Korean television viewers will have the chance to watch a drama highlighting the life of Kaneko Fumiko, a Japanese female resistance fighter and anarchist who planned an assassination attempt on Hirohito, then the crown prince, in September 1923…
Kaneko Fumiko, a lover of fellow anarchist Park Y[e]ol, a fellow Korean independence activist, was one of few Japanese citizens who betrayed [sic] her homeland and sided with the Korean independence movement during the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula.
Progressives in Japan and Korea have long studied Kaneko’s life. Her political activism came to an end when she was arrested for the assassination attempt on Hirohito, which was plotted with Park Yol. The Japanese judiciary protracted her trial for three years; during the trial, Kaneko and Park justified their assassination attempt instead of trying to make excuses, which often turned the courtroom into a verbal battleground…
Above : Fujin, “Japanese Anarchist Women’s Magazine”
For more on Kaneko, see Hélène Bowen Raddeker, ‘Resistance to Difference: Sexual Equality and its Law-ful and Out-law (Anarchist) Advocates in Imperial Japan’, Intersections, No.7, March 2002; on ‘The Anarchist Movement in Japan’ read John Crump… and cheer as anarchists in Japan shout “No Nukes! No War! No Government!” while others — including President Koizumi — pray for peace on Hiroshima Day, 2006.
