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On October 16th, Shignobu Fusako, the newly-released former leader of the now-defunct Japanese Red Army, stood on an outdoor stage in Kyoto. In front of her sat dozens of onlookers, many elderly – perhaps former comrades and supporters from the heady days of Japan’s New Left movement. Above hung a red banner bearing the words, “We Shall Change both Japan and the World! Anti-war/anti-poverty/anti-discrimination collective action in Kyoto.” (変えよう！日本と世界 – 反戦・反貧困・反差別共同行動 in 京都。) Shigenobu addressed the crowd in an unwavering voice, one practiced at decades of revolutionary pontification. This was her first public address since her release from prison on May 28th, following two decades of imprisonment.
Shigenobu Fusako and the Japanese Red Army
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Shigenobu Fusako was infamous as one of the world’s most prominent terrorist leaders. She was the face of the Japanese Red Army, and was publically credited as the mastermind behind the Lod Aiport Massacre that killed twenty-six people (most of them Puerto Rican pilgrims) at a Tel Aviv airport in 1972, among numerous other headline-grabbing actions. Operating out of shifting bases in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, Shigenobu worked alongside the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with which her Japanese Red Army was deeply associated.
To many in the Arab world, and especially among Palestinians living under Israeli occupation or in refugee camps in neighboring countries, Shigenobu was a hero; she was (and is) something of a legend in formerly Soviet-aligned spaces and countries where resentment towards US imperialism runs deep. In much of the rest of the world, including her home country of Japan, she was the poster child for youthful idealism taken to its most violent extreme.
After three decades spent evading capture by Japanese, Israeli, US, and European operatives, Shigenobu was finally arrested in November of 2000, having entered her home country on a fake passport. This was some 12 years after the final JRA operation – a bombing of a USO club in Naples in which five people died, four of whom were Italian civilians.
Shigenobu faced an extended trial, taking six years to reach its conclusion; in the end, the prosection’s hoped-for life sentence was reduced to twenty-year imprisonment. The trial revolved around Shigenobu’s involvement with the 1974 French Embassy attack in The Hague, a five-day-long hostage crisis carried out by the JRA which saw a deadly bombing of a Paris Cafe used as a pressure tactic. (In 2017, Carlos the Jackal, perhaps the most infamous independent operator of the “golden age of terrorism,” was charged with carrying out the bombing.)
Return of the “Mistress of Mayhem”
Shigenobu emerged from prison at the age of 76. She’d left for the Middle East fifty years earlier, at age 26, barely missing the horrific internal purge of her parent Leftist student faction, in which 14 members were brutally tortured and murdered. (Her close friend, Toyama Mieko, was among those killed.) For three decades, she’d helped formulate the Japanese Red Army’s Marxist rhetoric, bringing in new recruits from Japan and appearing in Arabic and Japanese language media to represent the JRA.
Scholars such as Patricia G. Steinhoff, who carried out a correspondence with Shigenobu, have argued that Shigenobu’s role in directly planning or ordering deadly attacks has been exaggerated. Nonetheless, Shigenobu publically associated the JRA and her leadership with operations like the Lod Massacre (an attack led by her own paper husband Okudaira Tsuyoshi), seen as a great victory for the Palestinian cause in much of the Middle East but as a terrible slaughter of civilians elsewhere. After two decades in prison, during which she survived cancer, the question on the minds of many has been what this final period of Shigenobu’s life will represent.
The speech in Kyoto is the first real sign we have of what Shigenobu intends for her last years, and represents something of a change (if an unsurprising one). In 2001, while awaiting trial, Shigenobu officially disbanded the Japanese Red Army; in the many years since, she would often reflect on “mistakes” made by the JRA and the outmoding of its violent methods. In 2017, for example, she wrote:
“The Japanese Red Army’s tactics were naive and had some faults. Our tactics weren’t aligned with the realities of Japanese society, and you could say we had a string of failures. People who weren’t targets of the armed struggle got dragged into it because of our weakness….I don’t believe there is any need for a modern-day equivalent of the Japanese Red Army in Japan.”
Letters sent to the media in the days before her release stated that “…my life after release will be filled with apologies, gratitude, rehabilitation, and fighting my illness.”
Starting Afresh?
Shigenobu Fusako’s words during Sunday’s speech, however, indicate a desire to return to more active involvement in politics – although this time at an individual level, working from within the normative framework of Japanese society. A far cry from her former role leading Japan’s most radical band of violent international revolutionaries.
Shigenobu addressed the crowd for around ten minutes. Part of her speech was devoted to her recent, extended experience with the Japanese legal system:
“I spent 22 years experiencing the violation of my human rights. You don’t even have the freedom to take a breath.”
She continued on with remarks related to her desire to contribute to social activism.
“I’ve been walking the path of revolution since I was 19, and there were both mistakes and good things that came of all those battles. After twenty-two years in prison, I’d like to start afresh. Just where can real democracy be found? We must change our politics. Change the LDP [Liberal Democratic Party]. My intention is to participate in these changes as a single individual.”
Following in her Mentor’s Footsteps
Shigenobu stated that she intends to work alongside citizen’s rights groups. In re-entering the political arena following a long stint in prison, she’s in fact following in the footsteps of her late mentor, Shiomi Takaya.
Shiomi was the founder of the Japanese Red Faction, the same group that Shigenobu became involved with in the early years of her student activism. He helped plan a thwarted abduction of the Prime Minister, and was imprisoned just before other RAF members conducted Japan’s first-ever commercial airplane hijacking. Shiomi was released from jail in late 1989, nearly two decades after his imprisonment; he went on to pursue an unsuccessful political career within the confines of the law, doing so while holding a low-paying job as a parking lot attendant. He died in 2017 at age 76 – the same age his younger protegee, Shigenobu Fusako, was at the time her own release from two decades in jail.
The difference, however, was that Shiomi’s Red Army Faction never reached the level of infamy (or, from another perspective, success) of Shigenobu’s successor organization, the international Japanese Red Army. Shiomi was imprisoned while still young, and despite audacious actions like the 1970 hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 351, his RAF was never directly responsible for the murder of civilians. Shigenobu’s JRA invaded embassies, hijacked numerous planes, engaged in multiple violent stand-offs with governments the world over, and was directly involved in the deaths of dozens of non-combatants. Whether any of these deaths were directly ordered by Shigenobu or no, she was the spokeswoman and face of one of the Cold War era’s most infamous terrorist groups.
A Surreal Situation
All this makes Shigenobu Fusako’s low-key speaking engagement in Kyoto feel a bit surreal. Shigenobu, now 77, looks for all the world like any older Japanese woman you might encounter in a covered shopping mall in the countryside. As she concluded her speech, her audience clapped for her, and joined arm-in-arm to sing old student movement songs.
Yet in police boxes throughout Japan, red-colored wanted posters still bear the likenesses and names of her comrades in the JRA. Many, like the infamous Bando Kunio, who was part of the United Red Army purge and the following siege of the Asama Sanso Lodge, are still on the lam; Okamoto Kozo, one of the three Japanese terrorists who committed the Lod Massacre, is known to have found sanctuary in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Their former leader, however, is now talking about engaging in peaceful political activism during her golden years as a free Japanese citizen.
In truth, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department has stated that she will remain under surveillance. Shigenobu Fusako is free, but she is not unwatched. Around the world, people raise cheers in her honor (perhaps with the “Okamamoto Kozo” branded beer bottled out of Brazil), speaking of her in the same breath as her old comrade Leila Khaled of the PFLP. In other locales, her return to normal civilian life is viewed with deep suspicion. For those who view Shigenobu Fusako as either hero or monster, her coming actions will bear watching.
What to Read Next:
Sources:
MBS News. 10/16(日). 「新しい気持ちで再出発したい」日本赤軍・重信房子元最高幹部 今年5月の出所後、初めての講演 京都市. Yahoo! Japan News.
2022年10月16日. 日本赤軍・重信房子元最高幹部が京都の集会に登壇 出所後、初の講演. Asahi Shimbun Digital.
2022年10月17日(月). 日本赤軍の重信房子元最高幹部「本当の民主主義はどこにあるのか」出所後で初の講演. TBS News Dig.
Steinhoff, Patricia G. (1996.) Three Women Who Loved the Left: Radical Woman Leaders in the Japanese Red Army Movement. In Re-Iminaging Japanese Women.
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