Japan’s Mistress of Mayhem and The End of an Era

The release from a Japanese prison of Japanese Red Army founder Fusako Shigenobu marks the end of an era, not only for Japan but for the global cowboy terrorism the JRA came to epitomize.

The release from a Japanese prison on May 28th, 2022 of Japanese Red Army founder Fusako Shigenobu marks the end of an era, not only for Japan but for the global cowboy terrorism the JRA came to epitomize.

The JRA was formed in 1971 by Fusako Shigenobu, a former Meiji University student and topless dancer. Shigenobu wanted to see the world — and cause mayhem in it. This, her good looks and her willingness to utilize her sexual favors to entice new recruits into the cause, led to the Japanese media dubbing her The Mistress of Mayhem. There is many an aging JRA rebel rotting in jail now because of a fatal fondness for the beautiful smile and body The Mistress of Mayhem possessed when she was young and metaphorically innocent. Shigenobu slept with leading members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to climb up the international terrorist ladder. Other JRA members also got into bed with the PFLP and ended up in jail as a result. Along with Carlos “The Jackal” and other international vagabonds, the JRA operated a very lucrative “guns-for-hire” racket. The JRA’s first — and arguably most notorious — such venture was the 1972 kamikaze machine-gun and hand-grenade attack on Israel’s Lod Airport. In the operation, paid for by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 26 persons were killed, including 16 Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims; nearly 80 others were wounded. The JRA became Palestinian heroes and Kozo Okamoto, the sole surviving JRA attacker, was given political asylum in Lebanon as a result.

Lod Airport was only the beginning. Together with Carlos “The Jackal”, the JRA seized the French Embassy in The Hague in 1974. They also bombed a discotheque on Paris’s Rue St. Germain for some obscure reason. Two people were killed and 35 others injured in that attack. The JRA also made ten million dollars from ransom payments from the Japanese and French governments. Libya’s Colonel Mu’ammar Ghadaffi also paid them well for bombing another disco, this time in Berlin. When not blowing up discos, they attacked American and Japanese embassies wherever the fancy took them. Then, all of a sudden, they stopped.

The JRA seemed to have out-grown their adolescent pathologies. Nothing was heard of them until 1990 when veteran JRA bomber Masano Wakamiya was killed in Peru. The Shining Path killed him; he had gone to Peru to help them — the JRA were later credited with masterminding the Tupac Amaru take over of the Japanese embassy in Lima. More silence followed. Then, in 1995, Yukiko Ekita was arrested in Romania and deported back to Japan. Other arrests followed in Lebanon, Peru, Nepal, Bolivia and Thailand. Most of the JRA ended up in Japanese maximum-security prisons.

So too did the Mistress of Mayhem herself. She was arrested on Tuesday 21st November 2000 emerging from an Osaka hotel disguised, for her own bizarre reasons, as a man. Shigenobu had a habit of blowing a smoke ring when she exhaled and she smoked her cigarette as if puffing on a pipe. When Shigenobu was finally spotted in a rural town in western Japan, her smoking habit helped to confirm her identity. A salutary lesson for all law breaking smokers!

She was then brought by bullet train to Tokyo and given very secure lodgings. The trip from Osaka was turned into a media circus and actually pushed the Gore-Bush election count of the same day completely off the Japanese airwaves; Shigenobu was a much bigger story than whoever might end up as 43rd POTUS. The train journey was covered live on all Japanese networks and, as the aging stripper and terrorist mastermind vowed to continue her campaign of carnage from Japan’s most secure prison, the Japanese were spared the first chapter of the Gore-Bush election count marathon. Instead, they watched the Mistress of Mayhem finally begin to face Japan’s legal system. Her daughter, May Shigenobu, returned to Japan and campaigned on her mammy’s behalf. May, incidentally, is named after the month of May, or more specifically, the May 30, 1972 massacre of Puerto Rican pilgrims at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport. The Mistress of Mayhem, May’s mammy, penned a book Ringo-no Ki-no Shita-de Anata-wo Umo-to Kimeta (I decided to give birth to you under an apple tree) on their relationship.

Although it is heartening to see the strong familial bonds holding mother and daughter together — and Yukiko Ekita did write a lovely collection of children’s fairy tales — the fratricidal Japanese Red Army were not a family advocacy group. They are, for example, implicated in the abduction of Japanese civilians by North Korea. The mystery over what happened to those Japanese citizens always appeared too fantastical to be true. About a dozen Japanese residents were snatched by North Korean agents as they went about their daily lives — walking home from school, enjoying romantic dates, leaving a restaurant. A Japanese woman, Megumi Yao, admitted working with the North Koreans to try to ensnare young Japanese women. The suspicion is that young women were wanted as wives for JRA members already in North Korea, to help build a community of Japanese revolutionaries. Others may have been taken to teach Japanese language and customs to North Korean spies. All in all, these kidnappings were a totally bizarre and sordid affair.

But, as these excellent background reports here, here, here, here, here, here and here help attest, they were part of a terrorist pattern that shook Japan to its core but ultimately served only America’s geo-political interests. The JRA’s roots were in the violent but disciplined mass protests students and farmers made against the Japanese government’s compulsory land purchases to build Narita airport, as well as Japan’s revulsion against America’s Vietnamese terror campaign, which were a direct continuation of Japan’s huge anti American riots of the 1950s, when Japan was a powder keg and the Japanese Communist Party, despite the many unexplained fatalities of their leading members, seemed on the cusp of power.

The JRA helped defuse all of that, just as their Irish, Palestinian, Peruvian and other chums helped derail progress in their own countries. As The Mistress of Mayhem has stated that ill-health means she can only spend her remaining days in contemplation of her past acts, she might like to reflect on how the JRA and their affiliated Irish, Palestinian and Peruvian groups were ultimately agents for reaction as the Anglo-Americans they professed to oppose were able to control the chaos they unleashed and emerge victorious in Japan as well as in their other client states.


By Declan Hayes
Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

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