Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 277 - The United Red Army of Japan

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

The terror group the United Red Army was born out of the fires of the anti imperialist student movement of japan but rapidly turned into a death cult. Within a few weeks even taking a shower would be considered counter revolutionary. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Yoshikuni Igarashi. Dead Bodies and Living Guns: The United Red Army and Its Deadly Pursuit of Revolution, 1971–1972. Patricia Steinhoff. Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army NHK World. The United Red Army: A Troubled Legacy

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe, and with me in the content mines, thousands of miles away, in the wonderfully sunny place that is London, is Tom.

It's actually going to be really sunny today. It's meant to be like 30. The one fucking time I talk about London weather, I'm wrong. The one time. But see, it's because Nate isn't on the show. Whenever Nate is on the show, the weather has to be shit, so he has something to complain about. Whereas, you know, I'm

like, went to the gym this morning, it was nice and sunny when I was walking back to the studio, you know, I'm in a good mood, I'm joined by the undercover Turk, Joe Kasabian, you know. That's right. If the people in my Twitter mentions are correct, that is true.

But, speaking of the gym, Joe, for anyone who follows me online you saw the saga the other day but i need to talk about people have a long list of my gym gripes crossfitters people who you know use too much equipment at once but yesterday who wear gym shark or no that was me that was me that was that was my crap so but yesterday i encountered a new type of guy in the gym and i'm gonna say up front i think it should be illegal for anime fans to go to the gym like we you're just saying that because i can lift more weight than you but the difference is is that like you were like you have them like both them both separate pillars of your personality.

I'm talking about the type of people who wear an Akatsuki cloak to the gym. They get on the treadmill to Naruto. They're Naruto running on the treadmill. They're huffing ammonia salts and screaming like they're charging a Rasengan. But yesterday... See, you're shit talking anime fans and i don't even know what that means it's you know the the blue ball that naruto naruto throws see the only thing i know about naruto is the run um and i have the i aged out of shonen

anime at that point i was a dragon ball z kid i have a couple years on you so i give you a pass yeah speaking well i've never watched naruto it's just true to like being on the internet i know these things but speaking of dragon ball i was working from home yesterday so i decided three o'clock okay i'm gonna hit the gym big mistake one because schools are back in you know term so that means like uh half three to four o'clock there is like 116 year olds who are now trying to emulate the youtuber of the year's workouts which is sam sulik a 21 year old who is on so much trend that he can't breathe whereas like hard eat clen whereas like last year was like they were watching tiktokers talking about you know like optimal workouts you know do like this lap pull down that's like at a

32.7 degrees angle to like get like 1.11111 percent more activation in your lats now it's just like a dude who eats cereal and krispy Kreme for breakfast and like blasts so much Tren that he likes. He doesn't have, that's not a COVID cough. That's a Tren cough. Yeah. And we're now, we're now referencing things that I hope a fraction of our audience understands. Actually, before you go on, do you want to explain what Tren cough is? So Tren, T trend is the meth of trend trend below acetate

for those unfamiliar yeah trend is like i guess i've heard i've heard it described as the the meth of performance enhancing drugs because it's your steroids generally speaking are pharmaceutical products like yes they're they're i mean you can get stuff that is cooked in some guy's kitchen, but generally speaking, they come from countries where they are legal and easy to obtain. If you're in the United States, it's almost all coming from Mexico. I don't know about the UK. The UK, it's mostly coming from Thailand.

That is a long journey. They come from Turkey as well. So yeah like your basic pillars of steroids are going to be your growth your lean and then you're kind of like your fat burner so you have like stuff that will increase your heart rate so it increases your body temperature so you burn more fat you have like stuff that like helps with protein synthesis and like helps you get bigger and then you have trend which seems to be a weapon of mass destruction for your insides

um it's it's cooked in a guy's kitchen from my understanding it has absolutely no uh pharmaceutical usage whatsoever it's not and like most of these drugs can be prescribed like hgh testosterone a lot of these things can be prescribed for people for legitimate medical conditions trend cannot yeah i'm just like blasting testosterone because i'm like going bald and like most so the reason why i made a joke about trend cough is because if you see a bodybuilder who looks like a human cloud monster um they're probably on trend and they always have like this rib shattering cough yep so what happens with trend cough is so there's a general rule with um being in the gym is that you can be big you can be lean or you can be strong you can only naturally be one or two of those things at the max with steroids you can add in a third one so you can either be really small and really lean which

is like the brad pitt looking fight club that's like and it's funny because my cousin used to be a personal trainer and uh he said i remember like asking, he's like, oh yeah, most people when they come in like to do personal training is like, oh, I want to look like that. And it's just like, yeah, just stop eating and do cardio. Or the, what they said, always study in Philadelphia with that Jesus on the cross look. Yeah, exactly. Or you can be like really big, but you'll have a higher body fat percentage, but you look huge. Or you can just be

a power lifter and be like really fat and really strong you can be a human dumpster which like that's fine i mean is it the healthiest thing on earth probably not uh you know like we on the show advocate sustainable healthy living yeah which none of these things are yeah so like yeah tren cough pretty much like when you inject tren you so after maybe like 30 seconds you will have the world's most uncontrollable cough like imagine you're trying to literally cough your lungs out of your body and like people they can't figure out why it happens but like it literally feels like you're about to die for five minutes like um you gotta have a lung gains i want an eight pack but across my left just my left lung because my right one has already collapsed but yeah like i was watching a

video of a dude like talking about like you know why it's so dangerous that like people so young are getting into like a lot of peds and steroids is that like you know he was saying like the first time he ever did train he literally had to lie on the floor of his of his bathroom for five minutes feeling like he was about to die because his body was trying to like cough out all this stuff that's poison yeah i mean i i think i mean this is not in fact the the the historical podcast, but like, I think a lot of it has to do with like, people don't realize the kind of like body dysmorphia popular media can put. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

You know, nobody is, nobody is like, I want to grow up and have a normal body type or a healthy one. and have a normal body type or a healthy one. They're ingesting so much media that makes like, oh, if you want to be a normal man, you want to be a real man. You have to look like a Marvel superhero. Yeah, it takes- They're all on incredible amounts of steroids. So that leads to, I mean,

you can go to any gym in the United States and you can find performance enhancing drugs or you can simply buy them on the internet. It's the same way here. Yeah. Taking a Trenbolone acetate to beat the body dysmorphia and taking estradiol to beat the gender dysphoria. Yeah. Instead of you, there are two wolves. Both of them are coughing horrifically. And both of them are trans um but anyway back to what i was going to talk about so i walked into the gym yesterday and my card wasn't working for like the the gate thing that i have to swipe to like get into where the gym area is to go like go up the stairs

and like go in so i'm like okay i need to ask someone at the counter and i like take my headphones out and i'm like why are people screaming at you and i look over there is a man in a michael jordan goku hoodie no goku basketball jersey so it has the michael jordan chicago bulls 23 on it with goku on both sides of the jersey so he has like regular Goku on the back and then he has like Goku blue or is it Goku black on the front and like this dude and the woman behind the counter and I felt really bad for it kept saying

wait is Goku black Goku with black face no he has like I think it's like beyond Super Saiyan 4 I don't know if you want to explain Goku Black. No, Goku Black has like pink hair. Yeah, okay. Goku Black is trans Goku.

Okay. I thought it was Dutch Goku. Yash, you take these Shenzhou beans. You know, we're going to the hyperbolic time chamber. We're going to train to beat Vegeta. Thanks, I hate it. Please go on. So the lady behind the counter is like, keeps repeating, he's like, don't swear at me. Don, I hate it. Please go on. So the lady behind the counter is like

keeps repeating, he's like, don't swear at me, don't swear at me. And this dude is like full on shouting at this woman and like only starts giving out to the other staff because I kind of go up and like elbow him out of the way to say to this lady, he's like, oh my card isn't working

would you mind buzzing me in? And I did it in a way, like in a way that he knew i was there and was kind of like okay i need to move on wait why was he why was he attempting to go super sane on the receptionist i will get there so i go and i get my you know i get my no coat get a bottle of water and i'm going up to the gym like cool gonna work out and like see this guy go around and then go upstairs and then i go upstairs and he comes out of like a sideway uh came up like a different way and i see him and he's wearing flip-flops then i get into the gym so this dude in his like goku michael jordan jersey is adamant about going into the gym with no shoes or socks on that is disgusting did he miss the wave of the vibram five finger shoes a decade ago like and

like this dude is like listening to music singing to himself and like look there are people who very clearly have like like mental problems in my gym. That's fine. They're nice people. I will chat away to them if they talk to me. A lot of them will, like, you know, sing to themselves, wander around, talk to random people. And talking to random people in the gym isn't a sign of mental illness, but... It is to me.

Leave me alone. But, like, this dude is, like, you know, he's clearly all there. He's just an asshole. And he's, like, walking around the gym with the dogs out he's hitting like very shit squats he's like hitting like incline bench and then wanders off and like there's no the pitter patter of goku feet there's there's like no power rack so i have to do like military press just in the middle of the free weight section so i have to like clean the barbell up and like do fucking like overhead shoulder presses like i'm about to kill myself and a dude comes up to me he's like oh are you using that bench and like

now i'll work away the dude gets managed to gets in two full sets before michael jordan goku like comes back and says it was like oh yeah i'm using that bench I'm like you fucking walked off for five minutes what the fuck like you can't do that all the while this dude's like disgusting dogs are out like oh god

so the only thing I'm learning from this is if I if I for some reason find myself in London for a prolonged period of time to not go to the gym like look at i argue that the natural place for weebs is not you know like a traditional gym just become a power lifter because power lifters are all nerds i love you guys that's true my friends are power lifters you know i i think i think it comes with the obsession like because to be a power lifter you have to be fucking obsessed yeah um

you're not doing it for aesthetics you're doing like three lifts repeatedly and you look awful um so like you feel terrible your knees hurt your back like pretend you ate like the gum gum through and you know you're you're due becoming a deadlift specialist because you've really long arms that's just me um joe's got the leverages of you know a uh a strain of like paleolithicus or like one of those other you know uh primates that was in the homo erectus line but died out now Tom speaking of disgusting

unwashed feet we have an episode to go over yeah shit have you ever heard of the Japanese United Red Army no but I assume there's probably some weird weebs with anime profile pictures who are big fans of

them honestly i feel like this might this much like the kamer rouge is a group that even the strangest people online give a wide berth to uh oh actually i should i should caveat that with something since nate isn't here i have to say the word caveat because the officer is gone after our Khmer Rouge series came out our discord community found a Khmer Rouge role playing discord group what? yes

they attempted to gain entry into said group to see how fucked up it was and they failed so I should say the united red army might stand alone on this one and since tom is considered our irish terror correspondent here on the show um and i just had to sit through four weeks of andreas botter i decided to find a group even stranger led by a guy, a guy and a girl. So kind of similar,

but a guy that is significantly more insufferable than Andreas batter. Okay. Off the bat is the group fucking like, are they, you know, Boston? Are they? Oh no.

By law, it is permanent. No, not November. Okay. So we'll get to that point. Yeah. So like any episode going forward,

if you are a habitual listener of this show, anytime we talk about a terrorist group, you can break them into the two factions of busting and non-busting. They're strictly non-busting. Okay. Though before we get to the United Red Army, we have to talk about their origins in pre- and post-war Japan, because pre- and post-war Japanese politics are fucking chaotic.

Everyone's getting killed with a doohickey. Let me get the device. Now, the first what we could consider Japanese leftist movement began, like many others, in the 1920s. But this was the Japanese Communist Party, and it was founded in 1922. Unlike many others,

it was founded not by a hardline Marxist, Leninist, or Trotskyist. Many of its founders, such as Yamakawa Hitoshi, Sakai Toshihiko, Arahata Kansen, were not those kind of people. They're followers and supporters of a man named Kotoku Jinjiro, a man credited not with introducing Marxism or Leninism to Japan, but rather anarchism to Japan. Yeah! Now we're in my realm! No gods, no states,

fucking burn everything! You know how his story probably ends then. In a different time, Danjiro would have been a member of the Japanese aristocracy, though at a low level. His family was born from samurai, and they supported the Meiji Restoration. From a young age, he was a political radical, though. At the age of 16, he joined a pro-democracy movement that called not only for the cancellation of unequal treaties with the West,

but the introduction of freedom of speech, press, and political rights to Japan, none of which existed yet. So he was exiled from Tokyo before he was even 18. Friendship with the West now ended. Now anarchism is my best friend. It gets weirder. Now, as Japan turned from an isolated island to a sprawling empire, he became vocally anti-war,

rightfully comparing what Japan was doing to the same thing the Westerners had just done to them. He was also the first person to translate the Communist Manifesto into Japanese, so he was intensely boring. Are we talking about opposition to the Sino-Russian War, World War I,

everything? He was opposed to the invasion of Korea. This is before World War II. He was opposed to the invasion of Korea. He was opposed to... This is before World War II. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was opposed to the Russo-Japanese War, which was legitimately so popular

that people protested in favor of it before it even began in Japan. Go back and listen to our series about it. People think it's one of our best of all time, but the war and empire in general was incredibly popular with the Japanese people not if you're not if you're

down with peace down with peace like quite literally that's what they were doing and translating the Communist Manifesto at the time and publishing it in Japan was illegal though he just barely avoided jail time though things eventually did get too hot and and he left Japan, ending up, like everybody,

in California. There, he discovered the works of Peter Kropotkin, and was the first person to translate those into Japanese as well. And he spread them amongst the large population of Japanese Americans in California. Though, rather than just being a weird theory guy, he was like, yo, fuck this, let's get guns. And he wanted to spread an anarchist revolution, not only in California, but also in Japan. He's like, once we get weapons, which it's America, you can go buy them at the hardware store in the early 1900s, we can go back to Japan and do it there too. But by 1906 he had returned to japan and ran to what was

the first japanese leftist party the japan socialist party who begrudgingly to him advocated for electoralism which you know he hated as an anarchist yeah like early 20th century japanese marxists you know like i can't imagine like the politics of the like 1906 this is like before the october revolution like not to mention there's no political freedoms in japan at the time so it's like why the fuck are we wasting our time on this yeah like like we're talking like meiji restoration where like okay let's open everything let's start wearing hats and pants we are westerners now and it's really they're about to go all bricks no gas on empire as well like it's not a good time to be someone that is not a hardcore nationalist yeah i'm like you know this is like during the time

when stuff like eugenics is like really starting to ramp up and like the japanese are because like the eugenics kind of like really quickly ran into the problem of like well there's white people but what if there's white people of other races so it was like you know people like the vietnamese and the japanese while both from asia were very different. And eugenics very quickly was like, hmm, Japanese, maybe they're the white people of Asia. Mr. Denjiro, let me see your brain pan. And to be honest, me and Nate and you have talked about this, Japan really is the Britain of Asia. That's fair. Other than their train system works.

Asia. That's fair. Other than their, you know, train system works. Yeah, their train system works, but, like, they have this kind of worldwide perception of being, like, very polite and, like, you know, like, the whole shit about, like... Wait, do British people think they're polite

when they go about it? Oh, yeah. Like, they, like, British people, like, have this idea, or, like, even, like, worldwide people think British people are polite. And it's, like, this, like, even like worldwide people think like british people are polite and it's like this like if you ask people from britain about queuing they'll say like oh people in britain love oh god i'm so sick of fucking hearing and it's like no they don't have you ever seen a british person in a queue that lasts more than like two minutes because i have and i saw a woman scream at someone in greg's because

she had to wait 90 seconds for her like cheese and bean like pasty slice this is why whenever you see british people talking about standing in a line you need to inject that situation with a whole bunch of people from the caucuses who will just shit it all up and like you know like japan but like colonial history as well like it's real bad yeah we we we have talked extensively about the japanese empire's deeply fucked up politics um yeah like you know like and that is where denjiro is injecting himself in the middle of rather than fold himself in this new wave of japanese leftism and encourage political change from the inside he rejected it what happened next is kind of up for debate.

In 1910, Japanese police raided a man's house and discovered what they believed to be bomb making materials. They also found anarchist literature that could have only come from one of the various organizations as loosely affiliated with Njiro. So upon a massive amount of torture being applied, they discovered, wouldn't you know it, there is a nationwide anarchist plot to murder the emperor and take down the entire government and the

fires of anarchist revolution fuck yeah it's probably seven people it probably wasn't even real um yeah if there's one thing you need to know about anarchists is like they love lying about the uh the size of their plots i mean the denjiro had a fair amount of They love lying about the size of their plots.

I mean, Denjiro had a fair amount of followers, but there's no real evidence of any kind of nationwide plot in any stretch of the imagination. All of the evidence is circumstantial, and virtually every proponent of anarchism, what you could consider radical leftism, Denjiro included, all ended up swinging from the end of a rope. And this directly led to

what was called the Peace Preservation Law, which effectively legalized the continuous unending Red Purge of Japan into the 1920s. Now, this is where we pick back up with the Japanese Communist Party because they were formed in 1922 and then outlawed in 25.

And many of its members are thrown in prison. And ironically enough, once in prison, and this is the Japanese penal system in the 20s and tortured mercilessly, if they refuse to, quote unquote, convert to Japanese nationalism, that being the only allowed political affiliation within the empire they would have to stay in prison many of them refused throughout the entirety of world war ii which meant they could not get drafted into the imperial army and uh so who really won that battle they all sat through world war ii and survived i mean like that they were playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers, you know, like, if it's like, eh, yeah, I'm gonna, like, you know, stick by my beliefs, I'm gonna sit in this

cell. Yes, am I being tortured mercilessly? Yes, but I am not gonna be strapped into, you know, a zero and having to, like, land in Pearl Harbor. Yeah. Now, after World War II, the party was legalized by the American occupational authorities,

and that probably sounds weird for a lot of people listening. Now, Japan was rapidly being rebuilt at this rate, and the Communist Party, which was then led by a guy named Sanzo Nosaka, was elected as its leader.

Now, Nosaka had an interesting career during World War II. He spent it in China, but not the way you think. He was not a member of the Imperial Army. Instead, he was a member of the Chinese Red Army and worked to spread communism throughout Japanese POWs. And he did an incredibly good job. He was charismatic, well-spoken, friendly, and convincing without speaking like an academic. He was able to convince thousands

of Japanese POWs into switching sides. At one point, all of Mao Zedong's artillery was manned by Japanese communists. And this is all because of Osaka. Now, the Americans originally loved Osaka. Remember, the Cold War really hadn't started yet. And while Americans clearly were not big fans of communists by any stretch of the imagination, times were different. The American occupational forces saw him as someone who could quickly organize Japanese workers, which they needed. Nosaka also liked the Americans, because despite the fact of them being a gargantuan imperial power at this time, he saw them as necessary to destroy the Japanese empire,

which they obviously did. And at the time, Nosaka saw the Americans as being pro-worker and pro-labor, which they were. Yeah. Oh, hold that thought. Like, you know, I think it's worth saying

that, yeah, pro-worker and pro-labor for a certain type of worker and a certain type of laborer. Well, remember, the Cold War hadn't started yet. The Chinese had not won the Chinese Civil War yet. So American opinions on communists are rapidly going to change. And that is going to

be connected to just how quickly Osaka and the Communist Party become popular within Japan. Because millions of Japanese people quickly join the labor force. They create labor unions. And in 1946, in the first elections after the war, Nausicaa is elected to the Diet, the Japanese parliament. By 1949, the Communist Party received a full 10% of the popular vote and multiple seats in the Diet. However, by 1949, shit had changed. American attitudes towards the Communist Party, unions, and workers, and communism in general, had changed drastically since 1946. The Cold War is now in full swing. The Chinese Communist Party is becoming a specter, haunting the thoughts and nightmares of American foreign policy thinkers.

And they would be goddamned if they were going to let a bunch of Japanese reds take over their fucking occupational project. God damned if they were going to let a bunch of Japanese Reds take over their fucking occupational project. Yeah, I mean, like McCarthy and Hoover are like chafing with how hard they are. And, you know, there's other reasons why the Communist Party became popular than just being good organizers. The rapid rebuilding of Japan and the rapid rebuilding of the Japanese capitalist class, if you want to call it that, had created massive inequalities in Japan. So, like, of course, the Communist Party has become popular. And thus began the second Red Purge of Japan. Yep. The Japanese government, working in tandem with occupational authorities and the Japanese private sector, fired anyone from their jobs that might hold any kind of leftist beliefs.

They didn't even have to be members of the party. Many members of the party were legally forbidden from taking part in political activities, and some were even thrown in prison. Now, this is where we kind of get the birth of militant leftism in Japan, because Joseph Stalin demanded that the Japanese Communist Party disregard electoralism and take up arms and revolution which nosaka refused nosaka's entire thing was giving communism a friendly japanese face and not to mention he had lived through the chinese civil war he's like i don't want to fucking do that here uh he he completely rejected violent revolution yeah like once again stalin has one solution because when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail and when you're joseph stalin you're a giant mustachioed hammer every problem looks like hungarians now the communist

party fractured at this point. Shocked, I know. Nosaka was driven out of the party and a more radical militant group took over. They took to the mountains to form Maoist People's War Units to rally the farmers and organize firebombings of police stations

and trains within the cities. However, the revolutionary urbanites of the party fucked up pretty bad here. Now, Maoism cannot be applied anywhere on Earth, specifically not in Japan. Their rural countrymen were seen as uneducated country bumpkins by the Communist Party members and easily be turned to their side. That could not be further from the truth. All of them were educated, many had university educ educations and rather than being poor disabused peasantry uh they were mostly well-off middle

class and many of them were like the bellwether for conservative political parties in japan yeah like but like this is why like maoism and in general like post Chinese civil war like the cultural revolution worked is that like the process of stuff like feng shan and you know the revolutionary you know practice in rural areas is that it was like targeted towards

treating like rural participants as equal as their urban counterparts you know like they were seen at the same level and rural participants as equal as their urban counterparts you know like there was they were seen at the same level and the apparatus for applying you know communist and like maoist doctrine in the countryside was kind of adapted a little bit but it was kind of the same as in the cities like every people weren't looked down on and if anything they were looked up to because they were seen

as like so important to the cultural revolution yeah and you know in japan that that the divide really didn't exist because the rural workers couldn't really be considered peasants and they were doing fine they're like this is actually what we want yeah uh so you know the farmers told the communists to fuck off refused refuse to give them food or shelter. And soon the people's war units had to retreat back to the cities, starving and cold. Within a few years, the party have banned of their militant line.

No Saka was brought back in, but that didn't really fix the problems. They didn't mean people in Japan were going to re-embrace them, nor were the newly militant Japanese left going to re-embrace Nosaka's friendly attitude. By the mid-1950s, the overall feeling that the Japanese people had during the Communist Party, remember only a few years before they won 10% of the popular vote, had turned. They had lost all their seats in the Diet, mostly in their response, because despite that their war parties in the mountains failing miserably, they had firebomb trains and police boxes, which was unpopular. Yeah. They also began to lose their support amongst their main base, student activists.

The party had helped form and eventually pretty much taken over something called the Zingak kuren which was a coalition of left-wing university students and groups oh the coalition of university students this can only go well the students weren't necessarily pissed at the party's militant swing as they did believe in the concepts of direct action in order to change things but what had turned them away from the party was their refusal to distance themselves from stalinism or the soviet union after first khrushchev's secret speech which was you know the anti-stalin speech and the soviet invasion of hungary after the revolution furthermore as the students became older and more active protesting u.s occupation namely the ever-expanding footprint of the military bases the party told them to stop and stop being so like uh like stop starting fires effectively now the students ignored this order and this culminated in what became known as blunny sunagawa as the zangakorin joined by thousands upon thousands of others protested the expansion of an american air base in sunag, which would require the eviction of 140 families.

The Zangakoran took a new tactic with them to the protests. Knowing the brutality of the Japanese police, they decided to use that against them. They gave orders to anybody that would listen to dress in all white and not fight back against the police whatsoever. So when the cops eventually did show up, thousands upon thousands of them, and began beating the ever-loving shit out of the protesters, their red blood showed vividly on their white clothes for the watching cameras of the media. The public overwhelmingly turned against the government and the US military on this issue, and eventually the extension project was dropped. Though by the 1960s, the Japanese New Left continued to grow within student movements.

The Zynga current still existed, of course, but there were splinter groups such as the Communist League, nicknamed the Boond. No, not that one. As well as the Revolutionary Communist League, the Boond being Marxist-Leninist and the other one being Trotskyist. Not that that is important. Oh no, Joe, it's very important. It's very important. Not that that is important. Oh, no, Joe, it's very important. It's very important. I assure you nobody cares.

Together, they worked to take over the Zingakuren from the inside through both fair and admittedly rigged elections. During one action, the ANPO protest against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, they smashed into the national diet compound, busted out some sick dance moves on some tables, sang some songs, and left peacefully. When they tried to do this again in January of 1960, Michikoku Kanba, a 22-year-old protester, was beaten to death by the police. Yeah, it's kind of hard to do the worm to someone playing the oud while you're being kicked in the spine. Yeah, yeah. And the police argue that they that she was simply crushed by protesters but yeah no now now these protests are actually hugely successful it forced the resignation of the kishi government now kishi was one of the most evil men in the empire of japan arguably in the entire axis powers that was not executed after World War II.

I can't... I'm not going to go into what he did at length. Behind the Bastards did a good series on him. Go listen to that or Google him. He was a fucking bastard,

but he had to resign from the backlash of these protests. The protests also stopped President Eisenhower of the United States from visiting Japan, though it didn't stop

the signing of the Security Treaty, so they were seen as a failure by the members and soon the boon to collapse under, you guessed't stop the signing of the security treaty, so they were seen as a failure by the members, and soon the boon collapsed under, you guessed it, a pile of infighting. This did not stop various splinter groups from continuing their direct actions, though, this time more and more violently. They showed up armed with poles, spears, and firebombs to fight the cops, and massive fights broke out throughout the 60s however the spark of militant spirit the national security apparatus of japan had little problem picking them apart and soon huge groups began falter after hundreds of them were arrested during protests and faced with decades in prison

and at this same time shinzo abe's grandfather was getting into bed with the moonies. If only we have a homemade solution to this problem. Go get the doohickey. Soon, the activists of the New Japan left saw all of this is futile. Public support for their actions collapsed. Their membership dropped. And soon they decided, fuck public support. We don't need it.

Now, as these more mainstream groups you could call it fell apart came out the true radicals those who thought armed rebellion and insurrection against the state was the only way to solve their problems and the the first of these group was the red army faction not the one with Andreas Bader. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Thank you. Wrong country. What are they, Joe? What are they?

Okay, fair enough. Now, these guys broke off from the Second Communist League, because they did reform at one point, and were led by a guy named Shio-mi Takuya. According to Dissenting Japan, a history of Japanese radicalism and counterculture, Shio-mi's main theory in the founding of the Red Army Faction was that by first carrying out a successful armed proletarian revolution in Japan, Japan would then become the headquarters of a worldwide revolution against the United States of America and its allies with the Red Army Faction becoming its vanguard.

Now, the second boond, as it was known, was not a very big fan of these guys. And this led to a string of tit-for-tat kidnappings between the boond and the faction. And they literally kidnapped each other's leadership at various points. And they literally kidnapped each other's leadership at various points. At one point, the leader of the Red Army faction had to escape out of a university window, because

the headquarters was in Meiji University. So he had to escape out of a university window using a fire hose as a rope. When one of the other leaders of the Red Army faction tried to join him, he fell off the hose and died. This this fucking like macgyver shit like god look at if you are in a group called the quote-unquote red army faction whether it's brackets japanese brackets german or brackets

whatever you have to dedicate your adult existence to doing the dumbest shit possible like climbing out the window any kind of union between any japanese and german ideas is a bad idea with a historical precedent for it this is the new axis brackets red army faction now Texas Rockets Red Army Faction. Now, with this escape, the Red Army Faction was on its feet, but short of people. They had a small core group of followers, but needed more, so they believed. So they began simply beginning to kidnap and beat the shit out of other Boond members until they agreed to join their faction. By September of 1969, they managed to have 200 people within the rank so as you can imagine differing degrees of loyalty yeah i was gonna say like you know beating the shit out of someone doesn't really endear the endear you to them hold that thought oh fuck though i will say

like the red army faction of all the groups we're going to talk about here the red army faction of japan um has the most amount of defectors to the police for reasons as you can imagine. Now, the first stage of the Red Army faction's revolution was dubbed the Osaka War because it happened in Osaka. No shit. This plan was to firebomb police boxes, once again going back to the classics, and then steal the cops' handguns, which they thought would be locked inside of them. They thought they were going to steal so many guns they'd be able to distribute them amongst the masses and

encourage people to vent their rage against the establishment government and capitalists and bourgeoisie and whatever you know like a Japanese version of Bane however they never actually checked on the last bit of information guns being stored in the police boxes.

Oh, about being Bane. I thought it was going to be like, no one cared about who I was until I put on the mask. Now, they did firebomb some police boxes, but they were horrified to find out there were no fucking guns inside, so all of it was for nothing. As they carried out their attacks,

more and more members were arrested, and they decided that the key to our revolutionary plan in Japan would be to create overseas bases from which they could launch future attacks from, away from the arms of the Japanese security apparatus, which is ironic when you think about how much they hated American military bases. Yeah, exactly. But my question is, how ubiquitous are arms in post-war Japan? How easy is it to get a gun

now i will say japanese police are armed they had to this day they have revolvers yeah um but weapons in general like owning a pistol in japan is virtually impossible you can own a hunting rifle or shotgun with intensive background and psychological exams I believe you even have to check in with the police every time you use it and turn in your expended cartridges like it's very strict so you're not going to get blasted by a police officer doing a

Jojo's pose no at the last time I saw any news about a Japanese cop and a gun it's because one of them left it in the bathroom on accident yeah i got fired um but like yeah the guns are not ubiquitous at all in law enforcement japan they carry them i they use them very infrequently much like here in armenia like they they have them they're more of a decoration they don't use them yeah but if you are japanese would like to make a gun please please look up the assassination 2022 assassination assassination of Shinzo Abe. There is.

This podcast is now banned in Japan. Also, if you are fighting against a police force, if you fill a latex balloon up with an oil-based paint and sand, it is very, very hard for them to get off their visors. Bleep! Now, the Red Army faction's goal of establishing overseas bases led them to the hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 351. Now, the plan was to hijack this plane and fly it to Cuba, armed with katanas and a homemade bomb.

You know, it was a really real golden era for hijacking planes. Oh, yeah. There's no security at all. like hijacking planes like oh yeah there's no security at all but like how did all of these hijackings happen in the kind of you know 20 ish year period and it took 9-11 for everyone to tighten up their security well like i remember we talked about during our rated on tebe episode that like people were were like upset that israeli airliners during this golden age of hijacking went so far and their security protocols to check people's passports so you know and like you're carrying a fucking katana on board like oh it's simply my sword-shaped umbrella don't worry about okay have a good flight yeah like

like the dude from smash mouth killed more people than 9-11. That is true. The super sprinter Venet Sturgis. I forgot about that. Also, really about 9-11 side story. I'm currently reading Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. And in the first like two pages, the asteroid that hits Earth that destroys northern Italy. Do you want to know what date it happens on was it november 12th the 11th of september yeah of course it is what did he know that's why he had to go he know too much now 20 minutes after takeoff takamura otamiya the leader

of the hijack team jumped up from his seat drew his sword and screamed quote we are ashita no joe which is a reference to the boxing manga tomorrow's joe uh which had become popular amongst japanese leftists just doing like a leftist uh like a six hour long youtube video of like leftist analysis of hajime no ipo it's out there i'm not gonna look for it i know it's out there it's always out there he's doing the role thing the role is actually like a statement about the cyclical nature of uh material dialectics and if you are watching any anime related to boxing and you're watching anything other than hajime no ipo you are wrong um small problem with the plan however once they took over the plane which they did without incident um and told the

pilot we're going to fucking havana the pilot had to tell them this plane cannot go to cuba that is too far away so they decided right then and there i guess we'll have to go to fucking north korea this is where things get very stupid the pilot told them they would have to refuel in fukuoka which is true and once they did they landed and exchanged some hostages and to get some maps of korea as well as a specific radio frequency the pilot insisted he would need to land in pyongyang yeah if you're catching on the hijackers are very stupid. The hijackers had no idea,

but the frequencies were actually for Gimpo Airport in South Korea, not North Korea. And the pilot knew that the hijackers would not be able to tell the difference between the two. So soon, South Korea and Japan are working together, which is kind of crazy when you think about this. This is the 60s. Yeah.

And the Japanese foreign ministry calls ahead to tell South Korea what's happening. South Korea immediately helps by tearing down all of the fucking signage that would say that they were in South Korea.

They removed all the South Korean flags. They put up North Korean flags. They disguise the Gimpo Airport to look like North Koreaorea i like that gimpo airport just had north korean flags on hands like you know yeah we gotta go get our weird flag guy every office has one yeah like despite the fact that the 60s in south korea flying a north korean flag was certainly against the law yeah it's a bad time to be super into vexiology yeah uh so only when the plane lands

in seoul do the hijackers like look out and realize because like they're still in seoul right like they they kind of disguise the airport but they could still see lights from the city yeah like literally if you were a hijacker and you look out the window, it is the 60s on the Korean Peninsula. If you see a load of lights, you are not in North Korea. Yeah, I mean, North Korea was certainly doing better in the 60s than they are today. And they actually were doing better than South Korea

at the time. But if you fly into Pyongyang, you're not going to see signs for fucking Samsung and shit. Yeah, you're not going to see loads of Jollibee. So only then did I was like, hey, goddammit, we're in Seoul. What the fuck? So they refused to get off the plane. This was the inspiration for the incredible 2000s movie, Soul Plane.

Boo. Now, they exchange hostages because at this point, they're like, we're not getting off this fucking plane. Boo. Now, they exchange hostages because at this point they're like, we're not getting off this fucking plane. Fuck you. They exchange hostages, one of which is the Japanese vice minister for transportation in order to win all the other hostages

being released. At that point, they're refueled and flying to North Korea where they are immediately given asylum upon arrival. But there's no international Japanese communist revolution coming out of Pyongyang.

The Japanese just crack down hard around the group. They eventually arrest the faction's leadership, including Takia, who was actually arrested two weeks before the plane hijacking on accident because he looked like a disheveled beggar who also looked like someone who was wanted for pickpocketing.

I mean, it's the 60s. 60s and the left. Leftists in the 60s just looked like that. Hold that thought. Oh, fuck off. The second group that eventually formed the United Red Army was called the Revolutionary Left, which formed out of several different splinter groups, Oh, fuck off. throwing firebombs at the plane carrying the Japanese foreign minister, all while singing the Internationale. Why is the aeronautics industry, like, put up a fence or something?

They did. There was actually quite strict security around Haneda. They just kind of, like, burst through it. So they're doing, like, a Takeshi's Castle-style, like, obstacle course to go throw, like, flares. Yeah, the hardest part was jumping over the rotating foam arm over the water pit.

And they also planted homemade bombs at US military bases, firebombed both the US and Soviet embassies, and of course police stations. Gotta keep them guessing, you know, like... Do you want to hear about Soul Plane no I do not starring

Method Man, Snoop Dogg, Monique and Kevin Hart and Tom Arnold of all people eventually Siyoshi was arrested and while still running the group from prison he appointed a woman named Nagata Hiroko to lead the group and with this new

revolutionary goal of course which would bring about worldwide communism of breaking him out of prison um they decided the best way to do this was with guns something as we establish is very hard to get in japan so they would have to find some and they tried to do this the same way the red army faction did by stealing them from cops so i i am doing the macho mcconaughey time is a flat circle thing why did every single one of these groups have the same idea why did they always try and break someone out of prison where are we going to get guns let's steal them off police let me guess they were going to try and steal them off patrolling policemen and then failed miserably police boxes so for people who are unaware a police box or a koban is like these

weird neighborhood tiny police stations japan is literally a box it has like two or three cops in it they're everywhere and this is like they believe that there's guns inside so and there was like like i said cops carry revolvers on them god damn bursting in the cop box yeah gotta get in that cop nothing nothing in the cop box and rather than using firebombs they decided to use lead pipes that they disguised by slipping cut garden hoses over the top of them like don't mind me i'm just carrying my weirdly rigid garden hose with me for tokyo i'm carrying my very very short garden hose and they charged a group of cops at a police box and immediately got shot for their efforts and one of them died so after that they decided wow it'd be a lot easier to simply rob a gun store and they did um and they they

were successful they stole 10 shotguns and thousands of rounds of shotgun ammo though the heat that was brought on them by stealing guns in japan which is a big fucking issue uh that the cops began scouring the countryside looking for them and the guns so they ran to tokyo where they finally made contact with the new Red Army faction leader and eventual United Red Army faction leader, Mori Sunyo, to forge an alliance. This ended up being a match made in heaven. The revolutionary lefts was penniless, but they had stolen a bunch of guns,

while the Red Army faction had a sizable war chest after, you guessed it, robbing a bunch of banks with katanas. But they all had no guns. So like, ah ah yin and yang coming together you have money I have guns and so by July 15th 1971 the two groups officially merged

creating the United Red Army with Mori in charge and Hiroko being his second command with the stated goal to quote fight a war of annihilation of guns against the Japanese authorities. Mind you, again, they only have 10 shotguns.

You know, Nishan Wade claims that he had loved planes since he was a child, but he had a horrible experience with a typical airline. His dog, Dre, is classified as check baggage

instead of carry-on. He eats a horrible airline meal and his buttocks get stuck in the toilet while he has diarrhea caused by his meal. Are you still on Soul Plane? During turbulence, whencks get stuck in the toilet while he has diarrhea caused by his meal. Are you still on Soul Plane? During turbulence

when he's stuck on the toilet during turbulence, Andrei is faintly sucked through a jet engine after a stewardess accidentally opens the cargo door. I should call her. Now, it's pretty clear from the beginning that Mori had no idea who he had allied himself with.

Now, Hiroko was very comfortable using violence, not for the sake of revolution, but for the sake of internal discipline. When two members deserted from the group and went to inform to the cops, or so she believed, Hiroko ordered them to be found. And when she asked Morii should we kill these two? Because neither of these groups had killed anybody at this point. Except the Red Army faction accident when that guy fell out of the window, right? Yeah. He reportedly unseriously said, yeah

so she did. Yeah, she is abiding by, you know the Irish mother doctrine of to spare the rod is to spoil the child. Well, they did beat them to death with lead pipes so that's pretty much a rock there you go now this execution happened separately and after the second execution took place mori seemingly exasperated said quote what they did it again by jew he's in charge seriously, this is a moment of self-radicalization

for Mori. He was now in charge of a group that had an incredibly violent element inside of it, and despite the fact he was a violent revolutionary himself, he had never dispensed that kind of violence against his own people before. Now confronted

with Hiroko and her much more violent faction that was clearly willing and able to do so, he decided if he wanted to stay in charge, he'd have to keep up. And he twisted that motherfucking dial to 11. Now, this is how we get into what the United Red Army is best known for. The cadre of the United Red Army moved into a remote mountain compound in Gunma in 1972. And whenever we say remote mountain compound on the show, you know nothing good is going to come from it. Yeah, especially if they're not fucking. They're just sitting around reading theory.

Oh, I wish they just were theory nerds. It's worse than that. And content warning going forward. You see, this is where the violence really begins. Hiroko was different in her leadership than mori and she demanded absolute commitment to her people she demanded that members swear to her they are not only willing to commit violence but die in the act of committing it according to her the enemy's death could only be achieved with each member's willingness to die. So, Mori took that idea and fucking ran with it.

These people were definitely so fun at parties. I think if they went to a party, they would be like, I was going to say hanging out with the dog, but that's something I do, so never mind. I was about to say that. You went to that party the other day, and I was like, Joe, are you hanging out with the dog?

This might shock you guys. I'm not much of a party person. As you can imagine, not everybody, especially in this group of committed revolutionaries, was cool with the idea of dying. So Mori and Hiroko began a process of effectively conditioning one to violence and brainwashing to no longer care about themselves. For starters, the body and all of its needs, whether they be emotional, physical, or otherwise, were to be considered another battleground in the ideological war between capitalism and communism. You see, the human body, a medium for emotional and physical activity, was a weakness and desire of any kind, comfort of any kind, was seen as bourgeoisie. They literally declared their own bodies as enemy territory that they would have to liberate.

Fuck sake. This is the downfall of so many leftist movements. Either you need to have a happy medium of busting if there's no busting then people get real pent up and they start you know like setting shit on fire and killing each other and placing bombs if they're busting too much then you create like a weird polycule that like hold that first thought i'm you were like the this is you know tempering your edging to you know a samurai sword level of sharpness now this inhumanity towards oneself was not true for guns which they saw as living breathing beings of the revolution according to hiroko during one

meeting mori talked about guns as this. Quote, when you think about the rifle that you're holding right now, what kind of gun was that? It was a dead gun, which was originally displayed at a gun shop and later used to shoot birds for pleasure. However, once it snatched away by our hands, this dead gun began to grow and became a gun that we forcefully gained control over. If one possessed it as a mere weapon or hid it as an attic, its growth would stop. And it would not serve our struggle in strengthening our unity and gaining genuine communist subjectivity. It would be pitiful for the gun. In order to strengthen our unity and gain genuine communist subjectivity, you must begin the battle of

annihilation. Only then will you transform yourself into a revolutionary soldier who fights the battle of annihilation. While the gun is in your possession, it will transform itself into a gun for the battle of annihilation. The gun does not change you. You change the gun. For that, you need to transform yourself into a revolutionary soldier who can engage in the battle of annihilation. So, guns are alive and your friend, while your living body, which we need to theoretically kill, is your enemy. Honestly, I preferred this when I heard it the first time in Full Metal Jacket. With that came the training in the mountains.

People were put on what you could consider a starvation ration, though just above it so they wouldn't die of starvation. So like, just a smidge. No pleasure could be obtained by eating. So food was purposefully made to be flavorless and awful. Because, you know, taste is kind of revolutionary. Following that came brutal, continuous physical and military training, though since nobody had any actual military experience to speak of, this mostly consisted of them running around the woods and trying to figure out how to use the shotguns they had just stolen. Then came the thing that they are almost certainly known for the most, the concept of self-critique or self-criticism. Now, first introduced in Joseph Stalin's The Foundation of Leninism in 1924, this concept boils down to people admitting mistakes they had made,

finding out the reasons they had made them, and how they could be corrected so they didn't happen again. Now, that's in theory. In practice, it's pretty much only used to root out political enemies, both real and imagined. For the United Red Army, it meant something very, very different. According to Mori, everyone made mistakes, even if they didn't know it. And for those who had no idea of their mistakes, there's only one way of getting them to admit it by beating the shit out of them until they said something, passed out after being beaten unconscious and apologized. Obviously, most people don't want to just viciously attack others especially people thought to be comrades and cadres they've been spending all this time in a small

shitty mountain camp together so mori thought of a way around that by beating someone unconscious you helped elevate them to a higher level of self where they could see and understand the mistakes they had made and therefore would never make them again this is just furthermore just kink shit like they're sublimating themselves so much that they're just doing like non-consensual bdsm on each other i mean i mean non-consensual bdsm is just assault yeah it's just it's just abuse like non-consensual like bdsm is just abuse but like we this is where they go from weird political group to outright cult yeah we're we're like passing through the busting uh overton window right now you know where it's like once you pass through it you got to get it out somehow and either you're like beating up people or you're

like chain smoking a million cigarettes a day like andreas batter like yep now furthermore hesitating the order to beat someone during self-criticism was a sign that you personally had made a mistake and you were hiding it because why else would you be so uncommitted to the cause that you wouldn't beat your friend unconscious like i remember reading something a couple of years ago when like i was you know exploring kind of different avenues of kind of like theory on the left and i came across something i can't remember who wrote it but it was like it really illuminating considering like when you read a lot of stuff it sounds quite dire you know like the using the body as a weapon and this sort of thing and it kind of see it in in so many words like

simply said you know one should imagine imagine the future after the revolution after a revolution as more joyous more delightful and increasing the the happiness in people's lives and when you lose when you focus so much on like the aspect of constructing a future, you strip the joy out of it, and then you kind of lose sight of the entire purpose of making people's lives better. Yeah. Yeah, they fetishize violence, effectively. Unwashed people, we'll get to the unwashed bit in a little, would gather around one another and smash each other in the head with fists, feet, and pipes in order to knock people unconscious. Which, remember, specifically unconsciousness was the goal of these beatings. Oh, and if you failed to pass out from said beating, this itself was a mistake that would require further beatings. One such man man Kato

was savagely beaten for hours and didn't lose consciousness Mori announced that he was not committed to the revolution so he was tied up and chucked outside in the middle of the winter this is in December he died oh like there no one tell

conservative news pundits about this because the knockout game was like bad enough they're gonna say like the Japanese knockout game there's leftist discord mods doing this to each other another Ozaki Mitsuo was starved and beaten for two days never losing consciousness until they

died Mori gave the explanation because he had to explain like oh god all these people are fucking dying now they've just murdered two people not counting the other two that the rev left had already killed he gave the explanation that their dying was not the fault of the people beating them or starving them but rather they died because they had failed self-critique this completely removed any agency from the violence and instead it was just further evidence of one's own guilt. Yeah, like when violence becomes like just a functionary of internal discipline, you've kind of lost the point of having discipline at all.

So everything I'm going to talk about happens within about a month and a half. Oh God. So yeah, this group just became a weird cult of beating each other unconscious. One woman, literally just like wait 20, 25 years and join FetLife and have someone that likes kicking people in the nuts, kick you in the nuts.

Like just be like, like a lot of people will say about, go to North Korea, go to the border, find the guys who kick people in the nuts. Yeah, literally. Get the dudes who have the turbo boots that will kick your nuts into space.

You know, go do that. The first Japanese space program. Yeah, like a lot of people who will say like, oh, people are into like weird sex shit, just need to be normal. In reality, it's these people who need to be normal because they just want to, you know, like kick each other in the nuts

and like have weird sub dom stuff, except their dom is, like, Hegelian Marxist dialectics. One woman, a leading figure in the Red Army faction, was told that she had sinned and she needed to beat herself unconscious.

Now, she tried. After hours of punching herself in the face, like that scene at a fight club, she was eventually forced to ask for help in knocking herself out. Now, this was actually a fail deadly. She couldn't beat herself to death, and Mori knew she couldn't beat herself unconscious, and Mori knew that she wouldn't be able to, and thus would have to ask for help. By asking for help was admission of more mistakes which would need further beatings. Yeah, so on January 7th

everybody helped her and beat her to death. Her crime, as accused by Hiroko, was caring too much about her femininity and her appearance by simply keeping her hair long. All these groups hate women so much. This one very much did.

According to Mori and Hiroko, remember Hiroko is a woman. The feminine, the concept of a feminine woman was connected to the bourgeoisie and had to be eliminated. This included bathing, not cutting your hair short, or having sex. Specifically for women within less than a month on their strange mountain compound they had murdered eight of their own members 10 would be dead by the end of january all of them beaten to death and a strange group of ritual revolutionary violence when one woman became pregnant mori was so infuriated that she didn't accept that she did not own her newborn child and instead that her newborn or unborn child rather quote belong to the revolution. That being him, that he directed one of his members, a former medical student to go buy textbooks because he wanted to give her a c-section and steal the baby

like the you know like that whole stat about how the 60s and 70s had like such a massive rise in serial killers in the US partially due to like the amount of lead that was in the air and in the water

like yeah it's just like that except it's the amount of lead pipes they're hitting each other with yeah like you know they're absorbing them through some weird communist photosynthesis photosynthesis of getting hit in the head with things like you know go fight the police stop like stop doing this shit to each other i mean he didn't end up doing the c-section but he did order her to be beaten unconscious while eight months pregnant, which killed her. This is all so just like horrific. As the bodies began to pile up, what constitutes as a crime against revolution were continuously narrowed down. Sex had been strictly forbidden the entire time, but was often discovered because people are gonna fuck.

Only the women were punished. Even something as simple as taking a bath was considered a crime because being clean was considered a desire, and therefore counter-revolutionary, and people would be savagely beaten unconscious for it. Other people were murdered. So soon, everybody is just a shambling zombie of filth barely eating covered in their own

like disgust for weeks at a time where are they disposing of all these bodies there's chucking them out back because by February surviving members talk about how the entire base smelled of nothing but alcohol body odor

and rotting corpses. I was about to say it better smell crazy in there, but you just answered that for me. However, by then the police were closing in on them because they weren't trapped to that area. Members occasionally were sent out to procure supplies

and a lot of these guys said, fuck this, I'm leaving. And eventually the cops were closing in on them. So when they heard about that, they decided to abandon their camp and walk through the Japanese Alps in the middle of winter. Fuck. Many of them immediately got lost. And soon this shambling group of disgusting odor creatures stumbled into the town of Karazawa wearing rags and smelling like shit.

And when someone saw them, they called the cops and they were all arrested. Because the cops didn't know what was happening out there, but they did know the United Red Army was a criminal group because they were plotting

violent revolutions and they were arrested. Now, the five of them that didn't get lost, but we're stuck out in the middle of the winter, took refuge in a vacation villa. Notice Asama Sanso sparking what would be known as the Asama Sanso incident. Once inside, once anything is called an incident, it's the incident.

Now, once inside, they ran into the wife of the villa's caretaker, a woman named Musaka Muta, who they took hostage and then locked themselves inside. Now, Muta's husband, who was just outside walking the dog, returned and saw something was off. All the furniture had been pushed against the windows and the doors, and he called the cops. The cops quickly reacted, blocking off all the nearby roads and cutting off any escape route through the mountains that the group might take but they didn't plan any rescue operations instead they simply waited hoping the group would surrender instead the group didn't even bother the contact cops ignored the

entire situation and stayed upstairs watching tv which is ironic in retrospect now there is a funny side story here one of the things that they saw on TV was Nixon going to China. And that was apparently... I am very much a friend of Mao Zedong. This was hugely demoralizing to them. Because, like, obviously, like, they were allies of, like, the communist Chinese revolution that's, you know, eternal and forever going. So, like, that's something that they idolized. And they're like, why the fuck are they meeting with Nixonixon they saw this as like china abandoning them despite the fact they're just five unwashed

weirdos in a mountain compound like they were in the mountains for what six weeks two months two months like yeah what can you do with your life in two months 12 people at this point yeah like all of them their own people, I should put. They have not killed a single quote-unquote bourgeoisie. They have not killed a single, like, functionary of the state. They had only beaten a dozen of their own people to death. Like, the police, like, it's two months. They have probably just figured out how the photocopier works.

Like, to, like, photocopy, you know, wanted posters. Like... Now, their sweet Netflix binge ended when the cops finally cut the villa's electricity, set up loudspeakers, and began constant calls for the group to surrender. The group did not respond. Give up. We are going to blow you up if you do not give up. We will give you free Netflix and some microwave

popcorn. Give up, please. We will give you a bar of soap. For the love of God, we can smell you out here. We will give you paraben-free soap and sulfate-free shampoo. Get your please dirty, stinking ass out of there.

I know it smell crazy in there and she cannot stand your odor. Please leave. You're shitting up the place. The group didn't respond, even when some of their parents showed up to ask them to give up. Nobody knew how many

people the group had killed, or anybody for that matter yet. So one of the parents who showed up urging the group to surrender had no idea they had murdered her son yeah but this is what i'm saying is like it escalated so quickly in the space of like two months like what like what what do you do with your life on in an average two months bad like i go to the gym like 40 in two months. I get paid twice in two months. It took them less time to murder a dozen people than it took you to write the Red Army Faction series.

Yeah, like, they killed 12 people in a third of the time it took me to write the Red Army Faction series. Clearly you don't have that revolutionary mindset. You, sir, kind of revolutionary. I don't smell bad enough for... Nate and I now have to beat you unconscious. Now, Sue and the police are planning an operation. One of their tactics included keeping the group awake, making them

tired and loopy. And rather than blaring loud music they set up a baits baseball pitching machine and just continuously fed baseballs into it and then bombarded the villa with baseballs that is that is really funny i'm not gonna lie were they like breaking the windows or were're just like hitting one singular wall with baseballs they're rotating it because they're they're bursting through windows and the walls because this is like a traditional japanese vacation villa has very thin walls so they're like just blasting through these wooden panels with like curveballs pitched from robo pitcher

3000 i mean like these people are so tired and malnourished that like I feel like even you know the softest curveball to the dome would obliterate. Turn into dust. Yeah like it would literally like Thanos snap you you just like disappear.

Meanwhile Mori is like they've invented a self critique machine I can just point this at their heads i don't feel so good mori and you just like disappear vanish into a fart cloud of odor uh now as this is happening as cops from japan's riot police squad which is their tactical team it's kind of their swat team as well got into position and then they rolled up a wrecking ball and began bursting their way inside i mean like if baseballs are going through the wall you don't really need like a wrecking ball just like hey what is a bit

what is a wrecking ball of it a very big baseball maybe they painted it some stitching on the side you know just go like full oj Simpson, just get in a Ford Bronco and just drive through the wall. We've imported a white Bronco from California specifically for this. Now, bursting into the villa was easy and cops rushed into the lower levels all under a hail of gunfire.

Now, the gunfire was entirely one-sided. The cops were armed, of course, but they decided early on, we can't kill these guys because they were worried that if they killed them, they would turn into martyrs for the revolutionary cause. So the cops charge in. Two of them are shot and killed.

Another dozen cops are wounded. A journalist is killed in the hail of gunfire who gets a little too close all while the cops don't shoot back I mean like they're all so iron deficient they probably like stood up too quick and they're like now the cops

at one point like there because there's barricades all throughout the villa it's a three story villa so once they get to one floor they run run into a Frogger-esque obstacle course. And all while they're getting shotgun pellets blasted into them. And they deploy a high-pressure water hose to just start blasting through the fucking walls of the third floor. Remember, it's winter. It's February, I think. So everybody's drenched in cold water. the fucking walls of the third floor remember it's like winter it's february i think so like everybody's drenched in cold water uh and finally the cops get to the third floor everybody surrenders

upon seeing the cops once they get that close two guys barricade themselves under a pile of traditional japanese futons and tatami mats and refused to come out like a child not wanting to go to the dentist when is this level going to come out on rainbow six siege right at one point these guys are hiding under a pile of futons uh get like the cops like all right come on out you fucking losers uh and they shoot one of the cops at point blank rage, blowing out one of his eyes, doing your, doing your best Gudetama like cosplay. And finally they, everybody is arrested.

The entire battle lasts eight hours and is broadcasted live at length by the Japanese national broadcaster NHK. At first, nobody in the group would speak to the police for a couple of days. Then Mori accepts responsibility for everything hoping that the police would return the bodies of the people that they had discovered in the woods to their families now this the that small smidgen of like human decency if you even want to call it that is enough for the other members who are in police custody to declare Mori counter-revolutionary.

Which then allows them to speak to the cops for some reason. The cops discover everything they did. Everybody involved, Hiroko and Mori, sentenced to death as well as several others. Now, for people unaware, the death penalty in Japan is more fucked up

than it is in most normal places that have the death penalty. If you want to consider those normal, it's always deeply fucked up. You're sentenced to death. You're effectively locked in solitary confinement forever. And you never know when your sentence is going to be carried out. One day, a prison guard simply comes to your door, tells you today's the day, and then and executed you never had like in the u.s not saying this is a better way to do it but but people are at least told months ahead of time 30 days ahead of time like your death warrant has been signed to make your peace or whatever in japan like morning bitch it's time to die uh and

then you are uh you get uh the long... They do execution through long drop hanging. And that is still today. They still do that. You get the chair, Marge. The chair. Now, Hiroko and Mori do not get executed. Mori kills himself in prison two years after a sentence, while Hiroko remains in prison until 2008,

when she dies of brain cancer. Other members are given long, decades-long prison terms, and Japan thought that was that. Enter the Japanese Red Army, a splinter group of the original Japanese Red Army faction, which was founded by Fusako Shigenoru and Shunyoshi Odekara. Now, both of these were former members of the Red Army faction, and they formedoshi Odekara. Now, both of these were former members of the Red Army faction, and they formed the Japanese Red Army. Now, the Japanese Red Army is by far the most famous Japanese terror group.

I mean, political terror group. I don't want to count Aum Shinrikyo in that, because they're certainly more infamous because of the gas attack on the subway. And the college farting and floating. Yeah. They're more well- farting and like floating. Yeah. They're,

they're more well-known internationally for sure. Yeah. In August, 1975 members of the JRA stormed the U S and Swedish embassies in Malaysia and took dozens of hostages amongst their demands was the re release of several members of the United red army. One of those, they demanded the release of a man named Sakakuchi refused to be released. Rather than.

Because he was still awaiting trial. And he was like. I want to go on trial. Plead my case. And use my pulpit. To further the communist cause in Japan. He was sentenced to death. He probably really regrets that.

He's still sitting on death row. As the time of recording. Another member. Kunio Bando, accepted his release, and he wanted to join them in Algeria, later taking part in multiple terror attacks with the JRA. And today, he is still alive,

as far as we know, and still free, pushing around 80 years old. So, man, Sakaguchi must really fucking hate himself. Yeah, he's like those World War II holdouts who don't know the war is over. Now, Bondo is still wanted by Japan for his new terror attacks. And as far as anybody can tell, he spends his time hiding out in China, Russia, and the Philippines. Other members of the JRA are much more famous about this.

One of whom, as far as anybody knows, is still alive and is the only person Lebanon has ever granted political asylum for. And he's still there hanging out with Hezbollah. He's still trying to figure out the two time zones of Beirut. But yeah, Bondo is still alive as of time of recording as far as anybody can tell, and he is still free. He's the only member of the United Red Army to as far as anybody

is aware, still be active as a left-wing terrorist. Though at 80 years old, I think most of his terrorism comes down to hoping he takes a shit today. Yeah. And thus is the end of the United Red Army, the revolutionary group most of his terrorism comes down to like hoping he takes a shit today yeah and thus is the end of the united red army the revolutionary group

that killed itself like sometimes i think about like especially when i was researching like stuff for the red army faction brackets german and like this sort of stuff is like imagine picking up a newspaper at any point between 1971 1972 like no wonder all the like boomers got

like super paranoid after taking like too much acid like in the 60s and like thought the world was gonna end because like you pick up a paper you have like the plo you have these guys you have the plfp red iron faction in germany like all the gladio shit that was happening in italy like no wonder philip k dick gave himself schizophrenia you know tom thank you so much for joining me on this punishment episode that i promised you um and we do a thing on this show called questions from the legion if you'd like to ask us a question donate to the show at any level, slide into our Discord, ask us a question there,

or message us on Patreon. We will answer it. Today's question comes from our Discord. Oh, God. What Eurovision piece would you want Momar Gaddafi to recreate with full outfit, choreography, everything? Riverdons.

Look, I'm not not gonna say i'm not surprised that you said that as an irishman rather than gaddafi being like the like lead dancer i want clones of gaddafi in every role in river dance so i want like 36 36 too much Gaddafi. 36 Gaddafis. Either that or... No. Either Riverdance or it's four Gaddafis performing Waterloo. Someone's going to Photoshop that. I look forward to it.

Abafi or something. I don't know. I am going to pick two things from this year since this is the first year that i've ever watched eurovision i am a gay olympics newbie um either a uh future lover by brunette that was not the armenian entry yes simply because like she spends her i mean fine song i like brunette she's's a fine Armenian pop singer, whatever. But because Gaddafi would have to spend about two and a half minutes

writhing around on an elevated platform, singing about how he just wants to look good, do good, and feel good while getting smoothies in cafes. I mean, that's a very Gaddafi... Or the easiest answer here... That's a Gaddafi energy. The easiest answer here is certainly karya uh and uh finland's song from this year oh yeah yeah yeah cha cha cha because

gaddafi in that weird green sleeve thing doing like a pirate dance back and forth and talking about how he likes pina coladas all for it like look I hate to say but Gaddafi knew how to serve like he was very like I'll give him that you know no one can rock you know Dior and Versace sunglasses in the same way that he can you know I don't know every cab driver

that I hang out with here has the same rip offs man maybe Gaddafi didn't die he just became a cab driver in Yerevan that explains the quality has the same rip offs man maybe Gaddafi didn't die he just became a cab driver in Yerevan that explains the quality

of the driving honestly Tom thank you again so much for joining me here today and use this space to plug

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