Return To Japan
She came out of hiding after her mother was captured in Osaka, and visited Japan for the first time in April 2001, making her the first child of a Red Army member to return to Japan in five years. She was the subject of some controversy in December 2001 when she gave a talk at a public school in Kanagawa prefecture about Arab culture and food at the invitation of a teacher there; the Israeli embassy in Tokyo sent a complaint to the school, describing her discussion as conveying "blatant, biased political" anti-Israeli sentiments. She then began working as an English teacher in a cram school in Tokyo. Japanese lawyers, scholars, journalists, writers and activists responded by signing a protest petition against the Israeli embassy and government saying that Mei was now a Japanese citizen and had the right to freedom of speech in Japan.
Mei later became an anchor on Japanese cable television channel Asahi Newstar's one hour live political programme Nyuusu no ShinsÅ. She is currently MBC's (Middle East Broadcasting Center, the United Arab Emirates' Arabic satellite channel) Tokyo correspondent, reporting in Arabic about Japan.
She earned her PhD degree in Media Studies from Doshisha University in 2011, doing research on the development of Arabic media, and the effect of satellite channels (a case study of Al Jazeera) on Arab societies.
Mei Shigenobu is a supporter of Palestinian statehood and a critic of Israel, and speaks of her mother's cause in sympathetic terms, although regretful of the violence used by the Japanese Red Army in support of the cause. She said, according to The Standard, that "We live in a different era ... it was an era in which people were fighting, thinking and being active everywhere against the Vietnam War and other oppression around the world and there were no means of gaining media attention. We forget all that background and we just pick up a person from there and choose to sentence her using today's sensibility, today's values and today's way of thinking."
Read more about this topic: Mei Shigenobu
Famous quotes containing the words return and/or japan:
“At your return visit our house; let our old acquaintance be renewed.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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