Concerns about the Unification Church’s fundraising activities in Japan have spiraled in the weeks following the assassination of Shinzo Abe; the momentum of public outrage now threatens to carry matters too far.
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.
In the weeks since Nara resident Tetsuya Yamagami used a homemade gun to shoot and kill former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in front of his city’s Kintetsu Yamatosaidaiji Station, the nation and the world have been grappling with the question of why the assassination occurred.
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.
