Just Another Jerk - JAJ37-39 script

JAJ37-39: Asama-Sanso incident

It’s podcasting time! This is Just another Jerk, Dispatches from Japan - the podcast! As always, I am Jonathan Isaacson, your host. That hasn’t changed since I last cast a pod. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast in the usual places, and while you’re there, please rate the podcast, give it a review if you’ve got a few minutes. And please SHARE the podcast with friends. Sharing is awesome. Let’s increase listenership from the 5 people that regularly tune in. Let’s aim for 100 listens of this episode. Tell two friends who might be interested!

So, for this story, I’ve decided to split it up into three parts. It’s probably not really three parts long in length. If that makes sense? I guess a better way to phrase it is that I’ve written enough content here, length wise, for two episodes. But the way I’ve organized it, three episodes works best. And there are some horribly violent acts that, while I won’t go into a ton of detail on, organizing the story this way, you can skip the middle episode if you want to avoid the horrible violence but still understand the story. So, let’s get into it. Episode one is not particularly violent, so - I guess this is an all-skate?

So, let’s have at it with our story. And I think it’s a good one. OK, maybe “good” isn’t quite the right word. There’s some pretty awful content that I’m going to get into. But it’s an interesting story. And it’s another episode of the Everything you’ve never wanted to know about Japanese history sub-series. Which, I mean, if we’re being honest, is like, half the episodes. It’s what I like, so it’s something I can get excited to share with y’all.

Our story involves hostages, a police standoff and shootout, some bat-shit level craziness from extreme leftists, with some tangents about terrorism in the middle east as well as Malaysia, and a few hi-jacked planes. It’s not a particularly happy story, so if that’s what you’re looking for - you’re not going to find it here. But I think you will probably find out about a side of Japan that most people outside the country - heck, even in the country - aren’t really aware of. So let’s get into it.

In the middle of the afternoon on a cold February day, five young men, armed with guns entered an almost empty mountain lodge in an area full of summer homes and mountain lodges in Karuizawa, Nagano. The lodge belonged to the Kawai Musical Instrument Manufacturing company - you know, the company that makes things like pianos and synthesizers. The only person in the lodge at the time was the 31 year old Mura Yasuko, one the lodge’s caretaker.

Karuizawa has for a very long time been known as a summer resort for the people of the Tokyo area. It is relatively close to the capital, making for easy access by train, but, being in Nagano, it is mountainous, meaning it is much cooler than Tokyo and its surrounding area. Being the mountains, it also gets a lot of snow, meaning that at pretty much all times of year, there are tourists in the city. And there are all sorts of lodges and hotels to serve them, many built into the mountains, which was the case of the Asama-Sanso, or Asama mountain lodge that these five young men entered.

The lodge was mostly empty - Yasuko’s husband, the other lodge caretaker, was out walking the dog, and the guests - presumably employees of Kawai Musical Instruments - they were out enjoying the winter fun. Ice skating apparently. So the five men, finding the Muta Yasuko alone, take her hostage and begin to barricade their positions.

Because, as you probably figured out by now - these men were running from the cops. They were members of the United Red Army, a militant radical leftist organization.

The police had been hunting for them for months, chasing them out of the cities, tracking them to their mountain hideouts in the middle of winter. Early that month, the groups two leaders were arrested as they were on their way back to the cave in the mountain that they had been using as one of their hideouts. 4 others who had been with the 5 now holed up in the Asama Lodge had just been arrested at Karuizawa Station, their bedraggled and unkempt looks arousing suspicion. But these 5 young men managed to evade police for a little longer, holing up with their hostage in Asama Lodge, a heavy concrete structure, built into the side of a mountain.

The maze like construction of the lodge, combined with it’s mountainside location, made it a perfect fortress for the militant leftists. They were able to block off all access to the top couple of floors and hold the police at bay for more than a week.

The entire country watched on TV as the drama unfolded. On the final day of the siege, nearly 90% of Japanese households watched on TV as the police finally rescued Muta Yasuko and arrested the five men.

Before that time, the men watched the news of Chairman Mao Tsetung and President Richard Nixon’s meeting during Nixon’s trip to China, which was happening at the same time. The news came as something of an ideological blow for the young men, some of whom were Maoists and all of whom were anti-US imperialists. However, they were unable to watch the news for long, as the police cut off the electricity on the third day. Loudspeakers were set up and the parents of some of the radicals implored their sons to surrender, though one of their sons was dead in Gunma, unbeknownst to everyone but the band of revolutionaries.

Initially, a sizable portion of the Japanese public had favorable views of the young leftists who were protesting, in part, the growing police state in Japan. Even some people who identified as being on the opposite side of the political spectrum had some sympathies for the radicals. A young man who was in university was quoted in a weekly magazine as saying “Although I am, if anything, right wing, I understand the United Red Army members’ feelings ... Whichever way you look at it, Japan resembles a police state. In challenging the system, their battles have to take such forms.”

At this point, I’m guessing if you only know the Japan of the last couple decades - really from the bubble economy of the 80s up to now - you’re probably saying to yourself - a-whaaaaa???? Militant leftist radicals in Japan?

And the answer is, yes. And how!

So, let’s leave our 5 radicals and their hostage for a bit and talk about the New Left Movement. In the 1960s, some of the young members of the Old Left groups in Japan - so your Japanese Communist Party and Japanese Socialist Party - were dissatisfied with the old leftists. The young members basically thought that the old leftists weren’t leftist enough AND were ineffectual because they weren’t taking any direct action. In 1958, a Maoist group broke off from the old communist party and in 1959, members of a far left student group - the Zengakuren - broke into a session of the national diet during debate on a US-Japan cooperative security treaty. And some within the political left felt that this was more than the JCP had ever done and were impressed. Those impressed were, not surprisingly, the younger members of the larger left.

By the mid-sixties, there were at least a half dozen groups, all following different flavors of leftist thought - Maoists, Trotskyites, Lenninists, Marxists, Luxemburgerites - you name it, there was probably a new Left group for you in Japan in 1965. By the late 60s - 1968 is the peak year of all this activism within Japan, as within many places in the world - the leftist student groups were occupying university buildings and battling the police when they were called to break up the demonstrations. There were so many groups of leftists that they apparently wore helmets to identify which faction they belonged to. So groups could recognize quickly who were their closest allies in a scrum with police. Apparently, the anarchists who wouldn’t help anyone out wore black helmets and just were basically saying F-you to everyone? And if you want to have a quick peek at these helmets, look up Narita International Airport on Wikipedia. The leftist movement opposed the construction of New Tokyo International Airport, which is Narita’s proper name. But anyway. That was also starting to be built during a lot of unrest in Japan.

These student demonstrations got pretty serious, with students occupying one of the main buildings on Tokyo University’s campus which spilled over to other universities across the country. Incidentally, and only very tangentially related to our story today, it was against the backdrop of all this famed author Mishima Yukio tried to instigate a right wing movement which ultimately ended in his ritual suicide. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway - by the end of the 60s, the majority of the students drifted away from the new left movement, leaving behind only the most fervent believers in the cause and the career leftist agitators. Even as their numbers dwindled, the new left movement became more and more fractious. Groups splintered off and combined sided with other factions within the movement. A few were pacifists.

Many were decidedly not.

There are two two factions of interest for us today - the Red Army faction and the Revolutionary Left. The Red Army Faction had split from the Communist League over the younger Red Army Faction’s push for more confrontational and increasingly violent tactics. The members of the Red Army Faction would go on to commit a string of robberies in what they called Operation M to finance their activities. M for...money. I know I briefly mentioned it in the 300 million yen heist episodes - but this was exactly the type of thing that the police were looking for when they made their huge suspect list in that case. Leftist students using theft as a way to finance their activities.

The Revolutionary Left would take a different approach in their violence. They had split from the JCP during the 60s and believed that most educational institutions existed to indoctrinate students in support of the state. As the Revolutionary Left’s tendencies towards violence increased, they went out and stole guns. In 1971, they robbed a gun store in Tochigi prefecture and made off with 10 shotguns, an air rifle and 2400 rounds of ammo.

So, as many of you know, Japan has very strict gun laws. But that is not to say guns don’t exist here. They do. And not just illegal ones that organized crime figures might use. Hunting rifles and shotguns are available for purchase AFTER you take an extremely thorough gun safety and training course and submit to a very thorough background check. And I believe you have to provide the police with a written plan of exactly how and where you will store both your gun AND your ammunition. So, yeah, gun shops and guns do exist here. I’ve, in fact, seen hunters out in the woods a few times when I’ve been riding my bike. It’s always a bit jarring to see them when they are just so uncommon here. But, yeah, the Revolutionary Left robbed a gun shop and so they had a cache of guns and ammo.

So, in 1971, there are these two radical leftist groups who, by accounts of people way more knowledgeable than me about the ins and outs of leftists in Japan in this era - there’s a good article by a historian and professor at Vanderbilt University named Yoshikuni Igarashi and I’ll link to this article in the show description - but apparently these two leftist groups were not really ideologically all that compatible. Different strains of communist and socialist thought apparently. Also there were some gender dynamics at work, with the Red Army Faction being more patriarchal - all the leaders were men - and the Revolutionary Left were more progressive on gender politics - one of the most important leaders of the group was a woman. But any hoo, there are these two somewhat incompatible groups who decide to team up because each has something the other needs. The Red Army Faction had the cash from their robberies. And the Revolutionary Left had the literal fire power from their gun shop robbery. Both were being hunted by the police, so they decided to team up and pool their resources as well as manpower.

Let’s take a brief sidebar here and talk just a little - very VERY briefly - about what exactly the far left in Japan was about, and what some of the things are that they got up to.

So, a lot of the complaints the far left had about Japan in the 1960s and 70s were pretty familiar to anyone who knows about leftist movements around the world at the time. There were the student leftists who felt the universities were just there to reinforce the state’s power. There were those against the monarchy. There was a lot of anti-capitalist thought in there as well. Japan was, remember, not far from the end of WWII and having to retool the entire country - and in doing so, very much buying into capitalism and all that comes with it. And at least some people were disillusioned with those changes in just the 20-25 years that had passed since the end of the war, though as Yoshikuni Igarashi points out in his article, the success of the middle class in Japan in this period kind of undermined the Left’s message. By the late 60s, something like 90% of the public felt as though they were part of the middle class, a significant increase from the early 50s, when the working class definitely didn’t feel like they were in the middle class. If people felt that capitalism was improving their lives, then the communist rhetoric about the working class being oppressed kind of falls flat for a lot of people. Again, check out the article - it’s academic, but in a readable way.

However, for the left, there were also grievances against a perceived police state - which is most important in our story today. And the complaints against the police state were fairly well received, even within the general public, so long as those grievances were presented without violence. Japan was, and arguably remains - a highly surveilled society.

As their beliefs grew and stretched, the New left in Japan fractured, and all manner of more and more extreme beliefs began to appear, including Anti-Japanism - the belief that Japan's actions since the Meiji period have been tainted by imperialism, and that a new regime is needed. These are pretty standard anti-monarchical beliefs. They further evolved into anti-Japaneseism. Anti-Japaneseism is the belief that Japanese people, as a race, are an evil that must be wiped off the face of the earth. It’s been compared to Anti-semitism, except that the people who espoused the belief were members of the group being denounced. And beliefs such as this led to Japanese terrorists. Again, something that is hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around if they only know Japan of the late 80s and beyond.

Japanese leftists were involved in the bombings of several embassies in the 1980s, a hostage situation in Malaysia at the US and Swedish embassies. There was also the hi-jacking of an airplane by some leftists - including a former member of the psych-rock/noise-rock band Les Rallizes Dénudés (裸のラリーズ). The Hi-jackers demanded to be flown to North Korea, where some of them still live to this day. And perhaps most infamous act of terrorism by member of Japan’s far left - the Lod Airport massacre, wherein 26 people were killed and 79 were injured at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv. The attack was conceived by a Palestinian group which recruited members of Japan’s far left to carry out. Again, that’s a whole ‘nother story for a whole ‘nuther day. But, yeah, the New Left movement in Japan had a quite a few extremists who were willing to commit acts of terrorism. And that is where we will end this story for today. Episode two is going to be the sad, kinda terrible episode with a lot of violence and dying happening. But then we’ll get back to the less terrible part of the story in episode three, so if you’d prefer to skip over episode 2, I’ll understand. I’ll make sure you can still follow the story with a non-violent recap at the top of episode 3, so… yeah. That’s all for the start of this tale of crazy leftists in Japan.

Again, this is a side of Japan that so few people outside the country are really aware of, what with the image of Japan from really the 80s on. I mean, I was kinda...surprised when I learned about this. I was about to say I was floored by learning about the leftist movement, but I guess I can’t say I was floored. I mean, I knew Japan had changed A LOT in the 40, 50 years following WWII, so I can’t go so far as to say floored, and I’ll just leave it at surprised.

Anyway.

That’s where we’ll leave it with the first part of our story today.

Remember to subscribe, rate and review the podcast wherever it is you cast your pods. This podcast is on most of the major platforms - Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora. If it’s not on your favorite platform, let me know and I’ll look into getting it on that platform as well. You can find the twitter for this podcast @justanothercast. You can email the show at justanotherjerkpodcast@gmail.com. And you can find all that information and more on the website- tinyurl.com/jerkpod, which I promise I’ll get to updating and improving soon. Summer break project? Maybe. But that’s all for me. I’m Jonathan Isaacson, and I’m out. Peace.

It’s podcasting time! This is Just another Jerk, Dispatches from Japan - the podcast! As always, I am Jonathan Isaacson, your host. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast in the usual places, and while you’re there, please rate the podcast, give it a review, and please SHARE the podcast with friends.

So, this is episode 2 of the story of the leftist radicals who ended up in a mountain lodge with a hostage in 1972. Just a reminder - this is the episode where we’re going to encounter some extreme violence and death, though no terribly graphic descriptions, but if you’d rather not, well I won’t take it personally. See you in episode 3.

And if you haven’t listened to episode 1 and are listening to this first - what are you, some kind of a weirdo? I mean, I guess. Whatever. Live your life however you want. Make a hamburger with two patties of meat with a slice of bread in the middle. Put ketchup on your hot dogs. I won’t judge you. At least, not out loud. But you’re still a weirdo.

If you really don’t want to go back and listen, just remember that there were all these different leftist groups in Japan in the late 60s and early 70s. The New Left, as it was known, was tired of the old left - so your Communist League - no relation to the Human League. But the old Left was the communist league, the communist party of Japan. They weren’t doing enough. There wasn’t enough direct action. All talk, and no fight, basically. So these new left groups were out pulling off capers and heists, like the Red Army Faction and their Operation M getting money and the Revolutionary Left taking a bunch of guns and ammo from a gun shop in Tochigi.

So, that’s where we left off last time. So, let’s get back into it.

And the Red Army Faction - which, incidentally is also the English name for the German Baader–Meinhof Gang. I doubt it’s a coincidence. But, yeah, the Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Left are two of the groups emerging in the late 60s, with all of this stuff happening in Japan at the time. Initially, membership in the Red Army Faction reached about 300 in 1969, but through a bunch of poorly planned actions, their numbers quickly dwindled. Even their “success” - the hi-jacking and flying to N. korea cost them feet on the ground in Japan. And so by 1971, the Red Army Faction was a lot smaller than two years prior. And the Revolutionary left was of a similar size. The “combat” members of each group number in the very low double digits. Like, maybe a dozen or so for each group. Maybe a little more, but at least in this story, it’s just a few people. And as I said before, they decided to pool their resources.

At this point, both groups had their own, separate mountain hideouts for training and general laying low. The Red Army Faction had a place in Yamanashi and the Revolutionary Left had a base in Gunma. Both are in the general Kanto region - the area that surrounds Tokyo, but are far enough away that you are getting into the mountains. If you’ve even been out in the mountains, you know that they are certainly not an easy place to be found out if you know what you are doing, even though both Yamanashi and Gunma are easily accessible from Tokyo.

While both factions espoused their support for the use of violence, the Revolutionary Left were, even by the standards of the furthest left of the New Left movement, extremely violent. Leadership had ordered the execution of defectors earlier in 1971. And the executions were carried out. Kinda gangland shit going down.

By late 1971, the two groups decided to finally fully join their two groups into the United Red Army. They met at the Revolutionary Left’s Gunma base - near Mt. Haruna, if you’ve ever been to the area. Now, it’s also worth noting here that Mori Tsuneo, the leader of the Red Army Faction, who would become the 1st in command of the new United Red Army - he had actually deserted the group previously, in 1969, due to infighting amongst the communist groups. But he had been called back because the number of members was dwindling by 1971. And Igarashi - the historian who a lot of this information is coming from - he notes that in a way, Mori had to re-prove his dedication to the cause. And I’m going to quote here - “The guilt he felt about his defection made him embrace the Red Army’s advocacy for violent acts. For him, backing down from violence was no longer an option.”

And so in November, the Red Army Faction moved to the Revolutionary Left’s Gunma base and in December of 1971, they began their training sessions as the newly formed United Red Army. And it was during this training that the group’s philosophy? Way of thinking? Started to get to bat-shit levels of crazy and violent.

So, the group embraced the idea of self-criticism, in particular as it was practiced by Mao in China. Well, it had some differences here with the United Red Army and in Mao’s China. So, the whole idea of self-criticism is that people who are communist enough - that is, people not toeing the party line completely - must undergo sessions of torture - either psychological or physical - to be made to recognize the error of their ways. In China, it was mostly used against people who were deemed enemies of the state or people who were otherwise a threat to the power of the communist leadership.

With the United Red Army, the self criticism was about making sure the members were sufficiently committed to the cause - and that included being willing to die for the cause. So the self-critiques could include beatings. Being willing to be beaten, even to death, showed true commitment to the cause while also transforming the members. I’m going to quote quite a bit from Yoshikuni Igarashi’s paper about the group because he summarizes it really well. So, as Igarashi writes, “By offering their own possible death as pawns, United Red Army members tried to transform themselves into killing machines devoid of all human concerns and fears. They managed to dehumanize not only their target—the policeman—but also themselves, denying all emotional and physical needs. Within their revolutionary struggles, there was no longer any room for living.”

The extension of this is that if members showed any desire for creature comforts, it showed that they were still tied to their bourgeois desires, which meant they needed to undergo a self-criticism session.

At the same time, the leader Mori Tsuneo in particular was elevating the weapons they were training with. Again, I’m quoting from Igarashi’s paper here, which quotes what Mori said:

“Mori Tsuneo provided a rather dubious theoretical ground for the necessity of instilling life into guns.41 Nagata Hiroko, the leader of the Revolutionary Left, recalls the rather ‘theatrical’ explanation that Mori gave on the ‘war of annihilation with guns’ during a joint training session:

Namekata, think about the rifle that you are holding right now. What kind of a gun was that? It was just a dead gun, which was originally displayed at a gun shop and later used to shoot birds for pleasure. However, once it was snatched away by our hands, this dead gun began to grow and became a gun we forcefully gained control over. If one possessed it as a mere weapon or hid it in the attic, its growth would stop, and it would not serve our struggle in strengthening our unity and gaining genuine communist subjectivity. It would be pitiful for the gun. In order to strengthen our unity and to gain genuine communist subjectivity, you must begin the battle of annihilation. Only then will you transform yourself into a revolutionary soldier who fights the battle of annihilation, while the gun in your possession will transform itself into a gun for the battle of annihilation. The gun does not change you; you change the gun. For that, you need to transform yourself into a revolutionary soldier who can engage in the battle of annihilation.

So you’ve got this dynamic where these revolutionaries are elevating guns to an almost religious icon. While at the same time trying to completely remove their own earthly desires. Even little stuff like paying attention to clothes and hairstyles. Like at all.

So, at the Gunma base, in the middle of winter in the mountains, the first of the self-criticism sessions began. The first two were Kato Yoshitaka and Kojima Kazuko. Kato was chosen for a session because he cared too much about his clothes and hair apparently. Kojima was supposedly not trying hard enough to fight her bourgeois thinking...whatever that means.

And this gets us to the next bat-shit level crazy thinking of Mori. Again, quoting Igarashi here:

“Mori Tsuneo initiated the use of beating as a means to facilitate self-critique. By beating the member unconscious, he claimed, other members could bring him to a higher level of self-critique. When he regained consciousness, he would be ready to accept genuine communist subjectivity. Nevertheless, inflicting violence on one of their own was not an easy decision to make. In her later accounts of her involvement in the United Red Army, Nagata Hiroko (the leader of the Revolutionary Left who was the United Red Army’s number 2) recalled that her hands shook uncontrollably after accepting Mori’s directive. Sakaguchi Hiroshi (another prominent member of the Revolutionary Left), a central committee member, also reflected in his accounts on the situation that he and other members faced:

Many of us hesitated to beat Kato. Therefore, once we participated in the beating, we were haunted by the idea that we had to self-critique ourselves even harder. This [cloak of morality] gave the brutal and merciless beating a scrupulous appearance. To beat a man in order to carry out one’s own self-critique. What a perverted logic!”

So, basically, if you hesitated in beating a comrade senseless - literally senseless. Like beat a comrade into unconsciousness. If you hesitated to do that, well, that just meant you weren’t hardcore dedicated to the cause enough, which meant that you were probably going to be next up for self-criticism, which would involve your getting the crap beaten out of you. Oh, yeah. And Kato? The guy who worried about his clothes and hair - his two younger brothers were forced to participate in his beating.

However, Kato, despite having the crap knocked out of him, didn’t lose consciousness. Which Mori then said was because he wasn’t dedicated enough to truly self-criticize himself. Which is just...what? And here’s how Igarashi interprets this whole situation. And I quote, “the body that does not follow the United Red Army’s political program was not revolutionary enough.” Just...wow.

So, Kato, who just won’t lose consciousness, was tied up outside. In the freezing mountains. For DAYS. Mori and Nagata would eventually decide he was dedicated enough to the cause and brought him inside. But, well, he died. Of course. While he was the first to undergo this violent parody of self-criticism, he wasn’t the first to die. Nor would he be the last.

Another member - Ozaki Mitsuo - underwent a similar ordeal and died on December 30th, 1971. And Mori used the logic of a crazy person again. This is what Mori told the other central committee members: ‘Because Ozaki did not try to attain genuinely communistic subjectivity, his spirit was defeated, leading to the corporeal defeat. If one were serious about becoming a revolutionary soldier, one would not die. The defeat of a revolutionary soldier means his death’.

Another horrible example of this was Toyama Mieko, who was accused of caring too much about her appearance - which means caring at all. I’m going to quote again, and it’s a pretty rough one:

The disappearing agency of violence was most clear in the case of To ̄yama Mieko (Red Army Faction), who was ordered by Mori to beat herself on 3 January 1972. Surrounded by the other members, Tōyama repeatedly hit her face with her own fists for about 30 minutes until it was a swollen bloody mess. There was absolutely no way out of the situation in which she found herself. Refusing to beat herself would surely be construed as evidence of her unwillingness to subject herself to a comprehensive self-critique. On the other hand, accepting the organization’s command of self-assistance merely proved that she needed it. After having helped to construct the prison of violence, Toyama dutifully applied the ideological assistance to herself. Yet her self-assistance was deemed insufficient for completing her comprehensive self-critique; and the others rendered helping hands in her deadly endeavor, hitting her, cutting her hair, and finally leaving her tied up until her death on 7 January. Toyama’s case further demonstrates that, as Otsuka Eiji has cogently argued, the repression of femininity was an integral part of the group’s critique of bourgeois identity.

I can’t say that I know a whole lot about the issue of Mori’s way of thinking, but Igarashi argues pretty convincingly that he was a pretty major misogynist, which doesn’t sound all that surprising, given the time and place, and the fact that he was the kind of guy who ended up in charge. Those sorts of people are often...well. I’ll save my opinion on that sort of thing. But given that he was a Japanese man born in the period around the end of WWII - well, misogyny sounds about par for the course. And one of the victims of these self-criticism sessions really illustrates that. And this is probably the worst one. I promise this is the last one I’ll go into detail on. So let’s talk just a bit about Kaneko Michiyo. Again, to quote Igarashi -

Mori’s criticisms against Kaneko initially focused on her alleged antagonism against Nagata and her opportunistic associations with men—using them as a means to establish her hegemony in the organization. Even her husband, Yoshino Masakuni, following Mori’s lead, criticized her for having been active in their sexual intercourse. As the organization faced deepening fear of being detected by the authorities, the feminine came to be identified not only as a negative condition to be overcome but also as a threat that could undermine the whole of the revolutionary movement. Mori later defined Kaneko’s body as the site of ideological battle. Kaneko was pregnant with Yoshino’s child at the time; and their fetus was construed as a future revolutionary soldier, the custody of which belonged to the organization. Mori denounced her for treating it like private property, or for assuming that she would not be killed as long as she was pregnant. The demand for her comprehensive self-critique was transformed into a struggle to transfer the fetus into the possession of the United Red Army. Frustrated with Kaneko’s seeming unwillingness to self-critique, Mori seriously contemplated delivering the baby prematurely by Caesarean section (accepting his plan, Nagata ordered Aoto Mikio, a former medical student [Red Army Faction] to purchase books on obstetrics). Kaneko’s body was deprived of femininity, while being transformed into a battleground for the revolutionary future. However, the opportunity for the operation never came. Kaneko died on 4 February along with the eight-month old fetus.

I mean - just - horrible stuff. In the end, 12 of the 29 who started the training in the mountains of Gunma would be dead. Beaten to death. Starved. Left tied up in the elements of the mountains in the middle of winter.

I know that’s a real downer, but that’s where we’ll leave it with the first part of our story today. Very much a New Hope / Empire Strikes back kind of dynamic. OK, New Hope if Luke and Han were crazy leftist radicals who hijacked airplanes and flew to North Korea. But. Yeah. Enough Star Wars references.

Remember to subscribe, rate and review the podcast wherever it is you cast your pods. This podcast is on most of the major platforms - Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora. If it’s not on your favorite platform, let me know and I’ll look into getting it on that platform as well. You can find the twitter for this podcast @justanothercast. You can email the show at justanotherjerkpodcast@gmail.com. And you can find all that information and more on the website- tinyurl.com/jerkpod, which I promise I’ll get to updating and improving soon. Summer break starts in less than a month, so…maybe? But that’s all for me. I’m Jonathan Isaacson, and I’m out. Peace.

So, this is episode 3 of the story. And if you haven’t listened to episodes 1 and 2 and are listening to this first - You do you… weirdo. No, seriously, I love all 5 of my listeners. I would never call you a weirdo. To your face.

But anyway…this is episode 3 of the story of the leftist radicals who killed some of their own comrades through extremely violent “self-critique” and sessions, sessions that basically came down to beating the crap out of members to prove their commitment to the cause or something like that. I mean, it was for all intents and purposes a street gang, but in the mountains of Japan. 12 members would end up dead, beaten, starved, and tied up outdoors for days in the snowy mountains in Gunma. And, yes, one of those killed was a pregnant woman. The members were trying to remove all humanity from themselves, really. And they were preparing for the battle of annihilation with guns. It was all just kind of crazy talk.

So let’s pick up the story in mid-February 1972. At this point, 12 of 29 members had died, leaving 17, which included Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko, the United Red Army’s number 1 and number 2. They were hiding out in their mountain base in Gunma, and apparently funds were running low.

So, in the middle of February, Mori and Nagata would return to the Tokyo area, on a mission to find some funding. And when they headed back to Gunma, the police, who I guess were starting to zero in on the mountain hideout location, arrested the two leaders at the base of the mountain before they could return to their comrades. Six other members were also apparently arrested, and the twelve dead were discovered - though this fact seems not to have been made known to the public yet. So 8 of the remaining 17 United Red Army members were now in police custody.

But that left nine members who managed to evade the police. They sheltered in a nearby cave for a couple of days before they decided, on February 16th, to set out across the mountains towards Karuizawa, in Nagano. Again. This is the middle of winter. In the mountains. Where there is snow. It was probably something like 30km or so.

Which just seems bonkers to me. I mean, this whole story is bonkers - a lot of it in a horrible, terrible way, but this part is just...well, bonkers. In a bonkers way. And since they were fleeing from the police, they probably would have had to stay off major roads. According to Igarashi’s article, they were going across the border on a really treacherous mountain route, walking through streams to throw the police dogs off the scent, literally. Because the 9 apparently reeked. Which, I mean, makes sense. They’d been in their mountain hideout for months at this point. And they were trying to deny their earthly desires and apparently, being clean was kind of part of that, even if not explicitly so. And that stinkiness would be at least some of the member’s undoing. Which we’ll get to in just a minute.

Somehow, the nine United Red Army members managed to make their way to Karuizawa, where we started this whole tale in episode one. Apparently, though, they had an outdated map that didn’t have the new developments of summer homes and retreat lodges in the hills around the town. The resort area was kind of a temple to the new Japanese consumerism and must have been something of a slap in the face to these would-be revolutionaries. However they felt about the summer homes and retreats, they needed food and supplies, so they split up into two groups. Four members made their way towards central Karuizawa to search for provisions, but, as they wandered through Karuizawa, their revolution was about to come to an end. To quote Igarashi again:

Their bedraggled look, filthy hands, and strong stench warned a kiosk clerk, who immediately alerted the station supervisor. The United Red Army members’ stoic efforts to transform themselves into revolutionary soldiers by transcending their bodily needs were eventually frustrated by their own unhygienic bodies.

They got busted for being dirty, stinking commies. Literally.

However, the last five members were still out there, in the resort development. They would end up in the Asama-Sanso lodge, where Muta Yasuko was the only person at the time. Which brings us fully back to the story we started with.

So, these five men, bedraggled, stinking and having just trekked three days through the winter mountains, took Muta hostage, and had watched the news of Chairman Mao’s meeting with President Nixon, which, remember, was happening at the exact same time.

And as I mentioned way back at the beginning of this story, the Asama lodge was a perfect fortress for the United Red Army members to repel efforts of the authorities to get them out. They barricaded themselves up on the top couple of floors and had the literal upper hand on the cops. They also ended up tying Muta Yasuko to a bed, presumably to prevent her from fleeing. We’ll talk more about her towards the end. Spoiler alert - she survives the ordeal, relatively unharmed.

After three days, the cops finally cut off the power to the lodge. But the 5 members still held their position. The top floor of the lodge had the kitchen, which meant they probably had enough food to hold out for a long time - remember, there was a group of employees staying at the lodge when all this went down, though the employees were not at the lodge at the exact time the United Red Army members entered.

It was after the power was cut that the police set up loudspeakers and urged the radicals to come out. Parents of some of the radicals traveled to Karuizawa and begged their sons to surrender. One parent who begged them to surrender was, in fact, the parent of one of the 12 who had died in Gunma during the self-critiques. But no one knew which members were in the lodge yet.

And the standoff would drag on for another few days - almost another week, actually. By the 25th, the riot police started making preparations to storm the fortress. Fire hoses, pitching machines and rocks were prepared. And so was a wrecking ball.

On the night of the 27th, the police, in preparation for the final siege, bombarded the upper floors, where the United Red Army members were, with rocks flung by the pitching machine. The idea was to prevent the occupiers from getting any sleep, to wear down their resolve and their defenses.

And finally, on the morning of the 28th of February, nearly 10 days since the 5 radicals took Muta Yasuko hostage, the police issued their final ultimatum - come out, or we’re coming in.

The radicals didn’t come out.

So the police went in. With a literal wrecking ball. And water cannons. And tear gas. It’s kinda wild, because you can find video of the police storming the fortress on YouTube.

And let’s just take a really quick digression to talk about the media coverage. So, the hostage standoff had been going on for about 10 days, so EVERYONE in the country knew about it. It was, quite obviously, the top of all the news stories by February 28th, the day it all ended. And at around 6:30 pm that night - because, spoilers, it takes the police the entire day to finally get everyone out of the lodge-cum-fortress. So around 6:30 that night, nearly 90% of TVs in Japan were tuned into the on-going standoff. Reportedly, traffic in Tokyo was lighter than normal for a Monday. Once people knew the police were going in, everyone was glued to the news. And being 1972, there is still tape of most of the broadcasts, so you can watch this all on YouTube. As I said - it’s Wild! I’ll put a link in the show description. It’s all in Japanese, but you can at least watch some of the action.

So, yeah. At a little after 10am, the wrecking ball swung into action and first made a big old hole in the wall near the staircase. And the water cannons or fire hoses or whatever they have prepared started to blast the place with water. It seemed that the police were trying to make it as uncomfortable for the 5 United Red Army members as they possibly could. It was freezing cold, there was no electricity. And now it was soaking wet inside the bedroom where the radicals were, along with Muta Yasuko.

Then the wrecking ball was moved and they started just dropping it on the roof. Over and over again, The roof, at least over the entryway where they were doing this operation, was made out of metal, which is pretty common in Japanese houses and whatnot of the era. Eventually, the roof gave up and just kinda fell off. By noon, the police were inside and had the bottom couple floors of the place secured. But, as I mentioned way back at the beginning of all this, the layout made the Asama Lodge an easily defended fortress. The police couldn’t get up to the top floor where the radicals, with their hostage, were. And so the standoff continued into the afternoon and evening hours.

All the while, the radicals were taking shots with their shotguns and rifles from their superior position. They actually killed 2 officers during the course of the day - the shooting of one was captured by one of the TV crews. The police had managed to get onto a balcony on the same floor as the radicals, and one of the United Red Army guys got a shot off out the window. They also shot a bystander who apparently wandered into the restricted area to get a better look or something? I dunno?

So this went on for hours. Once the police had openings in the walls, thanks to the wrecking ball and water cannons, they started firing tear gas canisters into the room. You can see in the videos on YouTube the moment when the radicals realized they needed to open windows to get air in and the gas out. You can see one of them banging on the window and then the storm shutters, trying to get it to open, and once he gets it open, the gas exits in this big old plume.

By this point, sometime in the late afternoon? Early evening? it was clear that the 5 members of the United Red Army weren’t going to get away. The entire place was surrounded by riot cops. The cops were also now up on the same floor of the lodge as the radicals, just not into the bedroom that was barricaded with furniture and piles of futons - Japanese style mattresses. And I’m guessing that 1972 futons were probably pretty heavy. I’ve used some old ones before, and, while they are fine for sleeping, they are heavy. And I’d guess that pretty much all the futons in the Asama Sanso in 1972 were the dense, heavy suckers. And there would have been a lot of them. So they would have made for good barricading materials. But the cops managed to grab one of the two Kato brothers who were 40% of the five. The Katos, remember? The oldest brother was one of the 12 who died in the woods of Gunma.

Anyway - so the cops nabbed one of the Katos, but the other 4 dove into a big pile of futons and kept resisting as long as they could. Until finally, at a bit after 6pm on the 28th - more than 280 hours after taking Muta Yasuko hostage in the Asama Sanso, the last five members of the United Red Army were apprehended. Their hostage, Muta Yasuko, was unharmed.

As the police led the 5 out, Fuji TV, one of the major networks in Japan managed to get footage - a scoop on everyone else - even NHK, the national broadcaster. It’s kind of interesting to watch the 5 being led out because the first guy you see - he’s surprisingly clean cut. He doesn’t look like someone who’s been hiding in the mountains for months and then spent the last 10 days in a standoff with police. But then you see the second guy and it’s like - well, yeah, that’s what I was expecting.

For her part, Muta Yasuko was in relatively good condition considering the ordeal she had just gone through, though she would never say much about it. She gave her statement to the police, saying that the United Red Army members had treated her reasonably well - well, except for the tying her to the bed thing. What I think what is meant by that is that they never threatened her with physical harm, made sure she got food and was able to use the toilet as needed. But they didn’t want her escaping. So, I guess, as far as hostage takers go, they did a good job??

And after that, she never said anything about the event in public. And, I mean, who can blame her. It was a media circus surrounding the Asama-Sanso incident, and I’m sure she had some pretty serious trauma, regardless of how “well” she was treated by her captors, though of course if they really had wanted to treat her well, they would have let her go and just made their stand on their own, you know, without a hostage, just barricaded in their fortress. Which they intruded in on - but, whatever. Yeah. What I’m saying is Muta Yasuko probably was probably going to have to deal with some pretty serious PTSD after all this, and dealing with the media - Japan’s tabloids are pretty wild, by the way - so dealing with media probably wasn’t something she wanted to do. So, good on her. I honestly can’t even find information as to whether or not she’s still alive. She was 31 when all this went down, 49 years ago, so she’d be 80 years old, give or take a few months, at this point. Quite possible she’s still alive. And I hope that she was able to find peace in her life after her ordeal.

But what about our 5 radicals? Well, as I said at the start of the story, a lot of people were, if not necessarily sympathetic to their cause, they were at least understanding and respected their willingness to take a stand and take action for their beliefs.

However, all of that changed quickly once the public started to become aware of what had happened in the mountains of Gunma in the months leading up to the events in Karuizawa. The violent purges and the deaths of a dozen due to beatings, starvation and exposure turned nearly all sympathy the radicals might have garnered into horror and disgust. Coupled with the Lod Airport Massacre in May of the same year, as well as some hijackings, the events of late 1971 and early 1972 marked an end to any sort of broad support for leftist movements in Japan.

The consumerism and capitalism that the United Red Army was railing against was benefitting too many average work-a-day Japanese people. Most people wanted their TVs and new cars. The system was working for most people. There was no more room for the far left movement in Japan.

The five were all, of course, tried and sent to prison to serve out long sentences. Well, one was sent to a juvenile detention center/reform school thing. The youngest Kato brother was only 16 at the time all this went down. And one of the 5 was sentenced to death - yes, Japan has the death penalty - but I believe his sentence still has not been carried out.

And that is the story of the Asama Sanso incident. And so much more.

Remember to subscribe, rate and review the podcast wherever it is you cast your pods. This podcast is on most of the major platforms - Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora. If it’s not on your favorite platform, let me know and I’ll look into getting it on that platform as well. You can find the twitter for this podcast @justanothercast. You can email the show at justanotherjerkpodcast@gmail.com. And you can find all that information and more on the website- tinyurl.com/jerkpod, which I promise I’ll get to updating and improving soon. Summer break starts in less than a month, so…maybe? But that’s all for me. I’m Jonathan Isaacson, and I’m out. Peace.