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Shinzo Abe assassin believed Abe was associated with Unification Church [1]
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Date: 2022-07-09
A lot has been written about the assassination of Shinzo Abe, but very little has given any insight into the motives of the assassin. This is terrible, since Japan’s politics is likely to be shaken—and not in a good way—by the assassination. Bloomberg News says this:
Tetsuya Yamagami, the suspect in Abe’s assassination, told police that he had initially planned to attack the leader of a religious group he believed caused his mother to become bankrupt after she donated large sums of money, Kyodo reported. … [Akihiko ] Kurokawa [secretary-general of the very small NHK Party] had also accused Abe’s grandfather, former premier Nobusuke Kishi, of bringing the South Korean-founded Unification Church, known for its mass weddings, to Japan. And he referred to close links between Soka Gakkai, the lay Buddhist organization that backs junior ruling coalition party Komeito, and the Chinese Communist Party.
Bloomberg writes this off as conspiracy theories. However, the Unification Church, founded by Sun Myung Moon and the creator of the right-wing Washington Times has in fact been accused of cult-like activities. Steve Hassan, The Guardian:
I was with the Moonies for two-and-a-half years. I worked 21 hours a day, seven days a week – in prayer for between one and three hours. Then I would spend the rest of the day doing PR or lectures for the group, recruiting and fundraising. Everyone on my team was told they had to raise a minimum of $100 a day, otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to sleep, and as a good leader, if they couldn't sleep, then I couldn't either. When I crashed a van into the back of a tractor trailer, I had gone three days without sleep.
I have read stories of Japanese members of the Unification Church being bled dry, so it’s entirely plausible that one of those families could hold a serious grudge. The Washington Times reported that in September 2021. Abe spoke to a Unification Church-organized “Rally of Hope”—along with Trump and “Hun Sen, prime minister of Cambodia; Jose Manuel Barroso, former president of the European Commission; Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, former president of The Philippines; H.D. Deve Gowda, former Indian prime minister; Anthony Thomas Aquinas Carmon, former president of Trinidad and Tobago; and Natasa Micic, former Serbian president.”
I don’t know of evidence that Abe was in any way connected to the Unification Church. Still, Abe’s politics were of the extreme anti-communist variety that Moon had, and speaking at an event organized by the Unification Church is highly unusual. And Trump’s attendance is even more interesting.
Abe was an ultranationalist. S. Nathan Park, Foreign Policy:
He has expressed admiration for his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, who was imprisoned after World War II on the charges of being a Class A war criminal. Abe was a special advisor to the group Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), which claims Imperial Japan should be lauded for liberating Asia from Western colonial powers, the Tokyo war crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and war crimes such as the Rape of Nanking in 1937 were exaggerated or fabricated. (In 2014, 15 out of 18 cabinet members in the Abe administration were Nippon Kaigi members.) In 2007, during his brief first stint as prime minister, Abe personally disavowed the 1993 Kono Statement that apologized to the World War II-era victims of systematic sexual abuse by the Japanese army, dishonestly claiming a lack of evidence. When Kan made the centennial speech accepting responsibility for Imperial Japan’s annexation of Korea, Abe yelled, “Idiot!” at Kan on live television. Upon taking office again in 2012, Abe wasted no time in showing the world where he stood on the history issues: He openly flirted with officially retracting the 1993 apology to the so-called comfort women and visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Japan’s war criminals, over strong criticisms from both South Korea and the United States.
This might cut against the assassin’s notion of a connection between Abe and the Unification Church, since Moon was Korean. Still, following Moon’s death, the Unification Church has presumably transformed.
Apologies for this hasty post. If I can find more information, I will add it below.
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