-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Peter Siegenthaler, Political Activism and the Everyday in Cold War Japan, History Workshop Journal, Volume 93, Issue 1, Spring 2022, Pages 301–310, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbac015
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
‘On the evening of February 28, 1972’, Yoshikuni Igarashi tells us in Japan, 1972, ‘89.2 percent of Japanese television sets were tuned in to coverage of the end of a hostage situation…carried out by a militant leftist organization, the United Red Army’ (p. 228). Approximately sixty million viewers out of a population of slightly more than 100 million Japanese watched over ten hours as the final stages of the so-called Asama sansō incident unfolded. After heavy fighting at the mountain lodge in which the hostage was being held, which involved use of a crane and wrecking ball to pierce exterior walls and the fatal shootings of two members of the police and a bystander, the hostage was freed and five members of the URA arrested. Initially, Igarashi writes, public sympathy remained with the URA members, who in the spirit of the times were seen to be, like the New Left groups from which they arose, ‘engaged in a courageous battle against state authority’ (pp. 228–9). Revelations of internal purges that preceded the hostage situation, however, soon turned public opinion against the URA militants. Interrogations after the siege revealed that ‘ten of the original twenty-nine participants’ in the group’s training camp had been killed ‘in the name of sōkatsu (self-criticism)’, and another two ‘were executed for their alleged unrevolutionary behavior’. As Chelsea Schieder writes in Coed Revolution, ‘no event symbolized the death of the New Left as dramatically and powerfully as the bloody internal purge waged by the URA in their mountain retreat’ (p. 154).
