The newly published English translation of Takazawa Kōji's book Shukumei, which won the 1998 Kōdansha Prize for Non-Fiction.

The English translation was initially done by several University of Hawaii graduate students and polished by Lina J. Terrell. I then added an introduction, extensive translator's notes, and a follow-up chapter and did additional polishing of the translation. It offers a rare glimpse into elite life in North Korea as experienced by a group of Red Army Faction student activists who hijacked a JAL plane from its Haneda-Fukuoka route to North Korea in 1970. It is also available at Amazon.

In 1970, nine members of a Japanese New Left group called the Red Army Faction hijacked a domestic airliner to North Korea with dreams of acquiring the military training to bring about a revolution in Japan. The North Korean government accepted the hijackers—who became known in the media as the Yodogō group, based on the name of the hijacked plane—and two years later they announced their conversion to juche, North Korea’s new political ideology. Little was heard from the exiles until 1988, when a member of Yodogō was unexpectedly arrested in Japan, and communications with the group opened up in the context of his trial.

As a former Red Army Faction member, journalist Kōji Takazawa made several trips to North Korea, reestablished his ties to the group’s leader Takamaro Tamiya, and helped to publish the group’s writings in Japan. After Kim Il Sung revealed that Yodogō members had Japanese wives, Takazawa published a book of interviews with the women, but in the process became suspicious about the romantic stories they told. He also wondered about the members who were missing and learned more details in long, private conversations with Tamiya. After Tamiya’s sudden death in 1995, Takazawa launched his own investigation of what the group had actually been doing for two decades, even traveling to Europe to follow traces there.

An example of superb investigative journalism, Destiny: The Secret Operations of the Yodogō Exiles offers Kōji Takazawa’s powerful story of how he exposed the Yodogō group’s involvement in the kidnapping and luring of several young Japanese to North Korea, as well as the truth behind their Japanese wives’ presence in the country. Takazawa’s careful research was validated in 2002, when the North Korean government publicly acknowledged it had kidnapped thirteen Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s, including three people whom Takazawa had connected to the Yodogō hijackers. Embedded in his pursuit toward what truly happened to the Yodogō members is Takazawa’s personal reflection of the 1970s, a decade when radical student activism swept Japan, and what it meant to those whose lives were forever changed.

Kōji Takazawa is a leading authority on the Japanese New Left and has close ties to some of its surviving participants and institutions.

Patricia G. Steinhoff is professor of sociology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a specialist on the Japanese New Left.

Kōji Takazawa, Destiny: The Secret Operations of the Yodogō Exiles. Steinhoff, Patricia G., ed. English translation of Takazawa Kōji, Shukumei: Yodogō Bōmeishatachi no Himitsu Kosaku. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017.

Pat Steinhoff

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Patricia G. Steinhoff
Professor and Chair
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Department of Sociology
2424 Maile Way, Saunders Hall 247
Honolulu, HI 96822
808-956-8428 Office
steinhof@hawaii.edu