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police searching empty holiday residences in the area of Mount Kasha, Gumma province, found fingerprints of a wanted radical in a cottage at the foot of the mountain. While police watched the cottage from hiding, a van containing five young people was spotted in the nearby town of Matsuida. Two were captured; the other three escaped into the mountains. The following day, an army of police with tracker dogs combed the area. Suddenly an armed man ran out of the bushes and tried to stab a policeman; a woman came to the man’s aid as he struggled. When finally subdued, they proved to be Tsuneo Mori, the twenty-seven-year-old leader of the Red Army Faction, and Hiroko Nagata. The operation also seems to have flushed out six more revolutionaries – four men and two women – who went into a shop in the railway station of Karuiwaza, Nagano – a holiday resort – to buy cigarettes. Their smell and the state of their clothes led the woman behind the counter to suspect that they had been sleeping rough, and she told the station manager, who notified the police. The radicals fled to an empty villa, taking hostage the wife of the caretaker, and it was soon surrounded by police. After a ten-day siege and the death of two policemen the radicals surrendered. The youngest of the captives was a sixteen-year-old youth.
    Meanwhile, Tsuneo Mori had confessed to the police that his group had murdered twelve of their own members during the time they had been in hiding on Mount Kasho. Following his instructions, police unearthed three decomposing corpses in a cedar forest – one man and two women, one of whom was eight months pregnant. Medical examination revealed that the cause of death was freezing in sub-zero temperatures; all three had been bound and left in the open to die. The women proved to be members of another radical organisation which had merged with the Red Army Faction – the Chukyo Anti-Japan-US Security Pact. Nine more bodies were eventually discovered, bringing the total to three women and nine men. Police searching for the corpses in the mountains admitted that their efficiency had been improved during the previous year when they had searched for the eight victims of a sex maniac called Kiyoshi Okubo in the same area; they had learned to tell a grave by the colour of the earth.
    What gradually emerged was that Tsuneo Mori was not the one who was mainly responsible for the murders. The person who had inspired them had been Hiroko Nagata. Mori was a weak character, who felt that he had to maintain his leadership through harshness; he spent much of the interrogation in tears. Hiroko Nagata, a pharmaceutical graduate, was altogether stronger. But her inferiority complex about her unattractive appearance had turned to murderous paranoia in the freezing winter hideout where the thirty Red Army members hid for three months. (They frequently made long treks in the moonlight, staggering with exhaustion, to other empty cabins; Mori urged them on by reminding them that Mao Tse Tung had suffered worse things during the Long March.) A woman member who escaped told of candlelight discussions of points of Marxist doctrine, ending with demands for ruthless ‘self-criticism’. All this led to harsh punishments, and to a series of ‘loyalty purges’ rather like the Stalin purges of the thirties. One twenty-two-year-old youth – the founder of the Chukyo group – was beaten, then stabbed to death by his two younger brothers, who were ordered to carry out the murder to prove their loyalty. A woman who escaped – leaving her three-month-old baby behind – had watched her husband stabbed to death but had not dared to protest in case she was killed too. It had been Hiroko Nagata who had led the discussions, often losing her temper and becoming hysterical. She liked to tell other members of the group that they were too materialistic. It was Nagata, too, who had ordered that the hair of the three dead women should be cropped close to the