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The Red Army (1969-2001) and Aum Supreme Truth (1987-2000)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Observers of early twenty-first-century Japan commonly note economic, political, and social crisis, on the one hand, and pessimism, lethargy, or helplessness about the possibility of reform, on the other. Yet Japan's civil society was idealistic and energetic in the early postwar decades. What happened? The reform movement that captured much of the vitality of the early postwar decades was either foreclosed, as many were co-opted in the “all- for-growth” economism, consumerism, and the corporation, or crushed in successive waves of repression of dissidence as the cold war order took shape. Political parties sacrificed broad vision and ideals to narrow-interest articulation. While the mass base of the reform movement was discouraged, demoralized, and depoliticized, one minority in the late 1960s turned to violent revolution and another in the late 1980s turned inward to seek spiritual satisfaction. Both paths led to violence. This article looks at the course of the student movement between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, with particular reference to the Japan Red Army, and at the new religious movement Aum Supreme Truth in the 1980s and 1990s. Both adopted “terrorist” tactics, by almost any understanding of that term. However, they were children of their times, reflecting the same deep social, political, and moral problems that Japan as a whole continues to face in the early twenty-first century.
1. In the age of globalization, this is increasingly common practice. See Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor, and Helmut Anheier, eds., Global Civil Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), iii-iv.
2. Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (Boston: Little Brown, 1977).
3. A flurry of conferences and publications marked the fiftieth anniversary of these failed efforts. For a brief review, see Iwadare Hiroshi, “Ima naze sakano 50 nendai gakusei undo no kaiko to kensho,” Shukan kinyobi, 26 July 2002, 32-35.
4. See Gavan McCormack, “The Student Left in Japan,” New Left Review, no. 65 (January- February 1971): 37-53.
5. Peter J. Katzenstein and Tsujinaka Yutaka, Defending the Japanese State: Structures, Norms and the Political Responses to Terrorism and Violent Social Protest in the 1970s and 1980s (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1991), 20.
6. Even after the subway attack, the Dalai Lama referred to Asahara as “my friend, but not necessarily a perfect one.” David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, The Cult at the End of the World (New York: Crown Publishers, 1996), 260. See also, Ian Reader, Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinri�kyo (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 68.
7. Reader, Religious Violence, 61.
8. Ibid., 121-23.
9. M. Cherif Bassiouni, Legal Responses to International Terrorism: U.S. Procedural Aspects (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoof, 1987), xxx-xxxiii.
10. For a chronology of the student movement, see Katzenstein and Tsujinaka, Defending the Japanese State, 16-18, 22-23. For a short, more up-to-date analysis, with bibliography, see Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Student Protest in the 1960s,” Social Science Japan, March 1999, 3-6.
11. On the Cuba venture, see Shiomi Takaya, Sekigun-ha shimatsu ki, Moto gicho ga kataru 40 nen [The Red Army put in perspective: 40 years, as told by its former chairman] (Tokyo: Sairyuusha, 2003), 106.
12. For details, see McCormack, “The Student Left in Japan,” 47.
13. William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1990), 158.
14. Kino Yasushi, Asama sanso jiken no shinjitsu (Tokyo: Kawade Shinsha Shobo, 2000), 9-10.
15. Nagata Hiroko, “Jiko hihan ï¿1/2 Rengo Sekigun no ayamachi o kurikaesanai tame ni,” part 2, Impakushon, no. 20 (30 October 1982): 104-119, at 104. Also Kino, Asama sansÅ□ jiken no shinjitsu, 314-16, and for a sensitive portrait, see Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Three Women Who Loved the Left: Radical Women Leaders in the Japanese Red Army,” in Reimaging Japanese Women, ed. Anne E. Imamura (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
16. Nagata, “Jiko hihan,” 106.
17. Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” Journal of Asian Studies 48, no. 4 (November 1989): 724-740, at 735.
18. Other groups were also caught in this spiral around the same time, notably the East Asian Anti-Japanese Armed Front (EAAJAF). The EAAJAF moved from bombing monuments and symbols of the emperor system and of Japanese colonialism to planning an attack on the person of the emperor himself. Plans went awry and the bomb was instead detonated at the headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, killing 8 and injuring 576 people. Two death sentences and one life sentence related to this incident were handed down and then confirmed in 1987. Three group members were “sprung” from prison in 1975 and 1977; two of them remain at large.
19. “Yodogo jiken: Menba 4 nin ga kikoku tetsuzuki,” Mainichi shimbun, 9 July 2002.
20. Several television documentaries, which draw extensively on police intelligence, were produced in 2002 and 2003, including Nihon TV's Sekigun Jiken no Onnatachi [The women of the Red Army incidents], broadcast 24 December 2002.
21. Shigenobu Fusako, “Nihon sekigun wa nani o kangaete ita no ka,” in Sekigun ï¿% Red Army, 1969-2001 [Kawade yume mukku, Bungei bessatsu], ed. Abe Harumasa (Tokyo: Kawade ShobÅ□ Shinsha, 2001), 2-8.
22. “Seventies-era Terrorist Who Killed Dozens Wants to Come Home, Go to College,” Japan Times, 8 May 2003.
23. See the following works by Shigenobu Fusako: Waga ai waga kakumei [My love, my revolution] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974); Beiruto 1982 nen natsu [Beirut, summer of 1982] (Tokyo: Hanashi no tokushu, 1984); Daichi ni mimi o tsukereba Nihon no oto ga suru [If you put your ear to the ground Japan can be heard] (Unita Shoho [publisher] and Aki Shobo [distributor], 1984); and, most recently, Ringo no ki no shita de anata o umo to kimeta [Beneath the apple tree I decided to give birth to you] (Tokyo: Gentosha, 2001).
24. Shigenobu, Ringo no ki no shita de anata o umo to kimeta, 71.
25. Steinhoff, “Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” 733.
26. Japan Times, 19 November 2000.
27. Ibid. 14 July 2001.
28. Asada Akira, “A Left within the Place of Nothingness,” New Left Review, no. 5 (September-October 2000): 15-40, at 19.
29. Shiomi, Sekigun-ha shimatsu ki, 32-6.
30. Ibid., 56
31. Ibid. 191-92.
32. Ibid.
33. See table in D.W. Brackett, Holy Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1996), 104.
34. Kaplan and Marshall, The Cult at the End of the World, 69-76, 106ff., 266ff., 191-93; Brackett, Holy Terror, 92ff.
35. Amy E. Smithson, “Rethinking the Lessons of Tokyo” in Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terror Threat and the US Response, ed. Amy E. Smithson and Leslie-Anne Levy, Henry L. Stimson Center, Report no. 35 (October 2000): 83-4. Available at www.stimson.org/cbw/pdf/atxchapter3.pdf.
36. Ely Karmon, The Anti-Semitism of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo: A Dangerous Revival. Available at www.ict.org.il/articles/aum_anitsemitism.htm.
37. Ibid.
38. Smithson, “Rethinking the Lessons of Tokyo,” 83-4.
39. Karmon, The Anti-Semitism of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo.
40. Japan has 2,512 Freemasons, almost all of them foreigners, and fewer than one thousand Jews. (Ibid.)
41. Smithson, “Rethinking the Lessons of Tokyo,” 106.
42. Reader, Religious Violence, 202-3.
43. Ibid., 218.
44. Karmon, The Anti-Semitism of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo.
45. Aleph website: www.aleph.to/.
46. Japan Times, 12 April 2003.
47. Ibid., 23 April 2003
48. Ibid., 12 April 2003.
49. Kiyotada Iwata, “Aum Kept under Watch � and at Arm's Length,” Asahi Online, 22 February 2003.
50. “The Long Wait,” Asahi shimbun, 23 April 2003.
51. The trial schedule is posted on the Aleph website: www.aleph.to/.
52. The Policy Working Group on the United Nations and Terrorism (2002) did not make any formal definition but stated that terrorism was “essentially a political act�meant to inflict dramatic and deadly injury on civilians and to create an atmosphere of fear, generally for a political or ideological (whether secular or religious) purpose.” See www.un.org/terrorism/a572 73.htm.
53. Fred Halliday, “Terrorism,” Global Policy Forum i¿½ WTC: The Crisis, May 2001; www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/terrorism/2510t.htm.
54. Richard Falk, Revolutionaries and Functionaries: The Dual Face of Terrorism (New York: Dutton, 1988), cited in Jan Oberg, “11 Things to Remember on September 11,” Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, 11 September 2003; www.transnational.org/pressinf/2003/pf186_11ThingsOnSept 11.html.
55. On Koizumi's tears over the Japanese kamikaze at the “Tokkotai Heiwa Kinen�kan” [Special Attack Force Peace Memorial Hall] at Chiran in Kyushu in February 2002, see Terashima Jitsuro, “Kitai sareru shidoshazo saiko,” Sekai, Sep�tember 2002, 55-57, at 57. Some five thousand allied sailors were killed by kamikaze attacks in the Pacific and East China Sea areas. Murray Sayle, “The Kami¿½i½¿½/kazes Rise Again,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 200 1; www.theatlantic.com/is�sues/2001/03/sayle.htm.
56. Editorial, “Ishihara's Latest Furor,” Asahi shimbun, 12 September 2003.
57. For a recent case, concerning the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, convened in Tokyo in December 2000, which subsequently found Emperor Hirohito, among others, guilty of war crimes, see Takahashi Tetsuya (in discussion with Henmi Yo), “Wataku�sh�tachi wa dono yo na jidai ni ikite iru ka,” Sekai, September 2002, 40-54, at 45.
58. Tatsuya Mori, director of two documentaries on Aum: “A” and “A2,” quoted in Eric Johnston, “Aum Bred Social Cult of Fear, Passion for Security,” Japan Times, 30 October 2003.
59. On the National Resident Registry Network set up in August 2002 to centralize and facilitate government access to personal data on all citizens (organized according to 11-digit individual numbers), see articles in Japan Times, 6 and 8 August 2002, and the Japanese website www.nttpc.info/Help/1253.html.
60. Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Three Paths to Enlightenment about Aum Shinrikyo,” Journal of Japanese Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 143-52, at 150.
61. Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Student Conflict,” in Conflict in Japan, ed. Ellis S. Krauss, Thomas P. Rohlen, and Patricia G. Steinhoff (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 174-213, at 208.
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