Edited by Patricia G. Steinhoff, with the translation assistance of Lina J. Terrell, Ryoko Yamamoto, Kazumi Higashikubo, Shinji Kojima, Eiko Saeki, Kazutoh Ishida, and Midori Ishida. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. xvi, 452 pp. (Tables, map, B&W photos.) US$24.99, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-7279-3.
Destiny begins in 1970, when Japan had yet to have a skyjacking and there was no specific law against it. As the country celebrated the opening of the Japan World Exposition in Osaka, student radicals belonging to the Japanese Red Army Faction gathered in a Tokyo coffee shop to plan the daring takeover of a commercial airliner. The radicals hoped to travel to North Korea to receive military training, establish an international base, and eventually return to Japan to spearhead an armed uprising against the government. They envisioned their action as a catalyst for a global proletarian revolution and an inspiration for Japan’s beleaguered New Left Student Movement, which was reeling under strong police repression. The slogans they adopted reveal their ardor:
Item: We live and die together.
Item: We will defend and nurture the simultaneous world revolutionary transition.
Item: To complete the success of the hijacking, let us prepare for a triumphant return to Japan! (55)
The students’ dramatic act, however, was suffused with tragicomic episodes. They aborted an initial hijack attempt because some of the would-be hijackers failed to arrive at Haneda Airport in time for the flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka. Four days later, the full group of nine men tried again. Midway through the flight, the students brandished weapons, invaded the cockpit, announced themselves as the Red Army Faction, and declared that they were flying to North Korea. But the pilot of the Yodogō, as the Japan Airlines Boeing 727 was named, told the students that he did not have enough fuel to leave Japan. After refueling in Fukuoka, the Yodogō headed across the Sea of Japan for Pyongyang, but a joint Japan-US-South Korean ruse deceived them into making a U-turn over the DMZ, landing the airliner at Seoul’s Gimpo Airport. Just in time, the students recognized the trap and refused to deplane. A tense standoff ensued, during which they negotiated safe passage to North Korea, as well as the release of the passengers, who were replaced as hostages by a Socialist Party member of Japan’s parliament. Flying over the DMZ again, the Yodogō escaped notice by North Korean air defenses for a second time. The pilot, who by chance had learned to fly in northern Korea when the peninsula was part of Imperial Japan, managed miraculously to recognize the Pyongyang Airport in the dark and land on the unlit runway. And then … nothing happened. The students had not made prior contact with North Korea. When at last the hijackers deplaned into the frigid spring night, they surrendered their pathetic weapons, including dull samurai swords and a toy pistol, to North Korean officials, who then whisked them away to an uncertain fate. Kim Il-sung said the hijackers would be his “golden eggs.”
The hijackers forced conversion to North Korea’s juche ideology, and the nefarious secret operations they later undertook in Europe, South East Asia, and Japan on behalf of the North Korean state, comprise the core of this page-turning tale of intrigue, spy craft, and manipulation. The original Japanese volume, by the journalist and former student activist Kōji Takazawa, was awarded the prestigious Kodansha Prize for Nonfiction in 1999. The English translation reviewed here brings Takazawa’s investigative and literary genius to a wider audience. Coming just as North Korea’s current supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, seems intent on improving relations with South Korea and the United States, this translation of Takazawa’s work is both richly entertaining and grimly informative of the character of the North Korean state and the extent to which its assurances may be believed.
Seen through the lens of Takazawa’s numerous reporting visits to Pyongyang, where he interviewed the Yodogō group in their comfortable compound, his editing of their works for publication in Japan, and his painstaking retracing of their activities in Europe and elsewhere, North Korea is confirmed as a murderous, authoritarian regime engaged in spying, kidnapping, counterfeiting, and smuggling. Manipulated by expert North Korean spymasters, some of the Japanese hijackers, and especially their Japanese wives, traveling freely under the cover of their Japanese identity, proved effective as covert operatives of the North Korean regime. We also learn how various intelligence agencies finally unraveled the Yodogō hijackers’ secret operations.
While Takazawa gained access to the hijackers and their life in Pyongyang, the doors opened for him there led only to deeper mysteries. Troubling inconsistencies in the hijackers’ stories piled up as his investigation progressed. The tales told by the hijackers’ Japanese wives—whose existence in Pyongyang shocked Japan when Kim Il-sung casually revealed it in a 1992 Japanese newspaper interview—proved to be elaborate, intensively rehearsed fabrications directed by the North Korean Worker’s Party. Eventually almost everything the Yodogō group did, said, or wrote proved to be a lie or a diversion designed to further North Korean strategic interests. Takazawa’s friend from his student days, the leader of the hijackers, Tamiya Takamaro, seems to have been purged in 1995 for holding opinions incompatible with those of Kim Jong-il. Tamiya is not the only “golden egg” to have been remorselessly cast aside.
Editor Patricia Steinhoff and her team of translators have preserved in English the naïvely hopeful mode of expression characteristic of the Japanese Red Army Faction and the feel of their heady times. Reasonably priced in paperback, the book contains thirty-four photographs from Takazawa’s collection to aid readers in visualizing the places and people described, and there is a helpful timeline of events. An epilogue and afterword by the author, and a final chapter by Steinhoff, bring this extraordinary ongoing story up to the present day.
Scott North
Osaka University, Osaka, Japan