As he desperately tries to survive the ruling party’s political funds scandal, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that he “will act as a fireball at the forefront of the Liberal Democratic Party and work to restore the trust of the people.” Most analysts, however, see this administration in the midst of a spectacular flameout.
The ghost of Shinzo Abe’s political and financial corruption has again risen up to haunt his successors, staggering the already weak administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
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.
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.
The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has occasioned a lot of valuable, eye-opening discussions in the media, but few if any have focused upon how Abe’s death could be seen as a form of karmic payback–what happens when you ignore the lessons of history in the pursuit of raw political power.
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.
