Kirishima Satoshi, Bombing Suspect 50 Years on the Lam, Possibly Identified

For long decades, Kirishima Satoshi’s bespectacled, long-haired visage has graced wanted posters in police boxes across Japan. The photo shows Kirishima as he was around the period he first became a wanted man: 1975. Back then, he was a member of the “Scorpion” cell of the now-infamous far-left terrorist organization known as the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front. (東アジア反日武装戦線.) After a series of deadly corporate bombings by the EAAJAF, most of its leadership was arrested. Kirishima Satoshi, however, went to ground. Remarkably, he remained on the lam for an incredible half-century; that is, it seems, until today.

The man believed to be Kirishima is no longer as youthful as his outdated wanted posters suggest. Now 70 years old, the individual checked himself into a hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture not long ago. He has cancer, believed to be terminal; he was at the hospital using an assumed name (perhaps the one he’s lived under all these years).

Sources close to the investigation told Unseen Japan that a suspicious fellow patient led to the unveiling of Kirishima. When confronted, the suspect admitted that he was, indeed, the individual in question. Police are working to verify that claim.

A Half-Century Underground

According to someone close to the investigation, police first became aware of Kirishima Satoshi’s potential whereabouts yesterday, January 25th. Once the police have verified if this patient is indeed Kirishima, his wanted poster (手配写真) will be removed from the Metropolitan Police and National Police Agency websites. The fact that it is still up at present indicates they are not yet fully certain.

The announcement has set off a media frenzy. Kirishima’s face is one amongst many emblazoned on wanted posters that make up a small but memorable subsection of Japan’s urban scenery. His is often seen near wanted posters for members of the Japanese Red Army, the far-left terrorist group later joined by many of Kirishima’s EAAJAF compatriots after their organization collapsed. The decades slowly slip by, but the faces mostly stay the same – until sudden, remarkable days like today.

The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front

On the morning of August 30th, 1974, the busy Marunouchi business district near Tokyo station suddenly became a scene of stark carnage. An explosion rocked the neighborhood; its source, a powerful homemade time bomb concealed in a flower pot at the entrance to the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Building. The sound of the blast was so loud to be heard as far away as Shinjuku. The glass fronting of the building shattered up to its 11th floor; nearby cars were destroyed. Five people in the blast’s range died immediately; three more died in the hospital soon after. Nearly 400 people were injured.

The “Wolf” cell of the EAAJAF claimed responsibility. The bombing, which had been more devastating than intended (two phone calls minutes before the blast attempting to incite evacuations had been ignored), was nonetheless claimed as a just act. According to the EAAJAF, it was “…an attack against the aggressor-corporations and the colonialists of Japanese imperialism, like Mitsubishi’s bosses.” As for the victims, “those people who have in consequence of the attack by the Wolf been killed or injured are no ‘ordinary workers’ or ‘normal noninvolved citizens.’ They are the parasites inside the centers of Japanese imperialism.”

Kirishima Satoshi was not a member of the Wolf cell. Rather, he belonged to the Scorpion – one of three loosely coordinated groups within the EAAJAF. The “Wolf” was a reference to the cell’s leader, Daidoji Masashi, who’d been born in Hokkaido, and held firmly to ideas of returning to a pre-civilization “proto-communism.” To achieve this within a Japanese context, the modern civilization of Japan would have to be destroyed.

Daidoji’s Anti-Japanism

The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front emerged from the dying years of Japan’s New Left student movement in the early 1970s. While the 1950s and ’60s had seen massive public protests against state violence and the Vietnam War, involving millions of individuals and achieving, at times, a fairly strong degree of public support, those days were over. The violence of the student movement’s fringe, made infamous by the hijackings of the Red Army and self-directed mass murder by the United Red Army, had turned public sympathies against the New Left. Police moved to break student blockades in universities across the country; leftist groups were pushed into the streets, their efforts diminished to localized (if still vigorous) struggles like that against the appropriation of land for Narita Airport.

The EAAJAF’s leader, Daidoji, believed in an armed struggle against the state. In his early years in activism, he mostly engaged in the bombing of statues and memorials he saw as representing the oppression of Hokkaido’s indigenous Ainu people. His bombings started in 1971; by 1972, his small group was organizing itself into a “terrorist underground cell.” (Knaudt, 2020.) They operated by existing as outwardly non-radical Japanese citizens; they held jobs, and avoided any clothing or personal stylings that would point them out as radical leftists. All the while they engaged in the study of bomb-making during their off hours.

Daidoji’s ideology deviated rather starkly from that of traditional Marxists. He saw the average Japanese worker not as a proletariat, a potential ally in revolution, but rather as a beneficiary of imperialism and colonialism. The only true proletariats were those in subaltern minority groups not corrupted by the economic gains Japan had seen since the 1950s. Anyone else was essentially an enemy, and fair game for revolutionary-minded attack.

Kirishima Satoshi and the Scorpion

Kirishima Satoshi was born in Hiroshima in 1954; just a bit too young to be in university during the height of the New Left movement. He met activists Kurokawa Yoshimasa and Ugajin Hisaichi at Meiji University in 1972; both were supporters of movements within Tokyo’s day-laborer community in Sanya, aligning with Daidoji’s belief in the day-laborer underclass as being one of the few potential revolutionary groups in Japan. The three of them became the core members of the Scorpion cell.

All three cells – Wolf, Fangs of the Land, and Scorpion – engaged in a series of ten bombing attacks against Japanese companies. From 1974 to 1975, these attacks injured 32 persons. The Japanese police have specifically credited Kirishima with detonating a bomb at The Research Institute for South Korean Economy and Industries building in Ginza in April of 1975.

One month later, The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front came to an end. Police, monitoring the activities of various other radical groups, slowly deduced the web of connections between the three cells. Seven of the group’s most important members – including Daidoji, his wife Ayako, and Kurokawa – were arrested. The police, however, were unaware of Kirishima. By the time they investigated Kirishima’s home, using a key Kurokawa had on him as evidence, Kirishima was gone. His well-known wanted poster soon went up; investigators closely monitored all his known associates. Kirishima stayed away. As the decades passed, police assumed he might have fled abroad. He remained the only known EAAJAF member to never be arrested.

That is, perhaps, until now.

The Age of the New Left, Not Yet Over

The 1960s and ’70s often feel incredibly distant. The fact that Kirishima Satoshi’s wanted poster, like that of the JRA, has remained ubiquitous for so long, often feels more quaint than urgent. And yet, many of the stories of the New Left radicals are only now coming to an end. Daidoji Masashi, leader of the EAAJAF, died in prison in 2017. Another Anti-Japan Front member, Ekida Yukiko, was released from prison that same year. Shigenobu Fusako, noted leader of the international Japanese Red Army, was just released from prison in 2022. She says she’d still like to play a role in modern politics.

The Metropolitan Police state that Kirishima Satoshi admitted who he was to a hospital worker, saying, “I’m coming to the end. Just arrest me.” But even his arrest won’t be the end. The story of his half-century in hiding awaits. So, too, do those of former members Daidoji Ayako and Sasaki Norio, who joined the JRA after that organization arranged their release from prison in a hostage exchange in 1977. Their fates remain unknown.

But, for now, one wanted poster may finally be disappearing from the landscape of Japan after five long decades.

Additional sourcing and reportage by Jake Adelstein.

Sources:

TBS News Dig. (1/26/24).【独自】1974年にかけて起きた連続企業爆破事件の「東アジア反日武装戦線」メンバー桐島聡容疑者（70）とみられる男の身柄確保　警視庁公安部. Yahoo! Japan News.

遠藤龍、斎藤文太郎、橋本利昭、井口彩. (2024/1/26).「あの桐島聡なのか」元公安幹部衝撃　逃亡半世紀、本人打ち明け. 毎日新聞.

Knaudt, T. (2020). A Farewell to Class: The Japanese New Left, the Colonial Landscape of Kamagasaki, and the Anti-Japanese Front (1970–75). The Journal of Japanese Studies 46(2), 395-422.

Andrews, William. (Aug 28, 2013). The Skeleton in the Closet. Throw Out Your Books: Japanese radicalism & counterculture.