KJCKorea
Journal Central

This paper examines two cinematic representations of political violence in early 1970s Japan—Kōji Wakamatsu’s <United Red Army>(2008) and South Korean director Kim Mi-Rye’s documentary <East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front>(2020). By analyzing these films, the study reconsiders the powerful image of “violence” constructed by mainstream Japanese media around the United Red Army incident and the bombing attacks carried out by the “East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.” It seeks to move beyond the representational field shaped by this media discourse and to explore alternative meanings of violence as a political and ethical act. The two incidents, which unfolded as postwar Japan entered the stage of advanced consumer capitalism, were thoroughly demonized by the media and came to symbolize the end of the “season of politics” that had defined the 1960s. While Wakamatsu’s film meticulously reconstructs the ideological process through which the United Red Army’s internal purges transformed into a death driven logic, it ultimately fails to explain why such violence emerged or why the group lacked mechanisms to restrain it. By contrast, Kim’s documentary traces the lives of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front members—still stigmatized as “terrorists” in Japan—revealing their enduring reflection, remorse, and commitment to anti-imperialist critique and East Asian solidarity. More than fifty years later, these ongoing gestures of reflection and solidarity transcend the instrumentalist binary of violence and nonviolence, suggesting the possibility of what Judith Butler terms an “ethos-practice” that resists “the institutional life of violence.”

postwar Japan, United Red Army, East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, post colonialism, nonviolence, anti-violence