Unemployed loner Tetsuya Yamagami hoped to use his homemade shotgun on Shinzo Abe not mainly to kill Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, but to take his revenge on the Unification Church, which he blamed for destroying his life and that of his family. Improbably, the assassination has become a wild political success.
It was exactly a month ago today that Shinzo Abe was assassinated in Nara by 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami. As the passions of that event begin to settle, this is an opportune occasion to reconsider both the benefits and the costs of an administration which lasted longer than any other in Japanese history.
When former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi formed a bond in the mid-1960s with Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon over their shared anti-communist views, little did he know that he was sowing the seeds that would eventually take the life of his beloved grandson, Shinzo Abe.
This SNA Speakeasy features Ulv Hanssen of Soka University on the theme of “Anti-Korean Hate Books in Japan.”
Ahead of Donald Trump’s second visit to Japan in 2019, a Japanese hotelier invited the US president’s former chief strategist and senior advisor Steve Bannon to give a “special lecture” in Tokyo. That hotelier’s name is Toshio Motoya.
The appointment of moderate Yoshimasa Hayashi as Japanese foreign minister has elicited a good deal of discussion in the Chinese news media, with voices on both sides of the Taiwan Strait trying to interpret what it means for the region in an era of heightened tensions.
Although there have been calls for immigration reform following the death of Sri Lankan national Wishma Sandamali in a detention center, the actual prospects for improvement in Japan’s controversial refugee and immigration system are not particularly bright.
The 500 Dot Com casino bribery scandal was yet another instance of major corruption that first emerged in the Shinzo Abe era.
SNA (Toronto) — A recent proud display of anti-homelessness online reflects how cruel some parts of society have become toward its most vulnerable members. In a livestream on August 7, popular YouTuber DaiGo declared to his audience of almost 2.5 million subscribers that “the lives
During a May 30 demonstration in front of central Tokyo’s JR Takadanobaba Station, my labor union, Tozen Union, called upon the Japanese government to overhaul its immigration system and to protect the human rights of foreigners.
