Ideology, Identity and Political Violence in Four Linked Japanese Groups

This paper examines the relation of ideology, context, and identity to political violence in four linked groups that form a natural experiment. Three of the groups are offshoots of the Red Army Faction, an armed clandestine group with a distinctive ideology that emerged at the peak of the New Left protest cycle in Japan in 1969. Under severe repression, some members went overseas to become the Yodogō group in North Korea and the Japanese Red Army in the Middle East, while others remained in Japan and merged with another underground group to become the United Red Army. All three offshoots viewed themselves as the vanguard pursuing revolution in Japan through political violence. However, each group interacted with different organizations in different state contexts, which re-shaped their ideology, organizational structure, and opportunities for political violence. The study examines how these changes affected the groups’ identity claims and choice of targets.