More On The Killing Of Shinzo Abe

Picking Up The Pieces

The picture we are getting about the slayer of Shinzo Abe is in some ways rather strange. From the first note that the perpetrator claimed his killing of Abe was not political, through to the alleged findings where he fired off a home made shotgun, to how he was making other guns from common parts found from hardware stores, all add to a very peculiar picture of a perhaps very sick man. This isn't your Lee Harvey Oswald claiming to be a patsy, this isn't even Sirhan Sirhan. It's more Travis Bickle from 'Taxi Driver'. 

Then again not all killings of men of history are the same. In the aftermath of an assassination you might feel bad about the lost potential - but Abe had probably fulfilled his historic mission already. This isn't about lost potential. And yet there is something very troubling - if anything what's most troubling about the killing of Shinzo Abe is that it wasn't really political at all, and thus fails to be an assassination - it is simply murder by a deranged madman. And if that is the case, we cannot ever find proper meaning to his passing. And maybe that's the point of the reportage. 

That's all to one side. Yet the whole episode demands we dig a bit deeper. More on that later. There may be a blatantly political reason why the police did not identify the organisation that is the target of the perpetrator's fury. 

Just for some context, I've also had discussions about political assassinations in Japan with some people. I myself have a distant relative who was a party too this thing here. My maternal; grandmother's great uncle was one of the 17 men from Mito who teamed up with the man from Satsuma Jizaemon Arimura. This is the guy, if you can read Japanese. After he was executed, he was later enshrined in Yasukuni. That's right. The Meiji government figured that the assassination of the Tairo Ii Naosuke was a patriotic act. That's the same Yasukuni shrine to which Shinzo Abe used to go for visits.   

So it's not like I'm personally holding to any kind of belief that political violence is completely foreign to the Japanese. However things have to be put into some perspective. 

The Meiji restoration essentially put an end to the Edo period, and with it went the Samurai. This essentially put an end to politics through violence from the general population. However, political violence carried out by military officers took their place, and Japan was plagued by political violence through the 1930s which led to World War II. It's really the end of World War II that brought about the current era where the average Japanese person is a peaceful pert, and political violence is unimaginable.

Gun laws are strict in Japan so any political violence this side of 1945 has involved blades or blunt instruments or hand-to-hand assaults. There was a prime minister who was assaulted with an ash tray in 1980. Gun violence is absolutely exceptional to ordinary life in Japan. And so to understand the outlier quality of this killer, you have to understand that somebody in this context where gun laws are strict, went and built their own guns to circumvent gun laws, and walked up to a political candidate on the street and opened fire. Does this really count as political violence of the same kind as the ones before World War II? If so, then just what the hell does this event portend? 

We can't know, because we can't understand the thinking the madman who pulled the trigger. Or is this some new kind of bullshit we've not really categorised? You can see right there that information control is letting the narrative move towards this being an act of a madman. 

What Was The Organisation The Perpetrator Hated?

All the same, it's starting to leak out slowly that the unnamed special organisation that was hated by the perpetrator is the Unification Church, a.k.a. the Moonies. The perpetrator Tetsuya Yamagami is claiming his family was sent bankrupt by a religious organisation, and somehow Abe was giving this organisation support. A little googling reveals Shinzo Abe was tightly linked with the Unification Church through political donations that came from the church. More importantly, his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was instrumental in bringing the Unification Church to Japan from Korea as part of his anti-communist stance. It is no surprise that Abe himself who inherited his grandfather's political apparatus through his father was well connected to the money from the Unification Church.

Was he a believer? Likely not. Shinzo Abe was a believer in whatever the hell form of Shinto that takes place at the Yasukuni Shrine. He spent a lot of political capital shoring up that one so it's hard to believe that he was also a closet Moonie. What is becoming apparent is that Abe and his faction took money from the Moonies, and in turn he offered his own support to them. He delivered some speech via video link to one of the Moonies' group wedding events and Donald Trump no less was also sending videos to this event. The speculation is running that Trump is closely aligned with the Moonies in America, and so, Abe was able to move closer to Trump upon his election through the Unification Church channels.

Money and politics have a way of going in hand. For a political party to look to a source for funding is par for the course (they literally make these deals on the golf courses). The traditional way this went in Japanese politics was through a 'General Construction Industrial Complex' that funnelled money into the LDP and then the LDP would parcel out general construction jobs from government. This old style landed quite a number of LDP politicians in prison in the 70s, 80s and 90s. As the 'GCIC' waned, so did its contributions. As the LDP went through a reformation in the mid to late 90s, it seems inevitable that they opened themselves up to religious organisations donating money to replace the GCIC. 

In the case of Shinzo Abe, it appears that he was very open to taking money from the Unification Church because of his family's own history in inviting them into Japan, but also a vague similarity in stated world views. Who doesn't want world peace as a stated objective? It's this kind of banal rhetoric that characterised Abe's speeches (and also invited much derision as if he was a retard). It is not irony or coincidence then that just as his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the target of an assassination attempt, he too had become a target.

What is kind of terrifying is that Abe's second government - as early as Feb 2014 - was accused of letting the influence of the Unification Church into Cabinet. By 2019, he was being accused that the separation of Church and State was being blurred by having so many Cabinet members who had some kind of organisational involvement with the Unification Church. And this is no ordinary denomination of Christianity - let's be blunt, it's a cult from South Korea. The cult is highly exploitative and Yamagami's leaked statement says his family lost everything to this cult. If Abe was going to endorse this church, Yamagami explained he was fair game for his grudge. The greater irony is that Yamagami himself doesn't think his act is a political act. He has expressly said his murder wasn't about politics. That might be true in his mind, but unravelling all this shows it was totally, entirely, political. 

This means it wasn't just murder, it really was an assassination. I'm wondering if at a future date, Tetsuya Yamagami is going to be identified as a patriot and get enshrined at Yasukuni. Now that, would be ironic.