
Fusako Shigenobu (28 September 1945-) was a Japanese communist and the founding leader of the Japanese Red Army.
Biography[]
Fusako Shigenobu was born in Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan in 1945, the daughter of an Imperial Japanese Army major who served in Manchukuo during World War II. Shigenobu joined the communist student movement at Meiji University in 1965 and the communist Kyosando New Left organization in 1966. In 1969, she became a leading member of the group's Red Army splinter faction. Shigenobu was renowned within the movemetn for her beauty and sex appeal, working in a hostess club and turning over all her earnings to support the revolutionary movement.
By 1970, Shigenobu had become the only woman on the Central Committee of the Sekigunha (Red Army Faction), but she grew disenchanted by the sexism inherent in the Japnese New Left and was increasingly intrigued by the possibility of making cause with the Palestinian liberation movement as a stepping stone on the path to world revolution. In 1971, she relocated to the Middle East and married fellow militant Tsuyoshi Okudaira to secure his last name as an alias. She arrived in Beirut, where she and her "husband" lived in separate apartments. She cofounded the United Red Army splintergroup, and she remained in the Middle East for more than 30 years. She volunteered for the PFLP before the JRA became an independent group. Okudaira was killed in the Lod Airport massacre of 1972, when the JRA killed 26 innocent civilians; Shigenobu called it a "historic event". Shigenobu gave birth to her first and only daughter, Mei Shigenobu, in 1973, with a PFLP militant as her father. She was placed on Interpol's wanted list after the 1974 French Embassy attack in The Hague, and she was fored to flee to Libya in 1978 after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Shigenobu oversaw terrorist attacks in Jakarta, Rome, Madrid, and the Philippines, and the JRA's final attack occurred in 1988, when a JRA car bomb killed 5 people outside a club in Naples that was frequented by American soldiers.
Shigenobu was arrested in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture on 8 November 2000 after illegally entering Japan through Kansai International Airport. She formally dsibanded the JRA in a faxed statement in April 2001, and, in 2006, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She was released on 28 May 2022, as she disavowed her past terrorist involvement by retrospectively saying that she was just a university student who thought she knew everything and was going to change the world. She remained under Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department surveillance after her release, even as she received cancer treatments.