Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 402, The Friendly Skies.

On March 31st, 1970, at 733 a.m., Japan Airlines Flight 351 left Tokyo's Haneda Airport for a short-hopped

domestic flight to the city of Fukuoka in Kyushu, with 131 passengers and seven crew members aboard.

The flight should have been short and uneventful, a bit under two hours, depending on weather conditions.

Instead, it became an international incident.

But let me back up, because to understand what's about to

happen to Flight 351, we have to talk a bit about the political context of Japan in the 1960s.

In a lot of ways, the 60s were the high watermark of political radicalism in the country, at least

for the post-war era, particularly for the political

left. There were a few factors external to Japan that made that possible. The continued uncertainty

about the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which, remember, was greeted with massive riots in

1960 when it was renewed, and anger at American policies in Vietnam gave some substance to the

suggestion that American Cold War foreign policy was going to drag Japan into conflicts the

Japanese people had no interest in, particularly since the Americans were still using their

bases in Okinawa, still on American-run territory at this time,

as staging grounds for the Vietnam War.

It's also easy for us to forget this now, but in the late 60s, the fate of the major communist

powers, that the USSR would collapse, and the People's Republic of China would essentially

embrace Japan's own post-war economic model,

just amped up quite a bit and with no political freedoms, was far from clear.

Indeed, the USSR looked to be growing at an amazing pace during this time,

and the scale of Maoist failure in the Great Leap Forward and later the Cultural Revolution

...