Strong Will Shall Keep Spreading
On 28th May 2022, after over 20 years in prison, Fusako Shigenobu has been released. Emerging from the Tokyo jail where she had been incarcerated to be draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, Fusako was greeted by her daughter May, and a large crowd of supporters. Although Fusako and those she led are typically vilified by a corporate controlled media placed it that privileged position of deciding where the parameters of debate should lie, she had become a revolutionary symbol through her commitment to internationalism, having shown a fierce willingness to resist imperialism in her own country and beyond.
For three decades the police had been looking for Fusako Shigenobu as the leader and co-founder of the Japanese Red Army (JRA). Based in Lebanon where her group conducted military operations as allies of Palestinian revolutionaries fighting against Israel, aalthough internationally wanted by the imperialist powers, Fusako evaded capture until 8 November 2000 when, at the age of 55, she was captured by police outside a hotel in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture. She had entered Japan illegally through Kansai International Airport using a forged passport that she obtained by impersonating another person between the years 1997 and 2000. Betrayed by her style of smoking, in which she drew on a cigarette as if it were a pipe, blowing perfect smoke rings, Fusako was using her married name, “Fusako Okudaira,” with which the arresting officers addressed her. That same day she was transported to Tokyo to be interrogated by the Metropolitan Police Department although it was reported that she refused to answer any questions. Japanese citizens were said to have been startled to see a handcuffed middle-aged woman emerge from a train arriving in Tokyo. Before waiting cameras, she raised her hands and gave the thumbs-up, shouting at reporters: “I’ll fight on!”
As leader of the JRA, Fusako was accused of orchestrating, what the Japanese state called ‘attacks, kidnappings and hijackings.’ After a lengthy trial, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison on 8 March 2006. Referred to as the “Red Queen,” “Red Empress” and “Mistress of Mayhem” by a media that feels the need to create such foolish spectacle, like in any patriarchal society, the Japanese media could not resist the cliché of the ‘dangerous beauty’ and even at the height of the Red Army’s campaign in the early 1970s; Fusako was praised as a ‘rare flower’. Fusako however, remains a symbol of revolution, of selfless internationalism and an inspiration to future generations that recognise the need for a new world.
The Japanese Red Army, or Nihon Sekigun, (JRA) was a revolutionary communist group founded and led by Fusako in early 1971 in Lebanon. Its stated aims were the overthrow of the Japanese government and monarchy as part of the international struggle for a world revolution. Under pressure from the Japanese state, Shigenobu had left Japan with a small number of dedicated comrades for the Middle East where the group forged very close ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In the decades that followed, this small contingent of revolutionaries proved themselves to be a dedicated and efficient contingent of the aspirations for a world socialist revolution.
Fusako was born on 28 September 1945 in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo, the month following Japan’s surrender to the United States. Her father had been a teacher at a terakoya or temple school for poor village children in the Kyushu region after World War I, but had later become a major in the Imperial Japanese Army dispatched to Manchukuo. Fusako’s father had been a member of a fascist political faction that was to be blamed for starting World War II in the East. He was however; too minor a figure to attract the attention of the US occupiers that put other members of the faction on trial after the war. Instead, he ran a small grocery store during Fusako’s childhood. Fusako’s excellent academic performance during junior high school however, deteriorated after she realized that her parents could not afford to send her to college.
After high school, Fusako went to work for the Kikkoman Corporation, a company that made soy sauce. She used her earnings to pay for night classes at Mayji University in Tokyo in 1964, eventually receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy and in History. Fusako however had become interested in radical politics and joined the student movement that was protesting the increase of tuition fees. It was the era of the Vietnam War, and Japanese students took part in protests against the presence of American troops on the Japanese island of Okinawa. In 1966, she joined the New Left group the Communist League, better known as the “Second Bund,”
That year, the Second Bund carried out a variety of university protest activities in 1968–69. The group however became increasingly confrontational over its violent struggle policy, and on 4th September, the most revolutionary faction of the alliance broke away and formed the “Communist League – Red Army Faction” (Sekigun-ha).
It was the RAF that would become the progenitor of two infamous revolutionary groups, the United Red Army and the JRA. As campus demonstrations hardened into militant action, Fusako became a leading figure in the Red Army Faction, which declared war on the state in late 1969, seeking to overthrow capitalism through armed revolution.
The RAF founders envisaged a full-fledged military organization, with arms, explosives, and battle helmets in blood red, embarking on a policy of “pre-stage armed uprising” during the struggle to prevent Prime Minister Sato’s visit to the United States in November that year. After failing to stop the renewal of the Japan – U.S. Security Treaty in 1970, the Japanese student movement broke up under heavy police surveillance and harassment. As RAF military operations began, several Osaka police stations were attacked with Molotov cocktails, another police station in Tokyo also being targeted. The state responded with the arrest of more than fifty RAF members at a training camp near Mount Fuji. These were accused of planning to attack the police headquarters in Tokyo and also the residence of Japan’s prime minister. In response, Takaya Shiomi, the Chairman of the Military Committee of the RAF, proposed the “international base land theory”. This foresaw that “the Japanese revolution will be achieved by building base areas in socialist countries and other countries and receiving international support.”
The RAF at this time had aspirations to set up offices in Mexico, Brazil, and San Francisco, coordinating a worldwide uprising together with a revolution in Japan.
In March 1970 the RAF carried out Japan’s first hijacking. After a Japan Airlines Boeing 727 took off from Tokyo, nine neatly dressed hijackers, including the bass player of the Japanese noise band Les Rallizes Dénudés, took out daggers and swords from cardboard tubes and burst into the pilot’s compartment. Demanding that the plane head for Pyongyang, North Korea; the plane first landed in Seoul, South Korea that had been disguised as the North Korean capital’s airport. The hijackers were not fooled however, and eventually the plane, with its ninety-nine passengers and seven crew members, flew to the DPRK. The hijackers were allowed to stay in Korea and the hostages, with the hijacked plane, flew back to Japan a few days later.
There followed a police crackdown that saw the arrests of many more RAF members, including Shiomi. The RAF lost around 200 members, and the remnants merged with the Kanagawa Prefectural Committee of the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Japanese Communist Party, also known as the Keihin Anti-Security Treaty Joint Struggle Group, a Maoist inspired organisation led by Hiroko Nagata, to form the Rengo Sekigun or United Red Army in July, 1971.
But Fusako was no longer in Japan having gone with Tsuyoshi Okudaira, whom she had married, to the Middle East to create international branches of the RAF. This sojourn was a result of making contact in North Korea with George Habash. Upon arrival, Fusako and her comrades split from the RAF in Japan due to both geographical and ideological differences with the new leader, Tsuneo Mori. Based in Beirut, Lebanon, Fusako studied the Palestinian revolutionary movement by working in the propaganda unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
This move to Lebanon reflected the concept of “international revolutionary solidarity,” and the notion that revolutionary movements should cooperate and eventually lead to a global socialist revolution. The Japanese revolutionaries were remarkable in that they embraced their internationalist duty, not as a means to avoid confronting revolutionary action, but as a way to send many of its fighters to the Middle East. This spirit compared clearly to the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War.
At Palestinian controlled guerrilla camps in Syria and Lebanon, the Japanese revolutionaries underwent military training, planning for the group’s most daring raids from a headquarters in the Bekka Valley in Lebanon that was largely controlled by Syria at this time.
Initially functioning as PFLP External Operations, the Japanese eventually became an independent group, Fusako working towards an Arab branch of the RAF. In May of that year, she served as local guide for several New Left film makers from Japan, helping produce the film, “Red Army: PFLP Universal Declaration of War” that ‘showed the ‘everyday life’ of Arab guerrillas, and transformed a ‘news documentary’ into a radical text for a world revolution.’ The following March 1972, the fledgling JRA issued a declaration, “To the comrades of the Red Army Faction and to the comrades of the United Red Army,” informing of their separation from the RAF and clarifying their stance of developing a base for their revolutionary activities while advocating the “Plan to Construct International Bases.” She has many times stated that “the mission’s purpose was to consolidate the international revolutionary alliance against the imperialists of the world.”
Back in Japan, the United Red Army (URA) had an estimated twenty-nine members and lost fourteen of these due to killings, many of them self-inflicted, in less than a year. In December 1971, by the order of their leader Tsuneo Mori, the URA moved its headquarters to the training camps that the Red Army Faction had previously made use of. It was here that they were to slaughter twelve of their own members in a training camp on Mount Haruna.
When their training camp was discovered, the remaining members left, taking a dangerous route through the mountains to Nagano Prefecture in order to avoid leaving traces of footsteps and the stench of corpses that hung about them due to a lack of bathing facilities. One group was arrested at the Karauizawa train station.
The remaining five URA members were chased by police into a lodge at the base of Mount Asama. In what became known as the Asama-Sanso Incident, the URA members took the lodge keeper’s wife hostage and a nine-day siege ensued, in which the mountain was sealed off and around three thousand riot police were drafted into the area. On the tenth and final day of the incident, the police destroyed the entrance of the lodge with a wrecking ball and fired water mixed with teargas into the building. The battle lasted eight hours with two police being killed before the URA members and their hostage were found sheltering behind a mattress on the top floor of the lodge.
This event was widely publicized, with viewers across Japan able to watch the shoot-out between the radicals and riot police on TV. Public perception of the group was varied and there was some sympathy. The United Red Army however, had fallen into a bizarre ultra-leftist zealotry that saw it eradicate its own members. In the final analysis they proved to be good fighters, but had ideologically lost their way, with gruesome results. By 1972 the URA in Japan was finished.
Upon hearing about the internal purges the United Red Army carried out in the winter of 1971–1972, Fusako recalls her shock and sorrow and she and Okudaira wrote My Love, My Revolution as a response.
At the same time, in Palestine, three JRA members, operating under the flag of PFLP External Operations, carried out an attack on Israel’s Lod Airport (known to Palestinians as al-Lydd) in May 1972 in which they targeted Aharon Katzir, the lead scientist for Israel’s biological weapons programme. The JRA members, Kozo Okamoto, Tsuyoshi Okudaira, and Yasuyuki Yasuda, entered the passenger terminal of Tel Aviv’s main airport and began throwing hand grenades and firing automatic rifles at their target, the crossfire killing twenty-four people. About seventy-six others were injured. Among those killed in the attack were JRA fighters Yasuda and Okudaira, (Fusako’s husband).
According to May Shigenobu, “The three Japanese volunteers had planned to sacrifice their lives during the operation by using hand grenades, but one participant Kozo Okamoto survived and was captured. In the Israeli interrogation, it was revealed that he was a Red Army Faction (RAF) member. The three volunteers called themselves the Arab Red Army, and this was leaked to the Israeli media. The Israeli media named them the Japanese Red Army and thus the name existed before the organization came into existence in 1974.”
After quietly working in the PFLP propaganda department, learning English by listening to the BBC World Service, Fusako was thrust onto the world stage. The PFLP had claimed responsibility for the attack, calling it ‘the Ridda Struggle, but Fusako was asked to speak on behalf of her dead comrades to show the Japanese dimension. The statement had revealed for the first time the existence of the Japanese Red Army which was becoming independent of the PFLP. While the state-promoted Japanese self-image was humiliated by ‘the crazed actions’ of its citizens abroad, within the Arab world the JRA fighters were hailed as heroes and martyrs.
In the aftermath, PFLP and JRA leaders became targets for Israeli death squads and the PFLP’s spokesman Ghassan Kanafani was killed in July 8, 1972 by the Israeli Intelligence Agency Mossad in a car bomb.
During the 1970s, the JRA carried out a series of attacks around the world, aside from the attack at al-Lydd Airport, two Japanese airliner hijackings, and an attempted takeover of the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. Over the next fifteen years, the JRA was one of the most active revolutionary groups in the world.
In July 1973, the JRA, along with several Arabs, hijacked a Japan Airlines plane to Libya, the plane being destroyed on arrival and the passengers set free. In January, the following year, a Shell Oil refinery was attacked in Singapore and in February, a ferryboat and its passengers were hijacked, the passengers being released unharmed. Fusako’s only filmed interview as the public face of the JRA was given to Fuji Television in August 1973, after the hijacking.
In September that year, the JRA seized the French embassy in The Hague, the Netherlands, taking eleven hostages, and negotiating for a plane to carry them to Syria. Shigenobu was listed as a wanted person by the INTERPOL in 1974 after this operation in which she was believed to be involved.
Later, ten JRA fighters seized fifty-two hostages including the U.S. consul and a senior Swedish diplomat as well as the U.S. consulate in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in August 1975. Demanding the release of seven prisoners held in Japanese prisons, including several JRA members, they secured the release of five of the prisoners, who flew to Tripoli, Libya where the hostages were set free.
In September–October 1977, JRA hijackers seized a Japan Airlines plane in Bombay, India, forcing it to fly to Bangladesh, forcing the Japanese government to exchange nine JRA prisoners and pay $6 million in ransom for the 159 hostages on the plane. The hijackers then flew to Algeria.
The JRA however, subsequently suspended its attacks for nine years, reactivating in 1986, sometimes under the name Anti-Imperialist International Brigade. In May of that year, mortar rockets were fired at the U.S. and Japanese embassies from a hotel room in Jakarta, Indonesia. That same month, JRA member, Yu Kikumura, was arrested carrying a bomb in his baggage at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Although deported to Japan, Kikumura was released on a legal technicality.
In April 1987, the U.S. embassy and United States Information Service offices in Madrid were attacked with rockets on the first anniversary of an American bomb attack against Libya, the JRA claiming responsibility. Also, in June 1987, the U.S. and British embassies in Rome were attacked with rockets and car bombs on the same day and in November of that year. Details released following the arrest of Osamu Maruoka indicated that the JRA may have been organizing cells in Asian cities, such as Manila and Singapore.
In April 1988, JRA operative Yu Kikumura (who had been arrested at Schiphol Airport) was arrested again with three antipersonnel explosives on the New Jersey Turnpike, apparently planning an attack to coincide with the bombing of a USO club in Naples, a suspected JRA operation that killed five, including a US servicewoman. Kikumura was convicted of these charges and was given a thirty year prison sentence in the US.
The following July, two unused, improvised mortars were discovered near the U.S. embassy in Madrid. The JRA claimed responsibility for planning an attack timed for the Fourth of July, in revenge for an Iranian airliner being shot down by the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf.
In July 1984 however, the JRA had published “If You Listen to the Earth, You Can Hear the Sound of Japan: Lessons from the Japanese Communist Movement,” which clarified its position of the “Japanese revolution as an organic component of the world revolution toward the establishment of the dictatorship of the world proletariat.” Expressing its criticism of the revisionist Japanese Communist Party and others, the JRA stated that it was developing the revolutionary party organization that it aspired to.
Acknowledging its weaknesses in terms of mass popular support, the JRA sought to seize the initiative in the armed struggle and achieve the tactical prominences necessary from a strategic point of view. To this end, it declared that “the party can organize the people’s struggles more broadly by organizing legal activities on the basis of the armed struggle.”
This was followed in May 1993 by “The Japanese Red Army: A 20-Year Trajectory.” After the collapse of the cold war structures, it was stipulated that the subject of the revolution “is to consider the working class as a whole as the subject rather than thinking of the working class as a revolutionary subject in a limited way. In our position, it refers to all those who oppose American imperialism and the domination of Japanese monopoly capital.” in addition to advocating a “people’s revolution,” the statement emphasized the importance of “the struggle against the dispatch of the Self-Defence Forces overseas,” declaring “the struggle against the Japan-US Security Treaty,” and the “struggle to abolish the Emperor System” as part of the “international class offensive and defence.”
On March 1, 1973 in Beirut, Fusako gave birth to her first and only daughter, May Shigenobu. The identity of the father remains a secret to the public with it being reported that he was a militant of the PFLP.
Often referred to as May, which translates from Japanese as “life,” it has often been stated that she was in fact named after the English word for the month of the Ridda attack, that of May. On her 8th birthday, Fusako sat her daughter down and told her that she was the leader of the JRA. It was part of a very unconventional childhood. May lived some of her childhood years in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, her mother often absent for months at a time. May was raised at such times by her mother’s comrades in the JRA and also Arab friends and supporters. May grew up in Palestine, under threat from the genocidal Israeli regime and its secret agents and death squads, rarely far from the war, and among refugees and political dissidents. In an interview she was to recall that the normal background sound, for much of her early life, was “machine guns.”
May had to move frequently and use aliases to evade reprisals by her mother’s enemies. Fluent in Arabic, English and Japanese, her early education took place in several schools in Lebanon and in other countries she refuses to name. May studied Journalism at the Lebanese University as well as going to the American University of Beirut in Lebanon where she continued her graduate studies in International Relations.
Coming out of hiding after her mother was captured, and visiting Japan for the first time in April 2001, May later became an anchor on Japanese cable television channel Asahi Newstar’s one hour live political program Nyuusu no Shinsō going on to become MBC’s (Middle East Broadcasting Center, the United Arab Emirates’ Arabic satellite channel) Tokyo correspondent, reporting in Arabic about Japan.
In spite of their difficult lives, Fusako has remained close to May, and to her two adopted children. When the three children’s names are combined in a certain way, the resulting characters spell “victory of revolution.”
The JRA’s level of activity fell significantly during the 1990s as the situation in Palestine greatly deteriorated and elements of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) headed towards capitulation with Israel. With the rise of Islamist tendencies in the Palestinian national movement and the signing of the Oslo Accords, the PFLP and the JRA’s ideological position was in decline.
The Japanese police also began making a string of arrests of JRA members by enhancing coordination among the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the relevant countries around the world. In March 1995, Ekita Yukiko, a longtime JRA activist, was arrested in Romania and deported to Japan. Other JRA members have joined revolutionary movements in Latin America, including in Peru and Colombia and in February 1997, five members, including Kozo Okamoto, were arrested in Lebanon. With the exception of Okamoto, who was imprisoned in Lebanon for illegal entry and other offenses, later being granted political asylum, the other five JRA were forcibly deported to Jordan and subsequently returned to Japan in March 2000 where they were arrested and imprisoned.
Subsequently, the JRA positioned the Asian region, which is both geographically and culturally closer to Japan, as a new strategic base to consolidate its domestic organization and as an international battle front after having lost their former activity base of Lebanon. In October 1999, the JRA was designated as a ‘foreign terrorist organisation (FTO)’ in the United States under the Anti-terrorism and Effective and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
In 2000, Osaka Prefectural Police Public Safety Section 3 was investigating JRA supporters and began to investigate a person that was in contact with someone who looked similar in appearance to Fusako. Still high on Japan’s list of most wanted, Fusako remained out of sight until 2001. Fusako was characterized by a birthmark on her face that she hid with makeup but, after her unusual style of smoking cigarettes gave her away and, due to her tendency to drink coffee at the same place, fingerprints were collected from a coffee cup that she had used, to identify her as Fusako.
Charged on three counts; for the use of a forged passport, aiding another member in the JRA in obtaining a forged passport, and attempted manslaughter by planning and commanding the 1974 occupation and hostage taking at the French embassy in The Hague, Fusako pleaded guilty to the first two charges, but not guilty to the charge linking her to the latter. Among the witnesses that appeared in the court for the defense was Leila Khaled, currently a member of the Palestinian National Council.
The Tokyo District Court found Fusako guilty of kidnapping and confinement as well as attempted murder in the 1974 case. Fusako was also convicted of passport law violations. However, as she had already served 810 days in prison, her sentence was reduced by time served to 17 years.
In April 2001, Fusako formally announced the dissolution of the JRA from her prison cell and proclaimed the armed struggle over. Playing her cards close to her chest, she declared,
“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.”
The JRA confirmed this in its “May 30 Declaration that it issues every year in commemoration of the al-Lydd Airport operation. The JRA stated, “The Liddah struggle opened up a new stage of the Palestinian liberation struggle through the self-sacrificing spirit of the three comrades, albeit with the inadequacy of the actors who played a role in it, and at the same time has built an indescribable solidarity.” to the friends with whom we once shared the struggle in various fields, and to those who have not yet arisen but are of one aspiration, let us challenge this global capitalism and seek the realization of a world in which everyone can live as human beings in the 21st century, a world full of justice, while correcting ourselves again and again.”
At a press conference before her sentencing in February 2006 however, Fusako’s lawyers read out a haiku she had composed, reading:
This verdict is not the end.
It is only the beginning.
Strong will shall keep spreading.
From her jail cell, Fusako has written books about her life and the Palestinian struggle and had maintained her blog, full of revolutionary optimism in the face of the oppression the Japanese state was inflicting upon her. Not long after her arrest, Fusako published her sixth book, written in the form of a letter to her daughter May: I Decided to Give Birth to You Under the Apple Tree, in 2001 and a book of her haiku, Jasmine on the Muzzle, appeared in 2005.
With the arrest of Fusako, the JRA placed the restructuring of its organization and the construction of new bases as its top priority. In December 2001, the JRA’s successor organization Rentai, or Solidarity, amended later to Movement Rentai after January 2003, was founded, starting operations and activities as a virtual successor organization to the JRA. In its declaration, “We will inherit the history of the struggle,” it returned to the JRA’s origins, stating, “As a sign of solidarity in which the three Japanese warriors put their lives on the line, the battle of Ridda was fought through as a decisive operation.’
By May 2014, the dissolution of the Rentai Movement was announced at the Ridda Struggle commemorative rally by members and sympathisers of the JRA in Japan. The following year, rallies commemorating the Ridda Struggle were held in Tokyo. On the occasion of the Ridda Struggle 47th Anniversary Commemorative meeting, members and supporters of the JRA held meetings in Tokyo and five other locations across Japan to commemorate the 50the Anniversary of the formation of the RAF.
In December 2008, Fusako was diagnosed with both colon and intestinal cancer requiring her to undergo three operations. In June the following year, in an extremely rare interview with the Sankei Shimbun, Fusako reflected that, “We only resorted to armed struggle because the movement had stalled. Although similar student movements were taking place all around the world, not all of them resorted to armed struggle. Some people went back to their home towns and continued the movement at the local level. People have friends and family in their home towns, people who can help them out and restrain them if they start to go too far. If we had gone back to our home towns and continued the movement there, we might have gotten different results.”
State broadcaster NHK may occasionally air a very conservative history of the JRA but there was no documentary in Japan that could give an alternative view of the group, their aims and their history. When a documentary was made with the assistance of May Shigenobu, an NHK acquisitions executive said, “My biggest concern is that the ‘Fusako side of the story’ although being very interesting, seems rather biased, desperate to tell that Fusako is not what she is told to be. Of course, being a family member, that is very understandable, however it seems to lack a ‘third person point of view’. Considering what has happened by and within the Red Army, in order to be accepted by the Japanese viewers, I think it needs to be more balanced…”
The Irish Republican, Robert Emmet, who led an abortive rebellion against British rule in 1803, at his trial, uttered the cry of every revolutionary,
‘Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them. Let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.’
It would not then be unreasonable for Fusako to make similar demands. Once again, ‘The emperor burns down villages, but the people are forbidden to light candles,’ and the mainstream narrative is infested with the clichéd talk of ‘bodies’ and ‘massacres’ left in her wake in an attempt to criminalise struggle. Comparing the skirmish that occurred at al-Lydd airport to a sustained campaign of ethnic genocide, driven by a brutal imperialist system that has cut a bloody swathe through the 20th century and on into the 21st with no sign of an end upon the horizon, the JRA, like so many organisations before and since, sought to end the horror.
As always a litany of liberals has felt the need, as though others want to hear, to express how ‘chilled’ they are by such revolutionary groups. They might feign sympathy for certain aims, but ultimately they become disillusioned, not because they have seen the truth, but because they fear justice; the justice that might lead to their losing their class privileges. driving them to misrepresent those that they want to bury. Such an affected stance should fool no-one with a capacity to think critically and for themselves the liberals professed squeamishness not extending to telling the truth about the JRA and its aims.
The enemies of humanity however are not the JRA and its kind whose struggle against tyranny and oppression seek to save a world that is under threat. Under threat from those that own and squabble over the wealth of the world, valuing land and property more than human life and destroying forests and communities in in pursuit of their self-enrichment.
In her own words, ‘this is not the end’ and in spite of her age and the passage of time, for Fusako the words of her haiku poem remain true. Fusako’s march to her own freedom has been achieved. In a world, under environmental threat and deepening imperialist crisis, the cries of the masses for global revolution continue. The page of Fusako’s life turns, and once again a new chapter begins.