“I want to meet my death with my real name.” That is what a dying man told hospital staff in Kamakura, according to Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, when he gave his name as Satoshi Kirishima. For nearly 50 years the face on that name had stared out from wanted posters in police stations across Japan.
CBS News reported that the 70-year-old had checked into the hospital under a false name for cancer treatment, then revealed who he was. Japanese media treated it as a sensation. Police had not finished their DNA tests when the man died on Monday morning, days after the reports surfaced. A police source told the Asahi newspaper there was “a very high possibility that this individual is actually Kirishima.”
Hiding in plain sight
Kirishima was born in Hiroshima in January 1954 and went to university in Tokyo, where he fell in with radical far-left politics. He joined the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, one of several militant groups of the era. The BBC has reported that the group is believed to be behind a series of bombings of companies in the Japanese capital between 1972 and 1975. In 1974, eight people were killed in an attack on the headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
The group worked in three cells with names like “Wolf”, “Fangs of the Earth” and “Scorpion”. Kirishima belonged to Scorpion. His own alleged offense came in April 1975, when he is accused of helping set up a bomb that tore apart part of a building in Tokyo’s Ginza district. No one died in that blast. He had been on the run ever since.
TV Asahi and the Japan Times reported that he spent the intervening years as Hiroshi Uchida, working at a building contractor in Fujisawa, in Kanagawa. He took his pay in cash. He had no health insurance and no driving license. A person who knew him told TV Asahi that he had “lost a lot of weight” compared with the wanted photo. When stomach cancer set in, he paid for treatment himself, and it was at the Kamakura hospital that he finally said who he was.
Others still unaccounted for
Nine other members of the group were arrested, the Asahi newspaper said. Two more, both 75 years old, remain at large after being freed in 1977 under a deal struck by the Japanese Red Army, which had hijacked a Japan Airlines plane in Bangladesh.
