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 men holed up in a snow-covered mountain lodge in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, taking hostages. The United Red Army. They once held up "revolution" as their ideal, but in reality they purged their comrades, assaulting 12 of them to the point of freezing to death in the mountains, and then letting them die. After the end of their internal strife, which they called a "summing up," they chose the Asama Villa as their final stage.

Amid the police siege, television broadcast the incident live for ten days. The gunshots and flames, the angry shouts and silence, were broadcast into homes all over Japan, and the revolution was presented as "an event in the living room. Two riot police and one civilian lost their lives, and dozens were wounded. And the viewers know. The young people who were supposed to be martyrs for their ideals had somehow destroyed themselves in a "closed circle of violence.

In that year, Japan had returned Okinawa to Japan and was nearing the end of its rapid economic growth. In the world, the Vietnam War and the Cold War structure were intensifying, and inside, the voices of the youth were soon silenced. The Asama Sanso Incident was also the sound of "another road" that postwar Japan had embraced crumbling noisily.

In the snow-covered mountain lodge, unvoiced anger, sorrow, and poems of defeat were left behind. This was no mere incident. It was a gravestone of an era.