LEAD FOCUS

By Steve Macko, ERRI Risk Analyst

A band of old radical leftist criminals has re-emerged in Japan and even the police admit their efforts to track them down have been a dismal failure. The leftists returned to the front pages of newspapers recently when they emerged as the leading suspects in the sabotage of rail tracks used for Japan's "Shinkansen" bullet train, the transport lifeblood of the nation.

Subsequent raids by police show the group has also stolen court documents in a celebrated case, tapped into the police radio network and may even have spies within the ranks of the police.

Tatsuzo Ono, author of 20 books on the Japanese police, said the latest series of raids on leftists only pointed out how behind the curve the authorities were.

Ono said, "The police are not really serious in their investigations of leftist radicals. They don't keep at it consistently."

Most embarrassing was the revelation that the leftist group Kakumaru-ha (Revolutionary Marxist Faction) had been able to eavesdrop on supposedly secret police radio transmissions for the past 15 years. Police discovered 5,000 tapes of conversations taken from police radio dispatches in a hideout near Tokyo.

A senior police official said, "They've been listening in on us for years, and when we got wise to them finally and changed our wireless system, they managed to hack into it again."

Police described the hideout as a veritable locksmith's basement, full of duplicate keys, key-making tools as well as stethoscopes for safe-cracking and files of identification cards from the Public Security Division, Japan's version of the FBI.

Police say the Kakumaru-ha had one of the highest profiles of Japan's approximately 20 extreme left-wing groups, with membership of about 30,000. Most Japanese leftists are in their 40s and 50s, beginning their radical careers as college students protesting against the Vietnam War during the 1960s.

After months of lying low, the Kakumaru-ha hit the news recently when police accused them of stealing documents on a notorious murder case involving a 15-year-old boy convicted of killing two children in the western city of Kobe last year.

In publications, the leftists claimed that the boy was not guilty of the murder, and that his conviction was a conspiracy between the government and the Japanese media. The hideout raided on 9 April was stocked with floppy disks containing confidential police records on the boy, who confessed to strangling and beheading one of his victims in a crime that stunned the nation.

Later in the month, bolts were found removed from a stretch of high-speed train track near the central Japan town of Sekigahara. Anonymous letters threatened multi-derailments with the aim of killing more than 10,000 people. The senior police official said the authorities believed the Kakumaru-ha was responsible because of its links to the now-defunct national railway workers' unions.

Japan's railway system has been the target of attacks in the past, mainly blamed on employees laid off when the rail network went private. Police experts say the track incident bore the trademarks of the Kakumaru-ha, which is said to specialize in rail-related sabotage and bombings.

A leftist publisher with close links to the Kakumaru-ha says the hard-core radicals were worried about fading away and were keen to recruit college students to give the movement new blood.

In the meantime, a small group of lower-ranking members still carry on the cause like a religion. Lae enforcement officiers said that one reason police were having difficulty was that the Kakumaru-ha had apparently infiltrated the national police force itself.