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Assassination of Shinzō Abe

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Road junction at Yamato-Saidaiji Station, several hours after the shooting

On 8 July 2022, Shinzō Abe, a former prime minister of Japan and serving member of the Japanese House of Representatives, was assassinated while speaking at a political event outside Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara City, Nara Prefecture. Abe was delivering a campaign speech for a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) candidate when he was fatally shot by 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami with an improvised firearm. Abe was transported via medical helicopter to Nara Medical University Hospital in Kashihara, where he was pronounced dead.

Quotes

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  • If you think about it carefully, what the assassin of Abe, Tetsuya Yamagami, did is strange. If the president of the Unification Church had been shot, I could understand it, even if I would in no way condone it. But Mr. Abe was shot and they criticized the Unification Church so much. My current impression is that the way the media reported it was quite strange.
  • When such a prominent public figure is assassinated, one might expect the media to focus on the act of murder. But in Japan, the narrative took a sharp detour. Fueled by long-standing opponents of the Unification Church, the press began to frame the story as a cautionary tale about the plight of the “shukyo nisei”—second-generation members of religious movements. Yamagami, in this version, became the poster child for religious trauma. The assassin was not a criminal, but a victim. …The teaser [for a series on the assassination by Mainichi Shimbun] described the murder as having “social significance”—a phrase that ignited a firestorm online. Critics [had] rightly asked: since when does gunning down a former Prime Minister qualify as socially meaningful? Is this journalism or a eulogy for terrorism? …To its credit, the prosecution is trying to keep the focus on the crime. They want to exclude testimonies about the Unification Church and concentrate on the fact that Yamagami killed a public figure in broad daylight. But the defense, backed by anti-cult activists and sympathetic scholars, is pushing hard to make the church the villain.
  • [Attorney Masaki] Kito’s claim that “religious abuse of children” caused the assassination is neither sociology nor sound legal reasoning—it is propaganda. Yamagami’s mother went bankrupt in 2002. Later, the local believers refunded half [of] her donations. Yet, the assassination occurred twenty years later, in 2022. Abe’s video message to a Unification‑Church‑related event hardly explains the timing. Politicians across the spectrum—Donald Trump, José Manuel Barroso, countless Japanese conservatives—had sent similar greetings for decades. If that were the trigger, Yamagami had twenty years and many “principals” to target. He did not.
  • Without confronting its Iagos, Japan cannot come to terms with the assassination of Shinzo Abe.
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