The revolution will be... illustrated?

What a terrorist incident from 1970's Japan tells us about American politics today

Fifty-five years ago this week on March 31, 1970, a group of nine young Japanese boarded a Japan Air Lines flight at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport bound for Fukuoka. Shortly after takeoff, they pulled weapons out of their carry-on bags and hijacked the plane. The nine were members of a terrorist group called the Red Army Faction of the Communist League. They forced the pilot to take them to North Korea, where they planned to regroup before heading to Cuba for military training and weapons, which they would then use to launch an armed revolution in Japan.

Before departing on the fateful flight, the group claimed responsibility in a letter mailed to the media, signed, “we are Ashita no Joe.” This was the title of a hit 1968 manga series about a boxer from the slums of Tokyo, fighting against a society that was stacked against poor kids like him. (It was only very recently translated into English for the first time.) As to what happened to the hijackers, stay tuned until the end. But the notorious incident was a hint that Japanese cartoons might be more than kid’s stuff, or even entertainment for adults. They might be tools for revolution.

The book from which the Pure Invention newsletter takes its name tells the story of how we got to now, or at least the “now” of 2020, when it first came out. But the final chapter, “The Antisocial Network,” threw some readers for a loop. It tells the story of a revolution, too: one in which “rootless white males” (as Steve Bannon described them) used manga, anime, and video games to help meme Trump into office in 2016.

The antisocial network in question was a website called 4chan, which functioned for American society like a Super Mario Brothers warp zone, speed-running us from the yes-we-can Obama years into the tornado of the first Trump administration. In 2020, after Biden won election, that story felt like quaint history. But that was just a blip on the radar, it turns out. Now the story of how online trolls helped rewire American politics is suddenly even more relevant than it was five years ago.

Pure Invention was all about fantasy-delivery devices that changed our realities, all those Walkmans and Game Boys, the karaoke crooning and kawaii cuddling, all of it so connecting and isolating, so soothing and addicting, all at once. 4chan was the ultimate fantasy-delivery device. Although invented by an American kid in 2003, it was Japanese at its literal and metaphoric core: Built on Japanese freeware, by fans of Japanese anime and manga and games and everything else. Total anonymity provided 4chan users a blank slate for expressing themselves in outrageous ways, turning it into an incubator for pranks, memes, trolls, and what in the olden times of the 2010s was called “politically incorrect” behavior, back when such a quaint concept still existed.

4chan’s Japanese roots explain why sexy anime waifus became a signal of support for Trump online in 2015, and why alarmed Republicans initially described his base as “single men who masturbate to anime.” But the site didn’t play any role in the 2024 elections for a reason as simple as it is unsettling. Whatever tenuous barrier once existed between life online and off has totally evaporated. Social media has supplanted journalism as the main source of information for large numbers of American citizens. And trolling has supplanted debating and legislating as the main job of large numbers of elected leaders. In other words, America has become 4chan.

Peak 2015.

This is why Trump policy so often feels like shitposting: siccing techbros with names like “big balls” on federal workers, threatening to annex Canada (and Greenland, and Panama), rebranding the Gulf of Mexico, naming a pro-wrestling promoter Secretary of Education, legislating what pronouns people can use, holding car sales on the White House lawn, threatening to deport citizens, all of it designed to test waters and probe boundaries for the next provocation. Trollocracy is our reality, at least for the next four years.

But 4chan was ahead of the curve in another way, too, in its embrace of Japanese fantasies. Anime and manga are bigger than ever, increasingly part of the American zeitgeist in all sorts of ways: One Piece nights at NBA games, collabs with the Major Leagues and NFL, name-drops in pop songs, cross-overs with brands ranging from flashy fashion labels to Amazon and McDonald’s.

Some of this can be chalked up to the inevitable corporate commodification of any grassroots trend. But there’s something more than just marketing at work here. Japanese fantasies are more than just popular: they’re quite possibly the only thing this fractured planet agrees on. “The primary uniting force in this country is anime,” posted Grimes, American Vice President Elon Musk’s ex, last month. “It's the only media through line that I can reliably observe regardless of political alignment.”

This is interesting, because despite what happened online in 2015, the intertwined mediums of manga and anime are, and always have been, progressive at their hearts. They advocate freedom, of expression and everything else. Their stories tend to be gleefully distrustful of authority, advocating free thinking self-actualization, featuring wildly diverse casts, and taking great joy in empowering the weak, the outsiders, the weirdos, the people who don’t fit in.

In other words, pretty much everything the current administration hates.

If MAGA politics resembles a fandom, as Noah Smith and many other observers have noted, it’s easy to imagine manga/anime fandom turning political. Actually, you don’t have to imagine at all, because there are so many examples of it happening in the past. Let me absolutely clear about something here: It isn’t that Japanese fantasies are designed to radicalize. There are something like twenty-five million copies of Ashita no Joe in print; only nine of its readers thought to hijack a plane. It’s more a testament to how popular this stuff was, then and today, and how much of a role it played in the lives of young people, then and today. Witness how Luigi Mangione had a Pokémon character in his Twitter banner.

This is why manga played a key role in uniting the Japanese student protest movement in the Sixties (of which those Red Army Faction hijackers were a lunatic fringe). And this is why, more recently, popular characters from anime and manga helped energize democracy advocates in Asia. Hong Kong protesters used One Piece and Evangelion on their posters; in Thailand, they hoisted Hamtaro dolls to troll the government; and Chile went all out, with characters from Pokémon, Naruto, Attack on Titan, and Demon Slayer playing parts in 2019 demonstrations.

When I went to AnimeNYC last year, I was struck by the sight of so many people of different backgrounds, nationalities, and identities coming together to bond over a shared love for things from Japan. That passion and camaraderie is amazing to see. It’s also potentially a threat to those in power. Recall what happened in 2020, when K-pop stans came together to troll a Trump re-election rally. Trump wasn’t in office at the time, so there was little he could do about it other than rail against TikTok. If something similar happened again fans might not be so lucky, particularly given the President’s notorious antipathy to anything Japanese.

There are no anime-themed protests I’m aware of happening in the States, no manga-versus-MAGA demonstrations playing out anywhere I’ve seen. But there is no question that a lot of people are unhappy about the way things are going in America right now. It is hardly a stretch to predict that some form of grassroots protest movement will emerge under some banner of resistance. And if that banner happens to feature an manga or anime character, it shouldn’t come as any surprise.

So what ended up happening to those Red Army Faction hijackers? Theirs was a naive plan, poorly executed. But perhaps their worst luck of all was that they actually managed to get to Pyongyang in the end. In another blunder, they’d neglected to tell the North Koreans about their intentions. Once the authorities there pieced together what was going on, they decided they had other plans for the group. Most would spend the rest of their lives as permanent guests of the hermit kingdom. Kim Il-Sung reportedly called them his “golden eggs,” pressing them into service for secret operations in Europe and Asia. There are allegations that members played a role in the notorious kidnappings of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 80s. One of the hijackers was arrested in 1988, after being sent back to gather funds in Japan using a passport taken from one of the abductees; another seems to have died in a separate escape attempt around the same time.

As for the rest of them, they seem to be alive and well. We know this because they actually launched a Japanese-language website and a Twitter account a few years back. They’ve used both to opine on Japanese politics, review Japanese television shows (which they apparently enjoy by satellite), deny their involvement in the kidnappings, and lobby the Japanese government to let them back into the country. It’s kind of wild seeing these ageing exiles argue their cases online — and also totally of the moment, in that all of us essentially argue our cases online now. Which really makes you wonder: if social media had been around in 1970, would these people even have needed to hijack a plane to hijack the national conversation?