Japanese Red Army

The Japanese Red Army (JRA) was a 1970s terrorist group famous for its actions on behalf of Palestinian nationalism, including a 1972 massacre at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport.

The Japanese Red Army arose from the Japanese student protest movement of the mid-to-late 1960s. Protests were directed not only at the Japanese government, which students felt was corrupt, but also at the U.S. military presence in Japan and against the Vietnam War. As the decade progressed, rampant factionalism overtook the Japanese student movement, with intergroup violence often more deadly and more frequent than student clashes with the police. The Japanese student movement was also marked by a certain militarism, and students often arrived at protests equipped with color-coded helmets and staves strikingly similar to the helmets and batons of the riot police. The end of the decade saw hundreds of student groups, many of which espoused radical strains of Marxism. The Red Amy was one such group.

By 1969 the JRA had come to accept that student protests were not swaying public opinion in conservative Japan, and that they were not likely to in the immediate future. Inclined to radical action rather than political persuasion, the JRA decided to align with the international communist movement. In March 1970, six JRA members hijacked a Japan Airlines plane and forced it to take them to North Korea, where the hijackers freed the hostages and surrendered themselves to the Communist North Korean government.

The successful hijacking left a void within the JRA leadership, and the group soon split into two factions. The first, under Tsuneo Mori, decided to remain in Japan and ally itself with another radical student group, the Keihin Anti-Treaty Joint Struggle. The new organization, called the United Red Army (URA), went into hiding in the Japanese countryside in the winter of 1972. It then conducted a brutal internal purge, in which 12 of the group's few dozen members were killed by their comrades. As the purge was winding down in mid-February, area police became aware of the group's presence and members fled their hideout. Five URA members invaded an inn and took the [Page 314]innkeeper hostage; a weeklong siege ensued. Police raided the building on February 28; one officer was killed, the innkeeper was freed, and the terrorists surrendered. This episode put an end to Mori's JRA faction.

The second JRA faction, which had no more than a few dozen members, was led by Fusako Shigenobu. This group left Japan in 1971 and went to Lebanon to support the Palestinian cause. In Lebanon they became protégés of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In May 1972, three JRA members attacked the Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, gunning down passengers in the terminal and attempting to blow up a plane. Twenty-three people were killed, and more than 80 were injured.

In July 1973 the JRA and Palestinians hijacked a Japan Airlines plane flying out of Amsterdam. The plane eventually landed in Libya, where the hostages were released and the plane destroyed. In February 1974, JRA and PFLP members blew up a Shell oil rig in Singapore; a second team attacked the Japanese embassy in Singapore, after which the Japanese government acceded to their demands and both groups of terrorists were allowed safe passage to Yemen.

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