Kishidia Fumio, the prime minister of Japan won the recent upper house elections by a respectable margin after his predecessor as both Prime Minister and the head of the LDP, Shinzo Abe was assassinated on the campaign trail.
Two months later, on the 27th of September Akie Abe carried her husband’s ashes into Tokyo’s Budokan arena, flanked by a military honour guard, foreign dignitaries and observed by Japan’s elite. Outside the arena, Japanese media was covering the citizens that were protesting the funeral, which the Japanese public have now largely turned against.
Against the backdrop of public protests, foreign dignitaries including former president Barrack Obama pulled out of the funeral, and Prime Minister Fumio’s approval rating has fallen from 57% to 43% in two months.
How did it all go so wrong, and why is this political assassination unlike any that have come before it?
The Assassin and the War Criminal
Tetsuya Yamagami was a former officer in the Japanese SDF (Self Defense Force) and was employed by a local manufacturing company at the time of the killing. Upon his arrest, Mr Yamagami immediately denied that the assasination was due to political reasons and instead insisted that his killing of Shinzo Abe was due to his association with the Unification Church.
The Unification Church is a cult-like religious group popularly known as the ‘Moonies’, after its South Korean founder, Moon Sun-Myung.
The group was founded in the 1950’s and quickly found common cause with Japanese anti-communists in the 60’s, including Shinzo Abe’s grandfather.
Shinzo Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi is an interesting historical figure — He co-signed the declaration of war against the United States, was detained as a war criminal for his horrific treatment of Chinese civilians following the war, but then released by the United States who considered him the best person to lead post-war Japan.
Kishi consolidated the various right-wing blocs of Japanese politics into the LDP, the party that his grandson would also come to lead. As part of this consolidation, he also established connections with the anti-communist Korean Unification Church, with which they shared a common cause.
It was because of this connection that Tetsuya carried out his assassination. ‘The Moonies’ are known in Japan for arranging marriages between their members and for exploiting grieving people through the use of ‘Spiritual Sales’.
Steve Hassan, a former member of the church describes these spiritual sales as
church members scanning local papers for obituaries and then turning up to the funerals with the message “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”
According to an association of lawyers pressing claims against those affected by the church, between 1987 and 2021, they received 34,537 complaints amounting to about 123 billion yen ($800 Million).
Tetsuya stated that his mother had been one of those targeted by the church for ‘spiritual sales’ and she had given away around ¥100mn ($700,000) in 1998, causing the family to declare bankruptcy.
Tetsuya’s older brother was diagnosed with cancer, which that family was unable to afford. Tetsuya’s uncle attempted suicide to bring the family his life insurace money, and Tetsuya’s brother committed suicide in 2005.
In a letter that he sent to journalists a few days before the assassination, Tetsuya blamed the church for his financial problems and wished that he could assassinate the current leaders of the church, but would find it too difficult.
Instead, he announced his intention to assassinate Shinzo Abe, who he considered one of the most powerful members of the church, and blamed his grandfather as the man responsible for bringing the church to Japan in the first place.
Following the release of his motives, Japanese media began to parade other people with grievances against the church in front of the public.
Prime Minister Kishida initially refused to comment on the church and its ties with the LDP and the Japanese media quickly uncovered that more than 20 ministers have ties to the church. An internal survey conducted by the LDP then found that nearly half of its legislators had links to the church either through campaign financing or by attending church events.
The events are reminiscent of the 2016 scandal that brought down the South Korean Government after their prime minister was revealed to be taking orders from a cult leader that had raised influenced her since she was a child.
The embattled Japanese government has lost confidence not just with the general public but crucially with their base. The right-wing of Japan holds quite a nationalistic, isolationist worldview and the revelation that senior leaders were deeply involved with a South Korean church whose core beliefs hold that Koreans are the rightful masters of the Japanese (and the world).
This assassination has prompted a lot of reflection in Japan, the right that have realised their leaders valued money over national ideals.
The young left are reflecting on how a Korean cult that weaponised their guilt about the actions of Japan during the second world war for financial gain was benefitting the direct descendants of the war criminals responsible for those actions.
The general public has had the curtain of political theatre lifted and many of the protests centred around the funeral were focused on the cost to the Japanese taxpayer and anger centred around the belief that it was a political ploy from the prime minister to deflect criticism of his administration and party.
It’s certainly the most complex reaction to the assassination of a democratic political figure in decades and it will likely be decades more before we can speak to the final legacy of both the Abe family and the assassin Tetsuya Yamagami.
