Rainbow Operation

Rainbow Operation (Japanese: 虹作戦 (にじさくせん) Nijisakusen[*]) was an assassination plan against Emperor Shōwa, devised in 1974 (Shōwa 49) by the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, a militant left-wing terrorist group in Japan.

In spring 1970 (Shōwa 45), the "L-han Struggle Committee," formed by Daidōji Masashi and others who were students at Hosei University and had originated from the Chukaku-ha, became increasingly radical, moving toward an escalation and a willingness to resort to direct action based on extreme anti-Japan ideology. In winter 1972 (Shōwa 47), Daidōji and others declared themselves the "East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front" and began full-scale preparations for armed struggle, selecting among their targets Emperor Shōwa, whom they regarded as "a great criminal who crushed tens of millions of Asian people in the Second World War."

Plans to assassinate the Emperor emerged from 1973 (Shōwa 48), but began to take concrete shape from the following year, 1974 (Shōwa 49). The Front studied the Emperor's movements and found that, while he performed various official duties across the country, he followed a pattern each year on August 14: departing from Nasu Imperial Villa by the imperial train and returning to the Imperial Palace to prepare for the National Memorial Service for War Dead on the following day, August 15. They resolved to blow up the imperial train together with the Emperor, and chose as the site for the bomb placement the Arakawa Bridge on the Tōhoku Main Line on the boundary between Saitama Prefecture and Tokyo Metropolis.

Originally, they intended to blow up the railway track at the moment the imperial train passed, by remote radio control, but this plan was abandoned due to technical problems, and they planned instead to detonate the explosives by wire.

On 14 August 1974, members of the Front, their faces painted with camouflage and dressed in black, armed with homemade model guns capable of killing and knives, began laying the detonation wiring the night before the day before. However, on the second day of work, the eve of the planned bombing, an unidentified third party appeared near the bridge pier and began wandering around. It is unclear whether this person was a plainclothes police officer, a vagrant, or a pervert. Fearing that this might be a sign of surveillance and encirclement by the authorities, the Front gave up the wiring, and the plan ended in failure. In order to resume the Rainbow Operation at a later date, they recovered the wires and destroyed the evidence.

Since the Front's plan did not take into account that police and National Railway staff would carry out inspections and security along the entire section where the imperial train ran, it cannot be denied that it might have been discovered in advance. Furthermore, because the imperial train passed along the upbound line of the Tōhoku Freight Line rather than the upbound line of the Tōhoku Main Line, even if the plan had been carried out, the assassination of the Emperor would have failed.

The explosives intended for use in this Rainbow Operation were later diverted to the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries bombing incident. Because the explosives manufactured for bridge demolition were detonated in an urban area, casualties exceeded the perpetrators' expectations.

In the following year, 1975 (Shōwa 50), on 19 May, the members were arrested all at once, and the second Rainbow Operation never came to be carried out.

References

• Matsushita Ryūichi, Noroshi o miyo (Yomiuri Shimbun-sha, 1997)