LEARNING WITH OUR ELDERS /// “We had to Change Ourselves Before We Could Change the World”

TRANSLATED FROM JAPANESE BY MAY SHIGENOBU

We are delighted to open a new section in the magazine (which adds four pages to each issue): “Learning With Our Elders.” It consists in asking an activist whose path has been a bit longer than most about a moment of their political trajectory where they learned something crucial from a mistake or failure (be it individual or collective) . To begin this series of intergenerational transmission, we are honored to publish the words of Fusako Shigenobu—see the April 2022 text her daughter, May Shigenobu, had written for us about her mother, one month before she was able to leave the Japanese prison where she was forced to spent almost 22 years. She generously shares with us a determining moment of 1975, a few months after having split from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and formed the Japanese Red Army.

I want to offer a moment from my past, one that fundamentally changed how I think about struggle, solidarity, and what it means to lead. It was a turning point, born not from victory, but from failure.

It was 1975, and we were fighting alongside the Palestinian liberation movement. At that time, two of our comrades were arrested in Sweden and deported back to Japan. We had only recently formed the Japanese Red Army in December 1974, having split from the PFLP to begin our own independent operations in the Arab world. This was our first mission as a new unit, independently from the PFLP. We were full of determination, committed like the fighters in the Lydd airport operation, ready to sacrifice ourselves with unwavering conviction. We believed we were strong. So when we heard, through the newspapers, that those two comrades had begun to confess to the Japanese police, we were stunned. At first, none of us could believe it. It felt unthinkable. But the reports kept coming. Slowly, it began to sink in. And with that realization came confusion, disappointment, and deep unrest. What shook us even more was the pattern. Japanese comrades arrested in Europe had confessed before. But those of us who had come from Arab soil had remained silent under interrogation.

We had taken pride in that. We thought: “We are stronger. More resolved.” And now, that illusion was crumbling.

Some among us reacted with anger, condemning the two who had confessed. Others, especially those who had led the operation, fell into guilt and silence, blaming themselves. I had been away during this introspection, and when I returned, I saw the group in disarray, frozen, unable to act. The organization I had helped build was paralyzed. That shocked me even more than the confessions themselves.

Strangely, because I had been absent, I wasn’t the target of criticism this time. And that distance gave me clarity. I saw that our problem ran deeper than individual failures. The organization we thought we had built—one based on unity and resolve—wasn’t real. It fell apart under pressure. And that wasn’t just on those two comrades. It was on all of us. It was on me.

I didn’t know how to fix it. But I knew I had to try. So I picked up a fresh notebook and started writing; raw, unfiltered. Then I passed it around to the others.

I wrote: “Maybe I can see this clearly because no one’s blaming me this time. But the truth is, we, who believed we were strong, fell apart when it mattered most. We’re scattered, not united. Can we really say the two who confessed are solely responsible? The organization we’ve built isn’t holding. And that’s my responsibility. Are we actually as strong as we believed? Or were we hiding behind the example of the Lod fighters, using their courage to cover up our own insecurities? Have we, shaped by Japan’s exam-driven culture, failed to see each other as comrades, competing instead of uniting? Our real battle should be with our own conscience, not with each other. Especially in moments like this. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s be honest: could any of us say, with certainty, that we wouldn’t have confessed under the same pressure? What kind of organization do we really want to build? Let’s reflect, and begin again, from this exact moment.”

People responded. They wrote in the notebook. They opened up. And through their words, we began to see each other anew. Some who always seemed strong were, in truth, struggling inside. Others, who’d seemed quiet or unsure, had been steady all along. That notebook became more than a collection of reflections, it became a mirror. For the first time in a long time, we really looked at ourselves.

It made us remember something simple: when we were kids, we knew how to reflect, how to admit when we were wrong. But somewhere along the way, we lost that. As adults, in the heat of struggle, reflection had started to feel like weakness. So we made a promise to each other: to bring reflection back into our practice. To value it like we did in our youth. And from that came a shared resolution: “We cannot change the world unless we are willing to change ourselves. Let’s become the kind of unit that is brave enough to transform from within.”

As Japanese leftists, we had inherited a rigid mindset from the old Comintern tradition, this idea that each nation must have one, infallible party. It had taught us to fight over “who was right,” to treat our own party as the one that could never be wrong. But that way of thinking had only created division, dogma, and infighting. We saw how this had kept us from moving forward with the people, rather than ahead of them. And so, we rejected it.

We said: let’s not aim at forming a flawless organization. Let’s aim at forming one that learns, that reflects, that admits its mistakes and corrects them. If people see us struggling to grow, struggling to be better: that’s what leadership actually looks like. We also realized we needed a new way of thinking. Before, we relied too much on deduction:
We saw everything only from our own point of view.
We blamed external factors for our failures, never ourselves. And we’d conclude: “It couldn’t be helped, someone else was at fault.”

We decided to break that habit. We developed a new method for reflection, with five steps:
– Start with the facts, look at them from the society’s viewpoint, not just our own.
– Ask why it happened, search both inside and outside ourselves.
– Reflect on what we could have done differently?
– Ask, why didn’t we do that at the time? What stopped us, internally and externally?
– Finally, consider what can we change now and use that to reform the organization.

This process changed everything. It led us to reevaluate internationalism, armed struggle, and what revolution really means. Revolution isn’t just about ideology or action, it’s about people. It’s about changing society in a way that transforms the consciousness of those living in it. In the past, we ran forward with abstract ideals—what should be—without really checking whether our actions matched the needs or realities of the people.

Since then, we’ve committed to something different. We’ve tried to return, again and again, to the people’s perspective. We’ve looked for ways to struggle with them, not just for them.

That’s why we’ve moved away from high-profile actions and placed more importance on grounded, community-based movements. Not flashy battles, but patient, rooted, positional struggles that grow from the soil they stand on.

Looking back, I see that moment, not of triumph, but of rupture, as one of the most important in my life. It reminded me that strength doesn’t come from being right. It comes from being honest, from being willing to change, and from standing together, even when things fall apart. ■