 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Aloha. My name is Roger Jelenek. I'm the host of Book Worlds for Think Tech Hawaii. And my guest today is Patricia Steinhoff, Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii, who is the prime editor of a team of translators and editors of what was a terrific bestseller in Japan a little while ago. It took some time to get it done. It's called Destiny, the Secret Operation of the Togodo Exiles, and the original book was by Koji Takazawa. Pat, tell us first how you got into Japanese studies as a sociologist and how you got to Japan. Okay, thank you for having me here. I grew up in the middle of Michigan and went to the University of Michigan where I got entranced by the idea of Asian languages. And at that time you could go to Japan, but you couldn't go to China, so I decided to study Japanese. I had an undergraduate major in Japanese, and then at the early in that time I had a summer trip to Japan. And then when I finished I spent another year of language study in Japan. Late in my undergraduate career I realized I needed a discipline. I didn't want to just do language, and the discipline that seemed to fit best was sociology. I was interested in contemporary society, interpersonal relations, and that I could do in sociology. It was also pretty exciting. Yes, it was an exciting time. It was. And so a lot of my classmates were becoming sociology majors. At Michigan I was involved in the Michigan Daily, which was the center of political activity. So I was around the edges of it, but was not directly involved. And then after Michigan I went to Harvard for a dissertation. I have no MA, I just went to Harvard. And at that time there wasn't a sociology department at Harvard. You could get a degree, you could get a PhD in sociology, but it was given through the social relations department, which was an interdisciplinary department. And I had already done the Japanese before I got there. I knew that's what I wanted to study. So it was just a question of how was I going to do it. And I don't think many people really understand the Japanese political scene immediately after World War II. We think of it at the time of the occupation in MacArthur. So it's military terms. But in fact it was a very lively political scene. Can you describe that? Yes. Well first of all the occupation ended in 1952. So then there were a few years where they were developing their own political system. They had been gifted by the occupation with a remarkably liberal and complete constitution. And it was approved by their diet. So they own it, but it was largely written, crafted by the occupation people in the post-war period. Looking backward and saying, we don't want Japan to do what they did in the pre-war period. So they need to have the tools for democracy well integrated. And they got that. And so they were developing, they were going past the occupation. And by 1960 there was a huge political upheaval over the renewal of the security treaty with the United States, by which American troops were stationed in Japan as they had been largely paid for by Japan. But the United States was pushing that very hard and the very conservative Japanese government was too. But the population was quite uneasy about it, particularly because the Japanese Constitution has the famous Article 9 which says Japan forever renounces the right to conduct war. And so many people felt that the security treaty itself was a violation of the Constitution. And others felt just that they didn't want to be that closely tied to the US. As the Cold War was ramping up, what was your sense as a sociologist of Japanese response to the Cold War? It was all over the place. Okay, on the one hand there was a conservative government that was happy to be allied with the United States and opposed to the Soviet Union. But the war, the Constitution had legalized a whole range of political actors, including a legal Communist Party and a legal Socialist Party. And so there was a strong left in Japan and they of course were not very sympathetic to the United States and had different views. So the population had a full array of possibilities. And the students had been, post-war students had been organized in part through the Communist Party. So there was a quite strong left influence in the universities despite the early period of Cold War purging of various both left and right in Japan. So the big radical crisis in the mid-to-late 60s, what kind of shape did that take in Japan? It's very different from Europe and the US. It's actually very similar to what happened in Europe and we've done some parallel studies. But I talk about the long decade of the 60s because starting in 1958, Japan-Japanese students in particular began mobilizing for opposition to the Security Treaty which was going to come up in 1960. So there was a big massive social movement in 1960 but then the government was able to just disregard all opposition and ram the approval of the Security Treaty through. After that the students went home and said what went wrong and realized that in 1970 the Security Treaty would come up again for approval and revision. So they went home and nursed their wounds for a while but then they began building for the late 1960s. And why so much of the energy among students? It's not something you would recognize today here. Actually it's quite typical that social movements have college students in the forefront. That happens all over the world and that's why sociology departments in particular get outlawed in places where they don't like that kind of activity. Was it more active in Japan than elsewhere? Because the other... Well, what was happening in the late 1960s was very much driven by third world ideas, new left ideas and by that time most of the movement had broken with the Japan Communist Party because they were left of it. And so by the late 1960s, first of all, if we can step back a bit, part of what happened after the war was they reorganized the public school system into a standard western style elementary and secondary system. So that meant that by the 1960s they had a whole cohort of young people who had finished high school and therefore were eligible to go to college. So there was a huge expansion of access to college and of desire to go because that was the ticket to the middle class. And so as Japan was ramping up for what became in the 70s and the 80s it's huge success. It was fueled by this increase of college students in the late 1960s. And there were by that time many issues. The Security Treaty was one of them but there were environmental issues that were coming to the fore and there were various kinds of political issues involving the presence of US troops and many other things. And by the late 1960s Japan had a... it was a fully literate society, lots of small-scale publishing going on and there was a big market for left-wing ideas and particularly these new third world, new left ideas. And Japanese students were getting those things in translation within a year of when they came out in Europe and the United States. And what was the role of Takazawa, your original author in this setting? He was part of that generation that went to college in the late 1960s and he became involved in a major organization, a student organization, which then in 1969 split and part of it became the Red Army. The part that was thrown out of the main organization became the Red Army. So he was around the fringes of it. He was involved in getting things published. They were publishing newsletters and flyers and all kinds of things and that was his role. So he knew all the people but he was in a relatively safe position. Did he have a job as a general? He was a student first and then after he did graduate unlike many people in that era but after he graduated because he was known to be affiliated he could not work for the major corporations but he was able to find employment as an editor for a small publishing company and he worked at that company until I think the late 1970s or early 1980s after which he went freelance and became a kind of investigative journalist. By then he already had a reputation for having packaged and published most of the primary materials of the New Left to make them available to the Japanese audience. He was a key journalist. He was a key editor and journalist. To start getting into the book itself what was his connection to this group? He was a member of the Red Army faction. He doesn't say that in his publications but that's the case. He knew all these people and he was publishing things for them so when the group split off he was working for them and with them and then in 1970 when the hijacking to North Korea took place he was in Japan and then was involved in all of the publishing that was connected with them. What was going on with the Red Army and the group that went into the hijacking? They saw themselves as part of the Red Army? Yes, they saw themselves as the key players in the Red Army. In early 1969 the government began to crack down on student protest which was very widespread and had become increasingly violent so that students already were going to demonstrations to fight with the police and they were beginning to use Molotov cocktails and things and the Red Army within this major protest organization began saying we need to go farther we need to create an underground army and use weapons and bring about a revolution so that was their position and they were led by a philosophy student from Kyoto University who was very good at picking up the ethos of what people were thinking and creating catchy phrases to turn it into ideology. How did they select the first nine? That group by the summer of 1969 they were thrown out of the main organization for advocating this so then they became an independent organization but because they had been part of it and because their people had controlled a lot of the local chapters they had a lot of people already when they went independent and so from that time they started doing what to them were revolutionary things and thereby hangs a tale we'll come to that in a moment This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness Okay Pat we have this group that's ready to create World Revolution how did they go about it? Well their first thing in the early fall was they had devised some what would now be called IEDs they had learned how to take round cans that peace brand cigarettes came in fill them full of pachinko balls little round metal balls and some kind of a detonator and then they could throw them or they also knew how to make simple pipe bumps so they started by trying to just knock over a police box and get weapons and of course that failed but then they had a training camp in the mountains where they took over 50 people up for the weekend to learn how to throw these things without blowing themselves up but they already were way too public because they had been a public organization and a lot of people were known so the police followed them up there and arrested them all and that was a major setback and after that things were quiet except that in the process the police had learned what their plan had been and what they were doing with this training was to prepare for what they hoped would be an attack in which they would surround the prime minister's residence and hold him hostage so he couldn't take a trip to southeast Asia so when they found that out all of a sudden this was not just a little nuisance group but they were serious folks who were planning dangerous things so the police security and surveillance got extremely heavy and they really couldn't move for quite some time in that situation the ever inventive Shiyomi their leader came up with a new twist in their theory which was we need to pursue the revolution it's getting too difficult to do it in Japan we need to establish international basis from which we can learn how to do revolution and then come back and make it happen so it was very quiet people thought nothing was much happening but they were quietly planning this hijacking and it happened at the end of March 1970 and the people who were doing it had never been on an airplane before they didn't know anything about how you do anything other than get a train to jump on the train and the first time they tried to do it not everybody showed up in time so they postponed it at any rate at the end of March they were able to hijack a domestic airliner which was flying to Hukuoka which is in the south of Japan and they picked North Korea in part because the plane's range was so limited that was the only place they could think of they had to refuel to get there that's right at any rate so they stopped the plane in Hukuoka and were immediately demanding to go to North Korea at first the government was delaying and Japan Airlines didn't want to lose its plane but then in a very complicated maneuver they took off for what they thought was North Korea but unbeknownst to them the South Koreans and the Americans had organized a diversion and the plane which they thought was going to North Korea en route there was no connection there was no way to do it they were using a high school textbook yes right because they didn't know how to do it and there was no connection to the North Korean airline system so they got diverted to Seoul and there had been an attempt to make the Seoul airport look like a North Korean airport so they had all these women in traditional Korean dress come out with their flowers and they were hearing that they were in Pyongyang but then the group in the plane started getting suspicious and one of them looked out the window and discovered a Northwest Airlines plane on the tarmac and he said this isn't Pyongyang this is Seoul so then they refused to budge and they were stuck on that tarmac for almost four days very long period they had already let off women and old people and children in Hukuoka but there were still a lot of passengers on the plane so they were bargaining over releasing those passengers and getting to North Korea and eventually North Korea by this time this was international news it was on the front page of the newspapers everywhere and people in North Korea saw it and Kim Il-sung saw an opportunity so he let the Japanese know through the Korean Red Cross and the Japanese Red Cross that he would accept them and that the plane would be returned so as soon as that happened then they said okay we'll let you go and so they let them go to North Korea so we have a conventional thriller beginning but now comes the fantastic part which is when they landed the North Korean government didn't really know quite what to do with them and so what did they do? well they kept asking the hijackers have you had made contact? and they said no we don't know what they're going to do but we're going to go so the North Koreans treated them very royally put them up in a fancy hotel and gave them a big banquet then they sent home the plane with the substitute hostage and the crew and then the hijackers still didn't know what was going to happen and then they were taken after a few days in the hotel they were taken to a guest house in the outskirts of Pyongyang in the countryside and at first they didn't know they thought they might be sent to jail or whatever but they were then moved to this guest house and they were asked what they wanted and they asked for a few things they basically imagined that they were going to learn how to do revolution and in the fall they would go back to Japan and start a revolution there that in itself was obviously a pipe dream although there were lots and lots of young people at that time in Japan who thought the country was on the brink of revolution so they were not total outliers in thinking that the situation was a crisis but what's fascinating is that the North Korean government brought into this yes in an amazing way it turned out that the North Korean government thought that these little radicals could become the nucleus of a party that would conduct a North Korean style revolution in Japan that's an even bigger pipe dream but the two fantasies came together and they first had to brainwash the people through intensive thought control until they gave up their Japanese radical movement and became willing followers of the North Korean Juche ideology and that happened within the first two years and that was pretty intensive training that they gave them absolutely but it wasn't just training in ideology it was training in weapons, in spy craft what they wanted initially was military training and they kept saying well no not yet so they wouldn't give them any military training until they had already converted and they already saw them as loyal to their ideology and able to and as far as I can tell from the description of the book they actually succeeded in converting them oh yes absolutely yes that's a chilling thought yes it is and the methods they used were described by an American psychiatrist in terms of China the methods that had been originally devised and used in China and so they were used again so in military candidate styles yes yes and Takasawa describes how it was done in the North Korean situation in a way that made the people feel like they were making their own decisions but they were sliding little by little and then they got wives for them right yes that was quite an operation yes after they had converted then they wanted to go do things but they also by this time there's a bunch of young guys and they've been there for a decade or more and their marriageable age in the mid-1970s a girlfriend of one of the members after years of trying to get to North Korea succeeded and all of a sudden there was a woman there and that caused a lot of unrest among the others and so the leader of the group felt well the only thing we can do is we've got to get wives for them so his proposal was why don't you let us go to Europe there's a lot of Japanese young people there in Europe now and we'll go find wives and the North Koreans said that's an interesting idea we've got a better one and they brought women to North Korea and basically matched them up and it was Kim Jong-il the son who was the matchmaker who decided who would get which one but it was quite methodical oh yes oh yes and they all came within a short period of time they were all married at the same time yes there was a big wedding ceremony for all of them which is sort of like the the Reverend Moon one but basically most of the women were people who had been involved with the North Korean support organizations in Japan and so they were ready and willing to go to North Korea and marrying these guys was incidental they were going because of their interest in North Korea but they ran out of good candidates and so the last couple of women were basically deceived into joining into getting to North Korea then they all had children I mean they averaged two or three children each yes they did so they remodeled their compound and made it a very palatial place and they brought in childcare people and made a store for them and they had a fleet of Mercedes-Benz's with drivers and you know so they were living a very elite life and they could see in a real bubble yeah absolutely a bubble but they really had no idea how different that was but then there was kind of a sad ending which is they began to get homesick well because they knew no other culture but their own and this peculiar one right right so yes but the whole business about homesickness was also used by the North Koreans as a ploy to try to get them back to Japan and they wrote things and said things about how lonely they were and of course the Japanese had no idea they had wives and children but only after they had wives and children did they then become agents who were then sent to Europe and other places to carry out things for the North Koreans so how did they all left by when by what date by what day did they leave for Japan they all went back to Japan no they didn't right yes there's still four wives and four men and two wives there in North Korea and one child who was a minor earlier I'm not going to go see them I'm not going to go see them but people do just to wrap up it it's absolutely fascinating because the impression of a seamless ideology that the North Koreans have it's quite impenetrable in the present context it's just fascinating to see it in operation in this adventure this book is also very interesting because it's a group of people lived an elite life they were right connected directly to the top levers of power and that what we see in the press in the United States is the horrible famines and how awful it is but these people were in a bubble that was very much like other elites in North Korea and they have the same kind of mentality as those elites mentality is the word Thanks very much Pat I really enjoyed the book and I look forward to featuring it at the next Hawaii Book and Music Festival Good, thank you very much for having me and I look forward to the festival Great, thank you