The Proletarian Revolution Action Committee of Toronto and the Revolutionary Student Movement would like to thank everyone for coming out to the event tonight!!!
To put the film in context, we would like to provide a brief historical overview of the political situation in which this film was made, the relationship between the Japanese Red Army and the infamous United Red Army, our own political position regarding some of these politics, especially the nature of armed struggle, and its implications of it on the larger communist movement.
This film was made 3 years after the second Ampo struggle by noted filmmakers Masao Adachi and Wakamatsu Koji, both sympathizers of the Japanese Left and the Communist League (Red Army Faction). The second Ampo struggle, like the first Amp struggle of 1960, was against the US-Japan Security Treaty which among others things included the right for American military bases to exist in Japan. The Communist League (Red Army Faction) itself was a split from the Communist League, or the Bund, in July 1969. The Bund itself was originally formed in 1958 by a group of Zengakuren members and leaders that split from the Japanese Communist Party in light of Khruschev’s Secret Speech and the JCP’s policies towards a number of political questions. Zengakuren stands for Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Sō Rengō or in English the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations, and is an umbrella group for numerous student groups in different universities. Although it must be noted that by the 1960′s several competing Zengakuren’s existed, each controlled by a different socialist/communist group. The Bund quickly came to adopt Trotskyism like much of the anti-JCP Left. The Bund was centrally involved in the first Ampo struggle in 1960 and collapsed shortly thereafter (1961) into numerous small sects due to the failure of that Ampo struggle. The different Bundists sects reorganized themselves into Communist League – Unity Faction in July 1965 in the midst of the ever deepening university struggles, the war in Vietnam and in preparation for the Ampo Struggles. The Bund again was a major force in the street battles, coordinated direct actions and university occupations across the country and was regularly pitted in violent street battles with the police.
Indeed, the unified Bund’s student organization soon emerged as one of the largest student groups on Japanese campuses. However, by 1969 tensions had arisen within the Bund’s central committee regarding the direction that the struggle should take thereafter. The Bund itself was largely concentrated in the Tokyo and the Kansai area around Osaka and Kyoto. The Kansai group argued, much like the Weather Underground, that the time had come to start a revolution in Japan using an urban political-military strategy. The Tokyo group opposed such a plan and deemed it adventurist and premature. In September 1969 at a public meeting organized by the Kansai faction called “The Great Red Army Political Meeting”, the Kansai faction announced the formal formation of the Communist League – Red Army Faction (RAF), and announced the following slogans, “Escalate the Present Struggle into Armed Revolution”, “Simultaneous Worldwide Revolution” and “Create a World Party, a World Red Army and a World Revolutionary Front”. Amongst the attendees were Shigenobu Fusako, future leader of the Japanese Red Army in the Middle East, and Tsuneo Mori, future leader of the Japanese Red Army in Japan. On September 22nd the RAF started attacks against police boxes in Osaka with molotov cocktails, and started a series of revolutionary expropriations and continued until 1971. Due to the success of these actions the RAF quickly came under pressure from police surveillance and saw the mass arrests of their underground and aboveground members. On November 5th the police in an early morning raid on a mountain lodge at the Daibosatsu Pass in Yamananashi Prefecture, surprised and arrested 53 members of the Red Army that were there on a program of ‘special training”. Chairman Shiomi was also arrested, thus resulting in the near collapse of the organization. These mass arrests resulted in two key developments: 1) the rise of Tsuneo Mori to the Chairmanship of the party; and 2) the remaining fragments of the organization came to theorize that it may be too difficult for an urban guerrilla army to get the necessary training in Japan itself, and results in a group of JRA members hijacking Japan Airlines Flight 351 on March 1970 which is re-directed to North Korea i.e. the JRA in North Korea, Shigenobu’s departure in 1971 to Beirut to receive training from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine i.e. the JRA in the Middle East at the behest of Chairman Mori, and the Mori group in Japan which would later merge with the Japanese Communist Party (Revolutionary Left Faction) to form the URA. Apparently Chairman Mori was less keen on establishing worldwide bases and continued to believe that domestic guerrilla training was possible.
