The Feline Warrior

​ Note from The Feline Warrior: This article was first published on The Sankei Shimbun on October 31, 2023. The original author and publisher retain copyright over the original Japanese article; the following English translation is the work of The Feline Warrior.

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Half a century ago in Israel, there was another terror attack that shocked the world.

On May 30, 1972, a mass shooting at Lod (now known as Ben Gurion) International Airport in Tel Aviv resulted in about 100 victims «TN: The victims were airport staff and visitors, with 26 killed and 80 more injured (figures do not include the perpetrators)». The international community was, at the time, not yet familiar with terrorist attacks that indiscriminately target defenseless civilians. And, curiously, all three of the perpetrators are Japanese.

One perpetrator was Tsuyoshi Okudaira, then 26 years old, a member of the extremist Japanese Red Army (JRA) which branched from the Communist League (a.k.a. “The Bund”). He, along with the then-24-year-old Yasuyuki Yasuda, died at the scene «TN: Yasuda was shot inadvertently by a fellow perpetrator, while Okudaira was killed by his own grenade’s explosion». Kozo Okamoto, now 75 years old, is the only perpetrator who survived and was arrested by Israeli authorities.

The attack on the airport was planned by anti-Israeli radicals known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) «TN: The PFLP remains active today and is one of the largest communist parties in Palestine». The three Japanese men joined PFLP and volunteered themselves as fighters.

The JRA was advocating for the creation of military bases overseas, aiming for a revolution that would include Japan as well as the rest of the world. Later, the head of the JRA, Fusako Shigenobu (now 78 years old), would choose Palestine as the headquarters for their revolution.

Patricia Steinhoff, a famous sociologist studying Japan’s New Left, went to an Israeli prison to interview Okamoto in 1972.

According to Steinhoff’s book Shi e no Ideorogi (“Ideology for Death”; Iwanami Shoten, Publishers), Okamoto emphasized on the JRA’s ideology during the interview; when inquired about his vision for the post-revolution society, he answered “my actual aim is the revolution itself — I don’t know what should happen after that.” Nor did Okamoto seem to know anything about the history of conflicts between the Arabs and Israelis.

Not too long before the airport mass shooting, there were students all across Japan campaigning against the Vietnam War, whose activities grew from the 1970 protests against the U.S.-Japan military treaty’s extension. Wearing helmets and wielding makeshift batons, student groups around the country joined in demonstrations and clashed with police. Toward the end of 1960s, having escalated into urban guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks with improvised explosive devices, they had lost much of the public’s support.

The JRA was formed in September 1969, adopting a more radical stance of armed struggle, amid the ongoing “internal gewalt” «TN: Gewalt is a German word that means “force” or “violence”», or internal dissensions between factions and sects.

“Amid the radical atmosphere in the radical era, it was simply not possible to tone it down. And I was further driven by my self-righteous sense of mission, going down the path of self-justification.”

This is how Shigenobu would describe the circumstances back then, as documented in her book Hatachi no Jidai (“Twenty-Year-Olds’ Era”; Ohta Publishing Co.) published this year. Radicalism itself had become the JRA’s goal, and not just its means.

After some JRA members hijacked Yodogo — a Japan Air Lines plane — and diverted it to North Korea in March 1970, the police began going all out in cracking down on its leaders who, having been driven into a corner, merged with other factions and formed the United Red Army (URA) in 1971. At its headquarters located in a mountainous area, URA members tortured 12 of their own to death in an internal purge, the survivors of which would then come to perpetrate the Asama-sanso hostage-taking incident.

How “ordinary youths” became terrorists

Red Army — the PFLP’s Declaration of War against the World. A movie so titled was released the year before the Tel Aviv airport shooting. Directed by Masao Adachi (now 84 years old) and the late Koji Wakamatsu, it is a propaganda film portraying the everyday lives of Arab guerrillas aiming for the liberation of Palestine.

Wakamatsu and his associates would drive around in a minibus — painted all red — and publicly show the movie on college campuses all across Japan. One of his assistants was Okamoto, a Kagoshima University student at the time.

Adachi, having spent over two decades as a central figure of the JRA, said during an interview:

“Things like occupying a foreign embassy or hijacking an airplane — doing so may be a ‘necessary evil’ in the Palestinian revolution, but they shouldn’t justifiable as such among Japanese revolutionaries.”

Yet still, “I’m glad that I fought the fight”

Today, in her book Hatachi no Jidai, Shigenobu would write fondly of and reminisce about her movement, almost as romanticized as if it were merely extension of on-campus club activities — which couldn’t be farther from the reality that Shigenobu, nicknamed “the queen of terrorists,” had repeatedly committed acts of terrorism globally along with her JRA.

Following the JRA’s armed occupation of the French embassy in The Hague in 1974, Shigenobu received a 20-year prison sentence and was only released last year. Though she admitted that it was wrong to have involved civilians in her attack, she nevertheless still wrote “I’m glad that I fought the fight.” It makes one wonder how much self-awareness Shigenobu really has, having been blinded by her revolutionary ideology and spent much of her life terrorizing the world.

Lessons learned from the atrocities committed by “ordinary youths” like Okamoto and JRA members, as Steinhoff wrote in an earlier book, would be that when people choose to believe their ideology while disregarding the truth in their own eyes, ears and hearts, such tragedies are bound to recur over and over again.