Fusako Shigenobu

Fusako Shigenobu (重信 房子) is a Japanese communist activist, writer, and the founder and leader of the now-disbanded militant group Japanese Red Army (JRA).

Born in Japan, Shigenobu became involved in New Left activism while attending night school at Meiji University in Tokyo.

Shigenobu was born on 28 September 1945 in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo.

Her father had served as a major in the Imperial Japanese Army and had been dispatched to Manchukuo.

Prior to his military service, he was a teacher at a terakoya (寺子屋) (or temple school) for poor village children in Kyushu.

A right-wing ultranationalist, he had been implicated in a failed prewar coup d'etat by military officers.

After the war, he worked as a grocer and Shigenobu grew up in relative poverty.

Although he remained staunchly right wing, Shigenobu's father was sympathetic to her activist impulses, and respected her militancy.

In later years, he consistently refused to apologize on behalf of his daughter for her actions, despite an intense pressure campaign to do so.

After high school, Shigenobu went to work for the Kikkoman corporation in a soy sauce factory while taking night courses at Meiji University.

She eventually received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy and in History.

In 1965, she joined the student movement at Meiji University that was protesting an increase in tuition fees.

In 1966, she joined the New Left group the Communist League, better known as the "Second Bund," and in 1969 she became a leading member of the group's "Red Army" splinter faction, which would eventually evolve into a separate group called the Japanese Red Army.

During this time Shigenobu, renowned within the movement for her beauty and sex appeal, worked in a Tokyo hostess club and loyally turned over all her earnings to support the movement.

In 1969, she joined the Red Army Faction (RAF), a communist group that advocated immediate, armed revolution against the governments of the United States and Japan.

Eventually becoming one of its senior leaders, Shigenobu played a significant role in establishing the International Relations Bureau for the organization.

During the 1970s and 1980s, members of the JRA took part in a number of violent incidents, including bombings, mass shootings, and hijackings.

Although Shigenobu did not directly participate in these activities, during this time she attained international fame as the leader and public-facing spokesperson for the JRA.

Despite initially supporting armed resistance, in later years Shigenobu expressed remorse about her involvement with violent militancy, and focused on grassroots support for and solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Throughout her years in hiding and later imprisonment, Shigenobu authored 10 books, including a book of poetry.

By 1970, Shigenobu had risen to become the only woman on the Central Committee of the Red Army Faction.

However, she began to grow disenchanted by what she viewed as the sexism inherent in the Japanese New Left movement and the RAF in particular, and increasingly intrigued by the possibility of making common cause with the Palestinian liberation movement as a stepping stone on the path to world revolution.

In 1971, she helped found the JRA as an offshoot of the RAF.

That same year, Shigenobu and the JRA relocated to the Middle East in an effort to start a world revolution, as well as to assist with the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation while working in concert with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

In February 1971, Shigenobu decided to relocate to the Middle East with a self-appointed mission to establish an international branch of the RAF for these purposes.

To this end, she entered into a sham marriage with fellow militant Tsuyoshi Okudaira to secure his last name, because while "Fusako Shigenobu" was known to Japanese police, "Fusako Okudaira" was not.

Arriving in Beirut, Lebanon, in March 1971, the two activists did not act as a couple and lived in separate apartments.

Soon after arriving in Lebanon, Shigenobu split with the Red Army Faction in Japan due to both geographical and ideological distance, as well as a personal conflict with the new leader, Tsuneo Mori.

Mori's faction went on to link up with the Maoist Revolutionary Left Wing of the Japanese Communist Party to form the United Red Army, a separate group from Shigenobu's JRA.

Upon hearing about the internal purge the United Red Army carried out in the winter of 1971–1972, Shigenobu recalled her shock and sorrow.

She and Okudaira wrote My Love, My Revolution (わが愛わが革命) as a response, the title of which was a reference to Mitsuko Tokoro's influential essay collection My Love and Rebellion.

Shigenobu remained in the Middle East for more than 30 years.

Her move reflected the concept of "international revolutionary solidarity," with the idea that revolutionary movements should cooperate and eventually lead to a global socialist revolution.

She originally joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as a volunteer, but eventually the JRA became an independent group.

She mentions in several of her books that "the mission's purpose was to consolidate the international revolutionary alliance against the imperialists of the world."

On 30 May 1972, three members of the JRA led by Okudaira carried out the Lod Airport massacre at Lod Airport in Israel.

The attackers killed 26 innocent civilians, but one of the attackers was killed by friendly fire, and Okudaira was killed by a mishap with his own grenade.

Shigenobu seems to have had advance knowledge of the attack, as she had written to friends in Japan advising them to be on the lookout for a "historic event" in the revolutionary struggle to take place in May 1972.

Following her arrest in 2000 after several years of hiding, Shigenobu was put on trial for passport forgery and alleged conspiracy involving an attempted hostage-taking operation at the French Embassy in The Hague in 1974.

She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2006 and released in 2022.