Asama-Sansō incident

The Asama-Sansō incident was a hostage crisis and police standoff at a mountain lodge below Mount Asama, near Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, lasting from February 19 to February 28, 1972. It followed an internal purge within the United Red Army (URA), a radical leftist group, in which URA leaders Tsuneo Mori and Hiroko Nagata directed the beating deaths of eight members and one non-member at a compound in Gunma Prefecture; six additional members were tied to trees outside and froze to death. On February 16, 1972, police arrested Mori, Nagata, and six others at or near the compound, while five other armed members fled on foot toward Karuizawa.

On February 19, 1972, these five fugitives — Kunio Bandō, Masakuni Yoshino, Hiroshi Sakaguchi, Jirō Katō, and Saburō Katō — took refuge in a vacation lodge called Asama Sansō, owned by Kawai Musical Instruments Manufacturing. Inside, they found Yasuko Muta, the 31-year-old wife of the lodge's caretaker, and took her hostage at gunpoint, barricading themselves inside the concrete-and-wood building. Police surrounded the lodge, initially waiting for a surrender, then cutting electricity and broadcasting appeals from relatives of the radicals, without success.

On February 28, 1972, police launched an assault using a crane with a wrecking ball, ladders, chainsaws, and high-pressure water hoses. The radicals fired on police and threw homemade explosives during the operation. Two police officers, Inspector Shigemitsu Takami (42) and Superintendent Hisataka Uchida (47), were shot and killed, and fifteen other officers were injured. A civilian observer who entered the area without permission was also fatally shot, reportedly by the radicals. Police officer Masahiro Endō was shot in the eye by Bandō and lost the eye but survived. By 6:15 p.m. that day, all four remaining radicals were taken into custody and Muta was rescued; she was cold but uninjured and told police she had not been mistreated, though she had been tied to a bed for most of the standoff. That evening, Bandō's father died by suicide in Ōtsu, reportedly despondent over his son's actions.

Public broadcaster NHK aired live continuous coverage of the February 28 assault for over ten hours, drawing average ratings of 50.8% and a peak of 89.7%. The five radicals were charged with two murders, one attempted murder, obstructing police duties, firearms violations, and illegal confinement. Four received long prison sentences; Sakaguchi was sentenced to death, and in 2013 the Supreme Court of Japan rejected his appeal for a retrial. In 1975, the Japanese government released Bandō, flying him to Libya in response to demands during a Japanese Red Army embassy siege in Kuala Lumpur; he remains at large. After the incident, weekly gossip magazines publicly criticized hostage Yasuko Muta, misrepresenting her comments about her captors, after which she stopped speaking publicly about her ordeal and continued working in Karuizawa. The incident is credited with contributing to a broader decline in popular support for leftist student movements in Japan.