Communist rebel, 83, leaves hiding after 50 years to blast Japan's coronavirus response - and call for revolution
After five decades on the run, the 83-year-old leader of a radical and violent communist group has resurfaced to blast Japan's handling of the coronavirus pandemic - and call for revolution.
Unfortunately for Takeo Shimizu, the elderly head of Chukaku-ha (Middle Core Faction), his defiant press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday, at which he claimed the government's response to the health crisis had made the nation ripe for a workers' uprising, fell largely on deaf ears.
"I want to call out to the working class," the ageing agitator told a sparse audience, that did at least contain one representative from the Mainichi newspaper. "The circumstances for a revolution have arrived."
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However, he refused to reveal where he had been sheltering for the past half a century since he went underground in the wake of six days of rioting in the Shibuya district of Tokyo in 1971, during which a police officer died after being hit with a Molotov cocktail and nearly 2,000 people were arrested.
Instead his cryptic response was only that he had been "supported by many people".
While Shimizu has been on the run ever since - though he is understood to have attended a meeting of the group last September - his group, which was founded in 1957 to promote worldwide communism, has remained active in his absence.
Has Japan's handling of the coronavirus led to conditions for a revolution? Ageing communist Takeo Shimizu thinks so. Photo: EPA
Over the years its members have led protests against the US military presence in Japan, the US-Japan security treaty, the development of Tokyo's Narita airport and other anti-government causes. In 1990, the group launched a home-made mortar round into the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, one of 124 attacks it carried out.
In addition to protests that often led to violent clashes with the police, Chukaku-ha members have carried out arson and bombing attacks on infrastructure and government facilities that have been blamed for the deaths of around 100 people. The most recent attack for which the group claimed responsibility was in 2001, when a home-made bomb went off beneath the car of an official of Narita airport, although there were no injuries.
Despite the group's past, Shimizu's reappearance does not appear to have caused undue concern.
"There is just not an audience for this kind of thinking in Japan any more," said Jun Okumura, an analyst at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs.
However, he added it was "not all that surprising [Shimizu] was able to hide for all that time" because the group "obviously has a network of sympathisers who could take him in and help him to disappear".
"He may have had something interesting to say in the 1960s and maybe in the 1970s, but that was a long time ago and Japan and the rest of the world have moved on from then," Okumura said. "But clearly he has not given up on his personal notion of a revolution.
"The ideologies that were being tested back then have been turned upside down in the modern world and, I would argue, Japanese society is far better now than it was then, so we have less to protest about," he said. "But you have to remember that we're also getting older, so perhaps we're not protesting because we're just not so lively any more."
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2021. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
