Snow, Blood, and the End of Revolution: Illusions of the Young People Scattered at Asama Villa in 1972

Snow, Blood, and the End of Revolution: Illusions of the Young People Scattered at Asama Villa in 1972

In February 1972, five young revolutionaries holed up in a snow-covered mountain lodge in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture. The United Red Army - those who dreamed of overthrowing state power with the words that were once called ideals - drew their last theatrical scene with blood and bullets. It was not just a case of a massacre, but the moment when the distortion of postwar democracy and the common illusion of revolution collapsed.

In the 1960s, the fervor of the student movement that swept across Japan was soon transformed into division and strife between radical factions. The Red Army faction of the Communist League and the Revolutionary Left faction merged to form the United Red Army. What began within it was an ideological purge known as "summing up. Relentless lynchings of comrades and the killing of 12 people in the frozen mountains. The enemy was not the state. One by one, they died at the hands of their comrades, who should have been their allies.

Then came the Asama Villa Incident, in which the five men, after fleeing, attacked a mountain lodge they happened to have arrived at, took hostages, and holed themselves up. The police gather riot police from all over the country, and a ten-day shootout and siege ensues. The whole of Japan was glued to their televisions, and the "revolution" was broadcast live. Gunshots, flames, and angry shouts. It invaded the family's living room as a "revolution visualized on film.

Two riot police and one civilian lost their lives in the incident. The injured were numerous, and the arrested perpetrators were subsequently sentenced to death or life imprisonment one after another. But what was even more important was that the entire nation witnessed the collapse of the "justice that the young people believed in.

The year was 1972--Japan was nearing the end of its rapid economic growth. The shadow of the Vietnam War, the U.S. visit to China by Nixon, and the reversion of Okinawa to Japan. Amidst the tumultuous international situation, the youth of the United Red Army clung to the "ideals left behind" and fell off a cliff.

The "revolution" they believed in eventually turned into a gang killing and a "logic of the secret room" that circulated violence within a closed space. Ideals turned into internal strife, solidarity into lynching, and purity into madness. Asama Villa is a "tombstone" symbolizing all of this.

After this incident, the New Left movement in Japan rapidly declined, and the youth movement fell silent. But is it really over? Ideology and violence, ideals and betrayal. The traces of these events still remain as sparks deep in the hearts of every generation.