Tracing Japanese Leftist Political Activism (1957 – 2017)

Kevin Coogan was a veteran investigative journalist. His previous books include Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (1999) and The Spy Who Would Be Tsar: The Mystery of Michal Goleniewski and the Far-Right Underground (2022).Claudia Derichs is Professor of Transregional Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. She has published on the Japanese New Left and the Japanese Red Army.

"Claudia Derichs has gracefully completed the manuscript left behind by Kevin Coogan’s untimely death. It tells a richly detailed story of Japanese leftist political activism that sheds light on neglected connections spanning national, organizational, and chronological boundaries."Kenji Hasegawa, Yokohama National University, Japan, and author of Student Radicalism and the Formation of Postwar Japan"Studies of the Long Sixties are increasingly transnational in approach and this book is another bold entry in that growing canon. Gleaned from a multilingual array of sources — political publications, previous scholarship, memoirs, reportage, declassified materials, and more — it is an ambitious attempt to pull together the disparate and sometimes astonishing threads of the Japanese Red Army and Beheiren — respectively, perhaps the most notorious and lauded elements of the Japanese New Left — as they intersected through several key intellectual-activists and interacted with other radicals around the world."William Andrews, author of Dissenting Japan

• PART ONE: TOKYO (1957–1973) Introduction: The Boomerang Flying Transnational Section One: The Rise and Fall of Student Radicalism 1. The Birth of the Japanese New Left 2. The First Bund 3. Ampo 4. Zengakuren’s Gangster Shōgun? 5. Profiling Zengakuren 6. The Return of Ikki Kita 7. Icarus Falling – The Second Bund 8. "Disorganize Tokyo Imperialist University!" Section Two: Beheiren 9. The Riddle of Shunsuke Tsurumi 10. Voiceless Voices – The Rise of Beheiren 11. The Intrepid Four 12. Beheiren’s War 13. "Destroy from Within" Section Three: Red Army 14. Sekigun! 15. The Yodogō Hijack 16. Sixteen Gravestones – Rengō Sekigun 17. Tsuneo Umenai Declares War PART TWO: GOING TRANSNATIONAL (1972–2017) Section Four: Arab and Japanese Red Army 18. Slaughter at the Airport 19. Paris Underground 20. Takahashi in the Curiel Network 21. Pyongyang Calling 22. The Hague 23. The Stockholm Arrests 24. Crisis in Kuala Lumpur 25. Trapping Takahashi Section Five: Return to Japan 26. After Dhaka 27. O! Japan 28. Station to Station Conclusion: Man of Ghosts