The arrivals hall at Lod Airport was full of pilgrims on the evening of May 30, 1972. They had come from Puerto Rico, many of them, traveling to the Holy Land with a religious tour group. They were collecting their luggage when three young Japanese men retrieved automatic rifles from their bags and began firing into the crowd. In under two minutes, 26 people were dead and approximately 80 more were wounded. One of the attackers, Kozo Okamoto, was the sole survivor among the three. He was captured, tried, and eventually imprisoned. The two others died in the attack. The organization that had sent them, the Japanese Red Army, celebrated.

Fusako Shigenobu was not in that terminal. She was never charged in Japan for the Lod Airport massacre. But in the years that followed, her name would become attached to this and a dozen other acts of political violence across three continents, earning her the nickname that Western journalists could not resist: the Empress of Terror.

To understand how a woman born in the rubble of postwar Tokyo arrived at that place, you have to start with the rubble.

She came into the world on September 28, 1945, in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, just weeks after Japan formally surrendered to the United States. The country she was born into was physically and psychologically shattered. Her father, a former Imperial Japanese Army major who had served in Manchukuo, carried his own kind of damage. He held ultranationalist views, the scorched ideology of a defeated empire, but he came home to a grocer's apron and relative poverty. His daughter grew up watching a man whose worldview had been obliterated learn to sell vegetables.

She was a serious student. After high school, Shigenobu took a job at the Kikkoman soy sauce corporation while enrolling in night courses at Meiji University in Tokyo. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy and History by showing up exhausted, twice over, doing the work that others with more money could afford to do in daylight. Whatever politics she was forming in those years were shaped by that kind of grinding persistence.

The 1960s remade her. The Japanese student movement was ferocious in that decade, animated by opposition to the Vietnam War, fury at the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and the specific grievance of rising university tuition. Young people occupied campuses, clashed with riot police, and argued ideology with a ferocity that felt, to those inside it, like the hinge of history. Shigenobu threw herself into it. By 1970, she had risen to become the only woman on the Central Committee of the Red Army Faction, a Marxist-Leninist group committed to armed revolution against both the Japanese government and the United States.

But even in the revolutionary left, she ran into walls. The sexism within the Japanese New Left was pervasive; men who spoke the language of liberation did not always practice it. Shigenobu grew disillusioned not with the cause but with its foot soldiers. Simultaneously, the Palestinian liberation movement was capturing her imagination. The PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was conducting dramatic international operations and articulating a vision of global struggle that resonated with everything she had come to believe.

In 1971, she entered into a sham marriage with fellow militant Tsuyoshi Okudaira, traveling under the alias Fusako Okudaira to evade Japanese police. She relocated to Beirut, Lebanon in early 1971, and there, in the political and literal heat of the Lebanese capital, she co-founded the Japanese Red Army as an internationalist offshoot of the Red Army Faction, formally aligned with the PFLP. She was 25 years old. She also found work at Al Hadaf, the PFLP's magazine, alongside its legendary editor Ghassan Kanafani, who would be killed by a Mossad car bomb the following year.

The Japanese Red Army that Shigenobu built was small in membership but outsized in ambition and reach. It operated from Palestinian refugee camps, trained with PFLP militants, and positioned itself as a node in a global anti-imperialist network. What it produced, in practice, was a series of operations that left bodies across Europe and the Middle East.

The Lod Airport massacre in May 1972 is the attack most indelibly linked to the JRA, even though Shigenobu's precise role was never adjudicated in a Japanese court. Twenty-six people died in those two minutes of gunfire, including Aharon Katzir, a prominent Israeli scientist, and at least 17 of the Puerto Rican pilgrims. It remains one of the deadliest terrorist attacks carried out on Israeli soil.

Two years later came the operation that would eventually send Shigenobu to prison. In September 1974, three JRA militants seized the French Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, taking the French ambassador and ten staff members hostage for 100 hours. Two Dutch police officers were shot and seriously wounded in the incident. France ended the standoff by releasing a jailed JRA member; the hostage-takers then flew to Syria. French and Dutch investigators, and later Japanese prosecutors, accused Shigenobu of masterminding the operation, specifically of coordinating with the PFLP to procure weapons. She maintained her innocence on this charge throughout her trial, though she did not contest it in the way she contested others.

The JRA continued to operate through the 1970s and 1980s: hijackings, embassy seizures, bombings. A 1988 attack in Naples killed five people near a facility frequented by U.S. military personnel. Japanese authorities issued warrants. Interpol circulated her image. And Fusako Shigenobu disappeared into the apparatus of a life lived underground.

For nearly three decades, she moved. The Middle East, mostly. She was believed to have re-entered Japan covertly at some point in the 1990s, a ghost slipping through the country that wanted her most. In March 1973, she had given birth to a daughter in Beirut. She named her Mei, which means May in Japanese. The father was reportedly a PFLP militant. Mei grew up stateless and undocumented, carrying no nationality, living in the shadow of her mother's choices. It would be 27 years before Mei Shigenobu had a country.

That changed on November 8, 2000. Japanese police arrested Fusako Shigenobu outside a hotel in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture. She had entered Japan illegally through Kansai International Airport using a forged passport, having assumed another person's identity between 1997 and 2000. The woman who had commanded a global network had been caught on a document crime. When she was transferred to Tokyo, she raised her handcuffed fists toward the reporters crowding the station and shouted: 'I'll fight on.'

She was 55 years old.

From her prison cell, in April 2001, Shigenobu faxed a press statement formally disbanding the Japanese Red Army. The armed struggle, she wrote, was over. Whatever she had built across three decades of fugitive life, she was now dissolving it on prison stationery sent through a fax machine. The announcement carried a particular kind of exhaustion.

Her trial began working through the charges: conspiracy in the planning of the 1974 French Embassy siege, framed as attempted manslaughter, and two counts of passport forgery. She pleaded guilty to the passport charges. On the embassy siege conspiracy, she maintained she had not masterminded the operation.

On February 23, 2006, Tokyo District Court Judge Hironobu Murakami handed down his sentence. Not the life term that prosecutors had demanded. Twenty years. The judge cited her role in coordinating the PFLP weapons procurement for the Hague siege, alongside the passport convictions. Because she had already served 810 days in pretrial detention, her effective remaining sentence came to approximately 17 years. The Tokyo Higher Court upheld the conviction in 2007. The Supreme Court of Japan rejected her final appeal in 2010.

In December 2008, while she was serving that sentence, doctors diagnosed Shigenobu with both colon cancer and intestinal cancer. She underwent multiple surgeries and was transferred to Hachioji Medical Prison, officially called the East Japan Adult Medical Facility, in Tokyo. She was fighting, now, on a different front entirely.

She survived it. She survived the cancer, the surgeries, the years, and on May 28, 2022, at the age of 76, Fusako Shigenobu walked out of the Akishima facility in suburban Tokyo. Her daughter Mei was waiting. Supporters held Palestinian flags. A crowd of reporters pressed forward with cameras and microphones. Mei draped a keffiyeh around her mother's shoulders. Shigenobu, in her black hat and gray suit, apologized publicly for hurting innocent people and said she would focus on cancer treatment. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police announced she would remain under surveillance.

Mei Shigenobu, who grew up without citizenship, without documentation, without the basic bureaucratic anchors of a recognized life, is now an internationally respected journalist. She works in Japanese, English, and Arabic. The arrest that upended her mother's life in 2000 was, for Mei, the moment she finally obtained Japanese citizenship. She was 27 years old before she had a passport of her own.

In October 2022, Fusako Shigenobu delivered a public lecture in Kyoto. She has since published two books: 'The Soldiers' Record: Living in Palestine' and 'Days of a Twenty-year-old: The 1960s and Me.' She writes. She speaks. She continues.

The accounting remains incomplete in ways that matter enormously to the families of the dead. Shigenobu was never charged in Japan for the Lod Airport massacre, for the series of aircraft hijackings, or for attacks in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, the Philippines, Jakarta, Rome, or Naples. The legal record of her life captures one siege in The Hague and two forged passports. Kozo Okamoto, who survived Lod and was eventually released from Israeli prison, is believed to be living in Lebanon. Several other JRA members remain wanted by Japanese authorities.

The grocer's daughter from Setagaya, who put herself through night school and worked her way onto a revolutionary committee, spent thirty years building something she ultimately destroyed with a fax. What she built cost dozens of innocent people their lives. What she believed, she has never fully renounced. The keffiyeh her daughter placed on her shoulders on the morning of her release was not a gesture of repentance; it was a statement of continuity.

That tension, between the apology for hurting innocents and the flag still flying, is the unresolved note on which her story currently rests. Whether history will remember her as a freedom fighter, a terrorist, or something more complicated that refuses to fit either word cleanly is a question that will outlast her, and perhaps outlast all of us trying to answer it.