Journalist Takayama Masayuki exposes the brutal reality of the United Red Army’s 12 murders, challenging the Asahi Shimbun’s “Tensei Jingo” column for shifting blame onto the former Imperial Japanese Army while ignoring the true madness of communism. A sharp analysis of left-wing violence and media distortion.

Tensei Jingo does not see the madness of communism but instead overlays it onto the former Japanese Army and feels satisfied.
For the immature, killing may be possible, but writing a column is difficult.
March 3, 2022.

The following is from Takayama Masayuki’s serial column that concludes this week’s newly released Shukan Shincho.
This piece again proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
Those with keen insight must have been impressed by the brilliance of the final sentence.

The first step in becoming a newspaper reporter was my assignment to the Mito bureau.
What I first learned there was the phrase “a fertilizer for leafy greens.”
Leafy greens need no night soil or supplemental fertilizer—only surface fertilizer.
It was a phrase used to mock empty bravado like “at least outside the prefecture” or “all talk with nothing behind it.”
I thought it was a good expression, but when I moved up to the Tokyo headquarters, no one used it.
Perhaps it was a saying limited to agricultural prefectures.
Still, many of the claims by radicals at that time had a “surface fertilizer” quality.

For example, there was the Keihin Ampo Joint Struggle, which broke away because they could not tolerate the cat-like facade of Kenji Miyamoto.
Following “revolution comes from the barrel of a gun,” they first robbed a gun shop in Moka, stealing eleven guns—shotguns and air rifles.
The Red Army faction had even grander ambitions and began by setting up a military training base overseas.
To raise funds, they robbed a post office in Funabashi, obtaining 15,000 yen, then snatched a purse in Setagaya to get 38,000 yen.

It looked like surface fertilizer, but their ambitions covered the sky.
Bringing together their small funds and small number of guns, both factions gathered at a hideout on Mount Haruna and formed the United Red Army.
It was exactly fifty years ago.
The leader of the Red Army faction was Tsuneo Mori.

He was extremely cowardly.
When captured by a different sect along with Toshio Fujimoto, the husband of Tokiko Kato, he cried and begged, “Please don’t hit me. I’ll do anything.”
He also ran from internal purges, yet was hot-tempered.
He resembled Naoto Kan, and Takamaro Tamiya dismissed him saying, “He’s useless.”

The Keihin Ampo faction was headed by Hiroko Nagata, who was not particularly beautiful.
Her resentment matched well with Mori.
Asahi Shimbun’s Tensei Jingo wrote that in this ragtag group, women were beaten for “putting on makeup,” a sign that they were not sufficiently awakened to communism.
But that is wrong.
In both factions, women were treated as quasi-members—sexual outlets for the men.
So most were pretty girls.
Except for Nagata, they wore makeup, kissed, and slept with men.

Tensei Jingo continued, “commanders assaulted members they judged insufficiently communized,” but that is also wrong.
According to Hiroshi Sakaguchi—still on death row and author of Asama Sansō 1972—Nagata singled out women she envied, and Mori agreed, making those women and their partners targets for “self-criticism.”

Mori and Nagata selected the first target on December 27, 1971—only one week after entering the Haruna hideout.
According to Sakaguchi, that day, Mori declared that Yoshitaka Kato, who had kissed Kazuko Kojima, must be “punished through beating.”
“We’ll beat him until he faints. When he wakes up, he’ll be reborn and accept true communization.”

Lenin never said such a thing.
Miyamoto Kenji never said such a thing.
In fact, Mori had once been knocked unconscious in a kendo match at Kitano High School.
“When I came to, everything felt refreshed.”
Mori used this as his justification for beating people in the name of communism.

Nagata asked, “How hard do you have to hit someone to make them faint?”
Mori replied, “Hit the face until it swells to twice its size.”
Nagata asked again, “Will they really faint?”
Mori nodded, and the beating of Yoshitaka Kato began.

Kazuko Kojima and Mitsuo Ozaki were also beaten.
But no matter how much you hit someone, a person does not faint.
Kunio Bando said, “Hit the solar plexus.”
In period dramas, an atemi blow knocks people out instantly.

Ozaki was punched in the stomach again and again and died at dawn.
Sakaguchi was shocked: “He didn’t faint even when beaten—he just died.”

But Mori and Nagata did not stop.
They killed twelve people over two months, including Michiyo Kaneko, who was eight months pregnant.
Kenji Miyamoto and other immature men have talked of communism while killing without hesitation.
This should have been a lesson.

Yet Tensei Jingo does not see the madness of communism.
It overlays everything onto the former Japanese Army and is satisfied.
Toynbee evaluated that Japanese Army as “achieving a historic feat by shattering white colonial imperialism.”
For the immature, killing is possible, but writing a column is difficult.