Communist rebel, 83, leaves hiding after 50 years to blast Japan’s coronavirus response – and call for revolution
- Ageing agitator Takeo Shimizu, head of Chukaku-hu (Middle Core Faction) went on the run following riots in 1971 that killed a police officer
- Now he’s back, claiming the coronavirus has brought about the ‘circumstances for a revolution’. Question is, has his audience died off?
Unfortunately for Takeo Shimizu, the elderly head of Chukaku-ha (Middle Core Faction), his defiant press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday, at which he claimed the government’s response to the health crisis had made the nation ripe for a workers’ uprising, fell largely on deaf ears.
“I want to call out to the working class,” the ageing agitator told a sparse audience, that did at least contain one representative from the Mainichi newspaper. “The circumstances for a revolution have arrived.”
However, he refused to reveal where he had been sheltering for the past half a century since he went underground in the wake of six days of rioting in the Shibuya district of Tokyo in 1971, during which a police officer died after being hit with a Molotov cocktail and nearly 2,000 people were arrested.
Instead his cryptic response was only that he had been “supported by many people”.
While Shimizu has been on the run ever since – though he is understood to have attended a meeting of the group last September – his group, which was founded in 1957 to promote worldwide communism, has remained active in his absence.
