Passing almost unnoticed in the mainstream media in Japan, the death on Saturday November 4 of Haruo Wako, a former activist in the Japanese Red Army (ARJ), nevertheless revived among some the memory of an organization close to the liberation movements of Palestine, whose acts of terror marked the 1970s. Mr. Wako died at the age of 75 of unknown causes at the Osaka medical prison (West), after his transfer from Tokushima prison (West), where he was serving a life sentence. The ARJ remains associated with the massacre in 1972 of twenty-six people at the Israeli airport of Lod and with resounding hostage-takings in Europe and in Asia in the name of the revolution and the Palestinian cause.
Born on June 12, 1948 in Sendai, in the department of Miyagi (North-East), Mr. Wako joined the faculty of letters at the prestigious private Keio University in Tokyo in 1968. He then got closer to the Communist League, of Marxist persuasion and, passionate about cinema, worked part-time at the Scorpio underground art center, a mecca for alternative culture in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. There he met the writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), the playwright Shuji Terayama (1935-1983), and the directors Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013) and Koji Wakamatsu (1936-2012), with whom he worked after having dropped out of university.
His political orientations lead him to sympathize with members of the Japanese Red Army Faction, such as Masao Adachi, also a regular at Scorpio. The fraction cooperates with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), founded in 1967 by Georges Habache (1926-2008) and Wadie Haddad (1927-1978).
Haruo Wako participates in the adventure of the “red microbus” of broadcasting throughout the Archipelago the feature-length propaganda film, shot in Lebanon, Red Army – PFLP, declaration of world war of the Wakamatsu-Adachi tandem. In 1972, he was assistant director of photography on the filming of The Ecstasy of the Angelsby Koji Wakamatsu.
Several hostage situations
In September 1973, Mr. Wako joined the Japanese Red Army. This organization aspiring to the elimination of the Japanese imperial system and a world revolution wants to be the heir of the Japanese Red Army Faction. It was created after the hijacking of a Japanese airline JAL plane in 1972 and allowed activists to have their own entity in their partnership with the PFLP. Until then, recalls the co-founder of the ARJ, Fuzako Shigenobu, in “my history of the Japanese Red Army, with Palestine” (Ed. Kawada Shobo Shinsha, 2009, untranslated), they considered themselves as “representatives of the Red Army Faction based in Japan and as volunteers working with the PFLP, like other foreigners”.
You have 45% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.