The Japanese Women's Liberation Movement and the United Red Army

Abstract

This article examines how the Japanese women's liberation movement responded to the news coverage of the United Red Army Incidents in 1972. The United Red Army was considered to be Japan's most violent domestic revolutionary sect. The United Red Army's misguided use of “revolutionary violence” in 1972 was devastating for Japanese leftist radicalism. The Japanese women's liberation movement was a political formation that emerged in 1970 in the wake of the Anti-Vietnam War and student movements of the late 1960s. In contrast to how the United Red Army received condemnation from across the political spectrum, from the right to the far-left, I focus on how these activists supported and identified with the women of the URA as an expression of their feminist politics. Through my analysis of the alternative media produced by these Japanese feminists and their multi-faceted support for the women in the URA, I argue that their intervention constituted a feminist praxis of critical solidarity and provides an illuminating feminist response to political violence.