Restoration, Revolution, and Terror in Japan, Or How the Right and Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Ideology

Parts II and III

Okamoto Kozo and Shigenobu Fusako

The United Red Army was composed of two major branches: the Japanese Red Army, or Sekigun-ha, was initially led by Shiomi Takaya, regenerated by Mori Tsuneo after his arrest (and later by Sakaguchi Hiroshi), and had its origins in the leftist student movements of the 1950s; Keihin Ampo Kyoto, which maintained tenuous links with the Red Army, was led by Nagata Hiroko.  While the “more nationalistic” Keihin Ampo Kyoto was more focused on effecting political change within Japan (particularly the removal of the occupying American military), the Red Army was internationalist in scope and defined its goals alongside the Marxist ideal of establishing a worldwide community of workers within which colonialism, imperialism, and class-warfare would be absent (Farrell 4).  According to Patricia Steinhoff,

[t]he group espouses Trotsky’s theory of a simultaneous world-wide revolution in which the proletariat of the entire world must overthrow the bourgeoisie which rules individual nation states.  The Red Army believes the revolution must be violent to defeat the overwhelming power of the bourgeoise.  (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 831).  

While this goal in itself sounds political, the acts undertaken to bring about this revolution about, as I hope to show, take place on the level of Messianism.

Fundamental to the Red Army’s ideology was the idea of violence as both a legitimate means towards intergroup discipline and a tool for political change.  During the United Red Army’s purge in the winter of 1972, in which several suspected defectors who might have “compromise[d] the goals of the cause” if allowed to live were killed, Mori Tsuneo, then the leader of the Sekigun-ha, espoused a theoretical perspective on violence that would justify not only the murders of the purge, but the use of violence in general in the group’s endeavors (Farrell 6).  From this perspective, the distinction between “victims and perpetators [of violence]” among the members disappeared, since everyone was a perpetrator at one point, and members who showed signs of weakness were physically tortured as a test of their endurance and willingness to join the group.  The members “began to reject the victims to create distance, even as they tried to maintain the bizarre fiction that the violent attacks were really comradely assistance. . . .  The more wretched and inhuman the victims became, the easier it was to inflict further violence upon them” (Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism” 218).  Even when torturers did not know why a particular person needed to be tortured, they were “[u]nable to question the authority who ordered them to perform acts of violence against friends or the theory that justified their actions,” making them forced to “question only the friends themselves.”  This let them channel “their own fear, doubt, and confusion . . . into an anger that could be vented safely, even satiated, through physical violence against a dehumanized victim” (219).  This logic, which Steinhoff calls “blaming the victims,” is similar to the logic motivating Seventeen’s boy-narrator towards violence: anger is vented indiscriminately towards random targets (but not imaginary ones, as in Seventeen), which opens up the space for this violence to become attached to a real-world referent outside of the training camp.  If the members were more than willing to dehumanize each other to the point where torture is not only permissible but beneficial, then how difficult would it have been for them to translate this attitude outwards to the population of Japan and to the rest of the world?  Albert Camus has picked up on this very same phenomenon in his philosophical essay The Rebel: concerning the military regime of Hitler, he writes,

[The torturer] must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success.  When the concept of innocence disappears from the mind of the innocent victim himself, the value of power establishes a definitive rule over a world in despair.  (Camus 184).

No one is innocent – not the victims of torture nor the victims of terror – because no one can escape becoming the bearer of this “universal guilt.”  Force is the only way to practically empower oneself in the world, to succeed, and the civilians slaughtered in the name of this success are expendable precisely because they are not innocent.

Another mode of legitimating terrorist activity for the Red Army and leftist student movements in general is the accusation that the conditions of society has driven a group of otherwise normal socially-adept citizens into terrorists, that it is the government who is the real terrorist and the leftist groups the victims who must now resort to terrorism in order to bring about justice.  Jacques Derrida makes a similar point in his interview with Giovanna Borradori:

[A]ll terrorism presents itself as a response in a situation that continues to escalate.  It amounts to saying: “I am resorting to terrorism as a last resort, because the other is more terrorist than I am; I am defending myself, counterattacking; the real terrorist, the worst, is the one who will have deprived me of every other means of responding before presenting himself, the first aggressor, as a victim.”  (Borradori 107, author’s italics).

Even before the Red Army formed into a cohesive group, the student movements from which it sprang were already using this logic during their protests of Japanese support for the Vietnam War: the general response of the leftist students to a public which opposed the public protests was: “What is our violence compared with the violence generated by fifty thousand Americans in Vietnam?” (Farrell 63).  The student movements and their sympathizers also claimed that “the state—by co-opting the masses and quarantining the extremists (by surveillance and threatened arrest)—denied them the opportunity to leave their group and seek reintegration into society” (78).  Concerning the actual Red Army itself, from the moment of its foundation violence was advocated as the only means towards effective change domestically or internationally.  It was argued that

the student movement, as it was then configured, had essentially been defeated by the government.  New, more radical strategies—including an uprising with guns and bombs—were required.  They claimed the situation was ripe for the creation of an “army” to do battle with the imperialist government of Japan.  Adherents to this view also called for alliances with like-minded organizations throughout the world.  Japan’s revolution would be part and parcel of an international movement (86). 

Following this logic, terrorists become terrorists because a.) they have no other way of responding to social problems other than violent terrorism and b.) they cannot become lawful members of a society that has pre-emptively demonized them as terrorists.  By adopting the cloak of victimhood, terrorist acts can be justified as the only way that this marginalized group of people can effect lasting political change in Japan and worldwide. 

Now that some of the ideological justifications for the terrorism of the Red Army have been outlined, it would be appropriate to turn to the ways in which they have been put into practice.  In 1972 members of the Red Army murdered twenty-four civilians (including “[s]eventeen . . . Puerto Rican tourists”) and injured seventy-six at the Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel  (Goodman 183).  Two important figures in relation to this massacre are Shigenobu Fusako and Kozo Okamoto, both members of the Red Army.  Shigenobu got involved with the student movements during her time at Meiji University and proved to be an intelligent and capable organizer of and participant in several demonstrations.  After the leader of the Red Army, Shiomi Takaya, was arrested, Shigenobu decided to travel to the Middle East (obtaining a passport by marrying another activist, Okudaira Takeshi, who would accompany her) to “undertake guerilla training at [the PFLP’s] facilities in Lebanon” (Steinhoff, “Three Women” 314).  She was involved in the decision to respond to the United Red Army purge in the winter of 1972 by joining the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in carrying out the notorious Lod Airport Massacre on May 30, 1972 as a gesture of support for Palestine (Farrell 6).   Okudaira Takeshi, Shigenobu’s nominal husband, Okamoto Kozo, and Yasuyuki Yasude, another Red Army member, participated in the massacre, but Okamoto Kozo was the only survivor.

Okamoto Kozo was a much younger member of the Red Army who began demonstrating alongside the student movements at Kagoshima University, which he thought were a “form of ‘masturbation’ which made the students feel good.”  In his search for “a comprehensive ideology which would link all the issues and offer a clearcut solution [to sociopolitical problems worldwide],” he joined the Red Army Faction in 1970 and received his first assignment in 1971: to prepare a room for the screening of the Red Army propaganda film “Declaration of World War by the Red Army and PFLP”.  However, Okamoto was not concerned with “the finer points of ideology.”  For him, “[t]he idea of being an active revolutionary was the main attraction.  The precise theoretical rationale was not important, so long as it encompassed his general political frustrations and his concern about environmental pollution.”  Also, “[w]hile he was personally concerned about the state of the Palestinian refugees, he said that was definitely not his motivation for entering guerilla training.  He was moved by a much more global desire to participate in world revolution” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 833, 834, 830).  In this respect he is similar to the boy-narrator of Seventeen: both are politically-ignorant but angry (and frustrated) individuals who want to sacrifice themselves to the service of an ideology, whether this be the ideology of emperor service or the ideology of “being a revolutionary” and fighting the “real” terrorists (or the “first aggressor[s],” to borrow Derrida’s term) of the capitalist-imperialist order.  

The decision to attack the airport was not the result of careful consideration about how this would advance the cause of the revolution or how it would advance the cause of the workers of the world; it was an act from the position of what Camus calls “the end of history.”  As he writes, “Values are thus only to be found at the end of history.  Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgment of value.  One must act and live in terms of the future.  All morality becomes provisional” (Camus 142).  This is directly related to the kinds of justifications for the act and for the revolution given by Okamoto at his trial.  During his speech at the trial,

 [h]e . . . outlined the theory of worldwide revolution by the people of the third world. . . .  He said this was . . . a revolutionary war in which ordinary people standing on the side of bourgeois society would be massacred.  “The world did not understand what we Red Army soldiers did, but as the massacres continue, the world will perceive the true meaning of our war.”  Now that the Red Army soldiers had joined in the world’s revolution, he continued, if those residents of bourgeois society who suffer from pollution were added, the revolution would be half-completed” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 842, my ellipses). 

Additionally, Okamoto believed that “[s]ince the revolution is not being fought in the name of any specific values, there are no constraints on how it may be fought. . . .  Only history . . . can judge whether he and his companions have been right or wrong” (815, my ellipses).  Morality is provisional, as Camus tells us, insofar as any act performed in the service of a revolution will only receive its full significance once the revolutionary struggle wins or loses.  If the revolutionaries win, it will have been a beneficial act, a moral act, one that was worth sacrificing the lives of innocent civilians; if not, it will have been morally unsound.  The belief that lives could be sacrificed in the first place had been solidified through the aforementioned ideological presuppositions of Mori Tsuneo, under which victims were dehumanized and denounced as always-already guilty.  Okamoto was fully in line with them since “the people he killed were not enemies against whom he felt a direct animosity. . . .  Rather, he regards them all as faceless, inevitable casualties of the revolution” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 814, my ellipsis).  If the revolution will end worldwide capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and class-warfare, then the “inevitable” loss of any  number of civilians will be justified. 

 Walter Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” frames a similar argument along the lines of Messianism and the retroactive signification of the revolutionary act.  In Thesis XIV he writes: “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.”  The proper way to understand history, then, is not by reading it as a linear sequence of major events, but to read how events become “historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.  A historian who takes this as his point of departure . . . establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time” (Benjamin 261, 263, my ellipsis).  The revolutionary act takes place in a moment of Messianic time, from the position of “Judgment Day,” the only position from which the morality or immorality of a certain act can be evaluated (Thesis III, 254).  The problem arises when individuals or groups believe that they are fully justified in acting from the position of Judgment Day: violent terrorism, the murder of civilians, kidnappings, and torture can all be unproblematically justified as acts in service of a revolution whose morality can only be properly established retroactively.  This frees anyone (whether on the individual or group level) capable of appropriating the banner of “revolutionary” for their cause from the considerations of violence as an appropriate means towards social change, the morality of taking lives in order to save many more (echoing the sentiments of Marat, who once frustratedly asked, “Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number?”), whether or not it was ever possible to achieve the stated goals of the revolution (Camus 126).  We should understand the Lod Airport Massacre as an act which took place under the Messianic register: it had no direct political goals, or if it did these goals were merely nominal.  The main motivation for the attack was the idea that by attacking Israel on its own soil (the country responsible for the major problems in the Middle East), the revolution against capitalism and imperialism would be advanced.  However, the belief that massacring civilians at an airport would advance this cause in any direct way is substantially misguided.  Practical politics are suspended as the Red Army adopts a Messianic perspective towards world revolution in which the category of morality loses any positive existence, since the legitimacy and morality of the act can only be assigned from the temporal position of the Messiah, or “the end of history.”  Now the only relationships that matter are relationships of force: which side, which political entity can exert itself above the other to achieve its Messianic goals?  It is in this context that we should read Camus’s statement on the historical inscription of the terrorist act:

Cynicism, the deification of history and of matter, individual terror and State crime, these are the inordinate consequences that will now spring, armed to the teeth, from the equivocal conception of a world that entrusts to history alone the task of producing both values and truth.  If nothing can be clearly understood before truth has been brought to light, at the end of time, then every action is arbitrary, and force will finally rule supreme.  (146).

discuss the co-ordination of German and Jewish organizations in order to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine.  Both the Germans and the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to move to Palestine.  The Germans preferred to have them out of Western Europe, and the Zionists themselves wanted the Jews in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible.  (Zizek, IBK 149-50).

While the context here is very different from that of terrorism in Japan in the post-war period, we can still see the same fundamental convergence of radically opposite ideologies into the same practical, real-world solutions.  The impulse towards violence and violent terrorism should be read as something inherent to political extremism in general, whether of the Right or Left.   

The terrorists I have briefly examined (whether actual or narrative representations) run into difficulties explaining exactly what it is they want to achieve in terms of real-world solutions to the sociopolitical problems they hold responsible for widespread inequality.  While we do not know what the boy-narrator of Seventeen would say if confronted by the question of practical goals, his response would likely be similar to Okamoto Kozo’s answer to the same question: as Patricia Steinhoff tells us: “When I asked him what kind of world he envisioned after the revolution, he smiled and said, ‘That is the most difficult question for revolutionaries.  We really do not know what it will be like’ ” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 814-15).  Without over-generalizing, I think it is safe to say that the terrorists of the Red Army and of Oe’s fictional Imperial Way party share the same sentiments about being a revolutionary or a Rightist, respectively: it is more about fulfilling a desire to be dominated by an ideology, to have something to which one is willing to sacrifice one’s life for, than it is accomplishing anything in the way of practical solutions.   

The major problem with terrorism of this kind is that even with its orientation towards a Messianic time, its symbolic determination to be decided from the perspective of the future, the perspective of the end of history, it nonetheless has no future in terms of forming political solutions.  This is related to what Jacques Derrida has called the “bin Laden effect”: terrorism that is oriented towards destruction without the possibility of opening up new political or discursive possibilities.  As he says,

What appears to me unacceptable in the “strategy” (in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so on) of the “bin Laden effect”  is . . . above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. (Borradori 113). 

Political terrorism in its ideal form is meant to open up new possibilities, perhaps the possibility of utopia, but more commonly the possibility for new kinds of things to be said and new kinds of action to emerge (not necessarily of the violent type).  The terrorism I have looked at in this essay falls far short of these ideals: it provides nothing in the way of practical solutions.  In this sense, the masturbatory theme of Seventeen comes full circle: terrorism of this kind produces nothing except the self-pleasure of the extremist groups who participate in and support the attacks.  We can put this much more succintly by manipulating Masao Miyoshi’s statement from the Introduction to Seventeen to say that “terrorism is inevitably masturbatory” (Oe xvii). 

 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003
Albert Camus,  The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, New York: Vintage, 1956.
William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army, Lexington: Lexington Books: 1990
David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa.  Jews in the Japanese Mind, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000.
Fred Halliday, “Terrorism in historical perspective,”    
www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=6&debateId=103&articleId=1865
Kenzaburo Oe, Seventeen and J, trans. Luk van Haute, Introduction by Masao Miyoshi, New York: Blue Moon Books: 1996.
Patricia J. Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables,” in Japanese Social
Organization, ed. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992.
- “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Kozo Okamoto,” Asian Survey, September, 1976, vol XVI. No. 9.
-“Three Women Who Loved the Left,” in Re-Imaging Japanese Women, ed. Anne E. Imamura, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989.
- Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London: Verso, 2003.