United Red Army

In February 1972 five student radicals broke into a retreat villa in the mountain village of Asama in central Japan taking the wife of the housekeeper as their hostage. The following hostage crisis lasting for 9 days and nights, ending with the death of two policemen and one bystander became one of the most notorious incidents of the decade, but also a media spectacle that was televised all over the nation.

But even more importantly the so called “Asama Sansó incident”, where police and the students alike employed war-like tactics, signaled the end of political opposition and the death of the leftist student rebellion of 60s that aimed to bring peace through world revolution. The end came also to the paramilitary United Red Army that had been marching in the forefront of the student battle. Despite the gruesomeness of the hostage crisis, the public was even more traumatised by the revelation that the five hostage takers, were indeed the last survivors of an internal purge within the radical student fraction, where former comrades had lynched 14 of their own in the name of ideological self-criticism. Those left alive either fled Japan to became eternal fugitives and those who stayed were sentenced to death row.

Koji Wakamatsu’s scandalous docudrama, not only sheds light to the grey periods in Japanese history often ignored in the eye of the public, but does it from the viewpoint of the surviving members of the hostage crisis and the actual United Red Army thus being a treat for the fans of history and drama alike.

Sten Saluveer / PÖFF

Japan 2007