Escape Review – A Notorious Japanese Revolutionary Tells the Story of the Country’s Most Wanted Criminal | film

MAsao Adachi is an 86-year-old Japanese film director and former revolutionary activist who spent nearly 30 years in Lebanese exile due to his former membership in the terrorist group the Japanese Red Army in the 1970s; He was arrested on his return to Japan, and after his release from prison, he returned to cinema – and has now made this interesting film called Tôsô, or Escape, an intense, sometimes emotional, work that imagines the inner life of a man who was once Japan’s most wanted fugitive.

The film revolves around the notorious Satoshi Kirishima, who escaped from the police in 1975 after being involved in terrorist attacks on corporate buildings, and lived for decades as a wealthy construction worker under an assumed name, hiding under the radar but in plain sight. He was never identified, and finally admitted his true identity on his deathbed in a hospital in 2024, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Rairo Sugita plays the young Satoshi, a long-haired, bespectacled extremist whose smiling face on his police photo has made him a national icon, and Kanji Furutachi plays the older Satoshi. In its stylized way, the film gives us a moment of youth turning into old age by having the young Satoshi accidentally bump into the older, wizened Satoshi on a bleak countryside picnic and bleakly cede his identity to him.

What was on Satoshi’s mind all those years? The film imagines him embracing, with monastic asceticism, the idea of ​​“escape” as a noble call to inactivity. This is not just a matter of silently mocking authority and not betraying your comrades: it is an existential state of defiance, and perhaps even of ascending, vaguely, to something higher. But what exactly? Wasn’t Satoshi supposed to try to flee the country and promote the cause abroad, just like the director did?

Perhaps Adachi wanted the audience to remember Hiro Onoda, the Japanese soldier who held out in the Philippine jungle from 1945 until 1974, refusing to believe that the war was over. But that was a kind of fictional tragic heroism that Satoshi didn’t quite possess; His life seems to have been a near-accidental embrace of stagnation, as he toiled aimlessly on construction sites. Or perhaps, in a somewhat pathetic way, his inactive revolutionary presence was the way in which he transformed the idea of ​​remorse for those innocent lives lost in the bombings caused by his comrades.