Kirishima Satoshi, member of the anti-imperialist armed struggle group East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, has died in a hospital, apparently due to complications from stomach cancer. He was 70 years old. Kirishima identified himself after 50 years underground, shortly before dying from cancer.
For many decades, Kirishima Satoshi’s bespectacled, long-haired visage has graced wanted posters in police boxes across Japan.
The photo shows Kirishima as he was around the period he first became a wanted man: 1975. Back then, he was a member of the “Scorpion” cell of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front. (東アジア反日武装戦線.) After a series of bombings against capitalist and imperialist targerts by the EAAJAF, most of its leadership was arrested. Kirishima Satoshi, however, went underground. Remarkably, he remained on the lam for an incredible half-century.
That is, it seems, until today.
At 70 years old, Kirishima checked himself into a hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture not long ago. He had terminal cancer; he was at the hospital using an assumed name (perhaps the one he’s lived under all these years).
A Half-Century Underground
Kirishima’s face is one amongst many emblazoned on wanted posters that make up a small but memorable subsection of Japan’s urban scenery. His is often seen near wanted posters for members of the Japanese Red Army, the armed struggle group later joined by many of Kirishima’s EAAJAF compatriots after their organization collapsed. The decades slowly slip by, but the faces mostly stay the same – until sudden, remarkable days like today.
The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front
On the morning of August 30th, 1974, an explosion rocked the busy Marunouchi business district near Tokyo station; its source, a powerful homemade time bomb concealed in a flower pot at the entrance to the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Building. The sound of the blast was so loud as to be heard as far away as Shinjuku. The glass fronting of the building shattered up to its 11th floor; nearby cars were destroyed. Five people in the blast’s range died immediately; three more died in the hospital soon after. Nearly 400 people were injured.
The “Wolf” cell of the EAAJAF claimed responsibility. The bombing, which had been more devastating than intended (two phone calls minutes before the blast attempting to incite evacuations had been ignored), was nonetheless claimed as a just act. According to the EAAJAF, it was “…an attack against the aggressor-corporations and the colonialists of Japanese imperialism, like Mitsubishi’s bosses.” As for those killed, “those people who have in consequence of the attack by the Wolf been killed or injured are no ‘ordinary workers’ or ‘normal noninvolved citizens.’ They are the parasites inside the centers of Japanese imperialism.”
Kirishima Satoshi was not a member of the Wolf cell. Rather, he belonged to the Scorpion – one of three loosely coordinated groups within the EAAJAF. The “Wolf” was a reference to the cell’s leader, Daidoji Masashi, who’d been born in Hokkaido, and held firmly to ideas of returning to a pre-civilization “proto-communism.” To achieve this within a Japanese context, the modern civilization of Japan would have to be destroyed.
Daidoji’s Anti-Japanism
The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front emerged from the dying years of Japan’s New Left student movement in the early 1970s. While the 1950s and ’60s had seen massive public protests against state violence and the Vietnam War, involving millions of individuals and achieving, at times, a fairly strong degree of public support, those days were over. Police moved to break student blockades in universities across the country; leftist groups were pushed into the streets, their efforts diminished to localized (if still vigorous) struggles like that against the appropriation of land for Narita Airport.
The EAAJAF’s leader, Daidoji, believed in an armed struggle against the state. In his early years in activism, he mostly engaged in the bombing of statues and memorials he saw as representing the oppression of Hokkaido’s indigenous Ainu people. His bombings started in 1971; by 1972, his small group was organizing itself into an underground armed struggle cell. They operated by existing as outwardly non-radical Japanese citizens; they held jobs, and avoided any clothing or personal stylings that would point them out as radical leftists. All the while they engaged in the study of bomb-making during their off hours.
Kirishima Satoshi and the Scorpion
Kirishima Satoshi was born in Hiroshima in 1954; just a bit too young to be in university during the height of the New Left movement. He met activists Kurokawa Yoshimasa and Ugajin Hisaichi at Meiji University in 1972; both were supporters of movements within Tokyo’s day-laborer community in Sanya, aligning with Daidoji’s belief in the day-laborer underclass as being one of the few potential revolutionary groups in Japan. The three of them became the core members of the Scorpion cell.
All three cells – Wolf, Fangs of the Land, and Scorpion – engaged in a series of ten bombing attacks against Japanese companies. From 1974 to 1975, these attacks injured 32 persons. The Japanese police have specifically credited Kirishima with detonating a bomb at The Research Institute for South Korean Economy and Industries building in Ginza in April of 1975.
One month later, The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front came to an end. Police, monitoring the activities of various other radical groups, slowly deduced the web of connections between the three cells. Seven of the group’s most important members – including Daidoji, his wife Ayako, and Kurokawa – were arrested. The police, however, were unaware of Kirishima. By the time they investigated Kirishima’s home, using a key Kurokawa had on him as evidence, Kirishima was gone. His well-known wanted poster soon went up; investigators closely monitored all his known associates. Kirishima stayed away. As the decades passed, police assumed he might have fled abroad. He remained the only known EAAJAF member to never be arrested.