Newsletter No. 1221
News-Analysis
December 13, 2008

 

THE GUARDIAN INTERVIEWS FUSAKO SHIGENOBU

The Guardian newspaper of the UK has today published an interview with Fusako Shigenobu, founder of the Japanese Red Army (JRA). As explained in Shingetsu Newsletter No. 200, Shigenobu was sentenced to a twenty-year jail term by the Tokyo District Court after being arrested in Osaka in late 2000.

An unbowed, 63-year-old Shigenobu told her interviewer: “It is time that Japanese people like me, who fought for a political cause in an attempt to create a better society, are offered a political way out of the deadlock… I regard myself as a political prisoner, in as much as I fought with all my strength to improve Japanese and international society, and to help the Palestinian people… If I am released, I will continue the fight, but through peaceful means. The armed struggle was closely related to historical circumstances, and what is right in one time and place may not be right in another.”

Shigenobu asserts that although her colleagues were involved in violent acts, her specific faction of the Japanese Red Army never killed anyone. She told her interviewer: “I regret some aspects of the armed struggle… the fact that innocent people were harmed and hostages were taken. However, my faction never killed a single person. We always strived to achieve our aims without bloodshed.”

The same, of course, could not be said of her colleague Kozo Okamoto, who led the attack on Israel’s Lod Airport on May 30, 1972. The attack led to the deaths of twenty-five people, with scores injured. Most of the victims were Puerto Rican Christians on a visit to Israel. JRA terrorists Yasuyuki Yasuda and Tsuyoshi Okudaira died on that day, but Okamoto was captured. Okamoto was released by Israel in 1985 after thirteen years as part of a prisoner exchange with Palestinian militant factions. In 1997, he was granted asylum in Lebanon, where he still resides today.

After spending almost three decades on the run in Arab countries, Fusako Shigenobu returned to Japan believing she would serve three-to-five years for using fake passports. Contrary to that expectation, she was charged instead with planning abductions in the September 1974 Hague Incident. As was discussed in Shingetsu Newsletter No. 200, it doesn’t sound like Japanese prosecutors had very solid evidence to back these specific charges against Shigenobu, but the judge still served her with a stiffish twenty-year prison term in any case. Apparently, this was mainly because the judge regarded her as “mean, selfish, and self-centered” -- or, in other words, not sufficiently repentant; and not enough of a proper, demure Japanese female.

In December 2007, the Tokyo High Court upheld her twenty-year sentence. Presiding Judge Fumio Yasuhiro stated: “Shigenobu played an important role in the incident, checking the embassy in advance and procuring arms… Even if she was in Libya, it was possible for her to conspire with the attackers… It cannot be said that she was the principal culprit in The Hague Incident who should shoulder the heaviest responsibility.” Like her earlier judgment, her conviction was apparently upheld because “it was possible” that she was involved -- not because the case was actually proven concretely by the prosecutors.

The Japanese Supreme Court will rule on Shigenobu’s final appeal within the next few months. However, considering the fact that this is the same court that handed down the Tachikawa Fliers judgment which essentially criminalized putting antiwar fliers in SDF mailboxes, it seems unlikely that Shigenobu will fare any better her third time at bat with the conservative male judicial system.

The Guardian gives some indication of the conditions under which the sixty-something Shigenobu is being held. She is allowed a maximum of one daily meeting with visitors that lasts no more than ten minutes. She is required to speak only in Japanese, although she apparently speaks English and probably Arabic very well. She is given “half an hour a day outside in the permanent shade of the exercise yard.” I gather that means that she never has a chance for any direct sunlight. Not surprisingly, therefore, her lawyer says that concerns for her physical health are growing, and she was described by the reporter as “drawn and painfully thin.”