LEARNING WITH OUR ELDERS /// “We had to Change Ourselves Before We Could Change the World”

TRANSLATED FROM JAPANESE BY MAY SHIGENOBU

We are delighted to open a new section in the magazine (which adds four pages to each issue): “Learning With Our Elders.” It consists in asking an activist whose path has been a bit longer than most about a moment of their political trajectory where they learned something crucial from a mistake or failure (be it individual or collective) . To begin this series of intergenerational transmission, we are honored to publish the words of Fusako Shigenobu—see the April 2022 text her daughter, May Shigenobu, had written for us about her mother, one month before she was able to leave the Japanese prison where she was forced to spent almost 22 years. She generously shares with us a determining moment of 1975, a few months after having split from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and formed the Japanese Red Army.

Fusako Shigenobu Funambulist — Photograph of Fusako Shigenobu in front of the Kyoto University student center (Yoshida Kodo). The three stars symbolize the three Japanese militants who sacrificed their lives for the Palestinian struggle of liberation.

I want to offer a moment from my past, one that fundamentally changed how I think about struggle, solidarity, and what it means to lead. It was a turning point, born not from victory, but from failure.

It was 1975, and we were fighting alongside the Palestinian liberation movement. At that time, two of our comrades were arrested in Sweden and deported back to Japan. We had only recently formed the Japanese Red Army in December 1974, having split from the PFLP to begin our own independent operations in the Arab world. This was our first mission as a new unit, independently from the PFLP. We were full of determination, committed like the fighters in the Lydd airport operation, ready to sacrifice ourselves with unwavering conviction. We believed we were strong. So when we heard, through the newspapers, that those two comrades had begun to confess to the Japanese police, we were stunned. At first, none of us could believe it. It felt unthinkable. But the reports kept coming. Slowly, it began to sink in. And with that realization came confusion, disappointment, and deep unrest. What shook us even more was the pattern. Japanese comrades arrested in Europe had confessed before. But those of us who had come from Arab soil had remained silent under interrogation.