA operative. They also demanded a hefty ransom. Any delay in carrying out these demands would result in the killing of the hostages one-by-one.

When the negotiations faltered, a bomb exploded in a Parisian café in nearby France, killing two people and maiming others. Later investigations showed that terrorists had planted the bomb to coerce the French government to cave to the hostage-takers. With pressure mounting, people now dead, and fearing a shootout in a highly-populated area, the French and Dutch governments finally assented to the terrorists' demands. They released the JRA prisoner and forked over $30,000. Yet when the victorious JRA operatives finally landed in Syria, their feelings of triumph were somewhat dampened when the Syrian government requisitioned their hard-won booty, stating that the demanding of monetary ransoms was “counter-revolutionary.”

Another brief period of dormancy then ensued. A year later, the JRA again made their presence painfully known to the governments of the world. This time, they mounted an attack in Malaysia. On August 5th, 1975, a date timed to coincide with Japanese Prime Minister Miki Takeo’s diplomatic visit to the US (and thus to embarrass Japan at a pivotal moment), five JRA gunmen stormed the Kuala Lumpur building housing the American and Swedish consulates. The attackers shot a guard point-blank in the head and then managed to take 51 people in the two embassies hostage, including the United States consul and the chief ranking Swedish diplomat present, the chargé d'affaires.

As always, the JRA made its demands quickly. The JRA would only release the prisoners if the Japanese government assented to the release of seven individuals, each of whom was serving prison time for involvement in violent leftist student operations. These included a recently captured JRA member, as well as two of the United Red Army members whom authorities had arrested following the infamous siege of the Asama Sanso Lodge. These were Bando Kunio (who had personally shot a policeman during the siege) and Sakaguchi Hiroshi. Sakaguchi was the husband of Nagata Hiroko, one of the instigators of the horrific URA purge and herself a death row inmate. The others included a Red Army Faction member who had been arrested following a robbery back in 1971, as well as a member of another violent student group.

Much to the JRA’s shock, two of the seven refused release. Neither was willing to enter the world of international terrorism that the JRA now represented. The former Red Army Faction member was nearing parole and wanted to live a free life. Sakaguchi, who had been near the top of the United Red Army organization, simply detested the JRA's approach. He preferred to continue his revolutionary struggle from within prison, despite his death sentence.

In the end, the Japanese government reluctantly released the five prisoners who were willing to go. After a tense exchange on an airport tarmac, the again-victorious JRA flew to Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi once more granted them refuge. The operation had been a major success and had substantially embarrassed Japan.

Next came a murderous attack at an airport in Istanbul, seemingly carried out jointly by the JRA and PFLP. In August of 1976, three attackers assailed a crowd of travelers lined up to board an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. The attackers were retaliating for Israel’s daring rescue of over 100 hijacking hostages in Entebbe, Uganda.

The terrorists killed two Israelis and a Japanese tour guide who was ferrying a Japanese tour group to Israel. 24 others were injured by the gunfire and explosions, many seriously. The captain of the El Al flight prevented more deaths by taking off with more than 80 passengers onboard before the terrorists could reach his plane. Back at the embattled airport, El Al security and Turkish police managed to kill one of the stranded attackers before finally subduing the others.

The Final Hijackings

Bando Kunio. (Photo: Naver)

1977 would see the final large-scale actions by the JRA. The first was a major hijacking, in which a JAL flight from Bombay bound for Haneda Airport was taken over by five gun-wielding JRA soldiers. Amongst these were Bando Kunio, once again in the thick of the revolutionary action following his release from jail. Maruoka Osamu, too, participated, intent on handling his second hijacking more smoothly than he had the 1973 incident in which his comrade had accidentally blown herself to smithereens.

The hijackers diverted the plane to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where they began negotiations with the Japanese government for the release of nine imprisoned persons in Japan. These prisoners were various JRA members (including the brother of Shigenobu’s late husband, Okudaira), and others that the hijackers considered good potential recruits. They also requested $6 million.

The hijacking led to an incredibly stressful 24 hours for the Japanese Prime Minister, Fukuda Takeo, and his cabinet. After a grueling session of intense late-night debate revolving around the efficacy of once again giving into JRA demands, as well as the danger of continuing to make Japan look weak on the world stage, Fukuda finally made his choice. His words describing his decision have since become iconic:

「人命は地球より重い。」 “The life of a human being weighs more than the Earth.”

The Japanese government gave in to the hijackers, and the hostages were released.

In December of the same year, the JRA seemingly attempted one more hijacking – this time with much more tragic results. Unknown hijackers took over Malaysian Airline System Flight 653 shortly after takeoff from Penang, Malaysia. Soon after the takeover, the control tower lost contact with the plane. Just before that, according to officials at Kuala Lumpur airport, the pilot said that the hijackers were from the JRA. Shortly thereafter, three gunshots rang out.

Sometime later, Malaysian Airline System Flight 653 crashed into the swamps around Johor, Malaysia, hitting the ground while falling at great speed in an almost vertical dive. Every one of the 100 people aboard died. The exact nature of the hijacking and the reason for the crash are still the subject of debate and have never been fully confirmed. Whatever the case, the JRA – whose parent group first rose to prominence during a hijacking – never attempted another hijacking again.

The Quiet Decade and the Last Attacks

After 1977, the JRA started to fade from world headlines. The group, which now consisted of about thirty-five core members, had entered a sort of crossroads. Shigenobu was still guiding the organization from her base in Lebanon, but her co-revolutionaries – who had now been fighting on the run for close to a decade – were unsure of what to do next. After all, what had they accomplished for world revolution? Their victories had mostly succeeded in embarrassing Japan and freeing captured member of their own group. They had become honored in Palestinian society, but in doing so had mired themselves in a regional conflict instead of turning the public towards communism.

The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon seems to have sealed the deal: Shigenobu and her fellows were forced to flee. Now operating from a series of hideouts around the globe, the JRA made contact with a variety of other unground groups, from M-16 to Kashmiri revolutionaries. And yet the group had lost its cohesion. Shigenobu still spoke for the JRA, making surprise appearances for interviews in the Japanese and Arabic press. She occasionally spoke of giving up violence for a more peaceful approach, only to later return to violence.

In 1986, the JRA went into action again, although on a smaller scale. They fired missiles targeting Japanese, Canadian, and US embassies from hotel rooms in Jakarata, doing only small amounts of superficial damage to building edifices. The next year they carried out a similar attack in Rome. A deadlier attack came in 1988 when the JRA bombed a USO club in Naples, Italy. A car bomb planted by Okudaira Junzo, Shigenobu’s released brother-in-law, exploded in front of the club, killing five people. They were the JRA's last known victims.

The USO club bombing was the last “successful” terrorist action by the JRA. (Although by this point they were operating under another, less country-specific name.) Days beforehand, authorities foiled an attack on the USA when they apprehended would-be perpetrator, Kikumura Yu, on the way to a US Navy recruitment office. He had been driving around the USA for months, slowly buying up bomb-making materials. Officers discovered the stash while searching his rental car.

The JRA would never attempt a major attack again.

The End of the Japanese Red Army's Revolution

Shigenobu Fusako upon her arrest in Japan.

In 1989, mere months after the final JRA attacks in 1988, a chain of events began that signaled the end of the Cold War environment that had made armed world revolution seem plausible. Free elections in Poland toppled communism in that country. Hungry, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania soon followed. In the next two years, the Soviet Union fell, and the vast majority of the remaining socialist countries abandoned communism. Cuba, China, Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea (where many Red Army Faction hijackers remained in imposed exile) were the only remaining, nominally Communist countries. The Revolution, it seemed, was over.

For the remaining members of the JRA, aging, hunted, and scattered around the world, this came as a major blow. Almost all the countries of the world had turned away from communism. All the efforts of the JRA soldiers, all their suffering, all their bloodshed, had been for naught. They were left with a shattered vision and a homeland they knew they could not return to.

Ironically, the Japanese Communist Party, whose moderate stance had spurred the radical youth of Japan to break with their party, survived the world communist collapse. In response to the fall of the USSR, the JCP announced, “we welcome the end of a great historical evil of imperialism and hegemonism.” They remain one of the world’s largest non-ruling communist parties. Meanwhile, the Japanese New Left movement, of which the JRA represented the most violent aspects, has faded into the dustbin of history.

Epilogue

As the decades following their departure from Japan marched on, various JRA members were discovered abroad and apprehended; others slipped back into Japan, attempting to return to a life in their home country under assumed names. Such was the case for two-time hijacker Maruoka Osamu, arrested in Japan two years before the fall of communism. He had attempted to enter the country using a forged passport. Given a life sentence, he died while still imprisoned in 2011.

Bando Kunio, if still alive, remains at large. A perpetrator and survivor of the URA purge and notorious hostage-taker of the Siege of the Asama Sanso Lodge, he has remained a free man despite engaging in many of the organization’s most high profile terrorist activities thereafter. It is believed he may have fled to the Philippines in the early 2000s, although his final fate remains unknown.

Okamoto Kozo, sole survivor of the three-man team that carried out the Lod Airport Massacre, is a special case. In 1985, he was released from Israeli prison, although in the end it was not the actions of the JRA that lead to his freedom. Rather, authorities released him in a mass prisoner exchange of thousands of captive Palestinians, who were traded for a handful of captured Israeli soldiers. Lauded by the Palestinians, Kozo eventually converted to Islam (although reports say that he had tried to convert to both Christianity and Judaism while imprisoned, even going so far as to attempt circumcising himself).

Lebanese authorities arrested Okamoto and four other JRA members in 1995 for using falsified passports. They deported the other revolutionaries to first Jordan and then Japan, where they received long sentences. Only Okamoto found asylum, in Lebanon, who granted him refuge in gratitude for his actions against Israel. He remains something of a hero amongst certain sectors of Palestinian society. The official Fatah party Facebook page having honored him in both 2016 and 2018, and reports say that he now lives a quiet life in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut.

Authorities released Shiomi Takaya, founder of the Red Army Faction in 1969 and ideological father to both the United Red Army and the Japanese Red Army, in 1989. His imprisonment had covered almost the entire era in which his violent brainchild organizations had been active. Following his release, Shiomi worked a low-paying job as a parking lot attendant in the outskirts of Tokyo. He published various books and appeared at speaking events. He died in 2017.

While many of the 1970 Red Faction hijackers to North Korea died while still exiled in that country, various of their children have been allowed to return to Japan and to receive Japanese citizenship

Authorities finally arrested Shigenobu Fusako – known variously as the “Queen of the Red Army,” “the Mistress of Mayhem,” and by her assumed Arabic name, Mariam, the JRA’s frontman and most notorious leader – in Japan in 2000. It had been nearly thirty years since Shigenobu left the country. She had re-entered Japan using a fake passport, and was caught while staying at a hotel disguised as a man; her unique style of smoking is said to have given her away. She received a 20-year prison sentence in 2006. Four years earlier, while still awaiting her final trial, she formally disbanded the Japanese Red Army. A three-decade history of armed revolutionary violence had ended.

Shigenobu’s daughter by an unidentified Palestinian guerrilla, Shigenobu Mei, continues to push for her mother’s release from prison. Growing up without any official national citizenship in Palestinian refugee camps, Mei has since become a successful international journalist. Since first arriving in Japan in 2001, she has pushed for Palestinian statehood, denounced Israel, and defended the actions of the JRA. She has fought to have her mother’s prison sentence ended, claiming she's a “role model.” She has appeared in documentaries and hosted Japanese and Arabic news programs.

Her mother, for her part, now sees a world in which violent revolution has lost its usefulness. She has even come to admit some of the negative aspects of her former organization. In 2017, she wrote:

The Japanese Red Army’s tactics were naive and had some faults. Our tactics weren’t aligned with the realities of Japanese society, and you could say we had a string of failures. People who weren’t targets of the armed struggle got dragged into it because of our weakness….I don’t believe there is any need for a modern-day equivalent of the Japanese Red Army in Japan.

Still, she dreams of a revolution she knows she will never personally see. After all, that revolution was what she fought for so ardently for some many decades; it was the reason she left her home behind and immersed herself in a world of underground terrorist action; it is what she saw friends kill and die for, and what she now, as of 2019, sits in prison contemplating.

The world is becoming more and more homogeneous. You could say that the world is ripe for revolution, in material terms. As long as humanity continues to be denied, the global humanist revolution will surely take place in a future generation. I’ll toast to it in the afterlife.

Fifty years have passed since her mentor, Shiomi Takaya, founded the Red Army Faction to fight against a capitalist and imperialist Japan in the midst of great social upheaval. Since that time, authorities had driven the Red Army Faction was underground. Its successor group, the United Red Army, imploded in a bloody maelstrom of both inwardly and outwardly directed violence. Finally, Shigenobu’s own Japanese Red Army engaged in years of bloodshed and terrorism before finally fading out of history and public memory as its mission lost meaning in a changing world.

And yet, Shigenobu Fusako dreams on. Whether her prophesied revolution will ever come, or whether she even deserves to see such a world after all she and her cohorts have done – such questions will remain unanswered.

Sources

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Kozo Okamoto.” Asian Survey, vol. 16, no. 9, 1976, pp. 830–845.

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, 1989, pp. 724–740.

Farrell, William R. “Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army.” Lexington Books, 1990.

Kuriyama, Yoshihiro. “Terrorism at Tel Aviv Airport and a ‘New Left’ Group in Japan.” Asian Survey, vol. 13, no. 3, 1973, pp. 336–346.

McKirdy, Andrew. “Imprisoned Japanese Red Army founder Shigenobu holds out hope for revolution.” The Japan Times, June 8th, 2017.

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