Mei Shigenobu
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Mei Shigenobu (重信メイ) (born March 1, 1973) is the daughter of the Japanese Red Army terrorist Fusako 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. 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. Shigenobu came out of hiding after her mother was captured in Osaka, and visited Japan for the first time in April 2001. She was the subject of some controversy in December 2001 when she spoke at a public school in Kanagawa prefecture, apparently about Arab culture and food; the Israeli embassy in Tokyo sent a complaint to the school. In 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, saying, according to 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."
