More than 30 years after Japan's student movement, a new film by Koji Wakamatsu aims to shed some light on the 1972 Asama Mountain Lodge incident perpetrated by the United Red Army ultraleftist group.
"I wanted to let people know why young people who in those days entered universities and had promising futures did such things," Wakamatsu told a news conference Wednesday night in Tokyo at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
The antigovernment movement raged nationwide from 1960 to the early 1970s as the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty was revised in 1960 and 1970. The URA was formed in 1971 by young ultraleftists who wanted to start a world revolution by force.