Mei Shigenobu

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Mei Shigenobu (重信メイ, Shigenobu Mei^?, born March 1, 1973)is the daughter of Japanese Red Army communist Fusako Shigenobu.^[1] Some news agencies have given her name as May Shigenobu.

Shigenobu's father was a member of the Palestinian militant group PFLP, and she herself was born in Lebanon, though she was not a citizen of any country until March 2001, when she received Japanese citizenship.^[2]^[3] Shigenobu lived her first eight or nine years in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon; Fusako Shigenobu was absent for months at a time and Mei was raised in those periods by her mother's colleagues in the Japanese Red Army. Following the Army's 1972 terror attack at Lod Airport, Israel, in which 24 people were killed and 76 wounded, members of the group, including Shigenobu, had to move frequently and use aliases to evade Mossad reprisals. Shigenobu attended a string of strict Islamic schools, although today she states that she is no longer a Muslim.^{[citation needed]} She came out of hiding after her mother was captured in Osaka, and visited Japan for the first time in April 2001, making her the first child of a Red Army member to return to Japan in five years.^[4] She was the subject of some controversy in December 2001 when she gave a talk at a public school in Kanagawa prefecture about Arab culture and food at the invitation of a teacher there; the Israeli embassy in Tokyo sent a complaint to the school, describing her discussion as conveying "blatant, biased political" anti-Israeli sentiments.^[5] As of 2002, she lived in Tokyo and worked as an English teacher in a cram school.

Shigenobu is a supporter of Palestinian statehood and a critic of Israel, and speaks of her mother's terrorism in sympathetic terms.^[1] She said, according to the Amarillo Globe-News, that it "reflected certain values of another age, when armed struggle seemed to some the only way to bring about quick change."^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Publications

(May 2002) 秘密―パレスチナから桜の国へ母と私の28年 (Secrets - from Palestine to the country of cherry trees, 28 years with my mother). Kōdansha. ISBN 4062108593.
(February 2003) 中東のゲットーから (From the ghettos of the Middle East). Weitsu. ISBN 4901391313.