Japan, the Red Years (2003, Michaël Prazan)

On the 8th November, 2000, after 30 years on the run from country to country, the “Red Queen“ of the Palestinian camps was arrested in Osaka. Her name was Fusako Shigenobu, leader of the Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army – JRA), the bloodiest and most mysterious of international terrorist organisations of these years. How can we explain why a group of Japanese former students turned to terrorism at the beginning of the 70’s. To understand their motives we have to go back 30 years : to 1968, the year of the Prague spring, the Vietnamese War, the student unrest in Paris and the factions of the extreme left. In 1968 student movements also set Japanese universities alight...