How Japanese Student Radicals Became Juche Believers in North Korea
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Volume 16 | Issue 7 | Number 1 | Article ID 5130 | Apr 01, 2018 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus How Japanese Student Radicals Became Juche Believers in North Korea Takazawa Kōji edited by Patricia G. Steinhoff color-coded crash helmets emblazoned with names of their organizations, carried long Excerpted and adapted from the English fighting poles, and threw paving stones or translation of Destiny: the Secret Operations of firebombs at the police. They confronted the Yodogō Exiles, by Takazawa Kōji, edited by squads of riot police wearing medieval style Patricia G. Steinhoff. helmets, who battled the students with tall aluminum body shields and police batons, supported by water cannon trucks that sprayed fire hoses of water laced with tear gas at the Abstract students. At the peak of the protest cycle in 1968-69, Japanese authorities suddenly cracked During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Japan down with mass arrests and prolonged had a New Left protest cycle that paralleled incarcerations of thousands of students. This those in western Europe and the United States. turned the tide, in part by producing splits The Japanese New Left was separate from the within New Left groups. parliamentary Japan Communist Party and drew many of its ideas from Japanese translations of the latest revolutionary New Left literature including works by Regis De Bray (1967), Che Guevara (1968, 1969), Rudi Dutschke (1968), Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1968), Howard Zinn (1968), Stokely Carmichael (1968), Eldridge Cleaver (1969), Alberto Bayo (1969), and Carlos Marighella (1970). Japanese New Left groups identified with student movements in the west and protested about similar issues, including opposition to the Vietnam War and American military bases in Japan, as well as tuition increases, overcrowding, and authoritarian regulations at universities. Frustrated by the Japanese government’s intransigence in the face of huge protest demonstrations, they despaired of change through either electoral or street Public debut of the independent Red Army politics, and instead saw revolution as the only Faction at the National Zenkyōtō alternative. New Left street demonstrations convention, Hibiya Park, September 5, steadily escalated into violent clashes1969. Red Army Faction members (right) resembling medieval battles. The students wore battled with members of Bund (left) 1 16 | 7 | 1 APJ | JF outside Hibiya Outdoor Amphitheatre. Keywords: Yodogō group, juche ideology, Red Takazawa, Kōji, author and editor,Army Faction, thought reform process, self- Zenkyōtō Gurafuitei. Tokyo: Shinsensha, criticism, mutual criticism, self-reliance, 1984, p. 55. sōkatsu, United Red Army A certain fateful day can mark the moment One major national New Left protestwhen all traces of a person whom we have been organizations nicknamed Bund expelled its following closely suddenly disappear. The flow radical Red Army Faction for advocating urban of information concerning our subject dries up guerrilla warfare with guns and improvised abruptly. We hear nothing more of how he is explosives to incite a revolution in Japan, as living, or where. In this kind of situation we part of the simultaneous worldwide revolution usually say "his whereabouts are unknown," or that their leader Shiomi Takaya believed was "he has disappeared." These words perfectly imminent. As the newly-independent group describe the situation after the Red Army experimented with explosives in fall 1969, Faction students arrived in Pyongyang. Of heavy police pressure pushed themcourse, they did not "disappear," but spent the underground. In March 1970 nine students first several years in Pyongyang undergoing from the Red Army Faction hijacked a plane to intensive daily ideological and life-style North Korea. Two years later they renounced remolding ("brainwashing"). But to us, their the Red Army Faction’s ideology oflives in Pyongyang were a blank during those simultaneous world revolution and converted to years. It was as if a wire had been cut, with Kim Il Sung’s juche ideology. Little was heard silence falling suddenly after all the noise. They from them until they re-established contact might as well have hijacked themselves across the river of the dead. with supporters in Japan in 1988. After one Yodogō member was arrested in Japan, his This impression may just be in contrast to the lawyer and the leader of a support organization flood of information that preceded the moment began visiting the group in North Korea. of the hijackers' disappearance. The testimony Takazawa Koji knew the group’s leader Tamiya of every passenger aboard theYodogō was Takamaro from his days as a student activist, public information; there was not a newspaper, first in Bund and then on the fringes of the Red magazine, or weekly tabloid that had neglected Army Faction, where he helped publish Red to cover the subject. Live, unceasing, on-the- Army Faction publications and providedspot television coverage had provided countless support when people were arrested. Heimages of the crisis. There is even a recording became an editor and authority on the New of the speech Tamiya made to the passengers left, and first visited North Korea in 1990 at the aboard the Yodogō. On this tape, Tamiya is group’s invitation. In this excerpt fromshouting at the top of his lungs, his distinctive, chapters 5 and 6 ofDestiny , he uses piercing voice delivering a political speech in manuscripts they gave him for publication in language the listeners found very difficult to Japan to examine their conversion process. As understand. With such a proliferation of he explored their experience in North Korea, he information, viewers could easily imagine found disturbing parallels to the United Red themselves at the scene. Army Incident in Japan that happened at almost the same time. But the hijackers' daily lives in Pyongyang remained a blank. Not only were there no relations between the two countries, but there 2 16 | 7 | 1 APJ | JF was no news of the students, and no way to so they could agree on a plan. The discussion make contact with them. The public knew only grew heated: suddenly they were no longer that they had indeed gone to North Korea, and dealing with an amorphous future. They found many believed, without reason, that they were themselves in Pyongyang, but they still had no jailed there. So, twenty years passed…. firm ideas of what they wished to do. When I visited North Korea for the first time, The meeting resulted in the entire group upon my arrival in Pyongyang, I checked into agreeing on three resolutions, embodied in the Koryo Hotel on Changuang Avenue. Tamiya three slogans. Much later, Tamiya read the was waiting for me in the hotel lobby. A man of slogans to me one by one and explained their rather small physique, he stood in the shadow meaning: of one of the pillars in the lobby, his head tilted slightly to the side. Memory can fade with the passage of time, but this was indeed Tamiya, Item: We live and die together. leader of that student movement of twenty Item: We will defend and nurture years past. But I was struck by the impression the simultaneous world that this man, the leader of that long-ago revolutionary transition. hijacking, did not seem comfortable in the luxurious hotel lobby. Item: To complete the success of the hijacking, let us prepare for a That evening, we enjoyed a fabulous banquet in triumphant return to Japan! a private dining room at the hotel, in the company of several high-ranking North Korean Workers' Party members. After the meal, we In the end, they agreed to make the following moved to another room in the hotel, and five requests: continued our party late into the night. My interest and excitement overcame any travel exhaustion: here I was, in North Korea! It was Item: Military training not a place one ordinarily visited. In addition, here were the Yodogō hijackers themselves Item: A solution for our return to who had come to meet me, and with twenty Japan sometime this year years of catching up to do, we had plenty to 1 Item: Lectures on philosophy, talk about. … economics, and the Korean Anti- The North Korean Workers' Party had promised Japanese Resistance to dispatch cadres to serve as instructors for Item: Training field trips the students, and [once they had settled into their new home] the students prepared to make Item: Japanese newspapers and their self-introductions. For the first time they magazines; access to a radio told each other their true names, since they had continued to use pseudonyms when addressing each other. Before the hijacking, These requests were immediately relayed to the group had met in full only twice. Since they the Workers' Party. The response to the request did not even know each other’s' names, it is for military training: "We will consider it." hardly surprising to learn they had no agreed- upon plan to follow now, after their arrival in As for returning to Japan, "It was a rash North Korea. Tamiya quickly called a meeting decision on your part to come here, and this 3 16 | 7 | 1 APJ | JF will not be a simple matter. We will do what we Consequently, their daily routine had two parts: can. Please consider any future requests the days were spent studying juche ideology, carefully." and the evenings, Shiomi Takaya's theory of the transition into simultaneous world Lectures began immediately. A curriculum was revolution.3 Once classes were finished for the developed, and a teacher was dispatched to day, they conducted their own study sessions deliver the lectures every day at the appointed and discussions to meet the requirements of time. The professors from the Social Sciences item two on their list of slogans, "We will Institute in Pyongyang spoke in soft tones, but ensure the success of simultaneous world there was no room for compromise inrevolution." interpreting their message.