Red Army daughter steps out of the shadows

May Shigenobu was a 28-year-old stateless Arab when she first set foot in Japan. It was an emotional "homecoming" to a place she barely knew to support a Japanese mother reviled for her blood-stained past.

Flashbulbs popped and a throng of reporters vied to ask the child of one of the world's most wanted terrorists, arrested after three decades in hiding: "What do you think of your mother?"

She stayed silent, raised two fingers in a victory sign -- and kept on walking.

Her long brown straight hair and the Arab scarf around her shoulders were a vivid reminder of her mother Fusako Shigenobu, the founder of the once ruthless Japanese Red Army.

But May carried no rifle and looked Middle Eastern, thanks to her Palestinian father. It was April 2001, and when she stepped off the plane from Beirut, she emerged from a life spent in the shadows.

This February, Fusako Shigenobu was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a Tokyo court. And May Shigenobu is just beginning to settle down to a new life of liberty -- and to her own identity.

"I am the daughter of a person who was not acceptable to Japanese society," the self-assured May said over coffee.

But "I have the joy of living here. I think I want to live with the Japanese people."

In 1971 at the height of global student radicalism during the Vietnam War, Fusako Shigenobu, then 25, headed to Lebanon with a vision to fight for Palestinian independence and eventually bring leftist revolution to Japan.

The following year three of her fellow Japanese militiamen, exiting an Air France flight in business suits, opened fire at Tel Aviv's airport, leaving 26 people dead -- most of them Puerto Rican pilgrims.

The attack, coordinated with the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), made the Japanese Red Army notorious around the world.

The group, which at its height numbered only a few dozen all-Japanese members, unleashed a series of hijackings and embassy seizures in the 1970s, mostly taking hostages to free jailed members. A siege of the French embassy in The Hague in 1974 would later become the case on which Fusako Shigenobu was tried and jailed.

As Shigenobu's name rose on the international most wanted list she gave birth to May, her only child, in 1973.

May's father was a PFLP militant whose name she learned as a teenager and has never publicly revealed. But she recalls that Red Army members lived in a commune in Lebanon and that all of them acted as her "mothers and fathers".

May commuted to schools in Palestinian refugee camps and remembers life being full of pleasant moments -- though anything but stable.

Pursued by Israeli and Japanese authorities, the young May and two other small children switched safehouses once a month.

When Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1982 on a hunt for Palestinian militants, May escaped to another Arab nation -- which she won't disclose -- that gave her permission to stay until high school.

She lived with Arab families and began to hide her identity completely. With her fluent Arabic and looks that could pass for Arab or Japanese, she managed to blend in.

"When I was in high school, I changed school four to five times a year," she says.

May also learned Japanese growing up but her situation banned its use in public to avoid suspicion.

"Even if I saw some Japanese tourists looking for help, I had to pretend I didn't understand them," she says.

She did not even know her mother's real Japanese name until she was a high school student.

May later returned to Lebanon to attend the American University in Beirut, and, as usual, stayed low-key to survive.

"My mother often told me, even if some people take pride in befriending us, they could unintentionally hurt us by spreading rumors of who we are. I had to draw a line no matter how much I liked them."

May Shigenobu still has no simple answer for the airport question: what do you think of your mother?

"I grew up as a child of fighters," she says. "Maybe it was because I lived in the Arab world, but I was proud of them fighting for the (Palestinian) cause. It was not anything I had to question."

Her mother has expressed regret over the victims of the Red Army, but not the cause. May sticks to her mother's view, supporting the cause but not the violence.

But her position remains controversial. The Israeli embassy lodged a protest when she gave a talk at a Tokyo area school, saying she presented a one-sided view.

With the Red Army on the decline, Fusako Shigenobu risked the return home but was arrested in Osaka in 2000 in an undercover police operation. May was half a world away in Beirut watching TV footage of her being handcuffed.

She gave up her studies and longtime partner and moved to Japan -- to support her mother and deal with the consequences.

A US bank rejected her application to open an account, saying: "We checked you on our computer. We cannot deal with money from a terrorist."

But May says she had expected harsher treatment after coming to Japan.

"Now I can voice my opinions, regardless of whether it is political or social, and have opportunities to speak publicly. By having an identity that I can present with confidence, I can act more freely," she said.

She got a master's degree at Doshisha University in Kyoto, and stayed on for a PhD program in international media specializing in the Middle East. She also teaches English at a private school.

"My entire life, I kept losing all my friends. At least I want to stay connected with the people I'm friends with now, who know both the me before and after," she said.

May visits her mother at a Tokyo prison at least once a week; rules allow a 15-minute chat through a plastic window.

"I know she had taken care of me and made me the first priority even at difficult times. I want to take care of her now," she said.

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AFP 311138 GMT 03 06

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