Films about Japanese Red Army and Anarchists

[M Arnold]

I've tried to keep up on the recent movies on the student movement, JRA and
etc. but I haven't found any of them to be very impressive or educational.
"The Choice of Hercules" in particular was a jovial depiction of big city
police vs. small city police and the victory of the more cultured agents of
law enforcement against the (nearly invisible) Sekigun in the Asama Sanso
incident.  Weird.  As Roland Domenig mentioned, there are any number of
older films that deal with the subject(s) directly or indirectly as well
that may be of interest.  I've seen a couple of old Takahashi Banmei pink
movies (I think "Nihon no gomon" was one of them) with parts that almost
looked like rough drafts of the "sokatsu" scenes in "Hikari no ame."  One
other I can think of off-hand that's only vaguely related would be Okishima
Isao's "Shuccho" (1989).

There have been at least a few TV and video specials on the topic in the
last couple of years as well, and recently I had the chance to look through
two of them.  NHK's 2-part Project X episode, "Asama Sanso: shogeki no
tekkyu sakusen" (http://www.nhk.or.jp/projectx/75/), in contrast to Harada's
film, virtually ignores Sassa and instead valorizes the crane operators and
local residents who helped out in the incident.  Overall it seems to be more
about good old-fashioned human spirit instead of anything else.  There was a
"Tahara Soichiro sengoshi o tadoru tabi" special on TV Asahi last July that
was much better.  "Naze wakamono wa tatakawanakunatta no ka: 70 nen Ampo to
Zenkyoto."  This one has much more debate and discussion about the politics
and history surrounding Asama Sanso and even includes short interviews with
people like Tatematsu Wahei (who wrote the original _Hikari no ame_ novel),
Uegaki Yasuhiro (who was an actual Red Army member and participant at the
time), and rightist Issuikai leader Suzuki Kunio (who seems to have really
liked the book Uegaki wrote about the Red Army).  The program also touches
on the legacy of political protest movements in Japan and America and draws
comparisons to anti-globalization protests in Ottawa last year and other
recent protest movements in Japan.  This one was at least worth watching.
The only things I laughed at in this show were the cartoony voices they used
to dub the foreign interviewees into Japanese.

I recently discovered a book in English about the JRA--_Blood and Rage: The
Story of the Japanese Red Army_ by William R. Farrell (1990).  It's
interesting, but it suffers from the same problem the films have,
'novelizing' events at the expense of a more objective history.  Farrell
mentions Wakamatsu's PFLP film on page 137 but doesn't mention Wakamatsu.
("One of Shigenobu's activities had been working with an independent
Japanese film maker in the making of the film 'Declaration for War by the
Red Army and the PFLP.'")  Adachi Masao's mug shot appears just before page
139 along with 15 others in a reproduced "Japanese Police wanted poster for
at large members of Shigenobu's branch of the Japanese Red Army."

I hope I didn't get a "homeland security" warning stuck on my record for
checking this out from the library...

Michael Arnold