The Karuizawa Five

The setting: the fashionable mountain resort town of Karuizawa, 80 miles northwest of Tokyo. The cast: five young terrorists, a woman hostage, and 1,200 cops equipped with armored cars, loudspeakers and a wrecker crane. The scenario--carried live and in color for 10 hr. 20 min. on national television last week--called for the police to rescue the woman, while avoiding any possible charges of police brutality. In what Takeo Doi, a leading Japanese psychiatrist, likened to the painfully measured emotional buildup of a classical Kabuki play, the cops accomplished that task--though not without tragedy.

ACT I. The five terrorists, hunted by the police for bank robberies, were driven by the freezing cold from their hideout in the mountains round Karuizawa two weeks ago. They holed up in a three-story lodge used as a summer resort. The five were student radicals belonging to a ragtag collection of urban guerrillas that in the past had skyjacked a Japanese Air Lines plane to North Korea in 1970, staged riots at Tokyo's new jetport, and had lately pulled off a rash of bank robberies and indiscriminate bombings. Now, armed with a rifle, pistol, three shotguns and some homemade bombs, the bank robbers took as a hostage the wife of the lodge's caretaker, Mrs. Yasuko Muta, 31. When police tried to rescue the hostage, the terrorists opened fire, sending the cops into a hasty retreat.

ACT II. The police brought up reinforcements and began a nine-day campaign of friendly persuasion. Over powerful public address systems, a police officer boomed: "Think of your own future. Surrender now." Instead, the radicals took potshots at the armored cars carrying the loudspeakers. Then the police brought in three of the country's top psychologists for an on-the-spot consultation. The scholars, shivering in the biting winds, took a pensive look and at last recommended the obvious: do nothing rash that might harm the hostage and try to keep the cops from catching cold. More volleys came from the students.

Next, three of the boys' mothers were airlifted to the scene to plead with their sons. Over a loudspeaker Mrs. Yoshiko Bando, 50, mother of the gang's leader Kunio Bando, 25, first whimpered: "You know what Mr. Nixon is doing at this very moment in China. He's meeting with Chairman Mao and trying to do what you've long wanted to do." Then she nearly screamed: "Come on out. Your job's done and finished." The terrorists responded with silence. The frustrated police next turned to psychological warfare, flooding the lodge with blinding light and bombarding it with thunderously loud recordings of marching troops and traffic noise to keep the boys from sleeping. Meanwhile, the TV public--92.2% of all viewers, by one rating--flooded police switchboards with their own tactical suggestions, like calling in a hypnotist to mesmerize the radicals by remote control. A young snack-bar operator, volunteering to be a substitute hostage, ran through the police cordon and was shot dead by the radicals.

ACT III. Concluding that over 200 hours of captivity had brought the hostage to a point beyond endurance, the police brought up a huge mobile crane with a 1.5-ton demolition ball to smash holes in the lodge's wall. Through the gaping holes the cops poured an almost endless barrage of 300 tear-gas canisters and 60 tons of freezing water. Finally the police charged. Two cops were shot in the face, and died on the way to hospital. The police retreated, waited until darkness and then charged again. The terrorists surrendered, with their hostage unharmed.

While Kunio Bando and his accomplices were jailed and the angry public mourned the police deaths, Kunio's father, a former hotel manager, gave the final dramatic touch to the affair by hanging himself from a tree. Composed in traditional Samurai style, the note he left said: "With my death I offer apologies for crimes committed by my son. Do not accuse the other surviving members of my family."

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