From Pouring Drinks to Planting Car Bombs

Fusako Shigenobu: Leader of Japan's most notorious international terrorist group

Fusako Shigenobu.

An elderly woman makes her way out of the car to the front of a small crowd. Behind her is a banner, in English, with the words: We love Fusako.

Her oversized black hat and wide face mask make her seem even tinier than she actually is. Across her shoulders is a white and black checkered scarf, a keffiyah—a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. Her eyes straining against the sun she said:

It’s half a century ago ... but we caused damage to innocent people who were strangers to us by prioritizing our battle, such as by hostage-taking.

Not the words you would normally expect a kindly-looking Japanese grandmother to say. But Fusako Shigenobu is not your average pensioner, she is one of Japan’s most notorious terrorists of all time.

Shigenobu is one of the creators of the Japanese Red Army (日本赤軍), a militant communist faction dedicated to world revolution. From 1971-1988, all across the world, they were responsible for dozens of murders, hijackings, hostage takings, and more.

What led this woman from humble beginnings to the world stage?

Student, hostess, activist

Fusako grew up poor. She was born right when Japan lost WWII and lived in American-controlled Tokyo. Her father was a former soldier and a hyper-nationalist; he believed that the emperor was a god and that Japan needed to reassert its strength against the US. He belonged to the Blood Brotherhood, a group known for assassinating political and business leaders pre-WWII.

When Fusako graduated high school, she got into Meiji University. Unable to afford the tuition outright, she worked in a soy sauce factory during the day while she took classes at night.

The fire that lit the drive for revolution happened in 1965 when she was 20 years old. Some students at her university were protesting the hike in tuition fees and Fusako joined them in protest.

From here she grew obsessed with her idea of “justice.” She began joining various socialist movements until she finally landed in a group called the Red Army Faction (RAF), led by fellow student Shiomi Takaya.

During this time Fusako worked as a hostess in Ginza, Tokyo. All her money went to basic survival and the rest to the RAF. As a communist, she was against the corrupting influence of money. She probably found deep satisfaction in siphoning cash from rich old men to fund an organization devoted to the destruction of the world that made them wealthy in the first place.

In 1971, the RAF merged with another group, the United Red Army (URA). Fusako didn’t like their Japan-focused tactics, she wanted to export revolution internationally. They also beat members to death for not being committed enough.

So she ditched them and went to Lebanon to do her own thing, creating the Japanese Red Army (JRA).

Good thing she left, because shortly after, the URA’s mountain hideout in Nagano was discovered by police. Thousands of officers laid siege to the building against 5 of the group members. In the end, police used a wrecking ball to smash through the doors, 2 officers were killed and all URA members were arrested.

The 1972 Lod airport massacre

In Lebanon, Fusako was able to link up with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). For her, the struggle was against imperialism in all its forms. From her perspective, Israel and the US were the perfect symbols of everything she hated.

She married fellow revolutionary Tsuyoshi Okudaira. There was no love here, not romantically at least, it was purely practical, she wanted to change her name to avoid detection from Japanese police. And it worked for 20 years.

Then came the moment that would forever mark Fusako as the “empress of terror.”

May 31, 1972, 1:30 in the morning.

Though it was dark and early, the Lod International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, was full of people rushing to get their bags from the luggage carousel.

A flight from Rome had just landed, with 3 ordinary-looking Japanese men walking off the plane. You wouldn’t have thought anything about them. All 3 were well dressed, carrying violin cases, and were Japanese—the most harmless-seeming of all tourists.

Opening their cases the men pulled out their Czech assault rifles and a handful of grenades. They began ripping through the crowds with their bullets. They lobbed their grenades wherever they saw multiple people huddled together.

Everyone ran away screaming. One of the terrorists, a man named Yasuda, was accidentally shot dead by one of his men. Another man began shooting at a nearby aircraft when there were no more people nearby to kill. He dropped one of his grenades by accident and blew himself up.

He was Okudaira, Fusako’s on-paper husband.

As the chaos of the attack cleared, 26 people were dead with another 80 injured; 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, 1 Canadian citizen, and 8 Israelis. The last surviving gunman was arrested.

What did Fusako have to do with this horrible incident? She flatly denied having planned it or even having any knowledge that it was going to happen. Strange since it was her husband who carried it out. She also leaked to a friend that a “historic event” was going to happen the same month that the massacre occurred.

She knew full well what was going to happen; being the leader of the JRA and being married to one of the assailants, even if it was a sham, I don’t see how she could have been blind.

Now, did she order the attack? We don’t have direct evidence of that. Fusako herself denies having any role in it, so we may never really know. She was a true believer in the cause though. Even after this horrific event, she continued to be involved in acts of terror, for which her direct participation has already been established.

Fusako’s other acts of terror

In addition to the airport murders, Fusako and her JRA also did the following:

• 1974: stormed the French embassy in the Hague and took hostages. No one was killed and the JRA got one of their members freed from jail in exchange.

• 1975: took 50 hostages at an embassy in Kuala Lumpur. No one was hurt, and more JRA members were freed.

• 1977: hijacked a Japan-bound flight and diverted it to Bangladesh. No one was hurt, the JRA got $6 million and the release of 6 more members.

• 1986: detonated a car bomb outside the Canadian embassy and shot rockets at the US and Japanese embassies in Jakarta. No one was hurt.

• 1987: more car bombs and rockets in Rome. No one was hurt.

• 1988: the long stretch of no one getting hurt ends with 5 killed in a bombing of a US military social club in Naples.

Looking at this list, the thing that stands out to me is that none of these actions were nearly as brutal as the airport shooting. Fusako herself expressed some regret at the loss of life. It’s still important to know that they threatened to murder all the hostages in every instance, so you can’t say that she was being “nice.”

The fall of the red queen

From 1988, the JRA was quiet. The Soviet Union fell and the PLO made an agreement with Israel, so there didn’t seem to be much support or fervor left for communist insurgency.

Fusako started coming back to Japan, on and off, under a fake passport of course. In 2000 police received reports that a woman who looked like Fusako—-her wanted posters were all over Japan—was hanging out in a hotel in Osaka. The thing that really tipped off the public, despite Fusako trying to hide her appearance, was her unique way of holding her cigarette while she smoked (see the lead image of this article). Japanese media had honed in on this detail and I guess that somebody was paying attention.

To prove it was her, Osaka police took fingerprints from a cup she had used at the hotel and positively identified her. She was shortly arrested, tried, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. During her first year locked up, Fusako officially disbanded the JRA.

20 years on and now Fusako is free again. She has expressed her deepest apologies over her past actions, yet still supports the anti-imperialist cause that initially spurred her on.

She may have been truly indignant at the treatment of people on the fringes of society. Yet, as with many violent revolutionaries, there was no sense that her actions were actually wrong. Maybe today she feels that they were. But what good is that, now that she’s in her 70s and at the end of her journey in this world?

Apologies made after taking innocent lives mean nothing. Let’s end this with a quote from the judge who presided over Fuskao’s trial in 2000:

[Fusako] sees her doctrine and assertations as absolute truths, having committed selfish criminal offensives for which she gave no mind to the danger towards the lives and bodies of so many. We can ascertain no serious remorse…