2022 murder in Nara, Japan
On 8 July 2022, Shinzo 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.
Leaders from many nations expressed shock and dismay at Abe's assassination, which was the first of a former Japanese prime minister since Saitō Makoto and Takahashi Korekiyo during the 26 February incident in 1936, as well as the first of a major political figure in Japan since Inejiro Asanuma's assassination in 1960. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida decided to hold a state funeral for Abe on 27 September. Yamagami was arrested at the scene and charged with attempted murder, which was upgraded to murder after Abe's death was confirmed. Yamagami told investigators that he had shot Abe in relation to a grudge he held against the Unification Church (UC), a new religious movement to which Abe and his family had political ties, over his mother's bankruptcy in 2002.
The assassination brought scrutiny from Japanese society and media against the UC's alleged practice of pressuring believers into making exorbitant donations. Japanese dignitaries and legislators were forced to disclose their relationship with the UC, and Kishida was forced to reshuffle his cabinet amid plummeting public approval. On 31 August, the LDP announced that it would no longer have any relationship with the UC and its associated organisations, and would expel members who did not break ties with the group. On 10 December, the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors passed two bills to restrict the activities of religious organisations such as the UC and provide relief to victims.
Abe's killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. "The Economist" remarked that "...Yamagami's political violence has proved stunningly effective... Political violence seldom fulfils so many of its perpetrator's aims." Writing for "The Atlantic", Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as "among the most successful assassins in history."
Background.
Shinzo Abe had served as Prime Minister of Japan between 2006 and 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020, when he resigned due to health concerns. He was the longest-serving prime minister in Japan's history. His maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was himself prime minister from 1957 to 1960, and like Abe, was the target of an assassination attempt, which he survived, unlike Abe.
Abe was the first former Japanese prime minister to have been assassinated since Saitō Makoto and Takahashi Korekiyo, who were killed during the February 26 incident in 1936, the first Japanese legislator to be assassinated since Kōki Ishii was killed in 2002, and the first Japanese politician to be assassinated during an electoral campaign since Iccho Itoh, then-mayor of Nagasaki, who was shot dead during his mayoral race in April 2007.
Relationship between Abe's family and the Unification Church.
Abe, as well as his father Shintaro Abe and his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, had longstanding ties to the Unification Church (UC), a new religious movement known for its mass wedding ceremonies. Known officially as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), the movement was founded by Sun Myung Moon in South Korea in 1954 and its followers are colloquially known as "Moonies". Moon was a self-declared messiah and ardent anti-communist.
Kishi's postwar political agenda led him to work closely with Ryoichi Sasakawa, a businessman and nationalist politician during the Second World War. As Moon's advisor, Sasakawa helped establish the UC in Japan in 1963 and assumed the roles of both patron and president of the church's political wing, International Federation for Victory over Communism (IFVOC, ), which would forge intimate ties with Japan's conservative politicians. In this way, Sasakawa and Kishi shielded what would become one of the most widely distrusted groups in contemporary Japan. Moon's organisations, including the UC and the overtly political IFVOC, were financially supported by Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama.
When the UC still had a few thousand followers, its headquarters was located on land once owned by Kishi in Nanpeidaichō, Shibuya, Tokyo, and UC officials frequently visited the adjacent Kishi residence. By the early 1970s, UC members were being used by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as campaign workers without compensation. LDP politicians were also required to visit the UC's headquarters in South Korea and receive Moon's lectures on theology, regardless of their religious views or membership. In return, Japanese authorities shielded the UC from legal penalties over their often fraudulent and aggressive practices. Subsequently, the UC gained much influence in Japan, laying the groundwork for its push into the United States and its later entrenchment.
Such a relationship was passed on to Kishi's son-in-law, former foreign minister Shintaro Abe, who attended a dinner party held by Moon at the Imperial Hotel in 1974. In the US, the 1978 Fraser Report, an inquiry by the US Congress into American–South Korean relations, determined that Kim Jong-pil, the founding director of the South Korean intelligence service and two-time prime minister of South Korea, had "organized" the UC in the early 1960s and was using it "as a political tool" on behalf of the authoritarian regime of President Park Chung Hee. In 1989, Moon urged his followers to establish their footing in Japan's parliament, then install themselves as secretaries for the Japanese lawmakers, and focus on those of Shintaro Abe's faction in the LDP. Moon also stressed that they must construct their political influence not only in the parliament, but also on Japan's district level.
Shinzo Abe continued this relationship, and in May 2006, when he was Chief Cabinet Secretary, he and several cabinet ministers sent congratulatory telegrams to a mass wedding ceremony organised by the UC's front group, Universal Peace Federation (UPF, ), for 2,500 couples of Japanese and Korean men and women.
In spring 2021, the chairman of the UPF's Japanese branch, Masayoshi Kajikuri, called Abe and asked if the latter would consider speaking before an upcoming UPF rally in September if former US president Donald Trump also attended. Abe replied that he had to accept the offer should that be the case; he formally agreed to his participation on 24 August 2021. At the September rally, held ten months before the assassination, Abe stated to Kajikuri that, "The image of the Great Father [Moon] crossing his arms and smiling gave me goosebumps. I still respectably remember the sincerity [you] showed in the last six elections in the past eight years." Kajikuri claimed that he originally invited three unnamed former Japanese prime ministers, but was turned down due to concern of being used as poster boys for UC's mission.
According to research by "Nikkan Gendai", ten out of twenty members in the Fourth Abe Cabinet had connections to the UC, but these connections were largely ignored by Japanese journalists. After the assassination, Japanese defence minister Nobuo Kishi, Abe's younger brother, was forced to disclose that he had been supported by the UC in past elections.
Unification Church practices in Japan.
The Japanese government certified the UC as a religious organisation in 1964; the Agency for Cultural Affairs classifies the UC as a Christian organisation. Since then, the government was unable to prevent the UC's activities because of the freedom of religion guaranteed in the Constitution of Japan, according to Mitsuhiro Suganuma, the former section head of the Public Security Intelligence Agency's Second Intelligence Department.
According to historians, up to 70% of the UC's wealth has been accumulated through outdoor fundraising rounds. Steven Hassan, a former UC member engaged in the deprogramming of other UC members, describes these as "spiritual sales" ("reikan shōhō", 霊感商法), with parishioners scanning obituaries, going door-to-door, and saying, "Your dead loved one is communicating with us, so please go to the bank and send money to the Unification Church so your loved one can ascend to heaven in the spirit world."
Moon's theology teaches that his homeland Korea is the "Adam country", home of the rulers destined to control the world. Japan is the "fallen Eve country". The dogma teaches Eve had sexual relations with Satan and then seduced Adam, which caused mankind to fall from grace (original sin), while Moon was appointed to bring mankind to salvation. Japan must therefore be subservient to Korea. This was used to encourage their Japanese followers into offering things to Korea via the church.
According to journalist Fumiaki Tada and other former UC followers, the conditions for Japanese followers to participate in the UC's mass wedding were substantially more difficult than Korean people, on the grounds of "Japan's sinful occupation of Korea" between 1910 and 1945. In 1992, each Japanese follower needed to successfully bring three more people into the church, fulfill a certain quota of fundraising by selling the church's merchandise, undergo fasting for seven days, and pay an appreciation fee of 1.4 million yen. For Korean people, the fee for attending the mass wedding was 2 million won (about 200 thousand yen in September 2022). Most Korean attendees were not followers of the church to begin with. According to one interviewee, the UC considered it an honour for a Japanese woman to be married to a Korean man, like an abandoned dog being picked up by a prince. If the Japanese followers wanted to leave their partners of the mass wedding or the church, they were told they would be damned to the "hell of hell".8:19
In 1987, about 300 lawyers in Japan set up an association called the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales (Zenkoku Benren) to help victims of the UC and similar organisations. According to statistics compiled by the association's lawyers between 1987 and 2021, the association and local government consumer centers received 34,537 complaints alleging that UC had forced people to make unreasonably large donations or purchase large amounts of items, amounting to about 123.7 billion yen. According to the internal data compiled by the UC which leaked to the media, the donation by the Japanese followers between 1999 and 2011 was about 60 billion yen annually.
Timeline.
Abe's schedule.
Abe was initially scheduled to deliver a speech in Nagano Prefecture on 8 July 2022 in support of Sanshirō Matsuyama, an LDP candidate in upcoming elections to the House of Councillors. That event was abruptly cancelled on 7 July following allegations of misconduct and corruption related to Matsuyama, and was replaced by a similar event in Nara Prefecture at which Abe was to deliver a speech in support of Kei Satō, an LDP councillor running for re-election. The LDP division in Nara Prefecture stated this new schedule was not generally publicly known, but NHK reported that the event had been widely advertised on Twitter and by sound truck. Nara police and Satō's campaign staff inspected the site on the evening before the incident, and the head of the prefectural police had approved of the security plan a few hours before the incident; one prefectural assembly member later said, "I thought it was a dangerous place that made it easy to attack former Prime Minister Abe from the cars and bicycles that pass along the road behind him".
At approximately 11:10 a.m. on 8 July, Satō began speaking at a road junction near the north exit of Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara City. Abe arrived nine minutes later, and began his speech at around 11:29 am. He was accompanied by VIP protection officers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department alongside VIP protection officers from the Nara Prefectural Police.
Attack.
While Abe was delivering his speech, the perpetrator, Tetsuya Yamagami, was able to approach within several metres, despite the presence of security. At around 11:30 am, when Abe said, , he was shot at from behind with a homemade gun resembling a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun capable of firing six bullets at a time. The first shot missed and prompted Abe to turn around, at which point a second shot was fired, hitting Abe in the neck and chest area. Abe then took a few steps forward, fell to his knees, and collapsed. Abe's security detained the suspect, who did not resist. According to security guards stationed during the assassination, the sound of the gunshot was very different from that of a