The Japanese Red Army (日本赤軍, Nihon Sekigun; abbr. JRA) was a far-left militant organization active from 1971 to 2001. The JRA was founded by Fusako Shigenobu and Tsuyoshi Okudaira in February 1971, and was most active in the 1970s and 1980s, operating mostly out of Lebanon with PFLP collaboration and funding from Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, as well as Ba'athist Syria and North Korea.
After the Lod Airport massacre, it sometimes called itself the Arab-JRA. The group was also variously known as the Anti-Imperialist International Brigade (AIIB), the Holy War Brigade, and the Anti-War Democratic Front. The JRA's stated goals were to overthrow the Japanese government and the monarchy, as well as to start a world revolution. It was designated a terrorist organization by Japan and the United States.
Fusako Shigenobu had been a leading member in the Red Army Faction (赤軍派, Sekigun-ha) in Japan, whose roots lay in the Communist League, part of the militant New Left in Japan. Advocating revolution through terrorism, they set up their own group, declaring war on the state in September 1969. The police quickly arrested many of them, including founder and intellectual leader Takaya Shiomi, who was in jail by 1970. The Red Army Faction lost about 200 members, and the remnants merged with the Maoist group Revolutionary Left Faction (Kakumei sa-ha) to form the United Red Army (連合赤軍, Rengō Sekigun) in July 1971. The United Red Army became notable during the Asama-Sanso incident, when it murdered fourteen of its members on Mount Haruna, before a week-long siege involving hundreds of police leaving a bystander and a police officer dead.
Fusako Shigenobu had left Japan with only a handful of dedicated people, but her group is said to have had about 40 members at its height and was, after the Lod Airport massacre, one of the best-known armed leftist groups in the world.
The JRA had close ties with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Wadie Haddad. It was dependent on the PFLP for financing, training, and weaponry.
In April 2001, Shigenobu issued a statement from detention declaring the JRA had disbanded, and that their battles should henceforth be done by legal means.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 2001 attacks, an anonymous caller telephoned the Jordanian newspaper Al-Wahdeh and claimed responsibility for the attacks on behalf of the Japanese Red Army. According to the newspaper's editor, Fakhri Kawar, who reported the call to Agence France-Presse, the caller spoke Arabic with a foreign accent and said the attacks were carried out in retaliation for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The claim was unverified and was subsequently identified as one of several false or speculative attributions circulating in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
The National Police Agency publicly stated that a successor group was founded in 2001, called Rentai Movement (Rentai Movement, Mūbumento Rentai).
On February 15, 2022, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department renewed calls for arresting other ex-JRA terrorists who have not been arrested, including Kunio Bando and Kozo Okamoto.
During the 1970s and 1980s, JRA carried out a series of attacks in Japan and around the world, including:
May 30, 1972: the Lod Airport massacre; a gun and grenade attack at Israel's Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, now Ben Gurion International Airport, killed 26 people; about 80 others were wounded. One of the three attackers then committed suicide with a grenade, another was shot in the crossfire. The only surviving attacker was Kōzō Okamoto. Many of the victims were Christian pilgrims.
July 1973: Red Army members led the hijacking of Japan Air Lines Flight 404 over the Netherlands. The passengers and crew were released in Libya, where the hijackers blew up the aircraft.
January 1974: the Laju incident; the JRA attacked a Shell facility in Singapore and took five hostages; simultaneously, the PFLP seized the Japanese embassy in Kuwait. The hostages were exchanged for a ransom and safe passage to South Yemen.
September 13, 1974: the French Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands was stormed. The ambassador and ten other people were taken hostage and a Dutch policewoman, Joke Remmerswaal, was shot in the back, puncturing a lung. After lengthy negotiations, the hostages were freed in exchange for the release of a jailed Red Army member (Yatsuka Furuya), $300,000 and the use of an aircraft. The hostage-takers flew first to Aden, South Yemen, where they were not accepted and then to Syria. Syria did not consider hostage-taking for money revolutionary, and forced them to give up their ransom.
August 1975: the Red Army took more than 50 hostages at the AIA building housing several embassies in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The hostages included the US consul and the Swedish chargé d'affaires. The gunmen won the release of five imprisoned comrades and flew with them to Libya.
September 1977: The Red Army hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 472 over India and forced it to land in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Japanese Government freed six imprisoned members of the group and allegedly paid a $6M ransom.
December 1977: a suspected lone member of the Red Army hijacked Malaysian Airline System Flight 653. The flight was carrying the Cuban ambassador to Tokyo, Mario Garcia. The Boeing 737 crashed killing all 100 passengers and crew on board.
May 1986: the Red Army fired mortar rounds at the embassies of Japan, Canada and the United States in Jakarta, Indonesia.