JAJ45 Hakodate Hijack (ANA 857 hijack)

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I’m bringing you another episode in the everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-about-Japanese-history series. Summer break means I have a little bit of spare time to look into some stuff. So, let’s just jump into it.

It’s 1995. 1995 was a pretty shitty year for Japan. Seriously. So, on January 16, there was the Great Hanshin Earthquake. This is the one that hit near Osaka. Really nearer Kobe, but, yeah. You might remember images of a collapsed elevated expressway. I was a teenager in the US at the time, and it’s an image I certainly remember, even though I wasn’t particularly interested in things Japan at the time. But it was a major disaster. Something like 6000 or more people died in it. Big deal.

Then in March - the 20th to be precise - the Aum doomsday cult/terrorist group used sarin gas to attack the Tokyo subway system. 14 people died in that attack and thousands more suffered some level of injuries and ill effects on their health. The Aum group might be another topic worth talking about someday in an episode - though I’m sure others have probably talked about them seeing as they are some of the most visible crazies in Japan. They are not the focus of today’s story, but they certainly play an important supporting role in it.

But, yeah, early 1995 was a tough time for Japan. I’m sure a lot of great stuff also happened, but looking at the Wikipedia page of 1995 doesn’t paint a great picture for the world - Windows 95 was released. Amazon began service - I mean, sure you can buy just about anything ever produced and it’s convenient, but it kills local business and puts money into Jeff Bezos’ pockets, so...at best that’s a wash. And, as I said, Japan in particular had a couple of horrible events in the first couple of months of 1995. So, I have to imagine a lot of people were a bit on edge. And on top of all, Japan was in the midst of the post bubble economy decade - the 1990s are commonly known as a lost decade in Japan. The economy stagnated in a bad way. Stagflation was a big problem. Stagflation - you know, really swole male deer. Wait. no. That’s not right. Stagnation and inflation. That's the ticket. That was a problem in Japan in the 1990s. And that also plays something of a supporting role in today’s story.

So what is our story? Well, if you read the title of the episode, you know it’s a hijacking. So let’s talk about that.

June 21, 1995. A flight - ANA 857 - left from Tokyo’s Haneda airport, bound for Hakodate, a city on the southern tip of the northern island of Hokkaido. A city I know well - I lived there for three years and my wife is from there, so she would have been around when this all happened. Anyway - this isn’t about me. It’s about our hijacker.

The flight left Tokyo late in the morning, and the 747 was carrying 365 passengers and crew. And as it’s flying over Yamagata prefecture - look it up if you don’t know - a single, middle aged man goes and hijacks the plane. He has a couple of items that are suspicious - one is a package with what appear to be plastic explosives. The other sus item is an insulated shopping bag with a plastic pouch filled with a clear liquid that he claims is sarin. He’s also carrying a screwdriver. He threatened to puncture the pouch and let the liquified sarin loose in the plane’s cabin. Now, here’s where the Aum doomsday cult plays a major supporting role in our story today. In the attack on the Tokyo subway system, members of the cult had plastic pouches of liquid sarin, wrapped up in newspapers. And they had umbrellas with sharpened tips. At the designated time, they placed the newspaper covered pouches on the ground and punctured them, releasing the liquid, which quickly released the sarin gas. Now, I’m not exactly sure the mechanism of how liquid sarin becomes gas - I don’t know the evaporation point or how easily it aerosolizes or all of that - but obviously, the method is effective enough - remember, the cultists killed 14 and injured or adversely affected thousands more using this method. And the hijacker was doing his thing only a few months after the Tokyo subway attack. So, a pouch with liquid that might be sarin and a screwdriver to puncture it? Yeah, you’re going to get people’s attention. Also - jeez. Airport security was a bit lax in 1995. I mean, I do think it’s gone too far in the other direction, though I understand why. But, yeah, seeing photos, this wasn’t a small screwdriver either. It was on the larger size of standard screwdrivers. Not one of those gigantic ones, but good sized, and dude managed to walk onto an airplane with it.

Anyway.

So, the hijacker’s demands weren’t terribly clear. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot to what he wanted - he wanted the plane to be landed in Hakodate, refueled and returned to Tokyo. And that’s kind of all I’ve been able to find. As I said, no real purpose - not like previous Japanese airplane hijackers. The most famous of those was the Yodo incident, which I’ve mentioned in the mini-series about the Asama Lodge hostage situation. The Yodo incident was the one where leftists hijacked a plane and demanded to be taken to North Korea. Up to this point - so 1995 - most Japanese hijackers had been leftist extremists. But this case seemed different. The intentions weren’t as clear.

Aboard the plane, the hijacker had the flight attendants cover all the passengers’ mouths and eyes with packing tape. He demanded the plane be returned to Tokyo, but the airport officials told the hijacker that there were some mechanical problems that prevented them from refueling immediately, and they needed to take care of the issues before they could comply with his demands.

Now, of course that was a big fat lie. The airport officials, working with police - obviously - were stalling for time. There was no problem with the airplane. Everything was in working order. They just didn’t want to send it back in the air. They wanted to try to figure out what the deal was. At this point, officials weren’t sure how many hijackers there were. They didn’t know if the hijacker or hijackers were armed beyond the plastic explosives and sarin. Was there a gun involved? It wasn’t clear to the police yet. And they wanted to figure it out.

Luckily, there was a passenger who was able to give the police a lot of important information.

There’s a Japanese pop singer named Kato Tokiko. And she was going, with her band and manager, to Hokkaido for a concert. And her guitarist - a man named Tsugei Nobutaka - was able to provide the police with a lot of important information.

As the passengers sat on the plane for hours - because, yes, the incident lasted for more than half a day - but as they sat there on the plane, the tape that was covering their mouths and eyes began to come loose - sweat and body oil and whatnot. And Tsugei and others in the band - Kato Tokiko herself also noticed it - but they noticed that every time the hijacker - or one of the hijackers, because remember, no one is sure if it’s one person of multiple people - but every time a hijacker walked by Tsugei, he was able to see that it was always the same pair of shoes - fairly new, white shoes apparently. So he was fairly certain that there was only one hijacker.

He also knew that Kato Tokiko’s manager, who was sitting across the aisle from him, had a mobile phone. This was 1995, remember, so mobile phones were still pretty rare. I mean it’s not the brick large enough to defend yourself from a puma type phone - we’re definitely into the fit in your pocket era by 1995. But they were definitely rare enough that only Kato’s manager - the person in charge of contacting concert halls and TV or radio stations and whatever - she was the only one in the group who had one. So she slipped it to Tsugei wrapped up in a newspaper. And he was able to slip into the lavatory on the plane and he called the police and provided them with information.

So the police now knew that in all likelihood, there was only one hijacker. And after a while of presuming that he had a connection to Aum - after running the records of ALL the passengers and crew, they realized that no one on the plane was a known member of Aum. Which is not to say that it was impossible he was a member - just unlikely. They were also able to deduce that the hijacker was most likely not in possession of a gun of any sort.

So the police began devising a way to safely bring the situation to a close. The Hokkaido prefectural police, working with the Special Assault Team - the Japanese SWAT team - devised a way to get onto the airplane to neutralize the hijacker. And the media played an important role. Somehow, the hijacker was able to get the information as it was being reported - maybe the plane was equipped to receive TV broadcasts or radio broadcasts when it was on the ground or something? But the TV stations all agreed to not show the rear of the plane in their broadcasts once the details of the situation were known. They were running either live images of a close up of the cockpit or video that had been filmed early on in the standoff.

Really briefly, let’s talk about the timeline - the plane was hijacked at around 11:45 in the morning, and it landed in Hakodate something like an hour or less later. And then the plane just sat on the tarmac for hours. It wasn’t until around 10pm that the decision was made about what to do.

And that decision was to enter the plane. The police had worked with the maintenance crew at the airport, looking at another 747 in a hangar to figure out the best paths for entry. And they devised a plan to enter the main cabin in three locations. The decision was made at 10pm, but getting permission to use the assault team took some time. The assault team had been, up to this point, focused solely on international terrorists and threats. They were not a unit deployed in domestic cases. But, their deployment was approved, and the plan was put into motion.

The police approached the plane from the rear, in the dead of night, in pitch black conditions. All of this - remember, the TV stations weren’t showing the rear of the plane - all to prevent the hijacker from knowing what was going on. The police erected ladders up to the three doors they would be using. Hokkaido police officers - and these were guys trained for hostage situations, though in office or apartment buildings - dressed in the coveralls of the airplane maintenance crew climbed the ladders - three at each door.

And in unison, the three groups opened the doors and rushed the hijacker, who was sitting in the main cabin of the plane. He tried to run, but was quickly cornered, and apparently took a swing at a cop with his screwdriver, but ended up getting smacked in the head himself. The cops quickly fell on him and pinned him, taking away his screwdriver, plastic explosives and liquid sarin. And as you might have guessed by this point, the plastic explosives? Just some modeling clay with fake fuses. The liquid sarin in the pouch? Just plain water. His most dangerous weapon was by far his screwdriver. At around 4 am, all 365 aboard were able to exit the plane uninjured. Well. 364. The hijacker was led off in handcuffs, with a lot of blood all over his shirt, from his very brief struggle with the police. The other 364 people were unhurt - I guess one person needed minor treatment due to being stabbed by the hijacker with his screwdriver, and 6 others required minor treatment at Hakodate hospitals due to the stress of the ordeal. But that was it. Nothing major.

So who was the hijacker? What did he really want?

Well, it turned out to be a rather quotidian story. He wasn’t some ideologue. He wasn’t a member of the far left as earlier hijackers in Japan had been. He wasn’t a member of the doomsday cult Aum, attempting to hasten the end of the world or anything.

He was a banker. A lonely, 53 year old banker. According to reports, he was a pretty high level guy at a bank in Tokyo, but was a bit unstable. He apparently had the worst temper in his office. According to Hokkaido Shimbun reporter Aihara Hideki reported on the story for years after the incident, said that the hijacker found himself useless in the 1990s. The word Aihara used to describe the hijacker was 飼い殺し - which has two, closely related meanings. One is keeping a domestic animal - think farm animal here - beyond its usefulness. So, an old horse that can’t pull the plow anymore or whatever. The other meaning of the word 飼い殺し is keeping a person on the payroll without utilizing their skills. So the hijacker had come up in the banking business in the 1970s and 1980s - Japan’s post war boom years. But by the 1990s, things were a lot more bleak. And the hijacker was also a real loner, according to Aihara. Aihara’s thought is that the hijacker was using the trappings of an Aum attack to gain notoriety and also to go out as some sort of weird anti-hero, unlike Asahara Shoko - the leader and founder of Aum, who was arrested not long after the Tokyo subway attacks. Asahara had yet to go to trial, but my guess is that most people probably thought he was in jail for good after that.

But, yeah, our hijacker, who I’ve decided not to name, though it’s not hard to find his name it you look for it, he was a loner, who was fairly successful in business, but not in social circles - was extremely alienated by everything around him and decided to take it out in a strange, strange way. He would later be found guilty - well, duh - and sentenced to 8 years plus 53 million in damages, though it was later extended to 10 years.

For its part, the government was criticized for not doing more to dismantle the doomsday cult Aum in the immediate aftermath of the Tokyo Subway Sarin attacks. I’m not sure what difference that would have made. I mean, I guess had Aum been dismantled immediately, there might have been less likelihood that people would have mistaken our dude as a possible member of the cult - but as guy wasn’t actually a member - just jacking their style - he could have done the same thing and people would have thought he was a member of a sleeper cell or sympathizer demanding for Asahara’s release or something. Seems a separate issue to me. But, yeah, I really should talk about Aum at some point. Aum doesn’t exist by that name any more, but the group, more or less, does continue to operate under the name Aleph. Another group split off in 2007 - Hikari no Wa. Aleph is still under police surveillance, and is considered to be more or less Aum under a different name, while Hikari no Wa was removed from the list of high risk groups in 2017 - apparently they are more focused on personal improvement in kind of a new age-y kind of way, though there are plenty of new age groups that are for all intents and purposes, cults, but, whatever. Like I said, Aum is definitely a topic worth talking about at some point.

So, yeah, untreated or undertreated mental health problems - a major issue in Japan, combined with the economic issues of the 1990s and the crappy start of 1995 Japan experience lead to a hijacking - one that thankfully ended with no deaths or major injuries. So, while I’m not a huge fan of police in a lot of situations, I’ve got to say that they did an excellent job in this case. Sure, the passengers weren’t in any real danger - but the police did a good job preparing for the worst case scenarios.

One last, completely unrelated point - the TV stations were able to deploy the latest technology for this story - a camera that was able to record in really low light. There’s some pretty cool footage of the police preparing the ladders for entry into the plane. It looks entirely pedestrian - nothing interesting. Just a bunch of cops and some ladders. Until you remember that it is about 3 in the morning. And it looks like it’s early evening. Pretty cool.

And that’s where we’ll end the story of the hijacking of ANA flight 857.

Please 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 - probably some others. 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 on the website- tinyurl.com/jerkpod. That’s all for me. I’m Jonathan Isaacson, and I’m out. Peace.