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Part 2 of Unseen Japan's series on the Japanese Red Army.

Part 1 – Homegrown Terror: The Birth of the Japanese 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

Part 5 – Japanese Red Army: End of a Global Reign of Terror

They found the bodies in the snowy foothills of the Japanese Alps.

The police had already been tracking the revolutionaries for some time. After the radical leftist group now known as the United Red Army had hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 351 and with an important government hostage in stow had managed to divert the plane to North Korea, they had emerged as Japan’s public enemy number 1. Internationally embarrassed by their inability to stop the hijacking, the national police had redoubled their focus on the the underground group.

Months of hard work had finally led the police here, deep into the snowy mountains of Gunma Prefecture. Days spent trudging through the snow drifts after rumor and speculation had proved fruitful; they’d managed to discover the URA’s remote and recently-abandoned hideouts. All clues indicated some 30 people had lived here very recently.

But they also pointed to something far darker.

As other police continued tracking the fleeing revolutionaries – eventually catching up with them in the mountains near Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, for what would become one of Japan’s most shocking hostage situations – the detectives examining the scene at the abandoned inn began to recognize the telltale signs of acts of violence. They found shreds of clothing that had been cut off of various people – a common method for removing the garb of those for whom rigor mortis has set in, making the usual removal of clothing nearly impossible. Staining on the ripped garments also demonstrated that these garments had likely been worn in the last moments of their wearers' lives. Lastly, a large quantity of personal items and baggage mysteriously remained, including the sorts of hiking backpacks that those fleeing the inn would have likely taken with them.

To the detectives, it seemed more than clear. Murder had taken place amongst the revolutionaries of the United Red Army. And yet, where were the bodies?

It all came to light in the days that followed, as the police ensnared and captured the various fleeing URA soldiers. While the leadership remained tight-lipped, some of the rank-and-file among the arrested began to tell of the horrors that had occurred at that inn – horrors that they themselves had participated in. The location of the 12 bodies, the former comrades and now victims of the surviving URA members, was revealed.

Police and news crews amassed on the sites of the various cold, shallow graves spread across the foothills near that cabin in Gunma. Images of the beaten and mutilated dead proliferated throughout a Japan already shocked by the ten-day-long standoff with the police just recently engaged in by five of the members of the URA. These pictures would disturb the Japanese public like few murder cases have.

They would also spell the end for public support in Japan for the once-inspirational mass student movements of the 1950s and ‘60’s.

The Story Thus Far

The Anpo Tousou (安保闘争), or protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty, rocked Japan in the 1960s, and again in the 1970s. In this picture, thousands of Japanese encircle the nation's Diet in protest. (Picture: Wikipedia)

As described in the previous article in this series, a highly radicalized, action-oriented student leftist revolutionary organization called the Red Army Faction came into existence in 1969 during the waning years of the Japanese New Left.

The turbulent post-war years had seen huge changes occur within Japanese society, including a great opening up of political freedom and the mass expansion of higher education. The Communist Party of Japan also came into the light in this period, unshackled from its formerly illegal status under the imperial system, its leaders able to breath the free air for the first time in years.

The youth of Japan embraced their new freedoms, and then balked as the environment of the emergent Cold War caused those freedoms to retract – especially as the US-led occupation forces began to crack down on communist university professors during the first of a series of red purges. Students and teachers took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands, shutting down university campuses country-wide in protest. Government buildings were also stormed.

Initial success via mass demonstration gave way under the repressive tactics of a more hardened government, which mounted a riot police force known as the kidotai (機動隊) specially trained to deal with protester violence. Clashes with police intensified as the New Left, made up of students angry at the overly moderate Japanese Communist Party, decided to take their fight for the soul of Japan into the streets.

This New Left movement managed to mobilize huge numbers of people in protests against the Japan-U.S. Security treaty, as well as on other issues where the Japanese government was either seen as kowtowing to “imperialist” powers, or was abrogating the new rights that had been granted the Japanese people by the post-war constitution.

While the movement did generate some major successes via peaceful mass demonstration, some key failures – such as the passage of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty by Japanese parliament despite mass public opposition – led elements on the New Left to cast about for more impactful ways to effect change. The use of violence as a political tactic escalated.

The Red Army Faction emerged from amongst the now constantly splintering leftist groups. Made up of a wide subsection of Japanese student youth from across the country, the Faction engaged in daring robberies, attacked police, engineered bombings, and finally carried out their most audacious act: the hijacking of a commercial air liner to North Korea, the first incident of its type in Japanese history.

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The hijacking appeared a major success, bringing the Red Army Faction incredible notoriety. It also ensured an intense clamp down by police on any activity by the group, forcing them more deeply underground. At times two to three plainclothes policemen would be spotted trailing a single activist. And with arrests (and the virtual imprisonment faced by the hijackers now stranded in North Korea) whittling away at its leadership, the Red Army Faction began to cast about for a new way to retain relevance and continue the fight for world revolution.

The choices made by the new leadership at this critical juncture would lead the group down a dark pathway towards devastation and eternal infamy within Japan.

Mori Tsuneo, Accidental Leader

Mori Tsuneo upon his arrest. (Source: Naverまとめ)

This power vacuum left one Mori Tsuneo in de-facto charge of the Red Army Faction. No master of Communist doctrine (as had been the now-arrested founder, Shiomi), nor of action, nor even a particularly inspiring figure, Mori’s rise to the top created some friction among the Red Army soldiers now beneath him.

Mori had been with the army for two years at this point, and had worked his way up fastidiously from mere soldier towards the top. As the original leadership of the Red Army was unceremoniously scraped away by the police and North Korean government, Mori found himself thrust into the highest echelons of the organization.

Mori had become radicalized while working a student job at Osaka City College; the cooperative he worked at was heavily affiliated with Communist student groups. He befriended a co-worker, Tamiya Takamaro, who would eventually mastermind the JAL hijacking. The two became nearly inseparable, and Mori was seen hovering around Tamiya at all times.

When the movement got underway to halt the construction of Narita Airport and the compulsory seizing of land that would go with it, Mori left the Red Army Faction’s antecedent, The Communist League, to join in the fight. Although thousands of students and local farmers were mobilized in what became a literal battle, they were eventually beaten back, and the construction of the now-famous international airport proceeded. Mori, perhaps disheartened, left the radical movement for an everyday factory job. There he might have stayed, if not for his friend Tamiya searching him out and begging him to return to activism.

Shiomi Takaya, the founder and leader of the new Red Army Faction, was at first against letting someone who had abandoned the movement into his organization, but Tamiya convinced him of Mori’s value. It was to be a fateful decision.

But as 1970 dawned, Shiomi had been imprisoned, and Mori’s best friend and supporter, Tamiya, had disappeared into the totalitarian ether of North Korea following his daring hijacking. Mori suddenly found himself in charge of the most-wanted revolutionary group in Japan.

He first dealt with this by burrowing the group deeper underground, organizing secret cells of operatives who would carry out bank robberies and bombings based upon orders delivered from leadership they would never see. Mori also deviated from Shiomi’s internationalist ideals by deciding to focus the Red Army Faction’s activities purely in the domestic sphere rather than on overseas outreach.

The turn from Trotskyite internationalism angered some in the Faction. This aspect of their doctrine was something that had always set them apart from other radical groups. They were supposed to be part of a worldwide revolution, fighting in tandem with their brothers and sisters across the globe. Petty bank robberies and myopic views of revolution did not mesh with these ideals.

The Splintering of the Red Army Faction

Shigenobu Fusako (重信房子). (Source: Amazon.co.jp)

One Red Army Faction operative perceived Mori’s top-down leadership and Japan-centric ideological style as especially offensive. Shigenobu Fusako, a young woman from Tokyo with a fiery sense of radical justice, found herself unable to sit idly by while Mori veered from the organization’s original internationalist course.

Shigenobu had in fact been romantically involved with Tamiya, Mori’s now-absent great friend, and she seems to have felt that Mori was not worthy of taking his place in the leadership. Not only that, but the entire Japanese leftist movement seemed to be faltering in the claustrophobic atmosphere of intensified police surveillance. Shigenobu decided that, in order to ensure a continuing place in world revolution, the Red Army needed to leave for friendlier shores.

Mori, never meeting with Shigenobu directly, sent messages denying her the right to take aspects of the organization abroad. Shigenobu countered that he could either let her carry out her plans, or she would simply leave the organizational name behind and form an entirely new group once she was overseas. Cowed, Mori finally assented.

Shigenobu married the younger brother of one of the JAL hijackers, and managed with the new last name that came with that marriage to avoid governmental scrutiny and get a passport to travel abroad. Her final destination was to be Lebanon, where she had made contacts with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As she stood at the airport, about to leave the only country she had ever known, only a single comrade from the Red Army Faction arrived to bid her goodbye.

Toyama Mieko, Shigenobu’s closest friend and essayist for the Faction, walked up to her departing companion. They embraced, and with tears in her eyes, Toyama expressed her fears for Shigenobu’s future safety in a faraway land. Then they said their farewells. Neither would ever meet the other again.

For her part, Shigenobu Fusako would not return to Japan for many decades. Her name would soon become infamous worldwide.

Toyama Mieko would remain in Japan. Within the year, she would be dead – murdered by her own comrades.

The United Red Army

Nagata Hiroko (永田洋子), leader of the Keihin Ampo Kyoto, a revolutionary sect known for targeting US forces in Japan.

With the troublesome Shigenobu gone, Mori was now uncontested leader of the Red Army Faction in Japan. Yet he still faced many pressing issues.

Following the hijacking incident, the Faction’s star was on the rise, with more and more radical youth hoping to join up. However, the clandestine nature of the organization as it now existed made large-scale organizing difficult. What’s more, the Red Army Faction, although flush with cash from their various bank robberies, lacked the tool that Mori most needed to take his army’s actions to the next level: guns.

Sure, his research team had developed some effective incendiaries, and there were always the staves and clubs used by militant protesters across the country. But firearms, made extremely hard to come by with Japan’s stringent gun control laws, were truly what any army worthy of the name needed.

Luckily, Mori knew of another radical student group which just so happened to have recently pulled off a successful robbery of a gun store. He decided to reach out to the leader of the Keihin Ampo Kyoto (京浜安保共闘, Keihin Anti-Security Treaty Joint Struggle Group).

Keihin Ampo Kyoto had managed to become notorious amongst the police of Japan. Compared to the Faction, they were known to be more nationalistic, directing most of their attacks against American military facilities. However, much like the Faction, they had been driven underground by police surveillance, with many from amongst their leadership stuck whiling away their days in jail cells. Much as Mori had found himself in charge as those above him were removed from the picture, so had twenty-seven-year-old Nagata Hiroko found herself among the top brass of Keihin Ampo Kyoto.

Nagata Hiroko had a very different leadership style from Mori, more inclined to yell and berate her followers. While her position in her organization stemmed from the more egalitarian nature of Keihin Ampo Kyoto (where women revolutionaries were generally treated the same as their male counterparts, whereas the Red Army Faction had often relegated the women in their ranks to support positions), she held very firm ideals regarding gender and sex within the context of radical activism; any couples caught fraternizing were punished for diverting their gaze from the all-encompassing revolution.

Regardless of any factional differences, the fact was that Keihin Ampo Kyoto needed the Red Army Faction’s money and notoriety, and the Faction in turn needed Keihin Ampo Kyoto’s store of guns and grenades. Mori and Nagata agreed to bring the two organizations together, and in the process create a new composite revolutionary group. On July 15th, 1971, the United Red Army (URA) officially came into existence.

Growing pains were present in this new organization from the very start, and one of the first orders of business on Nagata’s docket was to set the tone for the internally-directed violence for which the URA would become infamous. Two members of the Keihin Ampo Kyoto, twenty-one-year-old Haiki Yasuko and her ex-boyfriend, twenty-year-old Mukaiyama Shigenori, had recently “deserted,” an act Nagata found completely unacceptable.

She would show the two what armies did to their deserters.

To Those Who Desert the Cause, Death

In August, only weeks after the formation of the URA, a group of organization soldiers were sent to the deserter Haiki Yasuko’s school dormitory. Entering her room, they attempted to convince her that her former boyfriend, Mukaiyama, had returned to the cause and wanted to see her. Sensing a trap, she refused to believe them. After some more attempts at baiting her failed, the group turned more aggressive, eventually forcing her out of her room and into a waiting car. Her body was later found in a shallow grave in the Inba Marsh in neighboring Chiba Prefecture.

Mukaiyama would meet a similar fate some weeks later. One of his former comrades, Otsuki Setsuko, was sent to his apartment as a honeypot; she convinced him to go out drinking with her. She encouraged Mukaiyama’s heavy drinking as she talked of her personal loneliness, and then led him to the apartment of one of their mutual friends from the movement.

Once inside, Otsuki stepped out for some air. In her place, several larger Keihin Ampo Kyoto members entered. Suddenly aware that he’d been set up, Mukaiyama tried to fight his way out, but was eventually overwhelmed. He too was forced into a car, where the people he had once considered friends choked him to death with a length of rope. His body was found buried in the same marsh. He had been placed in a grave near that of Haiki Yasuko.

The Path to Oblivion

Mori had agreed with Nagata to have these deserters killed; unlike Nagata, however, Mori had previously failed to have similar deserters from the Red Army Faction murdered. Mori began to fear being seen as the weaker half of the organization. He decided to take the reigns of leadership by organizing a training camp at a hideaway deep in the mountains of Gunma that his faction had previously made use of. There, key members of the terrorist cells and the public civilian face of the United Red Army could train, plan, and most importantly, engage in mutual self-criticism to strengthen the group’s ideological precision and zeal.

The sort of group self-criticism Mori had in mind has long been practiced by various Japanese corporations, and had become quite common amongst Japanese New Left groups, who called the process sokatsu(総括). Operations, once completed, would become the subject of group discussion, where criticism of others and of one’s self was used to find whatever weaknesses had lead to any form of failure. During the planning of the next operation, they would then seek to overcome whatever internal problems had been discovered.

Within leftist groups, any such failures were often seen as ideological errors. However, as the United Red Army was forced farther underground and group interaction became limited, criticism increasingly became aimed towards the personal weakness of individual members rather than failures of group ideology.

In the first days of December, 1971, twenty-nine people, consisting of nineteen men and ten women, made their way to the Sangaku Base (山岳ベース) lodge deep in mountainous, rural Gunma Prefecture. Among them were the two joint leaders, Mori and Nagata; Nagata’s husband, Sakaguchi Hiroshi; and Shigenobu Fusako’s friend Toyama Mieko. Bando Kunio, a twenty-year old member of the Red Army Faction known for his organizational skill, was also among those gathered.

Training commenced. Amidst the study of ideology and strategizing for future revolutionary action there was also time for the daily chores of group life in the freezing cold of the snow-covered mountains; the cutting of trees for firewood, the procuring of stores, the cooking of food. At night, the self-criticism sessions would begin.

At first criticism was leveled by the former Keihin members towards those from the Red Army; in all but name, the two groups were still far from united. Red Army members would then return critical fire. Those who were targeted for special deficiencies in action or resolve were allotted punishments during which they were to reflect on the true meaning of revolution. Exactly what this meant, or how it would be achieved, was unspecified. Long bouts of fasting or coerced periods of sitting in the cramped seiza position were common punishments, with Mori and Nagata serving as arbiters, deciding who had accomplished the proper ideological breakthroughs that would allow them rest.

By the 20th, the continued disunity of those present convinced Mori and Nagata that harsher punishments were needed to instill the right revolutionary fervor.

The Sangaku Base Incident (山岳ベース事件)

The 12 people who eventually lost their lives at the notorious Sangaku Base incident. (Picture: Naverまとめ)

It all began with Ozaki Mitsuo. At twenty-one years old, the Tokyo University of Fisheries student had joined the United Red Army as a part of the merger with Keihin Anpo Kyoto. The crimes for which he stood accused by his fellow comrades during the self-criticism session were of discussing the whereabouts of Red Army hideouts and weapons stashes with unauthorized persons. Additionally, he was seen as lacking the correct amount of revolutionary zeal.

Mori’s corrective punishment for these offenses was to have Ozaki face off in a no-holds bout with a much bulkier co-revolutionary. The others encircled the two fighters, ensuring Ozaki could not run away, and then the larger man began waling on Ozaki. Beaten to the ground time and again, Ozaki, bloodied, still rose for more punishment. He knew the only way out was to accept his physically-imposed chastisement.

Finally, the badly beaten Ozaki was allowed some rest. He then made a fatal mistake: he thanked Mori for the chance to allow himself to become a better revolutionary. There was murmuring from the surrounding group: was Ozaki trying to flatter his way out of his proper training? Surely this represented more spiritual weakness on his part. The solution was to have Ozaki spend the night standing at attention outside in the mountainous sub-zero temperatures. After some hours of this, Ozaki, shaking and injured, asked to be allowed to lay down.

This was the last straw. Did his weakness know no bounds? He was brought back into the warmth of the lodge, only to face another intense beating. His comrades then carried Ozaki’s broken body back outside, where he was tied to a post that, in lieu of ideological mettle, would keep him standing. He hung there for hours and hours as his comrades ignored his increasingly weak cries for help. Occasionally, members were sent out to beat him again.

By next morning, he was dead.

Incredibly, this came as an utter shock to most involved. After all, they were supposed to be helping the youth become a better revolutionary, not kill him. The air became tense and confused as the news spread, but Mori stepped in to explain that they had not in fact murdered one of their own. Rather, Mori said, Ozaki had chosen to die. He had known the faults in his own psychology, and knew that he would only bring the revolution down as a result of that weakness. He had thus not died of exposure, or of ruptured internal organs, but rather of haiboku-shi (敗北死) – death by defeatism. His death was not something to mourn, but to celebrate! Those assembled were to take heart; the methods of their revolutionary self-criticism were clearly working. Ozaki had helped make the movement stronger by his death!

As the days went by in that snowy lodge in the mountains, the self-criticism sessions continued apace. The murder of Ozaki, much less than a cause to halt and reconsider the group’s actions, instead spurred them on, becoming just the first of many such horrifying incidents.

Spiral of Violence

Next came the murder of Shindo Ryuzaburo, accused of using the revolution for his own licentious gain by flirting with female members of the Red Army. His death came in much the same way as Ozaki’s.

Then came the murders of Kato Yoshitaka and Kojima Kazuko. The two were punished for various infractions; Kato, for disclosing information to the police when arrested, and Kojima, for experiencing emotional turmoil (seen as ideological weakness) after having been involved in the previous murder of the deserters Mukaiyama and Haiki. When their punishments of continuous seiza and fasting proved ineffectual, the beatings commenced. Kato’s two younger brothers, both URA members who had joined the movement out of idolization of their older sibling, felt they had no other choice but to join in.

During the course of these, both the accused began to admit other to crimes, perhaps hoping to show remorsefulness and to demonstrate that they were gaining something from the “training” they were being put under. Both began to admit the various sexual liaisons they had engaged in. To Mori, this represented something of a breakthrough for the two, but it was still not enough. He had both Kato and Kojima tied out in the freezing cold, near where the other victims had already perished.

Kojima died during the night. Kato, however, was found beating his head bloody against the pole to which he was tied in an apparent act of self-reflection for his crimes. Celebrated for his breakthrough, Kato was brought inside to rest.

He would not rise again.

When Kojima’s body was found the next morning, eyes frozen open, Mori saw her death not as a glorious selfless suicide like Ozaki’s, but somehow as a form of defiance. Her unseeing eyes seemed to mock him for his attempts at reform. Nagata, agreeing with her co-leader, became increasingly irate.

Back in the cabin, the barbaric self-criticism went on. Discussion turned to the topic of Kojima’s defiant, counter-revolutionary death. Nagata and Mori asked Toyama Mieko, who not long before had bade farewell to Shigenobu Fusako as she flew off to the Middle East, how she felt about seeing Kojima die in such a way. Toyama was already wary of Nagata, who had been fiercely critical of Toyama’s perceived femininity in the past: Nagata had once publicly berated her for brushing her hair during a meeting. Toyama also knew that Nagata found her means of coming to the movement – taking the place of her boyfriend, a long-time revolutionary, when he had been imprisoned – to be one that showed little commitment to the ideals of the cause.

She had no choice. Toyama Mieko, whose understanding of doctrine was great enough to have ensured herself the position of essay writer for the cause, insisted in no uncertain terms that she craved more than anything to become a “true” revolutionary. Yet, in a moment of weakness, she also admitted that she was horribly afraid to die. The same girl who had cried at her friend’s departure to faraway, dangerous lands, who had just watched her own comrades murder three of their own, stood shaking.

More weakness, decided Nagata and Mori. Nagata also voiced her suspicion that Toyama had been sexually involved with another member present, one Namekata Masatoki. Despite Namekata’s long, self-sacrificing record of imprisonment for violent revolutionary activism, in Mori and Nakata’s eyes they were both guilty of the sins of counter-revolutionary spirit and flesh.

But perhaps there was a way for these two to prove themselves, Mori thought. A sickening form of logic had brought him to his next suggestion; that Toyama and Namekata prove their zeal by going out to the body of the defiant Kojima and stabbing the corpse of their former friend.

The rest of what occurred that night, and in the next few days, devolves from here. The barbarity, carried out by friend against friend, brother against brother, defies explanation, and needs not be described here in excessive detail. Needless to say, Toyama and Namekata did as they were told.

It was not enough. Soon, both would be dead.

As the days passed, the body count continuously increased, and the methods of punishment and of killing became more and more sadistic. Mori would kill some personally. Others would actually ask to die. And yet, in between the torture and death, daily chores and training would still be carried out. Debates and discussion regarding the next revolutionary action were still had.

In the end, of the twenty-nine United Red Army soldiers who gathered at that cabin in the mountains in early December, twelve were murdered, purged from the movement like so much unwanted chaff. Including the two former members who had been lynched earlier in August, the United Red Army had now murdered fourteen of their own. When this massacre later came to light, the Japanese public was repulsed and appalled.

The How and the Why

The question remains: how could this have happened?

This wasn’t a purge carried out by some unfeeling government agency in the USSR of the Stalinist era upon strangers they knew nothing of. A group of like-minded comrades – who, despite some organizational differences, were ostensibly friends, and who had in many cases known each for years – engaged in the group murder and torture of their own co-revolutionaries.

No one spoke up. No one tried to prevent it from happening in anything but tacit ways. Can complete, fervent, radical devotion to a cause really be the answer for the why of these horrific killings?

Various answers have been given, some relating to the managerial style of the United Red Army and the cultural realities of Japanese groups. The vertical nature of the organization meant that no one was willing to go directly against the leaders of the group, even as the deaths began, and those who disagreed with such methods used traditional Japanese indirection to do so, “expressing opposition by silence and withdrawal” (in the words of researcher Patricia Steinhoff). However, the revolutionary nature of the movement necessitated active engagement and enthusiasm for the cause, and these culturally-ingrained actions of withdrawal were then in turn deemed to be revolutionary weakness, resulting in more violence.

Less culturally essentialist readings exist, of course. After all, the vast majority of other radical Japanese leftist groups never engaged in similar levels of violence, especially against their own members. The Japanese public was just as mystified and disgusted by the purge as any other people would be.

It is true, however, once the violence began – and the members saw that their comrades were willing to beat and kill their own friends – that groupthink likely took hold. The only way to prevent one’s own death was to actively and enthusiastically engage in the torture and punishment of others. That there was a supposedly just cause for it all, understood and enunciated by their leaders, likely acted as a balm against the rigors of the deep guilt they might otherwise feel.

No matter the rationale, fourteen people now lay dead. The survivors, whether they felt remorse or not, would soon pay for their crimes.

The Flight of the United Red Army

The mountainous region of Gunma was the hiding place of the United Red Arm – and the final resting place of 12 of its members. (Picture: NISH / PIXTA(ピクスタ))

The Japanese police force had not forgotten about the United Red Army during all of this. So many of the known radicals of the infamous leftist movement had suddenly disappeared from the urban spaces they usually occupied that it set off alarm bells for those officers charged with keeping tabs on them. The police slowly began to move in, collecting tips from villagers who lived amongst the mountains of Gunma who spoke of young, shabby outsiders seen coming and going into the mountain passes. Before long, the police had found one of the hideouts that had previously been in use by the radicals.

Meanwhile, Mori and Nagata decided to take a trip to Tokyo for supplies, leaving Nagata’s husband and second-in-command, Sakaguchi Hiroshi, in charge. Fearing that they had stayed in one place for too long, or perhaps feeling the need to flee from the specters of those he had helped murder, Sakaguchi made the executive decision to move the surviving members of the training camp to a new location. A likely cave was found. Calling Mori and Nagata in Tokyo to inform them of the change of locale, the two surprised Sakaguchi with a message of their own – Nagata had decided to leave him for Mori. Sakaguchi obediently assented to this new union, and hung up the phone.

As the group was setting up the cave for long-term habitation, some members noticed that a well-worn hiking path was nearby. Even more concerning, one member returned from a trip into town with a newspaper revealing that the police had recently found two of their former hideouts. While there were not yet reports of any dead bodies being found, Sakaguchi was shaken. He disbanded the camp, and ordered his comrades to take flight. They would split up and attempt to find some other refuge.

The remaining revolutionaries broke camp, and taking their belongings, including their guns, ammunition, and grenades, set out on foot into the snowy mountain passes that bridge Gunma and Nagano Prefecture. In his haste, Sakaguchi forgot to find a phone with which to call and inform Mori and Nagata of his decision to flee.

For Mori and Nagata, Revolution’s End

The very next day, February 17th, Mori and Nagata were driving to the recently abandoned cave where they believed they would still be able to meet their underlings. Yet as they neared the site, the two were startled to see a police vehicle parked nearby.

The officer on patrol noticed the approaching car and walked over to investigate. Mori rolled down the window, and the policeman asked who the couple were, and what they were doing this far out into the mountain range. Using a planned alibi, they replied that they were actors on their way to the shooting location for a new film. The patrolman seemed convinced enough, and advised that they leave the area.

The two thanked him, and began driving away. But anxious to find out what had befallen their comrades, Mori and Nagata decided to turn around and reach the cave by another route.

As luck would have it, the patrolman who had earlier encountered the two had moved to the same road. He was surprised to again see the couple he had just instructed to leave the area. His suspicions raised, he called for back-up.

As policemen emerged from the woods and surrounded the young radical leaders, Mori and Nagata pulled their knives and charged.

Mori managed to knock over a policeman, stabbing at his chest – but the Kevlar jacket the officer wore prevented any major injury. The assembled police quickly subdued the two revolutionaries, pushing them to the ground and putting them into custody. Neither Mori nor Nagata would know freedom ever again. Their bloody reign had ended.

But as the police tracked their compatriots into the depths of the frigid mountains, one last, startling drama was about to unfold.

Sources

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.

Emmerson, John K. “The Japanese Communist Party after Fifty Years.” Asian Survey, vol. 12, no. 7, 1972, pp. 564–579.

Dixon, Karl. “Recent Shift in Japanese Right-Wing Student Movements: The ‘Minzoku-Ha’ Students.” Asian Survey, vol. 12, no. 11, 1972, pp. 953–959.

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

「山岳ベース事件」。フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』。https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/山岳ベース事件

「あさま山荘事件」。フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』。https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/あさま山荘事件

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