¹ The hijackers had stayed in this same hotel for four days after their arrival in Pyongyang, and then had been moved to a Workers Party guest house in the country some distance from the city, which has been their home ever since. On his first trip Takazawa did not visit their home. They came to Pyongyang to see him and he learned about what had happened from long conversations and the manuscripts that he had offered to publish for them in Japan. Although they went to Pyongyang as members of the Red Army Faction, they later came to be known in the media as the Yodogō group, after the name of the Japan Airlines plane they had hijacked.

² Juche ideology is the official ideology of North Korea, based on the writings of Kim Il Sung. The characters for juche 主体 are the same as the characters for self-reliance or subjecthood in Japanese 主体性. The Japanese philosophical concept of “shutaisei” or independent subjecthood, was a much debated and admired quality among New Left students in the late 1960s, but was understood in quite a different way from the North Korean juche concept. Takazawa wrote the word in katakana and we have kept it as juche, but in quotations sometimes render it as “self-reliance.”

³ Shiomi Takaya, a philosophy graduate of Kyoto University, crafted the Red Army Faction's ideology while Tamiya organized and led its daring escapades.

⁴ All citations in the text are to the book Takazawa published in Japan based on the hijackers' manuscripts, Tamiya Takamaro et al, Hisho nijūnen: Yodogō de Choson e [Twenty Years after Takeoff: To North Korea on the Yodogō.] Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1990.

⁵ The term “giri” refers to a strong moral obligation in Japanese culture to repay one's benefactors. As radical left students, these men would have been dismissive of such a traditional cultural value, even though they would have felt its pull in their everyday lives. Calling it “revolutionary giri” allowed them to experience it positively.

⁶ In ordinary Japanese parlance, a sōkatsu is simply an analysis of a recent activity, but here it was a demand for a personal re-evaluation of one's behavior and thoughts to produce ideological change. The United Red Army was formed in 1971 by remnants of the Red Army Faction and a Maoist group called the Revolutionary Left Faction, whose parent organization had broken with the Japan Communist Party to favor a Maoist line some years earlier. The merged group contained many members who were wanted by the police, and they retreated into the mountains to develop the group's ideology and prepare for future activity. A Maoist-inspired process of self-criticism and mutual criticism introduced by the Revolutionary Left Faction went out of control as the leaders began ordering physical attacks and harsh punishments of their members. Their process of group criticism fed on itself, resulting in the death of a dozen members of the group during the winter of 1971-72. The group's leaders, Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko, called the demand for such an ideological self-criticism a “sōkatsu” and this new meaning was popularized in accounts of the purge. For a detailed account, see Steinhoff, Patricia G. 1992. “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables: The Social Dynamics of the Rengo Sekigun Purge.” Pp. 195-224 in Japanese Social Organization, edited by T. S. Lebra. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

⁷ The Japanese New Left struggled mightily to make sense of the United Red Army purge by analyzing it from its own Marxist ideological perspective as a policy error of disastrous proportions, hence a “terrible mistake.” In English calling it a “mistake” seems to trivialize it, but both the participants in the purge and the people around them understood such an unintended policy error as a serious matter for which one needed to apologize and seek forgiveness.

⁸ In Takazawa's view, both groups confronted ideologies that were distinctly different from Shiomi's theory that guided the Red Army Faction. However, when he examined the process more closely, they were not persuaded by these different ideological positions, but instead found themselves unexpectedly vulnerable to more fundamental, ingrained social values such as giri and deference to authority.

⁹ Both Takazawa's friend Yoshida and Okamoto had disappeared from the group before he began visiting them. Destiny examines what happened to them and how the remaining group members tried to cover it up.