Mercenaries of Global Terror: Shigenobu Fusako and the Japanese Red Army

Shigenobu Fusako vowed to take the Japanese Red Army global. Her mission ended with dozens of innocent deaths.

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Okamoto Kozo sat alone in his room at the Hotel Papillon in Beirut. It was early March of 1972, and at only 24 years old, the young man had never before been abroad.

Okamoto found himself overwhelmed by homesickness and apprehension. His orders to leave Japan for the foreign shores of Lebanon had come in quite suddenly, but he had jumped at the opportunity to get out of the stifling political atmosphere of his own country and to finally start making a difference. Now, though, the confines of his room and the unfamiliar noises of the foreign city outside his window only filled him with a sense of pained solitude.

Okamoto was jostled from his lonely reverie as his ears were greeted with the snatches of some familiar tune filtering in through his door. Enticed, Okamoto stepped into the hallway, where he could now clearly make out the sounds of Japanese vocals. He followed the trailing music to the door from which it emanated. After a moment’s hesitation, Okamoto knocked on the door.

A friendly Japanese face appeared in the entryway. It was a man who looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. Okamato told the stranger that the Japanese music had brought him over, and asked if he could join the man for some time to listen to the music and placate his loneliness. The man assented.

Inside, Okamoto sat cross-legged on the hotel room floor while the two engaged in pleasant conversation. His new host explained that he was a photographer who had spent some time in Lebanon and other Arab countries. Okamoto was interested to hear about this, and happily offered some information about himself in return. Okamoto’s interloper listened to his tale, the man’s reactions shifting from bemusement to worry as the story continued.

Okamoto told the man about himself: how he was studying agriculture at Kumamoto University, but that he had been called to the Middle East to “to do something big.”Just what this could be, Okamoto could not say, but it would all be for the purpose of world revolution and the defeat of the global imperialists. He hoped to etch his name in the annals of the heroic Japanese, and was expecting to soon be “called to the front.”

The photographer had become quite concerned about this young man, and the two began a quiet debate over the value and efficacy of violent revolution. Despite the young man’s seeming naivete, his zeal could not be diluted by the older man’s attempts at reason. Despairing of convincing him of the danger of pushing for revolution in the Middle East by himself, the photographer gave Okamoto a book on Arab culture to at least help him better understand the land and people around him. Then the two bid each other good night. Two days later, the photographer found a note on his door from Okamoto saying that the latter had suddenly been called away, and entreating the photographer not to reveal any of what had been confided.

The photographer furrowed his brow, but decided to do as Okamoto had asked. After all, how much trouble could a young Japanese man really get up to in the complex world of the Levant?

Soon, when the world resounded with the news of the three Japanese terrorists – armed with machine guns and grenades — who had brutally murdered 26 people in cold blood and injured 80 others at a Tel Aviv airport, the photographer would come to regret his inaction. By the time he reported his interaction with Okamoto Kozo to the authorities, it was already too late to stop one of the most shocking terrorist attacks of its day.

Revolutionaries from Japan

Shigenobu Fusako arrived in Lebanon in early 1971, about a year before Okamoto Kozo. A devoted and longtime member of the notoriously violent far-left student group known as the Red Army Faction, she had come to the Middle East fleeing the stagnant atmosphere of the Japanese activist scene following intensified police surveillance meant to prevent destructive political operations – steps which the Japanese police force had taken in part as a reaction to the headline-grabbing actions of the organization to which Shigenobu belonged.

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Coming to Lebanon fulfilled a variety of goals for Shigenobu. The country represented a safe haven where she and the comrades that would soon join her could train and prepare for revolutionary action, far from the reach of the Japanese police. Better yet, she had made contact with a bona fide revolutionary guerrilla group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which had offered to provide her cohort with training and to supply them with weaponry they would have been unable to obtain in Japan.

Shigenobu Fusako
Shigenobu Fusako in the prime of her revolutionary years.

Best of all, being in Lebanon and working with the PFLP meant that Shigenobu’s Red Army would be able to take part in real internationalized struggle in a location that had become a global flashpoint. In her mind, the provincial student protests she had left behind in Japan were a fool’s game. The true armed struggle for revolution against imperialism could only be fought in places like Cuba, Vietnam, and Palestine.

Shigenobu Fusako: Terror in Tel Aviv

How the vestiges of Japan’s ultraviolent left fled the country – and inflicted decades of terror upon the world. This is the story of the Lod Airport Massacre. Part four of a five-part series on the Japanese Red Army.

Watch a documentary version of this article on our YouTube channel.

Shigenobu was soon joined in Beirut by her husband, Okudaira Tsuyoshi, another prolific member of the Red Army. Though both were filled with the same sense of internationalist revolutionary conviction, their marriage was only paper-thin. Shigenobu had suggested the union with Okudaira so that she could take his name, thus obscuring her identity from the Japanese authorities as she made her plans to leave Japan.

Once the two were re-united in Lebanon, they were spirited away by PFLP guerillas, disappearing from Lebanese police surveillance and the knowledge of the Japanese embassy. The two were taken to training camps and hideouts in the Syrian-controlled Beqaa Valley, a base from which they could begin to prepare for the terroristic actions that would soon make the Japanese Red Army feared worldwide.

Okamoto would be among the first of their recruits. He would be far from their last.

Her Road to Terrorism

Although Shigenobu Fusako would mastermind or be involved in a dramatic series of terroristic actions that would claim dozens of innocent lives, there was nothing about her upbringing or characteristics that seem particularly cruel. Rather, it was her idealism, her strong sense of justice, and the era in which she grew up that seems to have led her down the pathway to a sort of infamy in modern Japanese society reserved only for the likes of such terrorists as the messianic cult leader Asahara Shoko.

Shigenobu Fusako (重信房子) was born on September 28th, 1945, mere weeks after the unconditional surrender of her home country of Japan to the allied forces in World War II. She grew up in a US-occupied Tokyo that had been devastated both structurally and economically by the war. The Japanese society of her youth was seeing cultural shifts unlike anything since the opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration that had occurred nearly a century earlier.

Shigenobu’s father, Sueo, had been a die-hard ultranationalist and a party to the League of Blood Incident (血盟団事件), a mass assassination plot by the iconoclastic Nichiren-Buddhist monk Inoue Nissho against Japanese captains of industry whose greed was seen to sully the honor of the emperor.

The young Sueo was excluded from the actual execution of the plot in 1932 (which saw the successful assassination of the former Finance Minister and the Director-General of the powerful Mitsui Holding Company), and thus avoided jail time. He would go on to serve during wartime as a member of the dreaded Kempeitai (憲兵隊), the military police known for strictly enforcing nationalistic thought in all the territories of the Japanese Empire.

For a man such as Sueo, whose entire identity revolved around the ideology of the virtue of emperor-centric nationalism, the Japanese defeat in WWII came as a great shock — one from which he never fully recovered. After his discharge from the disbanded imperial military, Shigenobu Sueo became the owner of an eatery of intermittent success (which, of course, he named “The Rising Sun”). His daughter, Fusako, grew up in his shadow in an often-impoverished home.

Although Fusako’s eventual far-left politics could not have been farther removed from the far-right bent of her own father, Sueo was still a strange sort of inspiration for her. Although embittered and highly temperamental, her father’s dedication to his ideals – which included helping the poor and defending the inhabitants of Japan (a definition which extended to local Koreans, who he alone allowed to eat at his store out of all the neighborhood eateries) – greatly influenced Fusako. She continued to admire him even as her revolutionary path took her away from the Japan he loved so well.

Indeed, one statement of her father’s that Fusako would recall years later seems to succinctly represent the philosophy she inherited from him: “A person’s nobility is determined by his convictions, and he must not be judged either by his authority, knowledge, or ability…A person gains values by being faithful to his convictions.”

The conviction Fusako seems to have held the longest is a detestation of poverty and the systems that produce it. An ardent student, she put incredible work into her schooling despite intense feelings of being on the receiving end of prejudice by classmates and teachers for her family’s limited means. Poverty galled Fusako, whether it be her own or that of the disfigured and homeless veterans which filled the alleyways of the Tokyo of her childhood, She would often give her hard-saved change to these beggars, soldiers that society had cheered on their way to war and then pointedly ignored when then returned in defeat. Someone even noticed her charitable actions, and wrote an article about Fusako that was published across Japan. Hundreds of admirers sent her letters to tell her of what an inspiration she was.

However, her whole world seemed to come crashing down when she realized that her altruism and good grades lacked all meaning when her parents had not the money to send her to university (now the dreamed-of destination for aspiring students country-wide following educational reforms instituted by the occupation government). It seemed that poverty simply could not be overcome in her society; even one that had recently enshrined a bevy of new freedoms in its new democratic constitution.

Fusako took a job at Kikkoman Soy Sauce straight out of high school because it offered a fairly good salary, but soon found herself unfulfilled – the meaningless chatter of her co-workers frustrated her to no end, as did the sexist nature of the workplace, where women were hired based on attractiveness and expected to serve the male employees tea with a smile. Other women would complain of their treatment, but given the chance to challenge the patriarchal system that surrounded them, they would simply demure. Why were none of these people willing to stand up for their beliefs, Fusako wondered?

Deciding she needed to continue her education to live a worthwhile life, she started putting herself through night school. The moment of her radicalization now showed itself – when she arrived at Meiji University to pay her dues, she was impressed by a group of students outside the gate who were protesting a planned tuition raise and the expulsion of a member of a radical group from the college. Moved by the ideological fervor of the protesters, she was soon sitting amongst them.

Before long, Fusako was firmly enmeshed in the booming student movements of the mid-60s, rallying against draconian security laws, the presence of American military based in Japan, the tacit Japanese support of the then-nascent American war in Vietnam, the red purges being carried out in Japanese universities, and the general injustices of the era that were seeing students take to the streets around the world. These heady ideas filled her days, and organized action soon followed.

Fusako left her job at Kikkoman, deciding to work just enough part-time to sustain her political activities and studies. She found that she was good with people; her winning smile, attractive personality and appearance, and strong convictions made her perfect for jobs that involved person-to-person outreach. Sometimes these jobs consisted of canvassing for leftist political candidates; sometimes she worked as a hostess at a nightclub, chatting and flirting with drunken salarymen. (Her concerned mama-san once recommended she find a husband and leave the activist lifestyle – Shigenobu gave an earnest reply of “the Revolution is my lover.”) Later, as a member of the Red Army Faction, she served as the perfect frontman, securing leases for hideout apartments without attracting the least bit of suspicion.

Yet Fusako was far from merely a useful human relations specialist. Always willing to jump into the fray, she helped lead the rear guard of a mass demonstration designed to forestall Prime Minister Sato’s journey to the US to visit President Eisenhower (seen as a further tacit connection between army-less Japan and the American war in Vietnam).

Thousands of students rushed in formation towards Haneda Airport, felling the kidotai riot police that lay in wait for them using wooden staves. Shigenobu remembered the rush of running past her fellows as they toppled the heavily-armored officers, only to find the student formation surrounded and hemmed in. As blows from police batons fell upon the heads of her comrades and blood spurted from their wounds, she saw her movement crumbling under the violence of what she perceived as capitalist state oppression.

The Red Army is Reborn

重信房子独占インタビュー 1973 Fusako Shigenobu Interview

1973年にまれなテレビ出演で房子重信。-The founder of the Japanese Red Army, Fusako Shigenobu in a rare TV appearance.

A rare interview with Shigenobu Fusako from 1973.

Shigenobu found herself drawn more and more to the radicalism of the student New Left movement and away from the centrism of the established Japanese Communist Party. Eventually, her quest for a group that was more willing to take direct action to fight against imperialist injustice led her to Shiomi Takaya and his Red Army Faction organization.

Shiomi was a Trotskyite, and firmly believed in the idea of violent internationalist revolution against imperialism that was to be carried out simultaneously worldwide. Shigenobu was highly attracted to Shiomi’s ideas (and also found herself attracted to one of his disciples, Tamiya Takamaro, a zealous activist from Osaka City College with whom she started a relationship). Shiomi, for his part, would later remember Fusako as highly driven, charismatic, and especially talented at attracting donations and new recruits to his organization.

By this time, the world of the leftist Japanese student movements had devolved into a series of internecine struggles, as the failure of more than a decade of mass demonstrations and the police crackdown on disruptive and destructive activities by activists led to bitter debates. In such a situation, what was the right path to take into the future?

Shiomi’s Red Army Faction was itself the product of one such splintering, as his Osaka and Kyoto-based followers broke off from a more moderate parent organization based in Tokyo. The new Red Army Faction called for violent action against the police and all other agents of capitalistic imperialism, although not before becoming involved in literal battles with rival leftist student groups.

In July of 1969, Fusako was disturbed to witness her own radical group beat bloody a former comrade associated with another group at Meiji University. When her crew returned to their base at a dental college to celebrate the successful raid only to have their hideout besieged in turn and its members badly beaten or turned to flight, Fusako began to experience a sense of disillusionment with the direction of the movement.

Still, she remained in the Red Army Faction, assisting with the collection of funds for operations. The radical group staged a number of attacks on the police, small bombings of neighborhood police boxes, and a series of brazen bank robberies. The police, training their focus on the group and upping their surveillance, managed to arrest over 50 members at a training camp at Diabosatsu Pass in Yamanashi Prefecture, which Fusako had found ill-planned and attempted to stop. Papers detailing a planned attack on the Prime Minister’s residence were found during the police raid of the training camp, and though Fusako had not been present and had thus avoided arrest, the trail led the police to her mentor, Shiomi.

Fusako’s boyfriend, Tamiya Takamaro, was lost in short order as well. He masterminded the Red Army Faction’s boldest action in the group’s history, leading a team of seven co-revolutionaries armed with katanas and pipe bombs in the hijacking and diversion of a Japan Airlines flight to North Korea. It was a journey from which he would never return; the North Korean government was not as receptive to their comrades from the Red Army Faction as had been expected, and kept the hijackers in virtual exile within the borders of the country for the purposes of revolutionary “re-education.”Takamaro would die in 1995 under mysterious circumstances, still in Pyongyang a quarter-century after he engineered Japan’s first airline hijacking incident.

Fusako was left emotionally alone in a Japan where the movement she had come to care so much about simply seemed to be falling apart. Worse, de-facto leadership of the Red Army Faction seemed to be slipping into the hands of one Mori Tsuneo, a man whom Fusako detested. To Fusako, Mori’s myopic focus on underground tactics aimed solely for use in Japan seemed to betray the internationalist ideals for which she had joined the group in the first place.

Casting about for a way to continue the battle for world communist revolution in a more meaningful way, Fusako remembered the Palestinian activists who had once visited Japan and whom she had helped ferry around Japanese university campuses. Following the Six Day War in 1967, which had seen the complete defeat of the assembled Arab armies by Israel, the Palestinians had begun to take matters into their own hands, waging a series of terrorist attacks and hijackings. If she could make contact with these Palestinian guerrillas, her movement might still be able to achieve an internationalist future, far away from the Japanese police state and the collapse of her native student movement.

Pressuring Mori into allowing her to leave for the Palestinian guerrilla training camps in Lebanon while still maintaining the Red Army label, Shigenobu – under her new married name, Okudaira – boarded a plane for foreign shores. She left behind the Red Army Faction as it existed in Japan, and just in time – only months later, Mori would merge the harried group with another violent student organization to form the United Red Army. It would soon implode during a horrific purge involving the lynching of fourteen of its own members (including Fusako’s best friend, Toyama Mieko), five survivors of which would then engage in a dramatic and doomed standoff against thousands of police while holed up in a distant mountain lodge.

She had escaped the astoundingly brutal implosion of the Red Army Faction, the intense public notoriety of which signaled the death knell of the student movement in Japan. In its place, in faraway Lebanon, Shigenobu would craft her own ideal internationalist revolutionary organization: the Nihon Sekigun (日本赤軍), the Japanese Red Army.

The New Recruit

Okamoto Kozo
Okamoto Kozo following his arrest.

Before he was called out to Lebanon for what would become the prologue to the terroristic massacre which would make him infamous, Okamoto Kozo could hardly have been called a true member of the Red Army. A student at a local university in southern, rural Kumamoto, Okamoto had failed to get into a university large enough to have a Red Army chapter. His two older brothers, both students at the prestigious and famously leftist Kyoto University, were another story. Both had become heavily involved in the student movement, and Takeshi, the second brother, had even gone on to participate in the hijacking of the JAL flight to North Korea as part of the Red Army Faction. Kozo deeply admired his brothers, but at such an academic backwater, he had few chances to emulate them.

Unable to attend the student meetings where the intricacies of Marxist, Maoist, or Trotskyite doctrine could be discussed in depth, Okamoto’s ideological views lacked the concise knowledge and thought of people like Shigenobu Fusako or Shiomi Takaya. He had a general desire to act to protect humanity from itself, with a special focus on the evils of corporate pollution, which Okamoto linked with imperialism and capitalism. He would attend protests against American military adventurism with fellow students from Kumamoto, but found such exercises to be little more than “masturbation.”

This all explains why Okamato jumped at the chance to assist the Red Army the few times they called upon him. The only real chance he had to do so while still in Japan came in the Fall of 1971, around a year after his brother disappeared with the other Red Army hijackers to Korea.

The Red Army Faction, who knew of him only via his connection to his brother Takeshi, contacted him with a request to book a room at his university for the showing of their new propaganda film, “Declaration of World War by the Red Army and the PFLP.”(赤軍・PFLP: 世界戦争宣言). He happily did as was requested of him and met with the Red Army Faction delegation that subsequently arrived to screen the film. With them was one Palestinian, a member of the PFLP, whom Okamoto helped show around. His first tenuous connection to the Palestinian cause had been made.

The meeting further inspired Okamoto towards finding a path to become a true revolutionary. His chance would arrive soon – in September, a letter came in from the Red Army that informed Okamoto that he would have a chance for military training and to even potentially meet his brother Takeshi again, provided he went to Beirut. Okamoto jumped at the idea (although the implication of a reunion with his brother was likely a lie to entice Okamoto: Takeshi would remain in virtual exile in North Korea for the rest of his life).

For some months, Okamoto waited for word that it was time for his departure. Suddenly, things began to move very quickly. The United Red Army standoff at the Asama Sano Lodge had just been watched with horror by a huge percentage of the Japanese population; the days of the Red Army in Japan were numbered. Okamoto was spirited out of Japan just before the bodies of the lynched Red Army members were uncovered in their shallow frozen graves in Gunma.

The Massacre

ben Gurion International Airport
A picture of Ben Gurion International Airport in 2018. (Picture: Rita Kapitulski / Shutterstock)

It was 10pm on May 30th, 1972, and the Air France flight from Rome had just arrived to the Israeli city of Tel Aviv. On board had been some Israelis making their way back home from their stays abroad, including the beloved Aharon Katzir, a world-renowned biochemist who hosted a popular radio show and who was an expected candidate for the Israeli presidency. The bulk of the plane seats had been occupied by 120 Baptist and Pentecostal pilgrims hailing from Puerto Rico making the long journey to the Holy Land to walk in the footsteps of their savior. Also among the passengers were a Canadian citizen, and three travelers who hailed from the far-off country of Japan.

Okamamoto Kozo, Shigenobu Fusako’s paper husband Okudaira Tsuyoshi, and a young student named Yasuda Yasuyuki had been waiting for this moment for some time. Here was where their harsh training in the Beqaa Valley would all pay off. All three were prepared to die. Or perhaps it should be said that they very much planned to die. The three bore passports with fake names and birthdates, all chosen with symbolic meanings. Okamoto’s false name had been taken from a would-be assassin of Emperor Hirohito who had been executed before the war.

Kozo entered a bathroom in the baggage carousel area, where he ripped out his photo from his fake passport to deter easy identification. His mind turned to Mishima Yukio, the far-right author of international acclaim who only two years earlier had committed seppuku following a failed coup attempt. While Okamoto and Mishima’s politics could not have been farther apart, the young man still idolized the author’s willingness to die for his beliefs. He hoped he would soon be remembered in the same breath as Mishima.

Exiting the bathroom, the three men walked amongst the Puerto Rican pilgrims wending their way to the baggage carousel to retrieve their bags. Amidst them was excited chatter, the recent arrivals speaking in Spanish, English, and Hebrew, discussing the various plans that lay ahead of them in the State of Israel.

Suddenly, the murmuring of the crowds was replaced by the ear-shattering firing of three assault rifles. The words of the assembled arrivals changed to screams.

Okamoto, Okudaira, and Yasuda had removed Czech vz. 58 rifles and grenades from their luggage, and had begun to fire at random into the crowds assembled around the conveyor belts. They only stopped firing when their magazines were emptied, throwing grenades as they switched cartridges. Within a minute, dozens of humans lay bleeding or dying as bullets and shrapnel careened into flesh. Screaming people ran, trying to find cover wherever possible.

In the chaos, Yasuda accidentally took a bullet from one of his two comrades. Okudaira ran over to the opening of the baggage carousel and began firing at planes on the tarmac. A sudden explosion blasted him backwards; one of his own grenades had killed him. Surviving victims differ as to whether he had purposefully taken the blast, or whether it had been an accident.

Israeli police were now firing back at Okamoto, the only surviving member of the terrorist crew. He took a bullet, but still returned fire until his ammunition ran out, and then fled from the passenger area back onto the tarmac. Spotting a parked plane, he threw his remaining grenades at it, hoping to destroy it; when this failed, he ran further, hoping to find another target, and to find a police officer or soldier who would kill him so that he could join his comrades.

His dreams of glorious death would not be achieved. An employee of the Israeli flag carrier airline, El Al, ran towards Okamoto and tackled him to the ground, restraining him. Soon he was swarmed by Israeli security, who put him in handcuffs and placed him under arrest. As they dragged him away, he begged them to kill him.

Ambulances arrived at the scene, rushing to carrying away the wounded to give them much needed emergency triage. In the end, the attack had killed 24 people, the vast majority of them civilians. Another eighty people had been injured, many of them seriously. The attack had been made with the intention of killing Israelis, but seventeen of the twenty-four murdered had been Puerto Rican pilgrims. Among the eight Israeli dead was Aharon Katzir, whose loss would be keenly felt in both Israel and the scientific world. A single Canadian citizen had also been murdered.

The Lod Airport Massacre (テルアビブ空港乱射事件), as the event has now become known, sent shockwaves around Israel and the entire world. That such a gruesome event had been carried out by three young Japanese men was mystifying to the world at large and humiliating to the Japanese government. The Red Army Faction and the United Red Army had both incensed and shocked Japan before, but those had been mostly domestic issues; now, the Japanese Red Army had introduced the idea of Japanese terrorism to the world.

When Okamoto Kozo’s father heard that his son had been identified as the surviving perpetuator of such a horrific massacre, and that a second son of his had shamed Japan on the world stage, he immediately wrote the Israeli government, stating,

[I am] indescribably appalled, angered and saddened…for forty years I thought I had devoted myself faithfully to the education of our young people. Please punish my son with the death sentence without delay.

Okamoto Kozo agreed with his father’s request. Indeed, such was Okamoto’s desire to join his comrades in glorious death that he only assented to providing his Israeli interrogators with information about the planning and motivation for their terrorist action once Major General Rehavam Zeevi promised to give him a gun with a loaded bullet with which to commit suicide. Later, at his trial, Okamoto was to actively flout his own defense in the pursuit of the death penalty for himself. Okamoto would insist the following to the three lieutenant colonels who sat on the bench of the Israeli court which tried him:

When I was a child, I was told that when people died they became stars. We three Red Army soldiers wanted to become Orion when we died. And it calms my heart to think that all the people we killed will also become stars in the same heavens. As the revolution goes on, how the stars will multiply!

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hailed the Lod Airport Massacre as great success, and Okamoto and his dead comrades had become heroes. The likes of the Foreign Minister of Egypt and the infamous strongman leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, praised the Japanese revolutionaries and took inspiration from their actions (Gaddafi was so impressed that he would soon become a patron of the JRA, and allow them to use his country as a safe haven). Some Palestinian babies born shortly after the attack were even given the names of the martyred Japanese attackers, who had just become heroes in the eyes of the Palestinian movement.

To Israel and the West, the JRA and its leader, Shigenobu Fusako, had just becoming notorious terrorists.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir expressed great sorrow at the event, placing blame at the feet of Arab countries whom she believed relished in the deaths of innocents in Israel. However, she announced that she did not hold Japan or the Japanese people responsible for what had happened at Lod. The Japanese government, for its part, sent envoys to the Israeli government and to Puerto Rico, had officials visit the surviving victims, and donated millions of dollars to support the recovery of those who had been wounded in the attack.

In Puerto Rico there was widespread mourning, with the backlash becoming so great that the Japanese embassy suggested that Japanese nationals leave the territory. The pain of the loss of the seventeen pilgrims remains keenly felt, and in 2006 the Puerto Rican government named May 30th “Lod Remembrance Day.”

And yet the JRA’s reign of terror had only begun. While they would never engage in the same degree of sheer indiscriminate bloodshed again, the Lod Airport Massacre initiated a period that would last for almost two decades, in which the JRA became one of the world’s most infamous terrorist groups.

Next In This Series

Japanese Red Army: End of a Global Reign of Terror

Previously In This Series

Last Stand: The Hostage Crisis That Ended Japan’s Red Army

Sources

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Kozo Okamoto.” Asian Survey, vol. 16, no. 9, 1976, pp. 830–845.

Steinhoff, Patricia G. “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, 1989, pp. 724–740.

Farrell, William R. “Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army.”Lexington Books, 1990.

Kuriyama, Yoshihiro. “Terrorism at Tel Aviv Airport and a ‘New Left’ Group in Japan.” Asian Survey, vol. 13, no. 3, 1973, pp. 336–346. 

McKirdy, Andrew. “Imprisoned Japanese Red Army founder Shigenobu holds out hope for revolution.”The Japan Times, June 8th, 2017.

This article was originally published on September 19th, 2019. The new date reflects the addition of the video version on our YouTube channel.

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