Commentary | William Andrews, Shigenobu Fusako and the Haze of Cultural Memory
On the morning of May 28, 2022, an elderly, somewhat frail Japanese woman came out of a prison on the outskirts of Tokyo, where she was met by a small group of supporters and family, and faced a packed line of media cameras.
That woman was Shigenobu Fusako, now aged 76 and finally released from her twenty-plus years behind bars for her role as leader of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), a far-left group active internationally from the 1970s to early 2000s. In a way, the scene marked the pathetic end of a career of radical political activism, and seemed to reinforce the sense that the era of extremism in Japan was now long past.
A quietly spoken Shigenobu told the assembled ranks of journalist that she was sorry for the hurt her activism had caused innocent civilians caught up in the JRA’s hijackings, embassy seizures, and other operations, and that she now wished to devote herself to study and to recuperating.
Predictably, Shigenobu’s release prompted headlines around Japan, couched in the kind of sensational language that has dogged the JRA for decades. “The founder of one of the most feared terrorist organisations of the 1970s has walked free from a Japanese prison after completing a 20-year sentence for the siege of the French embassy in the Netherlands,” said an Agence France-Presse article published in the Guardian. TV Asahi quoted a Tokyo Metropolitan Police official: “Considering the ideas of the Japanese Red Army members, doubts remain over the efficacy of the group’s disbandment that she announced while behind bars.” The police would, the report said, continue to monitor her movements.
Beyond the clickbait, the basic facts of Shigenobu’s early biography are less remarkable. She was born in 1945 into relatively deprived circumstances, the daughter of an ultranationalist shopkeeper in Setagaya, Tokyo. She worked at a soy sauce manufacturer while attending night classes at Meiji University. A chance encounter with a sit-in protest over tuition fees introduced her to student politics just as the student movement was gathering pace towards the end of the 1960s. From there, she would become involved in the Red Army Faction (Sekigun-ha), one of the many New Left groups that emerged at this time and which quickly achieved notoriety for its militant tactics like small bombings and robberies and eventually carried out Japan’s first airline hijacking in March 1970. She became one of the most senior members of the group, renowned for her skills at fundraising. But just as the police crackdown decimated its ranks and new leadership took over the central militant wing of the organization, she made the decision to leave Japan and continue her activism in the Middle East, where various volunteers (Japanese included) were then gathering to help Palestinian refugees. She arrived in Lebanon in early 1971 and started working for an English-language newspaper run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
But it is here that the narrative diverges and we are presented with two versions of Shigenobu.
Empress of Terror or Leftist Icon
According to the government and mainstream media account, Shigenobu is an “empress of terror.” From her base in the Middle East, she masterminded international terrorist operations, including the attack on Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion Airport), which left 28 dead. With her long hair and beautiful looks, Shigenobu was a femme fatale figure, luring men to give their lives for the cause, and directing an extensive network of terrorists until her arrest in Osaka in 2000.
The language about this version of Shigenobu has been gendered from the outset. The Observer called her “the lady terrorist with white gloves” in February 1974. The Sunday Mainichi in June 1972 put Shigenobu on the cover under a headline that labels her “the shadowy woman.” Inside, the article describes her as a “glamorous beauty” with long black hair “running down her back”; a “far cry from the image of a Red Army Faction fighter.” William Farrell’s book-length study of the Japanese Red Army, published in 1990, is infamous in this regard, describing Shigenobu as “Queen of the Red Army”, a “mistress of mayhem,” and salaciously accusing her taking many lovers among the ranks of the political groups where she pursued her activism. He even claims she was once a stripper in Ginza.
The other version of Shigenobu’s life is as a radical leftist icon. Advocates of this narrative like to point to a famous image of her cradling a Kalashnikov as she looks off into the distance. She was a female fighter in the same mold as Leila Khaled; someone who dedicated her life to the Palestinian cause. The “radical icon” narrative continued even up to her arrest, when she was brought to Tokyo on the Shinkansen and arrived at the station to a barrage of camera flashes. Despite the restraints around her wrists and the certainty that she would now spend years behind bars, she raised her hands defiantly and smiled, Japan’s number-one fugitive apprehended at last but unbroken.
This narrative was, in some ways, no less gendered, with the media-savvy and eloquent Shigenobu adopting highly feminine-seeming traits in a television interview, for instance, and choosing a title for her first memoir (My Love, My Revolution) that hinted at an almost maternal public persona. As Chelsea Szendi Schieder has written, “Shigenobu also portrayed herself as a manifestation of a self-consciously feminine revolutionary subjectivity” (156). Here, the two tropes dovetail: Shigenobu as simultaneously a “dangerous woman” and a “nurturing feminist icon of the Left.”
Thinking Beyond the Narratives
“All narratives should be questioned. Any narrative can be debunked.”
All narratives should be questioned. Any narrative can be debunked.
To start with the commonly cited allegation related to the Lod Airport attack, there is actually no proof that Shigenobu was involved, and she was never charged with anything related to it in her trial. The operation was organized by the PFLP’s “external operations” division under Wadie Haddad using the Japanese men, while Shigenobu was busy doing non-militant volunteering, and certainly not “masterminding” operations in the Middle East. She was nominally married to one of the men who carried out the attack and, as a Japanese activist connected to the PFLP, she assumed a role as representative of the Japanese involved with the Palestinian cause. In fact, the Japanese Red Army as we know it did not exist at the time of the attack. Though it did retroactively claim credit for Lod, which only cemented the misconception, the JRA (or the Arab Red Army, as it was known initially, among other names) was not fully active independently until around 1974. Earlier operations (the hijacking of a JAL Boeing 747 in July 1973, and a Shell oil refinery on Pulau Bukom island in Singapore in January 1974; the seizure of the French embassy in The Hague in September 1974) were carried out with the PFLP, which was the dominant partner in the relationship.
Another important thing to understand about the 1970s hijacking and embassy seizures that the JRA carried out on its own was that they were done primarily for pragmatic purposes: they were prompted by the arrests of associates and undertaken to secure the extralegal release of their comrades. It was a successful strategy and the Japanese government twice caved into the JRA’s demands and freed and flew prisoners out of the country.
After its final hijacking in 1977, the JRA effectively withdrew from such high-profile terrorist operations. Various rumors persisted about its involvement in attacks in Europe and Asia during the 1980s, but this may stem more from an over-confidence in the group’s abilities than hard evidence. In fact, the JRA’s influence and strength was on the wane as its associates struggled to survive in Beirut during the height of the Lebanese Civil War. Certain members may have been connected on an individual basis, since the JRA as an organization was less rigid than many assumed, but in stark contrast to its aggrandizing statements in the 1970s that openly acknowledged the hijackings and so on, it tellingly never claimed credit for any further terrorist incident. It was seemingly focused rather on international solidarity and grassroots activism during this period, though its attempts to re-energize its efforts regarding the former led to the arrest of many associates in various locations across the world during the 1990s. The trials that followed these arrests, including Shigenobu’s in the 2000s, revealed many of these details about the clandestine reality of the JRA. We should be wary of trusting everything the JRA members published but the array of materials and interviews that came out publicly around this time were refreshingly candid compared to the posturing of the JRA’s political publications up until then.
The “Haze” of the Long Sixties
The necessity of debunking narratives about Shigenobu is not merely a matter of pedantic, fact-by-fact accuracy. The issue here is that the “blur” of cultural memory has been shaped by the mainstream media (and very occasional interviews that Shigenobu agreed to give), and reinforced by the physical absence of the JRA, cut off from Japan and leading a mysterious existence in the Middle East. This process of blurring is compounded at regular anniversaries, such as the recent fiftieth anniversary of the Lod massacre, which automatically generate reams of often quite superficial retrospective media coverage that resort to the same tropes and images: pools of blood, airplanes on the tarmac, hooded terrorists, and so on.
In the hazy texture of this cultural memory, everything gets indiscriminately mashed up together.
The June 2022 issue of Shōwa 40-nen Otoko, a glossy magazine aimed at men born around 1965, features a four-page article about the 1974 bombing of the headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. But this is surrounded by photographs, text boxes, and “recommended reading” from different New Left incidents such as the United Red Army’s internal purge, the Mt. Asama lodge incident of 1972, and the freeing of prisoners demanded by the JRA after it seized embassies in Kuala Lumpur in 1975. There are indeed some connections among these other incidents and groups (related mainly to specific individuals), but those details are only mapped out in part for the uninitiated reader. Instead, everything is showcased as examples of “past extremist incidents,” whose details and differences matter less than their place in a simplistic framing of the New Left and the late 1960s and 1970s as a violent period of unrest that has nothing positive to offer. Shigenobu’s era was the “season of politics,” wrote the Sankei on May 26, employing a popular but reductive term, abbreviating any nuance to present the Long Sixties as a time of sensational incidents and extremism (with the implication being that things are thankfully different now).
We need to problematize and challenge these dismissive narratives; to not simply accept their historicizing, but rather to question their validity. Gavin Walker recently issued a similar call to arms that we must “attempt not simply to recount ‘what happened’ but to think with the Japanese ’68. To think with ’68 is to restore it to history, to take it away from the field of memory, where it is sealed into the museum, the memorial, and the testament” (10–11).
Shifting Attitudes and New Support
In recent years, Shigenobu has belatedly attracted more nuanced approaches. Eric Baudelaire’s The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images (2011) is a subtle meditation on the paradox of Shigenobu as a figure simultaneously both absent/invisible (physically) and ubiquitous (through her mediated presence in images disseminated by the media and police). Children of the Revolution (2011) is a sympathetic documentary about Shigenobu’s daughter, Mei (or May), and her relationship with her mother.
Throughout her imprisonment, Shigenobu has received support from a group called the Olive Tree, largely drawn from past associates of the JRA and Red Army Faction. Her release was greeted rapturously by various leftist and anti-imperialist groups, including in the Middle East. The Anti Imperialist Action Ireland denounced the mainstream media for sensationalizing the JRA’s operations as criminal and terrorist, which it believes are minuscule compared to the decades-long campaign of violence and oppression waged by the state of Israel against the Palestinians: “Comparing the skirmish that occurred at al-Lydd [Lod] airport to a sustained campaign of ethnic genocide, driven by a brutal imperialist system that has cut a bloody swathe through the 20th century and on into the 21st with no sign of an end upon the horizon, the JRA, like so many organisations before and since, sought to end the horror. [. . .] The enemies of humanity however are not the JRA and its kind whose struggle against tyranny and oppression seek to save a world that is under threat.”
Perhaps Shigenobu’s most steadfast ally is her daughter, who has also been instrumental in galvanizing a new generation of international activists. Though not a rehabilitation per se, people have rediscovered Shigenobu as a feminist icon, a wrongfully imprisoned political prisoner, and a champion of the Palestinian cause. In their discourse, these supporters address her by her given name, Fusako, humanizing a figure whose name has become so vilified. Having known of Shigenobu and her daughter for some time, the literary translator and activist Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda recently became involved directly in the support network. In an emailed comment, she described the appeal of Shigenobu to her: “She is a lifelong comrade of the Palestinian people and dedicated her life to communicating and conveying their struggle to leftist activists in Japan.” Speaking on the Against Japanism podcast in May, Setsu Shigematsu takes this further to locate Shigenobu within a lineage of revolutionary and radical women in Japan, noting how her activism was much than simply extremist or terrorist, but an anti-imperialist mode of femininity that defied patriarchal norms for women.
Hofmann-Kuroda has translated and published Shigenobu’s final newsletter from prison in an effort to make Shigenobu’s own words more accessible, after so many years of the media and academics speaking for her, often with bias. Beyond the haze of cultural memory, behind all the hijackings and headline-grabbing operations, lies a quieter, more sustained aspect of Shigenobu’s life that has garnered far less attention: the numerous memoirs and books she has written that have significantly contributed to disseminating information about Palestinians in Japanese. Her latest memoir was published in May 2022 and perhaps more are to come.
Draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, Shigenobu gave an impromptu press conference outside prison after her release. It was the first time she had been seen in public since her arrest. Here was a stark reminder that she is a living person, not an image—and that the generation active during the Long Sixties are still with us. We may not agree with everything Shigenobu says or what she did in the past, but we are now finally able to hear her voice unfiltered.
William Andrews is a Tokyo-based writer and translator. He is the author of Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture, from 1945 to Fukushima (Hurst, 2016). His scholarly publications include “Anti-2020 als transnationale Bewegung: Die Schaffung autonomer Räume durch internationalen Protest und Solidarität” (Anti-2020 as a Transnational Movement: Creating Autonomous Spaces Through International Protest and Solidarity) in NOlympics. Tōkyō 2020/1 in der Kritik (Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2020). He is currently working on a biography of the filmmaker and activist Adachi Masao.
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
William Andrews, “Shigenobu Fusako and the Haze of Cultural Memory,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, June 15, 2022; https://doi.org/10.52698/LFVE6790.