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Chapter Title: Ribu’s Response to the United Red Army Feminist Ethics and the Politics of Violence Book Title: Scream from the Shadows

Book Subtitle: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan

Book Author(s): Setsu Shigematsu

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt77b.9

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt77b.9

I I I

B E T W E E N F E M I N I S M A N D V I O L E N C E

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C H A P T E R F I V E

Ribu’s Response to the United Red Army Feminist Ethics and the Politics of Violence

Political violence remains as an aporetic condition.1 It is an ineluctable prob- lematic bound to politics, ethics, sovereignty, and power. The definition of political violence is debated and unsettled, involving a spectrum of violence for political ends that can include state- sponsored violence and terrorism; mil- itary and policing actions; incarceration and torture; and insurgent, counter- hegemonic uses of violence and terrorism.2 As a radical feminist movement that formed amid the turbulence of the early 1970s, ūman ribu’s approach to political violence was both compelling and complex. This chapter examines ribu’s relationship to the United Red Army (Rengo Sekigun; hereafter URA), a group considered by many to have been Japan’s most violent domestic under ground revolutionary sect.3 The following discussion of the URA dem- onstrates that the interpretability and contestability of any action or event is what renders its violence political, justifiable, and/or abhorrent. The events surrounding the URA in 1972 became a turning point for Japanese leftist radicalism because of the way political violence was deployed in the name of revolutionary purposes. The URA’s use of violence in the name of the revolu- tion has been regarded as a disturbing and tragic event that marked the down- fall of the Japanese New Left. To this day, the causes, residues, and scars of this self- destructive phenomenon have haunted many of those involved in the political movements of that era.

Ribu’s critical feminist approach to violence was evident in how it re- lated to the URA. While rejecting the URA’s use of violence as fundamen- tally misguided, many ribu women collectively engaged in various supportive actions toward the women of the URA. Ribu’s support of the women of the URA provides a critical reframing of how the state and the mass media constructed the female leader of the URA as a “violent threat” to national

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140 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

security. Through this analysis of ūman ribu’s approach to the political uses and abuses of violence, I argue that their praxis of critical solidarity and radical inclusivity offers a creative way to work through the causes and ef- fects of different forms of violence and expresses an alternative feminist eth- ics of violence. In the second half of the chapter, I discuss Tanaka Mitsu’s complex approach to different manifestations of violence as one element of her philosophy of liberation. I demonstrate how her philosophy of liberation involves the principles of torimidashi (contradiction and disorder), contin- gency, violence, relationality (kankeisei), and eros, which are all integral to her existentialist approach to liberation. I conclude with Tanaka’s approach to the URA’s female leader, Nagata Hiroko, as a powerful and symbolic distil- lation of ribu’s crucial intervention at this pivotal moment in Japan’s political history.

The United Red Army

Ūman ribu emerged at a time when political violence was rampant across the political spectrum from the far left to the far right. University campuses were rife with battles between right- wing student groups, leftist sects, and student activists. As the Japanese government continued its support of the United States’ war in Vietnam, thousands of Japanese took to the streets to battle against the riot police to express their solidarity with the Vietnamese. As the state increased its police powers and continued its repression of pro- tests by arresting thousands of activists, some far- left groups also increased the intensity of their tactics against the state. The URA emerged amidst this escalation of violent resistance.

The URA became the most infamous sect of the Japanese New Left. It formed through a merger of two far- left sects on July 15, 1971. The merger involved one wing of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) and the Revolutionary Left Faction, an offshoot of the Marxist Leninist Faction (ML Ha).4 The leader of the JRA at the time of the merger was Mori Tsuneo (1944–73), and the leader of the Revolutionary Left Faction was a woman, Nagata Hiroko (1944–2011). Nagata became second- in- command of the URA, after Mori.5 One of the reasons Mori merged with the Revolutionary Left Faction was that his JRA division was unable to acquire any arms or weapons. Under Mori’s leadership, the political aim of the URA was to escalate conflict with the Japanese government.

The JRA, which should be distinguished from the URA, was known as the most militant revolutionary group in Japan. Its other cells had engaged in several successful missions, including a series of robberies and attacks against politicians and police officials and the hijacking of an airplane to

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R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y 141

North Korea in 1970. In 1971, some of its members left Japan and aligned themselves with the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). Led by Shigenobu Fusako, the JRA division based in the Middle East continued its activities for the next few decades. After November 1971, nine of the ten most wanted “criminals” in Japan were members of the two sects that com- prised the URA. This was indicative of the state’s efforts to prioritize the targeting of leftist insurgents.

In the winter of 1971, the URA retreated to mountain training camps in the Japanese Alps in Gunma- ken to undergo revolutionary training. The URA intended to prepare for armed struggle against the state and to liberate one of its leaders who had been incarcerated. During this revolutionary train- ing period, under the directives of Mori and Nagata, the group engaged in a violent and lethal internal purge. This purge began as a process of sōkatsu (which took the form of collective and individual self- criticism) but quickly escalated into a form of testing and measuring each member’s revolution- ary commitment. During various training activities, Mori and Nagata ac- cused members of not possessing or demonstrating sufficient revolutionary consciousness. For example, when two of the members (Katō Yoshitaka and Kojima Kazuko) were found to be engaging in romantic relations, this was interpreted as evidence of a lack of revolutionary commitment. Within this logic of organizational discipline, having a romantic relationship was deemed counterrevolutionary. During the course of this internal purge, Mori and Nagata ordered other members to punish those they deemed as lacking in their revolutionary commitment. These forms of punishment involved beat- ings and torture and exposure to the elements without food and shelter.6 In the course of this purge, the sect tortured and killed twelve of its mem- bers, most of whom were in their early twenties. Between January 1 and early February 1972, the leaders of the URA ordered the torture or execution of:

Ozaki Michio (21, male) Shindō Ryuzaburo (21, male) Namekata Masatoki (22, male) Kojima Kazuko (22, female) Toyama Mieko (25, female) Katō Yoshitaka (22, male) Teraoka Koichi (24, male) Yamazaki Jun (21, male) Ōtsuka Setsuko (23, female) Kaneko Michiyo (23, female and eight months pregnant) Yamada Takeshi (27, male) Yamamoto Junichi (28, male)

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142 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

Torturing and killing one’s own comrades, who were suddenly designated as lacking in revolutionary commitment, became a means of both proving one’s own revolutionary commitment and ensuring one’s own survival. Two others had previously been killed in August 1971, when they had tried to leave the Revolutionary Left Faction: Hayaki Yasuko (21, female) was killed in Inbanuma, and Mukaiyama Shigenori (21, male) was murdered in an apart- ment in Kodaira.

In early February 1972, Mori and Nagata left the camp in the Gunma mountains to go to Tokyo. After they left, members of the URA began to escape, fearing they would be the next one singled out to be killed. By mid- February the police began closing in on the URA. On February 19, the police arrested Mori and Nagata.

The last five remaining members of the URA were on the run, armed with rifles and explosives. They were hiding out in a mountain lodge in the Japanese Alps and had taken the wife of the owner of the lodge as a hos- tage. Between February 19 and 28, these five remaining members of URA held off over fifteen hundred riot police at the lodge, called Asama Sansō, near Karuizawa. This armed standoff and hostage- taking incident became an unprecedented television spectacle. Television news coverage of the incident began on February 19, and hundreds of media staff were on site to work the story. The continuous live televised news coverage lasted for ten hours and forty minutes and constituted an unprecedented broadcasting event in Japan’s media history that has never been surpassed in terms of its duration and ratings. At the climax of the police operation, when the “radicals were arrested and the hostage rescued,” with almost 90 percent viewer ratings, according to NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai), “almost the entire country was watching the same thing on TV.”7

The orchestration of this prolonged televised broadcast recast the URA’s form of small- scale insurgency into unprecedented national spectacle, produc- ing the hypervisibility of the actions of a handful of militant New Leftists. In the month following this standoff, as the police interrogated the incarcerated members of the URA about the whereabouts of the remaining sect members, the details of the internal purge were gradually divulged. The police immedi- ately released these details to the mass media, which promptly disseminated stories about the killings across the nation. Revelations about the URA’s mur- ders and the exhumation of corpses made the front pages of major news- papers and top stories of television news during the first half of March 1972.

The collaboration between the police and the mass media rendered the killing of these twelve Japanese as an exceptionally heinous spectacle of vio- lence. In the wake of the Asama Sansō incident, the reportage about the URA

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The grave of two victims of the United Red Army lynching incident. Asahi Shinbun, March 10, 1972.

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144 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

tied the image of armed resistance to the murder of one’s comrades. This misuse of counterviolence served to delegitimize militant leftist struggles, as these young leftist revolutionaries were portrayed as ruthless extremists. The URA incidents thus became an ideal opportunity to hegemonize the state’s monopoly on political violence. In Patricia Steinhoff’s words, “As the gory details emerged, the entire nation recoiled in shock, and the New Left was shattered.”8

The unprecedented hypervisibility of this (ab)use of revolutionary vio- lence, as an effective discursive tactic, eclipsed the incommensurate magni- tude of mass militarized massacre being perpetrated against the Vietnamese. This incident deeply disturbed the Left and New Left. Immediately follow- ing the revelation, established leftist organizations such as Zengakuren (All- Japan Students Association) publicly stated their unequivocal condemnation of these violent actions. The chairman of Zengakuren, the largest communist (anti–Japanese Communist Party) student organization, stated to the news media on March 15, 1972, that the URA and other militant groups, such as Kakumaru (Revolutionary Marxist) and Chūkaku (Middle Core), were “undermining democratic forces in Japan.”9 In the spring of 1972, the JRA members based in the Middle East condemned the activities of the URA and officially declared their disassociation from them. As a consequence of the mass media’s coverage of the lynching incidents, Nagata became arguably the most notorious and reviled woman of her era, if not throughout postwar Japanese history.

Ribu’s Critical Reframing

In March 1972, just as the news of the lynchings was breaking, ribu women from different regions of Japan confronted how the media was framing the story. Even though the news was horrific, and all the more sensational be- cause of the role of a woman in leadership, many ribu activists responded in the moment to the mass media as part of a complex and multifaceted approach to the URA. Rather than condemn or single out the URA, ūman ribu’s response was based on a broader analysis of the interconnectedness and gendered regulation of the political system. Through their alternative media, ribu activists created a counterdiscourse critically reframing the com- plex convergence represented by the URA and Nagata Hiroko.

For example, the inaugural issue of one of the long- standing ribu news- letters, From Woman to Women (Onna kara onna- tachi e) addressed the URA and its media coverage as an issue related to all women. This ribu newsletter

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R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y 145

was edited by Miki Sōko and Saeki Yōko and was published from 1972 to 1982. Writing in a regular column under the pen name “witch,” or majo, Miki Sōko critiques the coverage of the URA. She analyzes the March 11 and 12, 1972, editions of the Asahi Shinbun and argues that this kind of cov- erage by sexist male reporters “disseminates discrimination throughout the nation” and thereby “oppresses women.”10 The morning edition on March 12, for example, ran headlines such as “The Onna Called Nagata Hiroko” and “Cruelty That Even the Men Feared,” along with commentary such as “You can hardly say Nagata was a beauty.”11 Miki also critiqued the publi- cation of a roundtable composed exclusively of men, who comment on the high number of women in the URA and how they were stronger [than the men in the group].12 One of the commentators repeatedly remarks on how the URA members were very “feminine” (joseiteki) and how what transpired was due to “extreme emotions” within the group.13 Another commentator suggests that perhaps it was not Mori, but Nagata, who was at the center of the events. Another states, “Women’s participation in the movements is not only a problem for the URA, but a new problem today.”14 Because of this kind of coverage, ribu activists took to task the skewed and sexist editori- als that suggested such violence was to be blamed on women’s involvement and the feminine characteristics of the group. By responding to the gendered representations of the URA, ribu activists offered a critique of the gendered economies deployed to render aberrant particular expressions of violence, especially when they were framed as emanating from a “feminine source.”

Nagata as Female Terror

Ribu activists addressed how Nagata was displayed as a spectacle and an object of loathing for the entire nation.15 They thoroughly objected to how the media declared that Nagata was “inhuman,” “a murdering devil,” and a “witch.”16 In the newspaper and magazine photos selected to represent the story, Nagata was often portrayed with her face down, tied up with a rope around her waist like an animal as she is being escorted by the police.17

Even though Mori was captured at the same time, similar pictures of the male leader, being tied with a rope and escorted by the police, rarely appear alongside Nagata’s. Compared with the more neutral facial photos of Mori, the photos of Nagata tied up with a downcast face indicate how the media chose to portray her in such a way that her very image was meant to be seen as an object of shame. Indeed, one of the first lines of the story about her confession published by Asahi Shinbun on March 14, 1972, begins, “Even her

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Nagata Hiroko. Photograph from Asahi Shinbun, March 14, 1972.

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Mori Tsuneo. Photograph from Asahi Shinbun, May 11, 1972.

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148 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

own comrades called her an ‘old hag’ (onibabā) behind her back.”18 This kind of news reporting unabashedly emphasized Nagata’s sexual difference, as a female leader, mediating how she would be viewed by multiple publics.

Patricia Steinhoff, who has conducted extensive research on the history of the URA, also underscores the disparity in how the two URA leaders were treated: “Both the court and the public have treated Mori as a politi- cal leader whose plans went astray, they have treated Nagata as a menacing crazy- woman motivated by spite and jealousy.”19 Steinhoff further notes that the judge had a “misogynous opinion” of Nagata, describing her as possess- ing an “emotional and aggressive personality, she is suspicious and jealous, and to these are added the female characteristics of obstinacy, spitefulness, and cruel sadism.”20 That such a gendered discourse was used to condemn Nagata highlights the degree to which her actions were being interpreted through a debased view of her sex. The ribu women clearly understood that treating and blaming Nagata as the source of the problem was a means to attack women more generally. These examples of the sexist discourse used to condemn Nagata contextualize the significance of ribu’s intervention.

The ribu movement was forming in the midst of the breakdown of the New Left. The planning for the first major ribu conference was ongoing just as the March news of URA incidents was revealed. In the newsletters leading up to the May 1972 Ribu Conference, many women took up the thematic of the URA right alongside issues such as unmarried mothers, abortion, women who kill their children (kogoroshi no onna), contraception, and child raising. They considered the problem of women engaging in different forms of vio- lence as connected with other political problems.

It is important to consider the various problems of daily life, seeing the problems of sexual discrimination, the problem of how to organize the movement and what form the struggle against authority should take, and the pain that Nagata Hiroko experiences as an onna alongside each other.21

Rather than seeing Nagata as an aberration, ribu understood her as caught within a matrix of interconnected political issues, a symptom of how state violence and leftist political violence, sexual discrimination, and movement organizing had collided in a self- destructive cycle. Alongside a much needed critique of the sexist and misogynist discourse of the mass media, ūman ribu forwarded a timely and trenchant critique of the URA tragedy as a cata- strophic outcome of the masculinism of the New Left and the state.22 As dis- cussed throughout chapter 2, the ribu women questioned and critiqued the

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R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y 149

masculinist culture of the New Left and how revolutionary action was con- flated with one’s willingness to engage in violent action against symbols of the state (such as politicians and police).23 Ribu women drew the connections and parallels between the masculinist values of the power structure, the New Left, and the mass media.24 A ribu activist named Kazu states that both the New Left and the state are engaged in a power struggle “based on the same set of values which is a fight between men to seize power and authority.”25 Therefore, any woman who tries to continue working within this thoroughly masculinist structure would eventually be found to be “counterrevolutionary.”

Along with their criticism of the New Left, ribu women recognized their relative proximity and relationality with them, as their progenitors. In this connection, another ribu pamphlet states:

There is no way that it should be said that ribu has no relationship to the New Left. Surely, the first thing that can be said that it [the New Left] was the parent that spawned and gave birth to ribu, and the fact that it has manifested such an aspect and broke down, with other parts in shock and struggling to survive, is a serious situation for ribu as well.26

Thus, rather than conceiving of themselves as somehow outside of or un- tainted by its politics, along with its strident critique of the New Left, ribu activists recognized their own political genealogy and formation in relation to the New Left.

In addition to their critique of the media’s sexist representations of Nagata and the masculinist culture of the New Left, ribu activists had to respond to the many ways the mass media linked the URA with ūman ribu. Nagata’s leading role provided a facile means to sensationalize the event, and her role as a female leader became a convenient way to connect and conflate ūman ribu with the URA. Miki Sōko also points out that the evening edition of the Asahi Shinbun (March 11, 1972) reported that one of the members of the JRA was also a member of the Group of Fighting Women, ribu’s most well- known group.27 Although this information was not accurate, in this way, the mass media linked the URA and ūman ribu in multiple ways.28 Linking ribu to the URA was a way to prevent some women from joining the move- ment, by casting ūman ribu as a “dangerous” affiliate of the URA. The ribu women recognized that this was an attempt to cast a shadow over ūman ribu and malign the image of women’s participation in revolutionary politics. The conflation of ūman ribu’s politics with the URA suggested that horrible things happened when women become too strong and too powerful, deflect- ing a broader critique of the masculinism of the New Left and the state.

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150 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

Critical Solidarity

Even as they maintained their critique of the masculinism of the New Left and URA’s militaristic tactics, many ribu activists supported the women of the URA, understanding the significance of this juncture and what was at stake. Based on their critical analysis of the URA, as symptomatic of the masculin- ism of the New Left and the state, and their supportive actions for the women involved, I describe this distinctive relationality as a feminist praxis of critical solidarity and radical inclusivity. The key words used in ribu’s discourse and alternative media to describe their relation to the women of the URA were shien, meaning support or backup, and kyūen, generally referring to rescue and relief work, in contrast to the term for solidarity (rentai).29Although the ribu women were critical of the philosophy and practices of the URA, they still engaged in a wide range of supportive political action for the women of the URA that not only constituted rescue and relief work but, I would argue, went beyond merely rescuing those in critical condition as the con- demned and rendered socially dead through their criminalization. Through their political actions, they produced a new form of relationality with these criminalized subjects.

Ribu’s collective actions to support the women of the URA can be theo- rized as a radical feminist practice of solidarity based on how ribu activists sought to identify as onna with the other onna of the URA. Ribu activists readily understood that Nagata’s treatment and condemnation was insepa- rable from her identity as an onna,30 which was in turn linked to the general- ity of onna.31 Reflecting on their actions toward the URA, in the mid- 1990s, Mori Setsuko stated, “We wanted to point out that these women [of the URA] were being criminalized for being onna. . . . We were not supporting the philosophy of URA. We were supporting the onna that was already being condemned as onna.”32 Nagata was being condemned not simply because of her actions but because she was an onna who had stepped far beyond the acceptable boundaries for women to act. In the context of the 1970s, based on her position of power over men in a paramilitary organization, Nagata embodied a subversion, if not what some might consider a perversion, of gender roles. Even in the context of revolutionary praxis, she was a gender- nonconforming anomaly.

Even as they completely rejected the use of violence against one’s own comrades, ribu activists stridently objected to the ways in which the state and the male- dominated media attempted to dehumanize the members of the URA and cast Nagata as some kind of female monster or witch. In her expla- nation as to why they organized in support of the URA, activist Namahara

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R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y 151

Reiko (“Nora”) emphasizes, “These people were not considered human.”33 Ribu activists were concerned with how other middle- class Japanese women were abjected and dehumanized through this process of criminalization. The fact that Nagata engaged in this form of political violence was an opportu- nity to amplify the criminalization of violent women as particularly heinous, rendering her status as a woman at once both questionable and yet the basis of her condemnation. Rather than disavowing or disassociating from her, Nagata was treated as an onna who had committed a fatal and tragic series of mistakes and as an important opportunity to question the conditions that could compel any woman to act as Nagata did.34

Ribu activists were motivated by a radical feminist logic that sought to affirm their own sex and revolutionize their immediate surroundings; they identified with other Japanese women who could be interpreted as rebel women committing mutiny against the dominant system. In doing so, they articulated a bold new approach to violence expressed by women. Akin to how the ribu women declared solidarity (rentai) with women who killed their children— while they in no way advocated killing children— ribu women understood the larger political discursive structure that had to be rejected and intervened upon. As seen through ribu’s solidarity with women who killed their children (discussed in chapter 1), ribu refused the complete repression and disavowal of women’s inherent capacity for violence, which then neces- sitated their pathologization, rendering violent women aberrant. By sup- porting the women of the URA and declaring solidarity with mothers who killed their children, ribu activists engaged in a form of feminist support and solidarity that was nevertheless critical of the context and effects of in- terpersonal and structural violence. Even though ribu activists did not agree with these women’s actions, they chose to support these women on the basis of their broader feminist concerns regarding the conditions that led these women to express their violent potential. Ribu’s form of feminist identifica- tion included active support of violent women and violent mothers who were criminalized and condemned by dominant society. Insofar as violence was thoroughly regulated through gendered economies, ribu women interpreted the expression of violence by women as necessarily political.

This praxis of critical support and solidarity is based on a broader analy- sis of the interconnectedness of the political system that illuminated the con- nections between the gendering of state power and authority, as maintained through violent domination, and how this gendering infected the culture of the Japanese New Left. Ribu took issue with this ideological gendering of domination that made violent physical domination of bodies a normalized

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152 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

form of expression for men in power but rendered it aberrant for women. They sought to expose how both the men who govern the nation and certain members of the New Left were upholding the same form of armed, lethal military power as the chosen and most valued tactic. Ribu intellectuals Saeki, Miki, and Mizoguchi summarize the URA as a militant group that empha- sized that “it is the gun that creates the party” and sought to “battle to the death with guns.”35 Such a reductive and destructive approach to revolution- ary change was antithetical to ribu’s all- encompassing approach to social transformation and desire to prioritize human relationality. Their use of the terms shien (support) and kyūen (rescue and relief), instead of rentai, mark this political distinction in their approach to revolution as a representational strategy that signified a constitutive distinction.36

Radical Inclusivity

Ribu’s feminist approach self- reflexively embraced the problem of the URA as its own. In so doing, ribu engaged in a challenging form of critical soli- darity, a praxis I call radical inclusivity. In March 1972, Mori Setsuko, a core ribu activist, stated, “I think that the essence exposed by the URA is actu- ally within each one of us, and within me.”37 In making such a statement, Mori approaches the violence expressed by URA and the complicity of the other URA women in that violence as a means to examine the self and locate the other within the self, enacting a self- reflexive form of radical inclusivity that enables solidarity and a complex political identification with these other women. Rather than disidentify or disassociate from the women of the URA, this was seen as an important opportunity to question the conditions that had compelled them to act as they did. Similarly, veteran ribu activist Yonezu Tomoko states why she went to the URA hearings:

We wanted them to have a proper trial, because if it was rushed, there would be no chance for the causes of what happened to be made clear. When I went to the public hearings, I thought about . . . what was the difference between me and those women standing there as defendants, not only just Nagata Hiroko, but also some younger women who did not have much of a leadership role in the group. . . . Fortunately, I was in a university where the New Left guys were more flexible . . . so we were able to make a women’s- only group. But what would have happened if I were in a university where there were only people who were more like Nagata and her people? My reality was that I did not go in that direction, but there was a possibility that I could have walked down that path. . . . I could sense how awful it was for those defendants standing there, and wondered

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how they would be able to go on with their lives, and so I could not allow myself to avert my eyes from them.38

In this case, Yonezu’s gaze is not one that objectifies but that seeks ways to connect with these women. Both Mori’s and Yonezu’s explanations highlight how ribu’s discourse and actions sought to interrogate and emphasize the potential commonality, as well as differences, they had with the women of the URA. They recognized that they too could have become entangled in such misguided violence had they not been fortunate enough to start a life- affirming movement like ribu that valued relationality with other onna. They therefore related to the women of the URA not as abjected others but sought to understand and imagine what they experienced, and they reflected deeply about the root causes of such violence. Ribu’s approach to violence was thus highly self- reflexive (and self- critical), for they did not simply reject and dis- avow the potentiality of such violence within themselves. Critical solidarity involves a praxis of political identification based on a philosophy of existence that emphasizes the contingency of one’s life and destiny and the realiza- tion of one’s potential commonality with the other, including the potential expression of violence.

Ribu did not have the luxury to philosophize about the URA from a safe distance. Because of the tactics deployed by the mass media, the battle over the representation of the URA became the terrain of ribu’s own struggle. Not only was ribu falsely connected by the media to the URA, but a few ribu women had various kinds of connections with the URA. As addressed later, Nagata Hiroko had solicited Tanaka to work with them prior to the lynch- ing incidents.39 Ribu’s response to the URA was thus infused with multiple agendas and dangers.

In the wake of the May 1972 Ribu Conference, women from five ribu groups together established the Ribu Shinjuku Center in September 1972.40 Alongside their activism on a myriad of interrelated issues, ribu women contin- ued their support for the women of the URA. One woman, who is described in the Ribu News as a member of the Group of Fighting Women, had a previous connection with members of the URA.41 Her movement name was Kunihisa Kazuko. She was arrested on July 18, 1972, under the suspicion of aiding and concealing Nagata Hiroko and Sakaguchi Hiroshi. Sakaguchi was another leader of the URA, who was married to Nagata and involved in the lynching incidents. Rather than trying to disassociate from or disown Kunihisa, the ribu women organized to support her case.42 Even though Kunihisa was ac- cused of concealing Nagata and Sakaguchi in April 1971, more than half a year before the internal purge, the media coverage of her arrest deliberately

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overlapped the story with the lynching incidents. In this manner, the media linked ūman ribu with the URA, casting ribu in the shadows of the URA. The ribu women recognized that such reportage was an attempt to use the violence of URA as an opportunity to destroy their own movement by “blur- ring the distinction between the existing struggles and ribu.”43

The inaugural edition of the Ribu News, published in September 1972 from the Shinjuku Center, ran a full- page article by Kunihisa called “The Gap between the Popular Image and Reality.” Kunihisa describes her expe- rience— as a mother of two— of being arrested on July 18, while her child was at home with her.44 The article discusses in detail how she was detained, interrogated, and indicted by the police and her emotional state throughout this process until she was released on bail on August 16, 1972. The largest- circulating newspaper of the ribu movement (with a circulation of several thousand copies) thus publicized ribu’s support of and relationship with Kunihisa and, in doing so, reframed and shed light on her (contingent) re- lationship with the leaders of the URA. Kunihisa’s voice and perspective, articulated through the Ribu News, enabled the reader to connect with her experience as an “ordinary woman and mother.” Kunihisa speaks of her struggle between her conflicting desires to keep her political integrity on the one hand (by not giving the police any information) and her worries about her children, on the other hand, due to her near month- long detainment.45 The space enabled by the Ribu News forged vital connections and a means of relating to a criminalized onna, in this case, Kunihisa, and understanding how Kunihisa was related to Nagata and Sakaguchi. Generating Kunihisa’s discourse enabled a recognition of how the fate of one woman and her crimi- nalization is connected to others.

Alongside Kunihisa’s own account, Yonezu writes an article titled “From the Side That Supports Kunihisa- san”46 in which she emphasizes a kind of relationality that was core to the politics of ribu. This relationship recognizes subjective agency but also emphasizes the degree to which coincidental fac- tors beyond one’s control also determine the course of one’s life.47 Yonezu concludes her article by saying, “We want to move forward by treating these women’s achievements and past mistakes as the accumulated resources of onna’s struggle.”48 In this manner, rather than repressing onna’s errors and mistakes, Yonezu includes them and critically embraces them as lessons for the future of the struggle. Critical solidarity thus involves a praxis of politi- cal identification that recognizes the inevitable imperfections and mistakes involved in any struggle.

On January 20, 1973, the Shinjuku Center organized a teach- in called On the Support of Nagata Hiroko.49 This meeting became the starting point of a

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support group for the women of the URA composed of many of the women of the Shinjuku Center and other non-ribu movement activists. The full name of this group was How Much of the Essence of the Thing Can We Hone In on by Supporting the Women Defendants of the United Red Army. The long, circuitous name of the group reflected the group’s inquisitive and deliber- ately measured stance toward their support activities, and it demonstrates how critical solidarity emphasizes that the “essence of the problem” extends beyond the individuals involved in an act of violence. Rather than individual- izing acts of violence, this approach analyzed violence as exceeding the indi- vidual and not being reducible to group dynamics of the militant New Left. The group’s titling also signals a radical Marxist approach— questioning the question— aligning this feminist politic with that of the New Left it also criticized.

This group began to print a newsletter called Ashura in February 1973, with the contact address of the Ribu Shinjuku Center. Naming the newsletter Ashura invoked the image of a well- known Buddhist guardian deity (deva) with three faces and six hands, serving as a reminder of how one body can possesses many faces.50 One of its first newsletters printed Nagata’s own ap- peal that she wrote while in detention on February 13, 1973.51 In this appeal, Nagata writes in bold language, expressing a determined fighting stance.52 Nagata states that she knows the trial of the URA and the special policies the court is trying to institute to rush the process is part of a larger “counter- revolutionary campaign” to target “extremist groups.”53 In her appeal, she explains why she and other URA defendants are protesting the proceedings of the court, through a hunger strike, because of how the authorities are try- ing to hasten the duration of the trial. Nagata writes:

From within this trial which is all about an ideological struggle (shisō tōso), I will endeavor to continue thinking about the death of my fifteen comrades. I want to move forward in my life struggle from within this con- text. I think that our struggle is one part of the class struggle.54

Printing Nagata’s own appeal from a newsletter emanating from the Ribu Shinjuku Center linked the voice of the most maligned woman of the era with one of the main centers of the women’s liberation movement. This collec- tive thus provided support for a woman who was fighting without hesitation or apology against the authorities even though her tactics may have been fatally wrongheaded. The cogency and analytic urgency of Nagata’s appeal contrasts sharply with the media representations of her as a menacing crazy woman given to fits of hysteria.

Ashura calls for a rally with the declaration: “We Will Not Allow Them

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to Use the United Red Army Trial to Promote Fascism,” forwarding a bold and unflinching critique of the state. But in contrast to this strident style of political writing, what characterizes many of Ashura’s articles is the non- jargonistic, down- to- earth style of its prose:

We started our actions, moving forward with baby steps. We take our time to figure out what we can do. . . . What is necessary to do at this time? . . . We attended the public hearings and visited them at the Tokyo Detention Center. . . . Others came after school and after work, and stayed to help make pamphlets, rubbing their sleepy eyes.55

Articles such as “Why We Bring Our Children to the United Red Army Hear- ings” argued against the assumption that ribu women were endangering their children by bringing them to the hearings and questioned how such a trial can be more dangerous than living in a society where children have been known to die from food contaminated by toxins.56 These articles thus forwarded a logic that went against the dominant narratives that sought to set apart and render hypervisible the URA as though they were a group of loathsome criminals. They expressed how “ordinary,” rather than radical or extreme, supporting the women of the Red Army should be. In an article titled “Why We Are Supporting the Women Defendants,”57 the author expresses her sense that “next, they are going to come after me.” Refusing to single out Nagata or the URA as dangerous extremists, ribu’s counterdiscourse consistently di- rects its critical lens on a system that continues to “threaten our existence,” underscoring a political subjectivity and ontology based on a collective form of existence.58

Ashura also served to document the various support activities this group engaged in, which included corresponding with the defendants, responding to relevant inquiries from other parts of the country, and collecting donations to support their legal defense.59 In addition to visiting them at the detention center and attending the hearings, the ribu women and other supporters went to bear witness to all the irregularities of the proceedings and to keep a record of them.60 Even though the hearings were formally public, the authorities tried to control who could enter and created special kinds of restrictions that were not part of the normal procedures. For example, the court required all those who came as spectators to the hearings to undergo a body search.61 In these ways, the creation of such special procedures to deal with the URA hearings signaled the way the state would continue to increase its forms of control and policing, using the URA as an example of why the state must take extreme and invasive measures to rid society of such left- wing threats to national security.

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The choice and commitment by ribu activists to continue an affiliation with this underground revolutionary sect—which was condemned by so many— points to how their principles of collectivity went against what would typi- cally be considered more pragmatic tactics. A more pragmatic feminist ap- proach may have involved publicly condemning the actions of the women of the URA as masculinist and distancing and isolating them as violent ex- tremists. Their affiliation with the URA rendered the ribu women the objects of police surveillance and ribu centers the target of police raids.62 By going to the hearings and visiting them at the detention centers, the ribu women moved their bodies into physical proximity with the women of the URA. In doing so, they risked being identified as part of the URA networks and placed their lives in the line of a state- orchestrated criminalizing gaze.63 Rather than staying within the comforts of the middle- class mainstream, their relatively privileged position as middle- class Japanese women enabled this kind of po- litical action whereby they could choose to make themselves vulnerable to the state.

Through a combination of coincidence and subjective will, the women of ribu found themselves in the crossfire of a decisive struggle in Japanese political history. Ribu’s decision to support the women of the URA was a dif- ficult, if not precarious, action for the movement, but all the more profound given the political climate at the time. This willingness to embrace those who were criminalized and not considered human was ribu’s most dangerous encounter.

Tanaka Mitsu and Her Philosophy

As she watched the New Left face its demise, Tanaka Mitsu forced herself to continue writing during the spring of 1972. Over the course of about forty days and nights, Tanaka struggled to complete her book To Women with Spirit: A Disorderly Theory of Women’s Liberation (Inochi no onna- tachi e: torimidashi ūman ribu ron).64 Described as the monumental text of the ribu movement, To Women with Spirit remains the most widely read book of the ribu era.65 Tanaka’s philosophy of liberation is woven into this highly per- sonalized text alongside her critique of the New Left, the URA, and Nagata Hiroko.66

Tanaka articulated a philosophy of liberation that departed from a par- ticular understanding of onna’s subjectivity and ontology. Tanaka’s notions of torimidashi, contingency, violence, relationality (kankeisei), and eros are all important principles in understanding onna’s ontology as a desiring sub- ject. Tanaka philosophy of liberation and onna involved a complex approach

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to different manifestations of violence constituting a distinct feminist epis- temology and ontology. Through this analysis of Tanaka’s critical approach to different forms of violence, I argue that it serves as a point of departure to reconceive the relationship between violence and feminist subjects.

Tanaka’s earliest manifestos spoke of a political subject who was not sin- gular in her desires but existed in the tension of her conflicted and contradic- tory desires. Tanaka referred to this subject as the here- existing onna (koko ni iru onna) in contrast to the nonexistent fantasy woman (doko ni mo inai onna). This here- existing onna sensed her miserable and wretched condition and could no longer bear to continue to live according to a heterosexist sys- tem that defined her as either a nurturing sacrificial wife and mother or a toilet for male sexual desire.67 She was a split subject: split between living a lie and sensing that lie, knowing she lived a performance and not knowing herself as a living woman, knowing there must be something other than what she was living but not knowing how to become that not- yet- living woman. She was caught between sensing her oppression and knowing she participated in the system that (re)produced her oppression, between learning to survive in the system and finding pleasure in her unfulfilled, unfree condition. This subject did not and could not know herself, because she had never been free to be herself. Regarding “the here- existing onna,” who existed in her state of con- tradiction and chaos, Tanaka writes,

Within each person, there are different intentions that contradict each other, and because they shift back and forth, you have this essential derangement and disorder. Therefore, from the outset it is impossible to express one’s real intent with words. That momentary constantly shifting real intention (honne) can only at moments be expressed as torimidashi— chaos, derangement and disorder.68

This condition of perpetual contradiction that Tanaka describes as torimi- dashi was the essence of what it meant to live as a human. Tanaka sensed that the orderly and abstract theories about human liberation failed to encompass what it meant to live as an onna in this condition of derangement. It was this existential inquiry, a conscious turning toward the painful and contradictory condition of one’s existence, that produced Tanaka’s conception of libera- tion as a chaotic and disorderly process. This sense of disorder is expressed in the subtitle of her book. Contradiction and derangement were at the core of a subject’s ontological condition. Tanaka’s conception of subjective and collective action for ribu was captured in her oft repeated phrase “torimidashi tsu tsu,” which referred to this continual state of disorder and derangement.

For Tanaka, the way the Left privileged its theories of liberation over prac-

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tice and lived experience was symptomatic of a masculinist modality that would rather exclude, repress, or deny the importance of this condition of perpetual contradiction or the significance of the visceral differences of wom- an’s sex. One of the reasons for Tanaka’s desire and will to assert this princi- ple as the core of subjectivity derives from her assertion about the anarchistic tendencies of woman’s sex. For Tanaka, this core essence of women’s sex as anarchistic was a potential counterhegemonic force against the orderly forces of modern capitalism and a masculinist and male- centered civil society.69

To begin to know and recover herself, the here- existing onna had to con- front herself and the misery of her life condition. In doing so, she would realize that her subjective condition did not originate or emanate solely from within herself but also formed from the outside by the system that consti- tuted her as a social being. Tanaka held that the here- existing onna must turn away from the forces that negate her and look elsewhere for her definition of who she is and who she will become. She needed to learn how to affirm and live as the here- existing onna.70 She must affirm herself not as a perfect revolutionary subject but rather, in her totality, as an imperfect, contradictory subject, for there was no other place of departure other than the here- existing onna. Therefore, Tanaka’s concept of the revolutionary subject was precisely that of the imperfect subject who was necessarily constituted by contradic- tory and even conflicting desires.

Tanaka’s theory of liberation called for an episteme of the self, an episteme that recognized and confronted one’s own state of contradiction and rela- tionship with violence. Tanaka’s theorization of violence provides a striking contrast with common feminist conceptions of violence as inherently mas- culine or as a manifestation of male dominance.71 One’s own contradictori- ness, excess, and otherness were linked to the conception of relationality and how one encounters the other. Tanaka rejected the dominant definitions of the “individual” based on binary models that separated and hierarchized the mind/body, theory/experience, rationality/sexuality. Part of Tanaka’s project was to displace this paradigm of the individual by theorizing through and centering the body- of- contradiction of the here- existing onna. For Tanaka, a capitalist society that alienates, divides, and splits subjects into categories of the “individual,” the productive and nonproductive, and cuts off relationality (kankeisei) according to the logic of capitalist productivity, was cruel and in- herently violent. Thus, Tanaka did not emphasize individual acts of violence but rather the violence of the system.

Tanaka speaks of various kinds of violence that differ in each context. In To Women with Spirit, in one passage, Tanaka writes about her desire for vio lence as a desire to be able to express her own violence, because she

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felt that as a woman she was not able to adequately express the violence that she knew resided within her. Tanaka’s articulation of her desire to express her own violence suggests that she does not idealize nonviolence, but rather, depending on the context, she sees and recognizes the efficacy of expressions of violence, particularly in the case of self- defense. “One thing that I don’t quite have that I want is violence (bōryokusei). Perhaps my very existence is violent but within me what is lacking is its concrete expression that one can understand such as the raised fist.”72 Tanaka makes this statement as she recalls how her father would beat her and her mother. Growing up, Tanaka lived in fear of her father’s violence until the day she fought back. Tanaka’s experience of using counterviolence against her father’s violence protected and validated her existence. Her own use of counter violence was, in this case, a form of self- defense used to stop the perpetuation of domestic interper- sonal violence against her and her mother.73 Insofar as she describes it as an effective means to break that cycle of domestic violence, she represents this form of counterviolence as seemingly having a desirable or positive effect. Therefore, the use of such counterviolence must be interpreted or attributed value according to its context. Nowhere does Tanaka advocate that such par- ticular uses of violence are generalizable as an ultimate principle for political action.

In another passage in To Women with Spirit, Tanaka writes about her ex- citement as she watches her first uchigeba (intra- /intersectarian violent con- flict) between the men of two left sects, Kakumaru (Revolutionary Marxist) and the JRA. Even though the young men from the JRA were well outnum- bered, they won. At that time, Tanaka was with a Kakumaru man, watching from a distance.74 When the fight was over, she recalls feeling repulsed by what she realized was her disdain of her companion’s lack of virility. Her reflections about her own desires and the lure of violence mirror her fantasies about masculinity and how that fantasy constitutes her own sense of femi- ninity and heterosexual desire.75 Through her inclusion of these anecdotes, Tanaka implicates herself and attempts an articulation of her location as a woman in the desire for violence and how it is linked to her fantasies about masculinity and power. Thus, even though she critiques these men, she places herself in intimate proximity and relation with those whom she criticizes. Tanaka’s analysis of the contradictoriness and fantasy- driven dynamic of her desire speaks to a fundamental inconsistency of desire as a force that is always potentially dangerous.

Philosopher Ukai Satoshi states, “The fundamental task of the current era is how to evaluate the differences among violences.”76 This task would involve an elaboration of what Randall Williams describes as “a defense of

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the ethicality of using violence as a strategic method— and when, where and under what conditions such strategic actions might be deemed both necessary and morally justifiable.”77 In this connection, I would add that when a subject is always already constituted within, by, and through a matrix of historical, structural, and systemic violence, this underarticulated historicity of vio- lence can serve as the ontological basis and epistemic point of departure for a feminist ethics of violence. Therefore, in certain contexts, such as the ones described earlier, violence can be interpreted as exerting a particular set of effects and can be precariously open to different kinds of interpretations. In one instance, it is deployed and narrativized as self- defense, and in another, it serves to shore up dominant fantasies of masculinity. Tanaka’s self- reflexive and critical discourse offers a means to consider the productivity of a feminist ethics of violence that examines the subject’s historicity, positionality, and desires as constituted by differentiated relations of violence and power.

Tanaka went beyond what was typical among leftist discourses at the time by elaborating a gendered analysis of the violence of the right and the left and the violence within and between women themselves. In her earliest mani- festos, Tanaka pointed to the contiguity of Japanese women’s structural rela- tionship to heinous forms of violence against other colonized Asian women, speaking of the relationship of the “chastity of the wives of the military nation” in direct relation to “the dirtied pussies of the comfort women.”78 Even if there is no direct physical manifestation of violence by an individual Japanese woman against the comfort women, we should recognize histori- cal and structural violence that produces their positionalities in a structure of correlation. In her writings, Tanaka makes it clear that Japanese women (notably the middle class) are also oppressors in the system, playing a dis- tinct role in reproducing men as slave workers under capitalism. According to Tanaka, women were not only participants who reproduced a violent so- cial structure: beyond being subjects that reproduced violent social effects, a potential for violence was inherent to the specificity of a woman’s body and being, to the particularity of her sex.

As noted in chapter 1, for Tanaka, the womb was not only the symbolic and material site of the creation of new life, it was also the origin of violence. Tanaka conceptualized the womb as the place that carried the grudge (怨) of women’s history, containing forces that were generative and violent. By positing a woman’s womb as a source of potential violence, Tanaka sug- gests the female body is no longer seen as only a victim of external violence but bears the potential to become a force of destruction and death. Thus, women are not separate from violence; rather, a potential for violence is lo- cated within women. By theorizing the female body as a site and source of

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violence, Tanaka’s ontology leads to profoundly different conclusions than feminist discourses that almost exclusively posit women as the victims of male violence.

Tanaka saw the capacity and desire for violence and revenge in the bod- ies of all women, and she spoke of the capacity for violence as inherent to women’s sex, as part of her will to power and her will to survive. Therefore, women who killed were not depraved or aberrant but were expressing a force both within them and beyond them. Rather than trying to speak to why women killed, Tanaka asks, What is it that keeps us from becoming murderers?

Isn’t having to exist in this society itself already agony enough? How can we go on living without engaging in such dishonorable tactics such as attacking men, attacking women, attacking children, and attacking ourselves?79

“I am not going to attack, I do not want to attack when the other/enemy is off guard” is the title of one of the sections of Tanaka’s book on the disorderly theory of women’s liberation. This contemplation of whether to attack the other expresses the force and singularity of Tanaka’s philosophy of libera- tion. Tanaka’s capacity to tarry with violence, and the desires for and against committing violence, and the contradiction and contingency between these desires are distinctive features of her feminist philosophy of liberation and also relate to this radical inclusivity of contradiction and chaos within the subject. Tanaka’s conceptualization of violence contours her texts not only as eruptions or obstacles on the way to liberation but also as the interminable reality of human subjectivity and power struggle and therefore not only un- avoidable but integral to the movement of liberation.

Tanaka says that what prevents people from taking out their revenge against others is that they have become numb to their pain and numb to the real violence of society; they deceive themselves into thinking they are all right, that they are living “in the light.”80 The majority of people refuse to confront the fundamental violence of society and also refuse to confront themselves, for doing so would bring them face to face with their own rela- tionship to violence. A confrontation with the self requires an understanding of who one is in society and how one is supposed to live.

The meaningful potentiality of Tanaka’s oeuvre to liberation inheres in becoming a subject that is open to this kind of self- identification, which be- comes a way to identify with the other. Tanaka’s theorization involved a radical pursuit of the other within the self, which became a way to forge a radical relationship to the other beyond the self. It is through this inward turn that

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a subject confronts one’s own violence and realizes that one could have be- come a child killer or a “Nagata Hiroko.” It is this same inward turn that leads to new possibilities of conceiving and embodying liberation. Because no one was beyond or outside the violence of the system, it was crucial to grasp one’s own relationship to violence and one’s position in a violent sys- tem.81 Tanaka was thus open to identify with and theorize a relationship to various expressions of violence. She therefore did not see violence as an aber- ration, or essentially evil, nor was it something that could be totally repressed or expunged from society. Although she recognized that violence was part of the struggle for liberation, Tanaka also refused to idealize or advocate violence as the ideal way to achieve liberation. Although violence was part of the ineluctable condition of existence and struggle, Tanaka recognized the multiple and relational consequences of violence. Tanaka’s grasp of the subject’s relationship to violence was why violence was not idealized or rei- fied but understood as integral to the perpetual condition of struggle and therefore something to be understood and judged according to its context, its relational causes and effects. As a radical feminist movement, an integral aspect of ribu’s liberation praxis was predicated on struggling toward an identification and relationality with the existential possibility that one could have become that other, whether that other be a child- killing onna or an even more notorious woman such as Nagata Hiroko.

Tanaka and Nagata

Tanaka states that she began her ribu because she was disgusted with the kind of revolution espoused by the New Left. In her words, ribu was the “demon child” (onigo) of the New Left— a painful birth that was well past its due date. In her dealings with the New Left, Tanaka writes about her observations of the JRA. Having been asked to allow members of the JRA to stay at her apartment (as was common practice among leftist activists at the time), she had the chance to observe the JRA up close. She writes, “Their lines sounded great, but they did not give a damn about me even though I was proposing to organize. What the hell kind of revolutionaries are they?!! . . . It was from this kind of anger that I began my ribu.”82

Immediately following the first ribu camp (gasshuku), held in August 1971, Tanaka received a call from Nagata Hiroko.83 Because their sect was already under surveillance by the police, Nagata’s group was looking for other groups to assist them. Nagata invited Tanaka to their mountain base to stay overnight to observe their “extralegal activities” (非合法活動).84 Tanaka states that although she had no interest in covert activities, at this

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point, she agreed to meet with them. Although she had never met Nagata before, Tanaka states she was “curious” about this woman who symbolized a “woman revolutionary.”85 According to Nagata’s account, from the time they met, Tanaka expressed her criticisms of the JRA. Nagata writes in her mem- oirs that it was clear that “Tanaka’s group would not support any kind of armed struggle that did not have the support of the masses.”86 Tanaka states she could not even consider merging with them because she could already see that this group did not grasp the difference between reality and their dream of “simultaneous world revolution.”87

Having met Nagata and other members of the JRA, Tanaka was shocked by news of the lynchings.88 She had met many of the members face to face when she visited the mountain camp.89 Tanaka’s trauma from these events would haunt her for years.90 Decades later, Tanaka recounts the unforgettable laughter and smile of Kaneko Michiyo, who was eight months pregnant.91 She began writing To Women with Spirit in the wake of these revelations and would reiterate her explanations for years to come. In To Women with Spirit, she begins her chapter about ribu and the New Left as if she sees the body of twenty- three- year- old pregnant Kaneko, who was killed by Nagata and Mori in the purge.

The tragically brutalized corpse of an eight month pregnant woman emerged from the other side of the fluorescent light. It was frightening. Whether it is the corporate logic of productivity or the logic of the pro- ductivity of revolution— they equally abhor woman’s menstruation. It is not the United Red Army that scares me. To live on in this society is for me what is frightening.92

This quote captures the radical inclusivity of Tanaka’s style of discourse, encompassing a critical analysis of the relationality of unnecessary death, capitalism, revolution, menstruation, misogyny, and fear. In an article pub- lished in 2009, thirty- seven years after the incidents, Tanaka explains, “I loathed Nagata. But even as I was shaking from disgust and fear, as I watched Nagata being lynched by the media, I asked myself, can I just let this go on?”93 Tanaka describes how, because Nagata was being treated like a devil and a witch by the media, and because the rest of the nation had fallen silent from fear, despite her shock and horror, she could not remain silent.94 Of the incident, Tanaka wrote,

The bizarre incident that happened in the middle of the mountains was one of the effects of the lies of this society that insists that a woman must exert herself “twice that of a man” in order to rise in the ranks in this male- dominated society.95

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According to Tanaka, Nagata was a woman who, like other career women, had to outdo men in order to prove her worth. But this base competition with men, whether it be in mainstream society or in the New Left, forced women to become like men and to compete within masculinist economies. Within the New Left, the women of ribu had already criticized how the very meaning of revolution had been defined by men, and Nagata was caught in this com- petition of proving herself within the economy of revolutionary violence. Tanaka writes, “Nagata martyred herself to the justice of man’s revolution, although it might be said that she was crueler than the other men, she had to exert twice the power.”96 Nagata was caught up in performing a role defined by a masculinist subculture and in becoming the ideal revolutionary who out- did the men in her ranks. But even though Nagata may have been exceptional in her accomplishments by outdoing men, Tanaka argues that the desire that drove Nagata was symptomatic of women (and men) who seek recognition within male- centered economies. In Nagata’s case, this economy was based on proving and measuring one’s commitment through “revolutionary vio- lence,” which became a self- destructive quotient.

Immediately after the incidents in 1972, in To Women with Spirit, Tanaka wrote, “All those women who wag their tails to please men are Nagata Hirokos.”97 This desire to flatter men by demonstrating one’s self- sacrificing devotion was not, however, a quality that was singular to Nagata: “Insofar as women exert themselves outdoing men in order to ‘subjectively’ carry out the men’s theories of revolution, they are all Nagata Hirokos.”98 In forward- ing this argument, Tanaka sought to lay bare the contagiousness of a male- identified logic that motivates many women to act as they do to compete for the (revolutionary) male gaze. Tanaka writes that Nagata’s determina- tion to prove her own revolutionary intent was what compelled her to the point of denying and disidentifying with her own sex. Nagata had become what Tanaka theorized as the nonexisting woman (doko ni mo inai onna), a woman who proved herself by denying the nature of her sex and the contra- dictions of her sex to become a woman who does not exist.99

Tanaka as Nagata

In Nagata’s Sixteen Graves, her memoirs written from prison, she reflects on her past.100 Nagata writes that she came from a background in which she was never able to openly deal with her sex, and it became, more than anything, a shameful thing for her. Moreover, Nagata had been unable to deal adequately with the sexual violence she experienced in her sect at the hands of its male leader, Kawashima Tsuyoshi. In August 1969, Nagata was working late at

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166 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

Kawashima’s home when his wife was away. That night, Kawashima raped Nagata.101 In response to her rape, Nagata writes, “I ignored my character (jinkaku) as a woman. . . . I could not at that time possess any demands or realize myself as a woman.”102 Nagata’s discourse contrasts starkly with ribu’s approach to the indivisibility of onna’s identity, her sexuality, and her liberation.

According to Patricia Steinhoff, Nagata’s sect took the position that “women’s liberation required women to be revolutionaries first and women second.”103 But it was precisely this kind of separation or bifurcation that Tanaka and the ribu women rejected in terms of the essential indivisibil- ity of being an onna and what it meant to be a revolutionary. They felt it was a grave mistake to base one’s politics on the notion that one’s iden- tity as a woman should or could be repressed so that one could be a “pure revolutionary”— a doko ni mo inai onna— a non existing onna. Tanaka sensed that Nagata failed to recognize how she was connected to the other women in her sect and refused to recognize her own contradictions, which could have prevented her from killing her comrades.

Tanaka writes that Nagata could probably sense that she had the here- existing onna (koko ni iru onna) within herself and was torn between the “nonexisting woman” and the “here- existing onna.”104 Tanaka argues that if Nagata had been able to confront her own sex, and the meaning of that sex, she would have realized the contradictoriness and excessive condition of the subject. Instead, in order to prove her pure revolutionary intent, she did not allow for the here- existing onna to exist within herself or outside herself. Rather than recognize the here- existing onna, Nagata killed the women who reminded her of the here- existing onna.105 When the other men and women of the sect displayed their sexual desires, or when other women acted too feminine, Nagata determined that these actions were counterrevolutionary. Tanaka writes that Nagata felt she had to kill the woman who was eight months pregnant who had “too much of an attachment to her accessories.”106 In so doing, Tanaka writes that Nagata was the one who killed and the one who was killed.107

In the Ribu News, Tanaka writes, “I desire to meet those members of the United Red Army, those who are dead and those who are alive.”108 By speaking of her desires to meet both the living and dead members of the URA, Tanaka’s discourse was both poetic and spiritual, gesturing toward desires that could not be categorized as purely political or rational. Thus, her desires to meet the dead members of the URA, as well as her vision of Kaneko’s corpse heavy with an unborn child, are suggestive of how some have commented that she seemed like a miko (shaman) or medium for the movement.109 Her affective

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R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y 167

response to those killed in the URA’s lynchings was thus not simply about em- pathy for those wrongly killed. It emanated from her own precarious relation- ality with those who killed in the name of a misconceived revolu tionary ideal.

Even though Tanaka critiques Nagata as the embodiment of a woman symptomatic of the masculinist and self- destructive economies of the left, Tanaka also expressed her will to protect Nagata and support her. In spite of her own sense of revulsion— in her own condition of torimidashi— Tanaka cast her being toward Nagata, grasping the gravity of this historical moment.

Tanaka states, looking back on her actions at this time, “In a sense, in order to protect her whole body, I used my entire being to shield her.”110 On June 1, 1972, in Nihon Dokusho Shinbun, she wrote, “First we must be clear about who the self is. I am Nagata Hiroko” (Atashi wa Nagata Hiroko desu).111 Given the context in which Nagata was displayed, as a national ob- ject of shame and abjection, Tanaka intervened by declaring that she was Nagata Hiroko. It goes without saying that Tanaka did not attempt to make sense of Nagata within a commonsensical schema of identity. In this state- ment, Tanaka opened up a different possibility of political identification and relationality. Tanaka’s statement forwards a philosophical assertion that re- configures the relationship of the self to the other. This statement involved the articulation of an imaginative possibility, of a consciousness that moved beyond the borders of what is said to constitute the self and the “I.” Tanaka’s use of the I in her statement “I am Nagata Hiroko” brings together her I and Nagata Hiroko and at once recasts the meaning of Nagata Hiroko and the I through a new episteme. When she speaks of the “Nagata Hiroko who is named Tanaka Mitsu,”112 Tanaka’s understanding of Nagata Hiroko is not as an individual or singular subject; rather, she grasps her as a convergence and culmination of animate and violent historical forces that Tanaka was open to identifying with and a part of. The mass media’s misogynist repre- sentation of Nagata had rendered her inhuman, but Tanaka’s reclamation of Nagata entailed a double movement that simultaneously deindividuated and humanized her. For Tanaka, Nagata was more than human, but she was not just an individual. Tanaka rather understood Nagata as the embodiment of a set of thematics and ontological principles, a woman who embodied the crises and contradiction of sacrificing onna’s sex for the revolution.

In the years following the incident, Tanaka continued to generate a dis- course that inspired affection and eros between onna. In 1973, for example, Tanaka wrote a pamphlet titled “Your Short Cut Suits You, Nagata!”113 This affectionate expression and compliment of Nagata’s appearance, which had been continually trashed by the mass media, was Tanaka’s way of reaching out with warmth toward a woman who was reviled by so many. In light

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168 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

of what happened, Tanaka carefully expresses her potential admiration for Nagata.

If she hadn’t been arrested as the ringleader in the lynching incident, she would have continued to be someone who I looked up to. The encounter is always an accident, contingent, and sometimes it is irony that is the primary factor that mediates the encounter. I have no doubt whatsoever that she is a “kind woman,” I have this image that we overlap in ways, as ordinary women (atarimae no onna).114

In this passage from the Ribu News, Tanaka again publicly declared her po- tential admiration for Nagata as a woman who was both ordinary and a product of her times. Rather than basing her support on a “rational” politi- cal choice, Tanaka’s relationship with Nagata and the URA was based on a series of chance encounters, a constellation of affinities and (un)fortunate crossroads.

Throughout To Women with Spirit, Tanaka refers to the facticity of con- tingency as the foundational condition of being in the world. She elaborates a concrete example of this “chance,” which she attributes to the contingent factor (tama tama) of the diseases each of them had contracted as young women. Tanaka, who had contracted syphilis in her early twenties, says that her disease, precisely because it was a sexual disease, did not allow her to deny her sex. “Without a doubt, the kind of sickness that I had made me conscious of a woman’s sex.”115 By contrast, Nagata’s illness, Graves dis- ease, allowed her to deny her sex. Thus, when one attempted to relate to or identify with the other, it was important to understand that one’s differences were often related to such contingent conditions.116 When a subject realized that her position in the world was ultimately contingent, this understanding could potentially work to mitigate the tendencies toward fundamentalism, fascism, nationalism, and absolute notions of what constitutes good and evil. Such contingent conditions, which permeate and extend beyond the subject, largely determine one’s life and death. On February 5, 2011, Nagata died of brain cancer in a Tokyo prison. She had been living on death row for almost thirty years.117

Conclusion

Tanaka was critical of any reductive prescription about revolution that neces- sitates violent action. Instead, she reconceived of revolution through a notion of relationality as figured in conditions of perpetual struggle and tension. She recognized that violence, contingency, contradiction, and relationality are all

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R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y 169

conditions of being in the world; therefore, she rejected any idealization of violence because of its interconnected, potentially irreversible, uncontrol- lable effects. Her ontological principles of contradiction and derangement (torimidashi), violence and contingency, relationality and eros, are all to be held in tension such that one should not be idealized over the other, and she did not advocate that nonviolence must be the basis of political struggle.

Tanaka’s analysis of the historical significance of Nagata and her capacity to articulate her relationship with her exemplified ribu’s creation of a differ- ent logic of relationality. Rather than turning against the other of the self, Tanaka could see the other within the self. She was a messenger of the force of ribu, which moved, articulated, and enacted a different logic of libera- tion and relationality that emanated from a place permeated with eros and violence. Tanaka’s discourse about Nagata expresses ribu’s praxis of radical inclusivity and critical solidarity as the symbolic condensation of ribu’s al- ternative relationality.

Tanaka’s analysis of Nagata constituted a complex modality of politi- cal and ethical identification that is philosophical and affective, political and spiritual. Within this form of identification lies the potential for a kind of liberatory relationality, which can form the basis of a different kind of femi- nist ethics of violence. These epistemological and ontological principles defy the ideology of individualism, liberalism, and by extension, liberal feminism. This relationality was deeply political insofar as it gestured toward the po- tentiality of more liberatory human relations. It required a different economy of identification that was not to be understood within the existing terms of identity and individuality.

In this dark hour of Japanese history that marked the demise of the New Left, through their collective actions and words, ribu women reflected the light in the shadows and created a space to support the lives of those who were condemned. Most immediately, ribu activists had to respond to a gro- tesque spectacle that would summon a nation to render militant leftist groups as the chosen objects to fear and to loathe, to be complicit with the state’s will to criminalize and punish insurgent subjects. Ribu’s praxis of critical solidarity inhered in the tension between the collective and subjective, femi- nism and the New Left, in the attempt to build a collective approach to how individualized subjects become the agents and targets of different forms of violence within hegemonic gendered economies of power. Ribu’s relation- ality with these criminalized and insurgent women enabled ribu women to confront and work through the contingencies conditioning the potential ef- fects of various forms of hegemonic and counterhegemonic violence. Ribu’s alternative modes of epistemology and ontology could constitute the basis

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170 R I B U ’S R ES P O N S E TO T H E U N I T E D R E D A R M Y

for a feminist ethics of violence that refuses to idealize either nonviolence or revolutionary violence. By recognizing the subject’s constitution in a system of historical and structural violence, such a feminist ethics would recognize that the eruption of counterviolence becomes recognizable only through its break with the normalized (and often nonvisible) conditions of state vio- lence. Thus, violence itself is not a break or exception but rather largely un- recognized due to the banality of its most pervasive forms. Insofar as the URA came to symbolize an extremist group that posed a mortal threat to an “innocent nation,” ribu’s approach to political violence and its praxis of critical solidarity remains trenchantly relevant today in a world where the discourses of terror and terrorism have all but foreclosed on the possibility of a sober and critical engagement with the vexed and vexing questions of political violence.

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