All That is Certain Vanishes Into Air: Tracing the Anabasis of the Japanese Red Army

Patricia Steinhoff, “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Közö Okamoto,” Asian Survey XVI (Sept. 1976), 842

Kyodo News Service, “Ex-Red Army member Maruoka dies in prison hospital,” May 29, 2011.

Naeem Mohaiemen, United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part 1), 70 min. (2012), 00:56:14.

Naeem Mohaiemen, Interview with Carole Wells, Los Angeles, March 2013.

Mohaiemen, United Red Army, 01:04:10.

Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy (New York: Columbia University Press), 2014; Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weather … We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008); Astrid Proll, Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run, 1967–77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998).

William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1990, xi.

Ibid., 3.

Nagata Hiroko described herself to Japanese police as a “very sensitive person” with parents who “gave her all that she could want.” Farrell argues that the arrival of puberty set off a spiral of self-loathing in Nagata, as her “husky voice” and “slightly bulging eyes” reduced her “femininity.” Nagata compounded this by wearing “wrinkled clothes” and “rarely applying makeup.” Ibid., 4.

Ibid., 5.

According to Steinhoff, the young men and women drawn to become members of the underground group were “quite normal individuals” who were “well-socialized members of Japanese society.” Patricia Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables: The Social Dynamics of the Renko Sekigun Purge,” in Japanese Social Organization, ed. Rakie Sugiyama Lebra (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 195.

Patricia Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 4 (Nov. 1989): 730, 731.

Although Steinhoff does not mention Werner H. Erhard’s EST program by name, it may be what she is thinking of when she compares these JRA confrontations to “consciousness-raising techniques familiar to American women’s groups” (Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables,” 198).

Eric Baudelaire, L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, et 27 années sans images [booklet] (Centre D’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, 2011), 12.

Jasper Sharp, Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema (Guildford: FAB Press, 2008).

Yuriko Furahata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 100.

Koji Wakamatsu, dir., and Masao Adachi, screenplay, Seizoku / Sex Jack, 70 min. (1970). For an extended discussion of Wakamatsu and Adachi's films: Go Hirasawa, Koji Wakamatsu: Cinéaste de la Révolte, Imho, 2010; Go Hirasawa, Masao Adachi: Le bus de la révolution passera bientot près de chez toi, Rouge profond, 2012.

Yuriko Furahata, Cinema of Actuality, 114.

Baudelaire, L’Anabase de May… [booklet], 28.

Alain Badiou, Le Siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005), 121. (Excerpts translated by Eric Baudelaire.)

Eric Baudelaire, L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, et 27 années sans images [film] 85 min. (Centre D’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, 2011), 01:21:00.

Don DeLillo, Mao I (New York: Penguin Group, 1991), 239.

Pierre Zaoui, L’Anabase de la Terreur: vouloir (ne pas) comprende, trans. Matthew Cunningham (Centre D’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, 2011), 45.